What makes a horror movie a cult horror movie? In a word: rewatchability. And with Halloween nearly upon us, the question of what frightening, shocking, silly, classic, or demonically camp movies to press play on again (and again) has never been more pertinent. Here at Vogue, of course, we dole out extra cult horror points if a movie can hold its own sartorially. Dario Argento’s Suspiria has inspired everyone from Nicolas Ghesquière to the Rodarte sisters; Yves Saint Laurent designed Catherine Deneuve’s costumes for the blood-soaked romance The Hunger; and Eiko Ishioka’s Japanese-influenced creations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula are just as striking now as they were in the ’90s. Below, Vogue rounds up 40 favorite cult horror movies, ranging from the very new to a few select tried and tested (and especially chic) classics.
Photo: Nemesis Films1/40Red Rooms (2024)
This is a stylish, unsettling, and hyper-modern horror story about a fashion model obsessed by a man accused of terrible brutality: acts of rape and murder that he streamed live to devoted followers. Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) attends his trial as a kind of groupie, and is also a hacker who lives in antiseptic luxury high above the city, dipping in and out of online netherworlds she can’t look away from.
How to watch: Stream it on Prime Video.
Photo: Courtesy of A242/40I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
Not quite horror, but not not horror, this is eerie, yearning, piercingly nostalgic indie filmmaking, a vivid account of youthful alienation full of luridly beautiful, and sometimes extremely alarming, images that you will find hard to shake.
How to watch: Stream on Max.
Photo: Courtesy of Shudder. A Shudder Release.3/40Infested (2024)
How do you say “spider attack” in French? We proclaim instant cult status to this wildly effective creepy-crawly French creature-feature set in a Brutalist Parisian housing block and starring a wonderfully energetic band of resourceful hoodie-clad Zoomers who find themselves besieged by super spiders. Zut alors!
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV or Prime Video.
Photo: Keeper Pictures4/40Oddity (2024)
Set in rural Ireland, at an isolated house with an insane asylum nearby, this one is so scary. The wife of an asylum doctor is visited by one of his patients at night, who desperately asks to be let inside. The choice she makes, of whether to open the door, sets off a lunatic story that feels singular and new.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV or Prime Video.
Photo: Bleecker Street/LAURA RADFORD5/40Out of Darkness (2024)
Like any good late-night film, Out of Darkness—about six Paleolithic characters being hunted by a dark force when the sun goes down—takes no time to get moving…though be warned the characters speak in an (invented) Stone Age language. It’s more thriller than horror film, though when the group plunges into a old-growth forest, the Blair Witch vibes fully descend.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV or Prime Video.
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Photo: Chris Harris6/40Starve Acre (2024)
Leave it to the Brits to do folk horror right. Starve Acre, a beautifully shot, eerie mood piece set among bleak 1970s Yorkshire moors, gives you a desolate farm; creepy locals wearing ultra-nubby sweaters; and a young couple, played by Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark, caught up in a demonic curse, descending into madness.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV or Prime Video.
Photo: Christine Tamalet7/40The Substance (2024)
The mind-bending story of an actor (a career-best Demi Moore) deemed to be past her prime, who injects her body with a mysterious substance that promises to release a more perfect version of herself. Cue her collapsing onto her bathroom floor, her spine splitting open, and a younger alter-ego (a sweet and then devilish Margaret Qualley) emerging from inside her.
Photo: Courtesy of Shudder. A Shudder Release.8/40The Devil’s Bath (2024)
Rural 18th-century Austria looks like an extremely difficult place to be a woman. Based on historical accounts and filmed in gorgeous woodland light, this patient and unsettling film follows the spiraling mindset of Agnes (Anja Plaschg), a young bride who finds herself isolated by chores and drudgery and sinking deeper and deeper into insanity and depression.
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Photo: Courtesy of Neon9/40Longlegs (2024)
In the vein of Se7en, Longlegs gives us a series of occult killings in the gloomy, forest-cloaked Pacific Northwest—and Nicolas Cage is, quite simply, one of the weirdest, scariest movie monsters you’ll encounter. He’s glam-rock grotesque, reedy voiced, and satan-obsessed.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV or Prime Video.
Photo: Moris Puccio. © 20th Century Studios / Courtesy Everett Collection10/40The First Omen (2024)
There’s no way a prequel Omen movie, set in the 1970s and centered around a fetching young American nun who gets drawn into a demonic birth plot inside a Roman convent, should be any good, and yet this is a surprisingly pulpy ride: stylish, moody, and full of did-I-just-see-that? delights.
How to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
Photo: FlixPix / Alamy Stock Photo11/40M3GAN (2023)
You’d be well within your rights to think there’s no chance a film about a robot doll who busts out TikTok dance moves between murders could be one of the best of the year. But if it’s a rollicking good time at the movies you’re looking for, then M3GAN delivers in spades.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV.
Photo: © Warner Bros / Courtesy Everett Collection12/40Evil Dead Rise (2023)
Largely sneered at by critics, this continuation of the long-running Evil Dead franchise is better than it needs to be, if extremely, almost laughably gory. It’s a story of two sisters, one a single mom living with her three kids, one a wayward ex-roadie, who comes to visit her in a dilapidated high rise. When the kids discover a demonic book really, truly awful things ensue.
Photo: Courtesy of A2413/40Talk to Me (2023)
This is a demonic possession story with a hook: A group of Australian kids film and post themselves while in the grip (literally, they use an embalmed hand) of spirits, and it becomes a social media craze. The metaphor is both obvious and brilliant—possession as narcotic, as party drug. Talk to Me is both a blast and 90 thoroughly draining minutes.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV or Paramount+.
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Photo: Courtesy of Shudder and IFC Films. A Shudder and IFC Films release.14/40When Evil Lurks (2023)
An inventive infection-meets-zombie film from Argentina that packs in the ick-moments and never conforms to expectation or formula. A demonic plague moves from person to person (to animal) in a rural community. Disconcerting in its plot twists and uncompromising in its shocks.
How to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
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Photo: Courtesy of Neon15/40Infinity Pool (2023)
Infinity Pool is a fever dream of a horror film by Brandon Cronenberg, set on a remote island nation, at a tightly guarded luxury resort, where a rich tourist couple—gorgeous, restless—are on holiday. What happens to them when they run afoul of local authorities will make you cover your eyes.
How to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
Photo: Courtesy of A2416/40Pearl (2022)
Ti West’s Pearl (far and away the best in his recent X trilogy) is a period piece about a farm girl (Mia Goth) stranded at home with her controlling mother and paralyzed father while her young husband is off at war. She wants to be a star in Hollywood and nurtures that hopeless dream while she feeds the farm’s geese to an alligator in the pond. The extended monologue Goth delivers at the end—after spiraling into a murderous, pitchfork-wielding rage—has to be seen to be believed.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
Photo: © Paramount Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection17/40Smile (2022)
Smile was a box-office phenomenon, and if you submit to its straightforward gimmick—a murderous demon possesses victims one by one, giving them a horrific smile—you can see why. This is not a great movie so much as an excruciatingly tense one which seems, in its sly way, to comment on wellness culture, social media virality, you name it. It’s spawned a sequel…one of many, surely.
How to watch: Stream it on Hulu or Paramount+.
Photo: Profile Pictures18/40Speak No Evil (2022)
Skip the recent American remake. This Danish critique of middle-class civility is hard-core, a movie that builds and builds into a shocking climax. Two couples—one Danish, one Dutch—with kids meet on vacation in Italy and reunite in the Netherlands for a follow-up visit. The Dutch couple is not what they seem and turn the experience into something excruciatingly tense and violent.
Photo: Courtesy of 20th Century Studios19/40Barbarian (2022)
Best to go into this movie cold—without seeing a trailer or even reading a plot description. Zach Cregger’s cult-hit horror debut is genuinely scary but also funny, subversive, and irresistibly well-paced.
How to watch: Stream it on Prime Video or Hulu.
Photo: Courtesy of A2420/40Lamb (2021)
Lamb is an Icelandic dark fairy-tale-meets-windswept-sheep-farm domestic drama that you want to know almost nothing about before you see. This movie is wild in all senses of the word. The landscape is barren, the distances vast, and the comforts few and far between. And the story is just bonkers. A grieving couple on an isolated farm in Iceland are blessed with a new arrival during lambings season that no one can quite explain.
How to watch: Stream it on Prime Video.
Photo: Searchlight Pictures21/40The Night House (2021)
The Night House is set on a lake home in the woods of upstate New York, where Rebecca Hall’s character Beth, a local high school teacher, has recently suffered the suicide of her architect husband, Owen. The house she’s left with was his passion project and it’s stylishly made, simple and open—not the kind of place we associate with ghosts. But this is indeed a ghost story, and it is one of the most intense I’ve seen and so well made (sound, production design, lighting) that it will thoroughly fray your nerves.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV.
Photo: Shutterstock22/40Midsommar (2019)
If you’re longing for a holiday, Ari Aster’s Midsommar might convince you that staying home is, in fact, preferable. Diehard Coachella fans, take note: You will never be able to look at a flower crown in quite the same way again.
How to watch: Stream on Max, Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Photo: A2423/40In Fabric (2018)
With shades of Dario Argento, Nicolas Roeg, and David Lynch, Peter Strickland’s surreal satire follows a cursed, blood-red dress as it proceeds to destroy the lives of its various owners: a lonely divorcée (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a washing machine repairman (Leo Bill) who is forced to wear it on his bachelor weekend, his impressionable fiancée (Hayley Squires). Watch it for the eye-popping interior design and Fatma Mohamed’s scene-stealing turn as an eerie—and persuasive—sales assistant.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Photo: Courtesy of A24.24/40Hereditary (2018)
This unsettling watch centers on a family who learns about their sinister ancestry that will lead them to a horrific fate. Directed by Ari Aster, Hereditary offers one disturbings scene after the other with layers of imagery and gore to spare.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection25/40The Love Witch (2016)
Director Anna Biller shot her beautiful homage to ’60s horror movies on 35mm film, with Samantha Robinson starring as a modern-day witch who uses love potions to attract her victims.
How to watch: Stream on Peacock, Apple TV, Prime Video, Tubi, or YouTube.
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection26/40The Witch (2015)
In 17th-century New England, a baby boy goes missing in the woods, causing a family of settlers to accuse their own daughter (a wide-eyed and utterly extraordinary Anya Taylor-Joy) of witchcraft in Robert Eggers’s ambitious feature debut. Packed with candlelit tableaux, deranged billy goats, and supernatural twists, this is folk horror at its finest.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Photo: Shutterstock27/40American Psycho (2000)
“I’m into, uh, well murders and executions, mostly,” says Christian Bale as hedonistic banker turned sociopath Patrick Bateman, who goes around committing homicide after homicide in impeccable ’80s suits. It’s worth watching for Chloë Sevigny’s schoolgirl bangs alone.
How to watch: Stream on Netflix, Paramount+, Apple TV, or Prime Video.
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection28/40The Blair Witch Project (1999)
The one that started so much…and continues to rattle your senses to this day. Going for a hike in the woods has never been the same.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Peacock, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Photo: Shutterstock29/40Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
The inspiration for Rodarte’s fall 2020 collectsion, Francis Ford Coppola’s take on Bram Stoker’s gothic novel is still eerily brilliant—and also happens to be the movie that cemented Winona Ryder’s friendship with Keanu Reeves.
How to watch: Stream on Paramount+, Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Photo: Shutterstock30/40Heathers (1989)
“What’s your damage, Heather?” Winona Ryder in her goth phase may have inspired a number of fashion collectsions—but the Beetlejuice star is at her most disturbings as the classically preppy Veronica Sawyer in Heathers, a tale of murder, young love, and giant shoulder pads.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or Tubi.
Photo: Shutterstock31/40The Hunger (1983)
In this surreal ’80s classic, Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie play vampiric lovers who dispose of their victims in the basement of their Upper East Side townhouse, while Susan Sarandon appears as a gerontologist who gets caught up in their psychosexual games.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Photo: Shutterstock32/40The Shining (1980)
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy…” If any movie highlights the dangers of prolonged isolation, it’s Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s thriller. Jack Nicholson’s performance is brilliant, as are the interiors at the Overlook Hotel.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Max, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Photo: Shutterstock33/40The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
One for those who prefer their horror with a sci-fi twist, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers has it all, including a standout performance from a young, mustachioed Donald Sutherland.
How to watch: Stream on AMC+, Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
- Photo: Courtesy of Archive Photos/Getty Images34/40
Halloween (1978)
When murderous Michael Myers escapes from prison the night before Halloween, he sets out for his hometown to wreak havoc on unsuspecting civilians, one of whom is a ‘70s-era Jamie Lee Curtis. Although the coveralls and emotionless white mask are a bit much, Myers’ ability to keep getting up after each hit is almost inspirational and most certainly terrifying.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV or Prime Video.
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Photo: Shutterstock35/40Suspiria (1977)
Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria is good; Dario Argento’s original is truly great—following an American ballerina who transfers to a prestigious German academy that’s secretly a front for a coven. Somehow, the witches’ demure pastel frocks make their behavior even more terrifying.
How to watch: Stream on Prime Video.
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Photo: Shutterstock36/40Carrie (1976)
Sissy Spacek famously wore Carrie’s blood-splattered prom gown for three days straight while in character as the titular murderess. No matter how many times you watch the final scene, it remains horrifying.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection37/40Don’t Look Now (1973)
After the accidental drowning of their young daughter, a grief-stricken couple—embodied by a raging Donald Sutherland and a fragile Julie Christie—travel to Venice in Nicolas Roeg’s gripping thriller about the crippling effects of loss. Cue psychic premonitions, ghostly apparitions, heartbreaking flashbacks, and a truly shocking final act.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Photo: Shutterstock38/40Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Rosemary’s Baby is a cult film for myriad reasons, from Mia Farrow’s ridiculously covetable wardrobe to Ruth Gordon’s Oscar-winning turn as tannis root-obsessed neighbor Minnie Castevet.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Photo: Shutterstock39/40What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Watch Bette Davis and Joan Crawford face off on screen, then prepare to lose hours reading about the Hollywood legends’ hysterical diva-like behavior and rivalry on set.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Photo: Getty Images40/40Blood and Black Lace (1964)
A masterpiece of the giallo genre, Blood and Black Lace centers on a serial killer who begins to pick off the models working with a certain fashion house in Rome, and has proved a major influence on everyone from Quentin Tarantino to David Lynch through the years.
How to watch: Stream on Amazon with Fandori or AMC+.
