A good scary movie makes us afraid of its ghosts. A great one sees ghosts for what they are—specters of the past. That past can be horrific, filled with darkness we can never quite outrun. Ghosts can also be seductive, drawing us back to a past that we ought to have outgrown, teasing us with the idea that we can visit long-dead people and abandoned places, if only in shadow. We love ghost stories, perhaps, because we love the idea that there’s life beyond the grave, and that the past is never really gone. But the logic of story ensures that the gift of that reassurance comes with a price, and reminds us to be careful what we wish for.
With the caveat that neither The Uninvited nor The Innocents, two of the absolute best of the genre, aren't streaming anywhere, here are a handful of the best and most interesting ghost stories.
Structured as a series of tales told by a group of weary travelers, Dead of Night is, perhaps, most famous for the segment about a ventriloquist and his dummy, Hugo—a sequence that paved the way for any number of creepy dolls. That's the only bit here that doesn't involve a ghost of some kind, as we're treated to phantom carriages, wailing ghost kids, a mirror haunted by the ghost of a murder to which it bore witness, and a golfing ghost looking for love from beyond the grave. Serious ghost stories were surprisingly scarce in the first few decades of cinema, but this British film gives us several, all rather brilliant. The movie is also justifiably famous for its clever twist ending that hints at science fiction—but I won't spoil that here.
Where to stream: Kanopy, Screambox
Though he'd later be known for epics like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago, director David Lean here crafted a bubbly adaptation of the Noël Coward play, with Rex Harrison as novelist Charles Condomine. When Charles invites a medium over for some research, she accidentally summons the spirit of his dead wife (Kay Hammond), who enjoys wrecking havoc with the lives of both Charles and his new wife (Constance Cummings). If a droll sex farce is more to your taste than outright horror this spooky season, this might be just the thing.
Where to stream: Max, Prime Video, The Criterion Channel, Tubi
It’s shocking how readily available Carnival of Souls is, given that its history saw it being mostly ignored. The first time I saw it, well into the DVD era, it was on an old VHS tape, because that’s all there was. Yes, it’s technically in the public domain, but even Criterion has made a slot for the micro-budget independent story of a young woman who stumbles into an incredibly atmospheric, existentially dreadful fairground full of sunken-eyed tourists who don’t always seem to be having that much fun. It plays a bit like a mash-up of George Romero and David Lynch, but pre-dated the work of each of them.
Where to stream: Max, Tubi, The Criterion Channel, Shudder, Crackle, AMC+, Prime Video
Based on the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House, the movie starts out with a fairly stock premise and builds to something unexpected. A scientist invites a disparate group of visitors to spend the night in the reputedly haunted Hill House, a beautiful but oddly designed structure. As in Jackson’s novel, director Robert Wise (about whom we don’t speak enough) creates character drama out of a terrifying night, exploring each character in turn but focusing on sheepish and awkward Eleanor, who spent most of her adult life caring for her mother, only recently deceased. It evolves into a movie about two lost souls who find what they’ve been looking for in each other. Forever.
The book on which it was based has been adapted multiple times, and inspired imitators like goofy-but-fun The House on Haunted Hill. They’re almost all worthwhile on their own terms, and the Mike Flanagan miniseries is essential, though the 1999 remake is probably best avoided.
Where to stream: MGM+, digital rental
What look like modern horror tropes (vengeful ghosts and demons, in particular) go back a long way in Japanese culture: J-horror was a thing long before we had a collective term for it—centuries earlier, in fact. So it’s no surprise that some of the best ghost movies come from Japanese filmmakers.
Kwaidan, from an archaic form of the word for “ghost story,” is an anthology film—horror being a genre that very often works better in small bites. The downside is that there are often peaks and valleys in quality. Not so here, with each of the four tales being very different but brilliantly constructed, and also influential: Horror lovers will recognize some of the imagery here that became iconic (as in the first story: “The Black Hair.”) The film is also stunningly beautiful, with tremendous use of color.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
A revenge story with surprisingly feminist themes, the stark, spare Kuroneko starts simply and grows more complex before an impressive, if ambiguous, climax. Two women, mother and daughter-in-law, are raped and murdered by a troop of traveling samurai. Vowing vengeance and making a pact with the underworld, their spirits seduce wandering warriors and then murder them ruthlessly. Eventually, a military hero is sent to deal with the deadly spirits. He's a samurai who soon learns that the two ghosts are those of his wife and mother.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel
So creepily influential was this British TV movie that it gave a name to a long-established idea in paranormal research that ghosts aren't so much the spirits of the dead, but instead playbacks of traumatic events that took place in particular locations. Here, a tech company heads off to an old Victorian mansion to work on some new developments in sound recording (circa 1972), and find themselves in the middle of a haunting something that appears to involve a maid who worked in the house a century before. Trying to work out the science in the hopes of applying it to their own research, the team soon discovers that there are older forces at work in the house. Unsurprisingly for a movie set in the world of audio recording, it's the sounds here that are the most chilling.
Where to stream: Shudder, AMC+, digital rental
A flying disembodied head bites someone in the ass; a girl is eaten by a piano: a woman disappears into a refrigerator. That’s just a taste of the fundamental and deliberate weirdness of House (or Hausu), the story of six friends invited to visit a spooky old house. It’s hard to make out any real themes or even much of a plot: the movie is almost entirely a triumph of style over substance, but what style! The bright, candy-coated visuals of the earlier parts of the film only pave the way for the bloodbath to come. The whole experience is like a music video fever dream—not scary, really, but unforgettable.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
Once again: Unless you like the idea of living in a horror movie, please think twice about cheap real estate. In this case, it’s a giant and inherently creepy Victorian mansion that, for some reason(!), nobody has lived in for over a decade. George C. Scott can’t see the problem, and, following the deaths of his wife and daughter in an auto accident, decides that the place might represent just the change of pace he’s looking for. Of course, all the best haunted houses have at least as much to do with the baggage we bring into them as with the events of their pasts, and Scott’s character has plenty as he investigates the increasingly weird happenings in a house that most people would vacate before even unpacking.
It’s a cult classic for a couple of reasons: the always reliable Scott’s performance, and also the technical proficiency of the haunted house scares is a cornerstone of that particular genre.
Where to stream: Peacock, Tubi, Shudder, AMC+, digital rental
Before his aesthetic became a brand, Tim Burton was genuinely one of the most original and transgressive filmmakers of his generation, bringing a specific spooky, dark-comedy weirdness to each and every project. After creating a single, extremely memorable ghost trucker in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, he took us on a full-fledged tour of hell with Beetlejuice, and, as with all of his early projects, goes to great lengths to make the case that the outsiders (the dead, in this case), are generally having more fun.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
An extremely unsettling juxtaposition of heady themes and exploitation, director Mary Lambert's Pet Sematary takes one of Stephen King's most challenging books and adds touches that border on camp (think Fred Gwynne's "Ayup!" neighbor Jud Crandall, and endlessly mimicked Maine accent). None of it quite works on paper, but it's full of indelible imagery (creepy cats, murderous toddlers, etc.) and is possessed of a real power to leave us creeped the hell out. You might make the case that the reanimated corpses of the film don't count as ghosts, but the narrative is framed around dead jogger Victor Pascow, a gory specter who shows up to warn Dale Midkiff's Louis Creed to stay out of that damned Pet Sematary. If only he'd listened.
Where to stream: digital rental
With all the trappings of a slasher movie (including a very memorable slasher in Tony Todd’s Daniel Robitaille), Candyman became a cult classic by defying its genre conventions—not only by foregrounding Black characters, but by building a gothic romance into its story of a vengeful ghost in the Chicago projects. Robitaille was murdered for his love affair with a white woman, the evil and trauma of that event and others like it spreading for decades. When his vengeful spirit encounters the woman who could be the reincarnation of his beloved Helen, Candyman haunts her to a tragic conclusion. The '90s-era sequels aren't essential, but the 2021 Nia DaCosta reboot-cum-sequel is the best of them all.
Where to stream: Shudder, Peacock, AMC+, digital rental
With a bit of War of the Worlds-style swagger, Ghostwatch descended upon an unsuspecting British public way back in 1992, presenting itself as a live Halloween TV special at the site of an allegedly haunted house. Real-life TV presenter Sarah Greene is on hand, as is comedian and Red Dwarf star Craig Charles, each playing themselves for what looks like it's going to be a night of spooky fun. That's before our presence, only ever referred as "Pipes," makes itself known and all hell breaks loose, almost literally. It's all based on the "true" story of the Enfield Poltergeist, which was also the subject of the second Conjuring movie.
Where to stream: Shudder, AMC+, digital rental
Audiences weren’t quite sure what to make of Beloved upon its release in 1998: its director (Jonathan Demme) and stars (Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, and Thandiwe Newton) suggested a prestige drama, but it’s also very much a ghost story, and not a gentle one—the opening scene leaves that in no doubt. The plot involves Winfrey’s character, Sethe, who escaped from slavery years before but finds that the specter (quite literally) of her enslaved life, and the brutal, impossible choices she was forced to make, won’t leave her be.
Where to stream: digital rental
Time, and two decades of only sporadically effective M. Night Shyamalan twists, may have dulled its impact somewhat, but repeat viewings make one thing clear: This movie is more than just its ending, and it retains its chilling atmosphere and effectiveness even when viewed with that well-known conclusion in mind. Haley Joel Osment, who was somehow turned down for the lead role in The Phantom Menace, gives one of film’s all-time great kid performances, and Bruce Willis has never been better.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
While The Sixth Sense was making an early case for elevated horror back in 1999, House on Haunted Hill was a bit of trashy fun, placing Famke Janssen, Taye Diggs, Ali Larter, Bridgette Wilson, Peter Gallagher, and Chris Kattan in a former psychiatric facility (for the criminally insane, naturally) where Geoffrey Rush offers one million dollars to anyone who lasts the night. If it's not terrifying, it's slick and fun, with some brilliantly gory effects from make-up masters Gregory Nicotero and Dick Smith (this would be Smith's last credit). If the carnage here is too much for you, there's no rule against revisiting the 1958 Vincent Price-led original, which is similarly goofy fun without so much blood.
Where to stream: Tubi, digital rental
There’s a twist ending here, which I won’t spoil, but what impresses me most about Alejandro Amenábar’s gloomy ghost drama is its rewatchability—the atmosphere is so relentlessly chilling that the scary bits still work, even when you realize that you were meant to be looking elsewhere. Nicole Kidman is excellent as the stolid but brittle mother to two children in an isolated house in the Channel Islands, waiting endlessly for her husband (Christopher Eccleston) to return for the war. The youngest child happens to be extremely photosensitive, to the point that he can never be in direct daylight—cleverly and conveniently ensuring that large portions of the house remain dark at all times. And what’s the deal with the friendly but secretive servants (including the great Fionnula Flanagan), mysteriously arrived from out of nowhere? The mysteries build to a brutal but satisfying climax.
Where to stream: digital rental
Spirits don’t have to be scary, though that doesn’t mean that they can’t be capricious and a little dangerous. Hayao Miyazaki’s triumph is, not surprisingly, also one of the greatest animated pictures of all time—a week of tremendous beauty, and great care in every single frame. It’s the story of stubborn Chihiro, who goes on an adventure in a world of spirits to rescue her parents and to reclaim her name.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
Through the eyes of young Carlos, we’re introduced to Spain, circa 1939: the final year of the Spanish Civil War. General Franco is ascending, and two leftist sympathizers maintain a secret and remote home for orphans, with the full knowledge that they’ve cast their lot with the losing side. The ghost here, Santi, used to sleep in Carlos’ bed, and del Toro makes just the right use of ghost-story conventions—using the memorable and creepy spirit to test the film’s living characters as they face the end of their world. His more recent Crimson Peak is a very different kind of ghost story, but equally effective.
Where to stream: Peacock, digital rental
A bona fide horror cult classic, Session 9 stars David Caruso as part of an asbestos abatement crew working at an abandoned mental asylum. It goes about as well as you'd expect. Though the evocative setting seems like it would be perfect for all manner of spectral jump scares, the movie has bigger ambitions—it's deliberately confusing if you're not paying attention. The crew start to take on aspects of those who died in the asylum ... or do they? Are they all possessed? Losing their minds? The movie is ultimately a psychological mind-bender that rewards close viewing.
Where to stream: digital rental
This Kim Jee-woon shocker is a visual stunner—a somber, Shakespearean tale of a South Korean teenager who reunites with her beloved sister following a stay in a mental hospital. Their father has a new wife, who herself has a disturbing relationship with the spirits present in the house—but there are even stranger, more horrific, and more absurd events that plague the family in this non-linear narrative. As with some of the best horror movies, it all comes back to the cruel family secrets that saw the sisters separated in the first place.
Where to stream: AMC+
This Australian import is a more restrained take on found footage horror, though the presentation is more documentary than shaky cam. Less interested in scares than in exploring the hole left by a death, the movie follows a family working to come to terms with the death of 15-year-old Alice. Her brother becomes convinced that he’s seen her spirit, and so sets up cameras to document what he believes is happening. Typical setup, in some ways, but the movie is much more interested in using the supernatural to explore grief, and also, as Alice’s life is explored, the ways in which we construct identities for those we love without always knowing them as well as we think.
Where to stream: digital rental
Claire and Luke are working the desk for the last weekend at the formerly grand Yankee Pedlar Inn, mostly there to turn out the lights. They’re both ghost enthusiasts, though, and realize that it’s also their last chance to gather evidence for some of the long-reported ghostly activity that surrounds the business. What begins as a series of slightly goofy attempts by the staff to come up with examples of ghostly activity grows gradually into something darker when the last guest checks in. I’m not sure that the movie breaks any new ground, but it’s an incredibly well-constructed example of the form: funny when it needs to be, but still smart and with some genuinely chilling moments. Ghost stories often turn on their endings, and this one builds to something worthwhile.
Director Ti West based the film’s location on the real-life—also supposedly haunted—Yankee Pedlar. The exterior and several scenes were shot there, and the actual hotel went under just a couple of years later. Was it a ghostly curse? Did the Pedlar’s spirits take umbrage at being the subject of a horror movie? Or did attempts to goose the business by converting it into a Best Western go south? You decide. (Probably that last one.)
Where to stream: Peacock, Shudder, Tubi, AMC+, Prime Video
James Wan and company kicked off the horror movie version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with this old-school haunted house thriller. You might not love every goddamn movie that's spun off from it, but there's a reason The Conjuring was so successful: After a decade or so of horror that leaned toward either found footage or dank basement torture, this spooky ghost thriller (based on a true story lol) was a welcome throwback. Smart and effective, and frankly the best thing to spring from the careers of professional con artist Lorraine Warren and her sex-pest husband, Ed.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
Beginning as a more straightforward ghost story, Personal Shopper shifts and morphs itself into something wholly unique, a story of personal shopper who’s also something of a medium, attempting to make contact with her dead brother. The mysterious text messages she begins to receive might be messages from the beyond or evidence of a stalker, and the disconcertingly fragmented nature of the movie’s structure works in maintaining a tone that’s both off-kilter and playful. Shopper is a follow-up to a previous collaboration between Stewart and director Olivier Assayas, the highly acclaimed Clouds of Sils Maria, and this one’s even better.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel, digital rental
David Lowery is one of our most impressive modern visual stylists (as anyone who’s seen his more recent The Green Knight will understand), which perhaps begins to explain how a film that involves a man in a sheet playing a ghost can be so evocative and interesting. The story of a man who dies unexpectedly and yet remains at the property shared by him and his wife, the story is haunting rather than scary, in the sense that the exploration of love and loss lingers after the end credits. The sheet device, which could be silly in other hands, makes the ghost into a figure we can easily identify with.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
Confusingly, this isn’t the The Curse of La Llorona, the Conjuring-adjacent American film also released in 2019. That one is perfectly serviceable, but not terribly memorable. This Guatemalan film (from director Jayro Bustamante) does something far more interesting with the legendary weeping woman, tying her into the very real history of the Indigenous Mayan genocide that reached its most horrifying depths in the early 1980s. In the film, a fictionalized version of the former Guatemalan president has only recently avoided prosecution for his crimes, retreating to his palatial home amid his divided family. They’re soon joined by a new housekeeper, Alma, whose name means “spirit”—not subtle, but it’s not meant to be. The typical thriller movie scares are largely absent here in favor of atmosphere and the chilling reality of the horrors it portrays.
Where to stream: Shudder, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
Good horror scares us; great horror stays with us, reminding us that the most frightening stuff lives outside the panels of the TV or movie screen. In writer/director Remi Weekes' thriller, a refugee couple makes an escape from war in South Sudan, only to find evil just barely beneath the surface in the English town that doesn't necessarily want them there. His House works both as an effective chiller about a house haunted by evil, but also as a potent and disturbing story about survivor’s guilt and the refugee experience more generally.
Where to stream: Netflix
Not scary, but certainly haunting, Simple Man finds Masao Matsuyoshi (Steve Iwamoto) at the end of his life, with the ghosts of his past appearing before him and roaming the countryside. First and most prominent is his wife, Grace (Constance Wu), who died in 1959, on the night that America took Hawaii as a state, but she's followed by literal and figurative ghosts that trace Oʻahu's development over the decades, for better and worse, and explore Masao's identities as Hawaiian, Japanese, and American. More than that, though, it's a moving and not-unconvincing take on the idea that our loved ones live on, in every meaningful way, at least until we join them.
Where to stream: Tubi, digital rental
One of the most inventive horror-comedies of recent years, Deadstream cleverly calls back to the original Evil Dead with its blend of goofy good humor, wonderfully gross practical effects, and legit scares. Director/star Joseph Winter plays Shawn, a once-popular YouTube personality working on a comeback (one of the movie’s most clever conceits is in tricking you into liking a character who, it becomes increasingly clear, doesn’t deserve your love). Beloved for his outrageous stunts, he builds an all-night livestream around locking himself in a purportedly haunted house. You can certainly see where that’s going, but Winter and company construct a movie that’s uniquely fun, and also manages to get in some good digs at our toxic social media landscape.
Where to stream: Shudder, AMC+, digital rental
