Top Horror Movies Streaming This Week

The concept of the Backrooms, a seemingly endless liminal space that exists outside of our world but is accessible to human beings through openings in the fabric of the extradimensional space, has existed on the internet since 2019. It came from the humble beginning of a real photo posted on a popular imageboard that captured people's imaginations. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia are the unfortunate and fortunate explorers of the interdimensional complex of terror and weird furniture.

What was it about the Backrooms and that photo that caught the zeitgeist, led to it becoming a creepypasta, and made it the obsessive subject of so many Reddit posts? Is it the unsettling color or simply the expressive emptiness of the photos? It's that line of curiosity that has caused internet fans of the creepypasta to expand on stories about the Backrooms and eventually led to Kane Parsons' cinematic version of the story.

Backrooms is now streaming on HBO Max.

Director Curry Barker's Obsession still has a firm grip on its spot in this week's list as the film reaches the three-month mark among the most-watched horror movies. It has become one of 2026's cinematic cultural phenomena, becoming more than just a really popular movie that provoked conversations about its story and characters, and Internet memes using screengrabs of scenes from the film, like Weapons and Sinners did last year.

Inde Navarette's performance as Nikki was lauded as one of the year's best, and the film still has an excellent 93% Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes even five months after Obsession‘s release. Curry Barker and Inde Navarette returned to the Toronto Film Festival on September 11 for a Dialogues conversation for the film festival's newly opened film market and to celebrate with a screening of the film a year and six days after the premiere at the 2025 edition of the festival.

Obsession is now streaming on Peacock.

Writer and director Jane Schoenbrun's third feature brings a new viewpoint to slasher films, a brand-new slasher killer to the subgenre, and has captured the third spot this week, along with our hearts.  Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Dylan Baker, Eva Victor, Zach Cherry, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Amanda Fix, Louise Weard, and Patrick Fischler star in this bloody fantasy horror film.

When a young film festival wunderkind, Kris Williams, gets the plum assignment of rebooting her favorite slasher horror movie franchise, she seeks out the original final girl from the first film to tempt her into coming back to the new film she is creating. The actress, Billy Presley, is a mysterious and glamorous presence that fascinates Kris, as she tries to get to the bottom of the mystery at the bottom of Camp Miasma.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now streaming on Mubi.

The second new film on the list brings the Evil Dead franchise home once again. Directed and co-written by French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček, who is best known for directing 2023's Infested, the suitably gnarly and critically acclaimed feature about a deadly spider hitching a ride to France. Critics raved about the film, which Vaniček said had themes of xenophobia, or irrational fear of immigrants.

In Evil Dead Burn, Souheila Yacoub stars as a young widow who reunites with her family for her husband's funeral, alongside Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Erroll Shand, and Maude Davey.  Little do the family members suspect that the Deadites have already been released and are jumping from one person to another in a frightening chain reaction of demonic possession. 

Evil Dead Burn is now streaming on HBO Max.

It would hardly be October without the horror master John Carpenter's slasher movie classic being in our hearts and on our TV screens. If there was ever a film made to watch for the entire month of October, Halloween has seen 48 birthdays after its release on October 27, and seems every bit as relevant and scary as it has ever been. One of the all-time Halloween favorites has improved its standing in this week's top ten, moving up one spot.

Carpenter wrote the film with his girlfriend at the time and long-term producer Debra Hill, who was born in Haddonfield, New Jersey.  So the name of the town is likely based on that on a real town, but is still fictional as it was placed in the state of Illinois. Hill and Carpenter worked together on seven films, and she had a total of 20 film credits as a producer. Carpenter had only complimentary words for their collaboration, and it is clear that Carpenter is comfortable working with women on his films, unlike many of his contemporaries.

Halloween (1978) is now streaming on AMC+,  Cult Pix,  Fubo, and Shudder.

Zach Cregger's second horror movie, Weapons, is still doing well in the top ten and was a leap forward for the director after the surprising and wild success of Barbarian.  Rather than leaning into what worked the first time, he tackled a different set of fears and was rewarded with box office success and critical acclaim after a bidding war for the spec script that became Weapons.

Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Cary Christopher, Toby Huss, Benedict Wong, and Amy Madigan's performances as the movie's characters show the skills that Cregger has as a director working with actors and as a writer who crafts the story and dialogue. It is likely related to his time as an actor and a sketch comedy performer that gives him the understanding that reinforces the sureness of his work with those actors.

Weapons is now streaming on HBO Max and Prime.

Barbarian is a movie with scares that sneak up on you; at first, it seems fairly ordinary and then spins wildly out of control. For the character Tess, it is hard to know who to trust among the film's men who may or may not mean her harm. The situation is quite realistic for women who have ever been asked to accept the word of a male stranger and who hope against hope that they have not made a bad decision.

Sometimes the most charming men who seem harmless are the ones you have to look out for. Cregger's interest in Gavin de Becker book, The Gift of Fear, which encourages women to listen to their intuition rather than trust someone blindly, was a gold mine for a scene Cregger wrote that put as many “red flag” warnings as possible into the action and dialogue. It is an interesting perspective and thematic principle for a director to follow in a horror film, and it paid dividends as the audience was riveted by Cregger's ideas.

Barbarian is now streaming on Hulu.

The third new film on this week's list is Soulm8te, the third movie in the M3GAN franchise, an offshoot of the original story with a different kind of robot companion.  A very, very different kind of companion, namely a sexbot for lonely adults. Kate Dolan directed and co-wrote the film, which takes an erotic turn. A widower who is a programmer at Ultima Robotics is given access to a chatbot and then his own Soulm8te robot, who becomes angry once he makes a connection with a human woman.

Lily Sullivan, David Rysdahl, and Claudia Doumit star in the film, which was produced by Jason Blum of Blumhouse and James Wan of Atomic Monster. The film was originally scheduled for a theatrical run, but after one film festival screening, it was switched to a digital-only release. It has now hit streaming for the first time.

Soulm8te is now streaming on Hulu.

An undeniable classic has entered the ring of the top horror movies on streaming this week. One of the masters of horror, Wes Craven, who has no less than three horror franchises in his filmography, with several classics that were one-offs among his films, made a big splash with A Nightmare on Elm Street, which eventually became a franchise with eight entries, including reboots and the slasher crossover movie Freddy vs. Jason.

With a cast that includes Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Amanda Wyss, Lin Shaye, and horror favorite Robert Englund, in the role that made him a horror icon, it's an inspired idea with one of horror's best and most inventive final girls, Heather Langenkamp as Nancy Thompson.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is now streaming on AMC and HBO Max.

After last week's high-water mark of Zach Cregger and Resident Evil-related moves taking lots of spots in the top ten, this is one of the three movies left. Paul W.S. Anderson's ode to Milla Jovovich being hot, with lots of zombies, is also a movie that created a mostly different narrative than the games, with new characters who had never been established in the gaming universe.

The movie is very stylish, with flying curtains, hip outfits, and strongly colored gel lighting that was reminiscent of Anderson's space horror film, Event Horizon. It stars Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy, Martin Crewes, and Colin Salmon.

Resident Evil is now streaming on Paramount+ on Prime and The Roku Channel on Prime.