The most surprising horror movie of the decade is streaming now on Hulu

The most unpredictable horror movie of the past five years (or more) is streaming now on Hulu — just in time for spooky season.

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It’s hard to genuinely surprise moviegoers these days. Many of them have seen too many movies. They know the ropes too well. That has especially become the case with certain horror genres. How does someone even try to reinvent the slasher thriller in the year 2024? Or the haunted house movie? There are too many well-known tropes now, and a lot of movies understandably try to focus less on surprising their viewers and more on exceeding their expectations in different ways. But then there are films that still make unpredictability look shockingly easy. Perhaps no movie of the 2020s so far has done that as well as Barbarian. The horror film from writer-director Zach Cregger came seemingly out of nowhere in the late summer of 2022 and quickly garnered a reputation for being a thriller that you should go into knowing as little about as possible. That’s because Barbarian is, to put it incredibly simply, a wild ride unlike any other horror movie in recent memory. It’s now officially streaming on Hulu — just in time for the Halloween season. Barbarian wastes no time before putting you in an uncomfortable, uncertain place. Its opening scene follows Tess (The Watchers star Georgina Campbell), a young woman caught in the rain in a dark, quiet subur. She arrives at the Airbnb she’s rented in Detroit only to discover that someone else, Keith (The Crow‘s Bill Skarsgård), is already there. They both assume that the rental was accidentally double-booked, but when Keith invites Tess to just share it with him for the night, she’s forced to make numerous quick decisions about how much she should trust this total stranger she’s just met. To say much more about Barbarian‘s plot would be to spoil all the fun. The places that the film goes following Tess and Keith’s initial meeting, however, are as shocking as they are — at times — genuinely horrifying. Barbarian never overly telegraphs what it is about to do, either. The film, in fact, offers very little warning about where it is ultimately going to go, and that’s a large part of its brilliance. It forces you for almost the entirety of its 102-minute runtime to sit in the present moment with its characters and, therefore, discover new information at the same pace they do. Watching it feels like finding a mysterious thread and simply following it to see where it goes. The film’s plot is, on paper, ridiculous, but it ends up making a crooked kind of sense because of how patiently Cregger takes you through it on a step-by-step basis. It doesn’t hurt that Barbarian also has a goofy sense of humor about its story. The thriller pulls off several truly audacious, jarring, and effective transitions over the course of its runtime, including one midpoint break that manages to give viewers a much-needed sigh of relief and simultaneously prompts them to continue sitting forward. Quite frankly, there aren’t many modern horror movies that feel as well-rounded and satisfying as Barbarian. There are moments when it achieves a suffocating level of terror that leaves you frozen in place, but then there are instances when it gets you to burst out laughing as well. It’s a familiar underdog Final Girl story, haunted house thriller, monster movie, and pitch-black comedy all wrapped into one, and it really does need to be seen to be believed. While it frequently bounces between horror and comedy, too, the one thing that Barbarian consistently does is keep you on the edge of your seat. Once you turn it on, you can’t turn it off, and you’ll be glad by the end that you didn’t. Barbarian is streaming now on Hulu. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Bryanston Distributing Company / Bryanston Distributing Company Earlier this week, Variety published a list of the 100 best horror movies ever. Sitting at the top, like an exhumed corpse festering in the brilliant midday sun, was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This was not a controversial choice on the publication’s part, not in the year of our unholy lord of darkness 2024. Tobe Hooper’s deranged thriller, which roared into theaters 50 years ago, has been rising in critical esteem for decades, its reputation as a truly great movie — rather than merely a deeply upsetting and effective one — steadily cementing over the last half-century. Time, in other words, has been very kind to a savage, scandalous act of grindhouse exploitation once considered so shocking, it was banned in multiple countries. Yesterday’s outrage machine has become today’s lionized classic. Author Stephen King has had his writing adapted for film and television several times in the past 50 years. Since so many interpretations of his work have been made, some films and TV shows were bound to have fallen under the radar. One King adaptation that audiences have sorely overlooked is 1993’s The Dark Half.

Based on King’s 1989 novel of the same name, this horror film follows bestselling novelist Thad Beaumont as he decides to retire his pen name, “George Stark,” and holds a mock burial for him, only for Stark to become an actual person hellbent on terrorizing Beaumont and everyone close to him as revenge for his “death” years before.

THE DARK HALF (1991) | Official Trailer | MGM The Dark Half failed to recoup its $15 million budget, making around $10.6 million at the box office. Like the most recent version of Salem’s Lot, this movie was lucky to have been released at all, as it had finished filming for two years by the time Orion Pictures decided to distribute it. The Dark Half may be a bit too dramatic for modern tastes, but the film has earned considerable praise and deserves greater recognition from audiences. Now that Halloween is almost here, it’s time to dig deep into the annals of spooky cinema and explore why The Dark Half is such an underrated film.

The Dark Half has a clever story In terms of traumatic childhoods, few movie characters have ever had it as bad as Danny Torrance. The young psychic child at the center of The Shining is not only relentlessly preyed upon one winter by the malevolent ghosts of a haunted hotel, but he and his mother are also nearly killed by his ax-wielding father. He experiences so many unimaginable horrors over the span of just a few months that one can’t help but feel both relief and concern for him when The Shining ends. Danny’s traumatic time at the Overlook Hotel fittingly haunts writer-director Mike Flanagan’s Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep. Based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, the film attempts to bring the story of Dan Torrance (played as an adult by Ewan McGregor) to a close. In doing so, it ends up telling a very different tale than its revered predecessor. If The Shining is about the dangers of alcoholism and male rage, then Doctor Sleep is about how children survive abuse in a world that seems intent on tamping them down and stealing their “shine.” Upgrade your lifestyleDigital Trends helps readers keep tabs on the fast-paced world of tech with all the latest news, fun product reviews, insightful editorials, and one-of-a-kind sneak peeks.

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