Top Horror Movies Streaming This Week

The maestro is back. Sam Raimi's newest film, the survival horror story Send Help, has hit streaming and instantly shot to number one on the weekly list, as you would expect it to do. This is Raimi's first film since 2022's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which contains nothing supernatural and is about a resilient, yet nerdy, corporate employee and her boss after their plane crashes, and they are marooned on an island in the Gulf of Thailand.

Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien play the adversaries who have to live together, but their animosity remains under the surface. It is a change of pace for McAdams, whose last genre film was 2005's Red Eye.

Send Help is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

Another new entry to the top ten this week is Scream 7, the first film in the franchise directed by Kevin Williamson, who shares co-writing duties with Guy Busick. Williamson is the writer of the original Scream, which was also his first produced screenplay.  It was the script that had a huge influence on the genre and which spawned a wave of young, hip, meta horror in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

This scary movie is the return of Sidney Prescott. Neve Campbell, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, David Arquette, Matthew Lillard, and Courteney Cox are on board for this latest movie, and Isabel May, Anna Camp, Michelle Randolph, Jimmy Tatro, McKenna Grace, Asa Germann, Celeste O'Connor, Sam Rechner, Mark Consuelos, Tim Simons, and Joel McHale are new actors who have joined the cast.

Scream 7 is now streaming on Paramount+.

Jessie Buckley, who plays two roles, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Penélope Cruz star in writer and director Maggie Gyllenhaal's second feature film. It is the second time that Academy Award winner Buckley has worked with Gyllenhaal; the filmmaker's husband, Peter Sarsgaard, and brother, Jake Gyllenhaal, also star in this violently whimsical monster romance.

Interestingly, one of the characters, a police detective, is named Lupino. With the film's themes of giving credit to female characters and creators, it isn't hard to imagine that the name is a reference to British actor Ida Lupino, who was also the leading female director in the 1950s. She was the first female director of a film noir and made movies that often had social messages, including the 1950 film Outrage, which addressed the trauma of rape victims realistically and sympathetically.

The Bride! is now streaming on HBO Max.

Ross Marquand, who played Aaron on The Walking Dead, and Sarah Bolger star in this film, written and directed by Peter Cilella.  A security guard at a school in Los Angeles, with a traumatic past, sees a light in the sky and suddenly is gifted with the talent to create art that shows images of extraterrestrial beings. He wakes up in a hospital and has to find a way to deal with this mysterious gift before his wife gives birth.

The film was produced by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who are filmmakers who have co-directed five science fiction horror films, including The Endless and Something in the Dirt.

Descendent is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

Written by Andrew Kevin Walker (Brainscan, Seven, 8mm), Psycho Killer was directed by Gavin Polone, a producer for many films, including 8mm, Stir of Echoes, and Zombieland. This was Polone's debut feature film. In it, a police officer tries to find the killer who murdered her husband, who is known as “The Satanic Slasher.”

Georgina Campbell (Barbarian, Influencers, The Watchers), James Preston Rogers, and Malcolm McDowell star in the film, which was released with little fanfare, but Campbell's performance got kudos from film critics.

Psycho Killer is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

While many of the movies on this list have changed this week, filmmaker Francis Lawrence's excellent adaptation of the Stephen King novel, written by JT Mollner (Strange Darling), remains and soldiers on. The Robert Altman award-winning film, which is awarded by the Independent Spirit Awards, is an award that the film's director, casting director, and cast share, and rewards maverick filmmaking and large ensemble casts, which Altman was known for.

Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Joshua Odjick, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman Griffin Davis, Josh Hamilton, Judy Greer, and Mark Hamill are the ensemble cast in the film, and with Lawrence and the casting director, Rich Delia, are responsible for the movie being so emotionally engrossing with great characters. You have to start with a director who knows what they want and a casting director who can find the actors who deliver the most realistic and empathetic work, and then you get a film as devastating as The Long Walk.

The Long Walk is now streaming on Starz.

Fans of the 28 Days Later series have been clamoring for the return of Jim, the bicycle messenger, and it seems strange that the film where he does make an appearance is the one that wasn't as financially successful as it was hoped to be. The film also continues the story that began in 28 Years Later, the popular characters Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, and his cult of Satanic Jimmies, Dr. Ian Kelson, Spike, and Samson, the alpha infected.

We can't forget that fans initially and inaccurately thought that a promotional photo of one of the infected was Jim before the release of 28 Years Later, but it wasn't him. Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, and Chi Lewis-Parry return to their roles in this sequel, and, yes, Cillian Murphy is also back.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is now streaming on Netflix.

Mads Mikkelsen, Sophie Sloan, Sheila Atim, David Dastmalchian, and Sigourney Weaver play the characters dodging both a hungry monster under the bed and vicious assassins in Bryan Fuller's Dust Bunny. The writer and director said in an interview that he had first envisioned the story for the television series Amazing Stories, which had a short-lived revival in 2020, and was based on the series created by Steven Spielberg in 1985.

Sigourney Weaver won Best Supporting Actress in a Film for Dust Bunny, and Dust Bunny won Best Independent Film at the 53rd Saturn Awards, after the movie was nominated for five awards in total.

Dust Bunny is now streaming on HBO Max.

This is the third time that this rambunctious and very bloody horror comedy has broken into the top ten this year. Co-directed by the same team that revitalized the Scream franchise from the film collective, Radio Silence, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, it became a breakout hit without previously existing intellectual property. The cast didn't have any household name stars, but what it did have was a devilish sense of humor, a terrific cast, and a relatable premise, namely, dealing with in-laws can be terrifying.

It was exactly what horror fans love about a good horror comedy: gruesome gore, hissable villains, and a great cast with a heroine that everyone has underestimated. Samara Weaving, Adam Brody, Mark O'Brien, Elyse Levesque, Nicky Guadagni, Henry Czerny, and Andie MacDowell star in the film as the flawed characters and the stalwart bride who clash with some very surprising and hilarious deaths.

Ready or Not is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.