24 Best Horror Movies Streaming On Arrow and Criterion This Month

Take a terrifying trip into the Arrow archives in December with the family foursome that created The Deeper You Dig, Hellbender, Where the Devil Roams, and Hellhole.

Toby, John, Lulu, and Zelda shared, “We love Arrow’s wide range of films and had a lot of fun picking our own eclectic mix of styles, eras, and tones here. ”

“From exploitation to coming of age, German new wave to video nasty; illuminating documentaries. Pick your poison,  to Dollar Baby short; 70s sleaze and Austrian folk horror; modern punk middle finger fun to modern-retro-vaudevillian. We’ve got a bubbling cauldron of great picks here – including several films by women filmmakers to watch (Julia Marchese, Jill Gervargizian, Izzy Lee) or those who set the stage decades ago (21-year-old Fhiona-Louise). Pop some corn, crack a beer, or do what you do…. and thanks for checking out our Arrow Selects!”

Titles include Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin, The Gore Gore Girls, and The Witch Who Came From the Sea. 

Arrow has a new entry in their Seasons series of film compilations: Fear of the Dark. Don't turn off the light! All the scariest things we can imagine lurk in the darkness. Creeping around in the impenetrable black, just waiting for the chance to grab our feet as we run up the stairs or jump into bed.

Banish this terror, or maybe make it worse, with a curated collection of Cult films where what hides in the shadows is more terrifying than anything you can think of. Shine a flickering flashlight on any of the horrors below and give yourself a real Fear of the Dark. Watch The Monkey's Paw, Legs, and BLEEP as part of this seasonal offering.

When a homicidal mental patient flees an experimental drug program, he'll leave a five-day trail of psychosexual carnage from the peep shows of 42nd Street to the gore-soaked shores of Florida. Written and directed by Romano Scavolini, this “devastating masterpiece” (Cinefear) has been scanned from the internegative and various foreign print sources to create the most complete version ever assembled.

Froggy: A teenage girl with a significant connection to nature is attacked by bullying classmates. A reckoning is unleashed to defend herself, and the creatures she cherishes.

Affentanz Hunter: A hunter is on the prowl. He has his sights on a stag and his finger on the trigger. But then – a crack and a smack from a faceless hooded figure. A knockout and darkness. From that moment on, everything changes.

When a couple of intergalactic space crabs land on Earth, they encounter the one thing they didn't expect… A duo of dumb frat boys force-feeding them cocaine! As it turns out, cocaine gives space crabs an overbearing impulse to kill! Their string of peculiar homicides has Detective Charlie Reese thinking that something smells fishy, literally.

For more than three decades, the remarkable debut feature by award-winning director Gianfranco Giagni has been one of the most elusive Italian horror titles in home video history…until now: When an American professor is sent to Budapest to complete a mysterious research project, he'll become ensnared in a mind-bending web of sexual provocation, occult carnage, and arachnidian havoc.

Big-name stars such as Tom Cruise and Eddie Murphy flocked to vampire films in the 90s, as did high-caliber filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, veterans Wes Craven and John Landis, independents Michael Almereyda and Jeffrey Arsenault, and up-and-comers Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo del Toro. Amid the fangs and crucifixes, Abel Ferrara reunited with his King of New York star Christopher Walken for The Addiction, a distinctly personal take on creatures of the night making its 4K premiere on Arrow.

Starring Lili Taylor, Edie Falco, Paul Calderón, Fredro Starr, Kathryn Erbe, Michael Imperioli, and Annabella Sciorra, in an unforgettable performance as Casanova.

Philosophy student Kathleen (Lili Taylor, The Conjuring) is dragged into an alleyway on her way home from class by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) and bitten on the neck. She quickly falls ill but realizes this isn’t any ordinary disease when she develops an aversion to daylight and a thirst for human blood.

Having made a big-budget foray into science fiction two years earlier with Body Snatchers, Ferrara’s approach to the vampire movie is in a lower key. Shot on the streets of New York, like so many of his major works – including The Driller Killer, Ms. 45, and Bad Lieutenant – and beautifully filmed in black and white, The Addiction sees the filmmaker on his terms and at his very best: raw, shocking, intense, intelligent, masterful.

When her estranged father passes, twenty-something Nyla is tasked with the thing she hates the most – cleaning up his mess. Left behind are a collection of VHS tapes, and with them, the burden of returning them to “Blaster Video” a time capsule to an era in which cover art and a catchy movie title were king, run by Kevin, a human encyclopedia of VHS history and a friend of her father.

Amongst the returns is an unknown tape, a movie not even Kevin has heard of. Was this the last movie Nyla’s father watched before he died? The mystery is too much to resist. But when Kevin and Nyla press play, they unwittingly activate a long-dormant curse, and a series of classic cinematic villains are plucked from B-movie heaven and hell to be unleashed into the store itself

There's less swinging and more stabbing in the Arrow 60s Cult collection, but whether it's horror, sci-fi or a Western you choose, there will be plenty of far-out thrills from this wild and creative decade in Cult cinema. Titles include Two Thousand Maniacs. 

For one of the final films of his legendary career, director Antonio Margheriti headed to the Philippines to deliver “the perfect '80s Italian popcorn flick” (Mondo Digital): When environmental activists attempt to expose an evil corporation dumping nuclear waste into the local volcano, they'll instead discover graphic gore, exploding miniatures, and a rampaging full-scale kaiju-style creature.

“Screaming young girls sucked into a labyrinth of horror by a blood-starved ghoul from Hell.” So said the original advertising for Beast from Haunted Cave. Directed by Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop) and filmed in the Black Hills of South Dakota, this feature is about a gang of crooks being terrorized by a nasty, spider-like creature.

The final season of 2024 for Arrow: Monochrome Madness. The blood doesn't have to be red, for you to be scared half-dead. Monochrome Madness is a collection of Cult films that, while lacking in color, are not lacking in horror, imagination, and unforgettable thrills and imagery.

You don't need to be afraid to watch films in black and white – but maybe you should be! Titles Include: A Ghost Waits, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, and Laguna Ave.

High praise from The Criterion Channel for Don Coscarelli's incredible horror film. It is particularly notable since The Criterion Channel is known for film preservation of cinema's best films.

“A mind-bending cult classic of DIY horror, Don Coscarelli’s epic tale of the Tall Man, his deadly silver Sentinel Spheres, and a group of small-town friends who must band together to stop his dimension-hopping schemes was made on a shoestring budget by a cast and crew comprised largely of friends and family, but its sheer audaciousness, gonzo visuals, and haunting exploration of the dark side of childhood fantasy have ensured that its legend has lived on (spawning four sequels along the way). Suffused with a mood of dreamlike dread and featuring an epic, eardrum-pounding synth score, Phantasm took indie horror into new realms of delirious imagination.”