10 Great and Obscure, Under the Radar Horror Films to Watch

There’s no bad time of year to watch a scary movie—but there’s no better time than the Halloween season. And, sure, you could stream all the usual classics again for tradition’s sake: Michael Myers is kinda the Santa of Halloween, right?

But why not venture from the canon into something that’s all the more terrifying because it’s totally unknown? Below you’ll find recommendations for ten under-the-radar horror movies from all through film history, with scares, twists, and all-around creepiness that you won’t see coming.

Murders in the Zoo (1933)

Lionel Atwill stars as a zoologist/madman who begins the film by sewing a man’s mouth shut and leaving him to be eaten by tigers then returning to America to continue his campaign of terror in a metropolitan zoo. A Paramount production, the film mixes grimness with broad comedy and a high society setting, a combination that only makes it weirder. Watching it means getting past the usual stereotypes of the era and some unsimulated scenes of big cats brawling with one another that wouldn’t fly today (and shouldn’t have happened then) but it’s a fascinating relic of an early-’30s moment when every studio tried to get in on the appetite for horror stoked by Dracula and Frankenstein, and some went about it in some exceedingly odd ways. This truly nasty film was released before the Production Code Administration started to flex its muscles, but that didn’t stop the movie from being banned in several countries abroad.

Where to watch: It’s not streaming, but it is available on Blu-ray and DVD.

A Bay of Blood [a.k.a. Carnage, Twitch of the Death Nerve, New House on the Left, and Blood Bath] (1971)

By studying the films of Alfred Hitchcock and finding ways to make the Master’s tricks his own, Italian director Mario Bava helped invent one of his country’s most significant cinematic exports, the giallo: lurid, stylish thrillers filled with gloved killers, unsettlingly eroticized violence, and (at their best) technical mastery. Bava turned out film after film over the course of his career, many of them hits: This wasn’t one of them. But the influence of the film, which concerns a bloody property dispute involving a bayside mansion, can be felt in countless slasher films.

Where to watch: Shudder, AMC+

Messiah of Evil [a.k.a. Dead People] (1973)

Spouses and creative partners Willard Hyuck and Gloria Katz weren’t really horror fans: They’re best known for writing American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (and, yeah, Howard the Duck) as well as making uncredited contributions to other George Lucas productions. But before hooking up with Lucas they wrote and directed this low-budget horror movie set in a coastal California town that just might be the staging ground for an apocalypse. Maybe. The plot takes a backseat to the film’s disturbing atmosphere and chilling set pieces, including an especially memorable encounter with the walking dead in an after-hours supermarket.

Where to watch: Paramount+, Shudder, AMC+, Plex

Dead & Buried (1981)

Speaking of coastal towns with undead issues, the picturesque getaway of Potters Bluff finds itself troubled by some mysterious deaths in a film scripted by the Alien team of Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. James Farentino stars as a sheriff who’s returned home after spending a few years in the big city only to find things have changed a bit. Why is his wife (Melody Anderson) lying about where she spends her days? And why is she suddenly so interested in witchcraft? And can the local coroner (Jack Albertson) help him get to the bottom of things? The twist at the heart of the film is silly but effective, but it’s director Gary Sherman’s ability to wrap a beautiful location with a sense of dread that makes the movie so striking.

Where to watch: The Criterion Channel, Shudder, Prime Video, Peacock, AMC+, Vudu

Roadgames (1981)

Combining elements of the slasher film and the road movie, Richard Franklin’s tense, funny Australian thriller follows Pat Quid (Stacy Keach), an American trucker making the long, coastal journey from Melbourne to Perth, who suspects he’s discovered the identity of a serial killer and attempts to bring him to justice. One complication: the killer may be onto him and attempting to pin his crimes on Pat. Franklin fills the film with local color and Hitchcock-inspired suspense scenes (he’d travel to Hollywood to direct Psycho II a couple of years later) and Jamie Lee Curtis shows up around the halfway mark to give the film an extra jolt of energy.

Where to watch: The Criterion Channel, Freevee, Roku

Nightbreed (1990)

The recent release of a (just-okay) new Hellraiser movie has drawn attention back to the original and its creator, novelist, artist, and filmmaker Clive Barker. And deservedly so: Hellraiser’s a weird, kinky outlier in the ‘80s horror canon. For his follow-up, Barker got even more ambitious, building a story around a group of strange but sympathetic (and memorable-looking) outcast creatures who’ve built a society of their own on the fringes of the normal world. (Any metaphorical resemblance to communities built around sexual identity is not accidental.) Barker had to watch as the studio recut his film, which flopped at the box office. A director’s cut surfaced in 2014, and while both versions are flawed it’s a worthwhile, too-often-overlooked film that deserves its own revival. Bonus: David Cronenberg co-stars as a serial killer.

Where to watch (studio cut): Shudder, Peacock, AMC+, Roku, Redbox, Plex, Freevee

Pontypool (2008)

The ’00s and ’10s saw an explosion of new zombie-inspired movies and it was sometimes hard to tell one from another. Canadian director Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool, however, is a zombie movie like no other. Adapted from the Tony Burgess novel Pontypool Changes Everything, it stars veteran character actor Stephen McHattie as Grant Mazzy, a brash small-town DJ who comes to realize, after one victim starts to manifest strange speech patterns, that he’s dealing with a zombie outbreak that spreads via language. Set almost entirely within a radio station, it’s a masterful example of how what’s suggested can be scarier than what’s shown.

Where to watch: AMC+

Impetigore (2019)

The problem with a great opening scene can be that the movie has an uphill battle trying to sustain it. But for a confident filmmaker like Joko Anwar, that’s not a problem. Beginning in Jakarta before traveling to the furthest reaches of rural Indonesia, Impetigore starts with Maya (Tara Basro) and Dini (Marissa Anita), a pair of bored tollbooth operators, slowly realizing they’re under attack by machete-wielding, out-of-town visitors. They survive only to learn their attackers are from Maya’s hometown, where she’s inherited a house. When she returns to claim it, she discovers the village has a horrible secret. What follows brings in everything from ghosts to skinless babies to an elaborate shadow puppet performance as Maya and Dini discover that the modern world they call home hasn’t put some of the spirits past to rest.

Where to watch: Shudder, AMC+

Relic (2020)

In this remarkable debut film from Australia’s Natalie Erika James, Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote co-star as, respectively, Kay and Sam, a mother and daughter who return to Kay’s childhood home after the disappearance of Kay’s mother and Sam’s grandmother. Once there, they find reports of disturbing behavior and a mysterious black mold that starts spreading anywhere. At once a spooky haunted-house movie and a remarkable depiction of what it’s like to deal with a parent suffering from dementia, Relic earned strong reviews in 2020 but had its release cut short by the onset of the pandemic.

Where to watch: AMC+

Censor (2021)

The early ’80s saw Great Britain gripped by panic about “video nasties,” horror movies deemed so inappropriate for impressionable viewers that a public outcry led to some being pulled from video store shelves. Set at the height of that moral outrage, Censor stars Niamh Algar as Enid, an employee of the British Board of Film Classification who spends her days meticulously scrutinizing images of extreme violence. To Enid, it’s just a job, until she’s asked to watch a movie that echoes her own troubled history. The first film from writer/director Prano Bailey-Bond, Censor raises questions about why we’re drawn to watch horror—questions that the director knows she can’t begin to answer, and the ambiguity makes her mesmerizing film all the more disturbing.

Where to watch: Hulu