To the discerning horror aficionado, a streaming service is only as good as the case of the jibblies that they get from watching it. Disney Plus? A combined total of zero jibblies across hundreds of shows and movies. Hulu? Jibblies a-plenty.
And for our money, the best jibblies for your dollar are over at HBO Max, where a carefully cultivated collection of frights wait on just the other side of a reasonable monthly subscription fee. The skeletons are spooky scary, and the somethings in the moonlight will almost stop your heart. Here’s a look at some of the streaming service’s monster mashes, hand-picked for their likelihood to be a graveyard smash.
The Silence of the Lambs
If you’ve ever had a bunch of lambs, you know how scary it can be if they get real quiet. That’s not what this movie is about, but it adds a certain amount of suspense to the proceedings if you go into The Silence of the Lambs expecting eerily noiseless livestock that will never arrive. It’s the ultimate cinematic subversion of expectations.
Still, the movie has other stuff. This adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel swept the Academy Awards, made fava beans a staple of weirdos’ cabinets across the world, and basically ruined Monk for anyone who recognized Ted Levine under all that mustache. All that, plus Buffalo Bill teaches you a cool new dance that’ll get you kicked off of TikTok. It’s worth your time.
Barbarian
Alien. The Omen. Some of history’s greatest horror stories are really just metaphors for a fear of parenthood. Meanwhile, other classics of suspense like Friday the 13th, Psycho, and the Disney Channel Original Movie Smarthouse made us afraid of mothers, biological or otherwise. Barbarian managed to juggle both ideas in the most efficient way imaginable.
No spoilers if you haven’t seen it yet, but this dark horse blockbuster from Whitest Kids alum Zach Cregger never lets its audience get comfortable, in the best possible way. Watch it, enjoy it, and thank us later for all the money you’ll save by never using AirBNB again.
The Fly
There are aspects of the 1986 remake of The Fly that don’t hold as much water as they used to. Some of the special effects are a little dated, and it can be difficult to parse exactly what the main character was doing with that baboon when he wasn’t sticking it in his high-tech diving bell to see if it would come out his other high-tech diving bell. At its core, though? It’s very much still the story of a person who’s afraid of what will happen to their body after hooking up with Jeff Goldblum, and that’s a story that resonates almost 40 years later.
The Shining
Nobody ever told the parable of a writer struggling with alcoholism better than a bunch of filmmakers on a cigarette boat’s worth of cocaine. For receipts, check out The Shining, a movie too disjointed to be anything but uncut auteur brilliance. This movie was to 1980s film appreciation what DMT is to Joe Rogan fans today. Bonus points if you can figure out your my uncle won’t stop talking about the moon landing every time he scrolls past this on streaming after a couple of vodka gimlets.
The Cabin in the Woods
There was a time not so long ago when a movie written by Joss Whedon and starring Chris Hemsworth couldn’t get a release. Then there was a short window when it could, followed by a much longer period of time when it couldn’t again. The point is, gather ye rosebuds while ye may, since you never know when half a dozen accusations of inappropriate conduct or Thor: Love and Thunder might bring everything crashing down around you.
The Cabin in the Woods is an astonishing array of things wrapped up in a quippy, 95-minute package. If you don’t know anything about it, try to keep it that way, and go watch it right now. You’ll never look at mermen the same way again.
The Witch
It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost a decade since The Witch introduced audiences to Anya Taylor-Joy’s all-seeing eyes, and to the unsettling feeling that we all still experience when we’re in the same room as a goat. What’s more, it represented Robert Eggers’ feature directorial debut, opening the door for future stone-cold bummers like The Lighthouse and The Northman.
Child’s Play
Back in the ‘90s, there was no better shorthand for “my parents are going through a divorce and it’s affecting me” than having a working knowledge of the Child’s Play franchise. From its wildly earnest roots to the borderline-parody of the early 2000s, all the way up through the post-ironic brand reconsideration of the last few years, the adventures of Charles Lee Ray and his bevy of fellow killer dolls never fail to entertain. You can check out the first entry in the Child’s Play saga on Max right now, and remember a time before the reboot, when a working understanding of go-motion and some fundamental misunderstandings about Haitian voodoo were all you needed to make a classic.
Hereditary
Family’s tough. Even more than Little Miss Sunshine, Ari Aster’s Hereditary represents perhaps the very strongest entry in the genre of “Movies Where Toni Collette Just Can’t Right Now With This Kid.” Come for the bad dreams you’ll have about driving past telephone poles with a kid in your back seat, stay for Gabriel Byrne living up to his last name.
Parasite
So much went right for Parasite. It was a movie about being stuck in a house full of people that you hate that came out right before lockdown. It represented sort of a cinematic national anthem for service industry workers, and a power fantasy for anyone who’s ever wanted to hide in a basement to get away from city-wide bug fogging. It won an Oscar so hard that the president got mad. Check it out.
Osmosis Jones
We’ve talked about a lot of frightening scenarios here today – quiet sheep, regular-volume goats, meeting Jeff Goldblum, etc. But none of these situations holds a candle to the most chilling proposition of all, proffered by the 2001 classic of suspense Osmosis Jones. “Imagine,” it tells its audience, “what it would be like to live inside Bill Murray’s body.” Goosebumps. Too far, Osmosis Jones. Now we’ve got the jibblies.