The 10 best horror films now streaming on Tubi, reviewed (October 2026)

The Silence of the Lambs

By Steve Newton

The world is a very scary and disturbing place right now, what with all the death and destruction in the Middle East and Ukraine, the fear of nuclear war, the threat of annihilation via AI, and the possibility that the Republicans might stay in power in the States.

Many people seek an escape from the real-life events of today by watching horror movies, which means a lot of them are currently scanning the streaming channels, trying to find decent fright flicks.

The bad news is, there’s a lotta lousy ones out there.

So to save you the trouble of searching around and maybe blowing some money on crap, here’s my roundup of the Top 10 horror films currently showing for free on Tubi.

These are my original reviews, which were published when the films were first released in North American theatres.

Have a happy, horror-heavy Halloween! And try not to worry so much about human extinction and stuff.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991, Orion Pictures)

Review originally published on Feb. 21, 1991

In Richard Attenborough’s superb 1978 thriller, Magic, British actor Anthony Hopkins played a struggling ventriloquist who loses touch with reality and transfers the murderous side of his personality into his wooden dummy. Hopkins portrayed the doomed performer as so pitiable that–even while he was knocking off good guys (his agent, played by Burgess Meredith) and creeps (an Ed Lauter-portrayed wife-beater)–you kept hoping he’d somehow snap out of his psychosis and destroy the creepy doll that embodied his madness.

In The Silence of the Lambs, Hopkins plays another sick killer with heroic tendencies, the imprisoned psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter, and even though Lecter gains his nickname “Hannibal the Cannibal” by chomping on the inner organs of his victims, Hopkins once again manages to portray a sympathetic side to the human monster.

He achieves this duality with a chillingly believable performance that even tops that of the always-great Jodie Foster.

Foster portrays FBI trainee Clarice Starling, who’s been chosen by her mentor, agent Frank Crawford (Scott Glenn), to interview Lecter in hopes of gaining some insight into the motivations of a serial killer nicknamed “Buffalo Bill”, who kills women and uses their skin to sew dresses.

In return for clues and hints about Bill–whose identity Lecter knows–Starling must open up to him about her own tortured past (the death of her policeman father; her horrifying childhood memory of lambs “screaming” before slaughter).

The odd psychological interplay between the gutsy, but green, Starling and the deranged, yet fascinating, Lecter provides the basic tone for Jonathan Demme’s well-made, insidious shocker, the same way it did for the Thomas Harris novel on which it’s based.

While the last film made from a Harris thriller (1986’s Manhunter) spent half its time dealing with the technicalities of investigative police work, The Silence of the Lambs forgoes the FBI lab and keeps the camera on Starling as her Lecter-inspired hunches put her hot on the grisly trail of Buffalo Bill, a.k.a. Jamie Gumb (played with giddy, demented relish by Ted Levine).

Demme’s passion for vibrant colours and clever pacing makes the film’s few gore sequences–a decapitated head in a jar, a bloody fingernail jutting from a wall–all the more effective.

Following an FBI foul-up, the inexperienced Starling gets in over her head and is forced to take on the killer in a nail-biting showdown, and Demme, known for his quirky, stylish comedies Something Wild and Married to the Mob, leaves things wide open for a sequel.

With director Demme and all the principal actors reportedly keen on doing the follow-up that Thomas is currently writing, it shouldn’t be long before thriller fans are lucky enough to see Starling and Lecter in action again.

Wolf Creek (2005, Roadshow Entertainment)

Review originally published on December 22, 2005

The intro to Wolf Creek claims that 30,000 people are reported missing every year in Australia and that 90 percent of them are found within a month. Of those who are never heard from again, there’s little doubt that some are murdered; there’s been a spate of backpacker killings down under in recent years. Writer-director Greg McLean’s uncompromising take on such real-life cases shocks with the same gritty realism as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The movie opens with rugged Aussie good guy Ben (Nathan Phillips) buying a cheap used car and picking up two friends, British holidayers Liz and Kristy (Cassandra Magrath and Jennifer Aniston look-alike Kestie Morassi). The carefree trio have plans for some outback sightseeing, and after a routine run-in with rednecks at a remote gas station, they reach their destination, a meteorite crater at Wolf Creek National Park.

Everything goes fine until after their hike, when it’s time to leave, and the newly purchased clunker won’t start. As the group hunkers down for the night, a jovial hick named Mick (Oz screen veteran John Jarratt) shows up in a big truck and offers to tow them back to his place, where he’ll fix the car for free and send them on their merry way in the morning.

At first, their talkative host seems harmless enough; he’s the type of macho, eccentric loner you’d expect to find living out in the boonies. But when one of Ben’s smartass remarks draws a long, cold stare from Mick, it becomes pretty clear that the party has to end.

Sure enough, after being drugged with spiked rainwater, the guests awaken to find themselves bound and at the mercy of one well-armed and extremely sick puppy.

McLean’s digital videocam doesn’t pan away from Mick’s casually administered yet shockingly gruesome tortures, and the ghastly images are hard to shake. The tension meter gets stuck on high for the last 30 minutes of the film, culminating in an action-packed highway sequence straight out of Mad Max.

Wolf Creek relies as much on the extreme environment as the twisted motivations of a sadistic killer to instill fear and compound dread. The sheer, desolate expanse of the outback makes it obvious that even if the victims manage to escape the psycho’s grimy lair, their chances of survival are slim.

McLean’s cliché-free script and the believable performances by Phillips, Magrath, and Morassi keep you focused on their characters’ grim, life-or-death struggles against the unfathomable evil of man and the unforgiving power of nature.

Low-budget horror doesn’t get much better than this.

Hostel (2006, Lions Gate)

Review originally published on Jan. 5, 2006

The horror scene seems to be in the grip of a hardcore revolution these days. It’s as if a cabal of serious fright-film fanatics got together and organized a bitter backlash against hokey Hollywood body-count flicks with cookie-cutter plots and predictable outcomes. In the last couple of years, there’s been a resurgence of grim, graphic, in-your-face scare films.

Shock-rocker Rob Zombie kickstarted the trend in 2003 with his blood-spattered love letter to ’70s exploitation flicks, House of 1000 Corpses, and the hugely popular Saw grabbed the gore torch from him in 2004. Both of those films spawned sequels in 2005 that ratcheted up the sadism and nastiness, and then just last month Aussie fearmonger Greg McLean topped off the year with his torture-the-tourists entry, Wolf Creek. Now comes Hostel, the most extreme, punishing, pain-filled gorefest yours truly has ever cringed through.

It doesn’t start out that way, though. Writer-director Eli Roth is a sly one, so he lets us believe that this follow-up to his 2002 killer-virus debut, Cabin Fever, could be just a routine tale of nauseating Yank backpackers getting snuffed over in Europe. The film opens in Amsterdam, where randy American college buddies Paxton and Josh (Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson)-along with their Icelandic travelling companion Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson)-act like immature bozos, get in barroom scraps, and call a prostitute with a bit of flab on her a “hog”.

You can hardly wait for these jerks to get sliced and diced by some maniac in a Dutch hostel, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, they take the advice of a slimy Russian geek-pimp who impresses them with digital photos of himself frolicking with a bevy of naked Slovak babes. He convinces these lawyers- and writers-to-be that if they book into a certain hostel in Bratislava, the beautiful women there will be crawling all over them. So they catch the next train out. Sure enough, as soon as they get to the place two scantily clad Euro-foxes suggestively invite the bug-eyed guys to join them at the spa.

Jackpot!

Around this time, though, the pussy-hunt vibe starts to erode like the decaying surfaces of the Slovakian buildings. Their Icelandic buddy disappears, along with a Japanese tourist, and a sinister gang of pint-sized street kids threaten Josh. Then, in one harrowing scene that sets the ghastly tone for things to come, Hostel switches from being an overseas American Pie-type romp to being a no-holds-barred look at the international pay-to-kill trade. If there is a place in the world where wealthy businessmen can spend upward of 50 grand for the opportunity to torture someone to death, Roth has done a killer job of depicting it.

There is one particular moment of torture that literally had me gritting my teeth in revulsion, and it’s sure to go down in the annals of film as one of the most stomach-churning images ever released in theatres. If you thought The Exorcist was famous for making people puke and/or pass out, just wait till Hostel‘s little snip-snip scene.

Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.

The Tunnel (2011, Distracted Media)

Review originally published on August 3, 2011

Remember the last part of The Blair Witch Project, where the supposed real-life documentary makers are freaking out and running around in that decrepit house in the woods and the chaotic camerawork has reached its jiggly apex and you’re wondering what the fuck is going on and what the hell’s going to happen next?

Well, the makers of The Tunnel must have studied those scenes religiously, because their low-budget flick manages to ooze that feeling of hysterical dread and panic quite often and most effectively.

Call it a rip-off if you must, but it’s nicely done.

The Tunnel’s story is told pseudodocumentary style via interviews with Australian TV reporter Natasha (Bel Deliá) and cameraman Steve (Steve Davis), incorporating footage they shot along with soundman Tangles (Luke Arnold) and producer Peter (Andy Rodoreda). Investigating rumours of homeless people disappearing in the abandoned train tunnels beneath Sydney—and a potential cover-up involving a scrapped government plan to recycle the water there—the quartet descends into the cavernous blackness to see what they can find.

Too bad for them.

It’s made clear early on that because Natasha and Steve are the only ones talking, Tangles and Peter never made it out alive. But that knowledge doesn’t diminish the edge-of-your-seat thrills that fans of claustrophobic, lost-in-the-dark flicks like The Descent will get from this engrossing feature.

Director Carlo Ledesma and writers-editors Julian Harvey and Enzo Tedeschi make great use of the less-is-more approach. When scary shit happens, the terror sticks with you because you’re never shown enough to be certain of anything.

By keeping moviegoers in the dark—literally, at times—the filmmakers force them to exercise their imaginations.

Then again, they didn’t hold much back in that scene with the eyeballs.

Backcountry (2015, IFC Midnight)

Review originally published on August 24, 2015

If you’re thinking about going camping anywhere bears might be, Backcountry is definitely not for you. It’s Stephen Colbert’s worst nightmare come to life, basically.

Surrey escapee Missy Peregrym, from TV’s Rookie Blue, and Montreal’s Jeff Roop star as Jenn and Alex, a young couple embarking on a camping trip to the provincial park he visited as a child. We first meet them as Alex is loading their backpacks into his SUV, and his furtive glances at Jenn texting away make it clear that he’d much rather she leave her phone behind. It’s the first of many bad ideas on his part.

While renting a canoe to start their trip Alex scoffs at the safety advice offered by Nicholas Campbell’s park ranger, but Jenn is cautious enough to bring along a can of bear spray.

Things go fine until, while Alex is off gathering wood, Jenn befriends sketchy-looking hiker Brad (horror vet Eric Balfour from Cell 213 and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake), whom Alex immediately takes a paranoid dislike to. Brad picks up on the vibe, but stays for dinner anyway, showing off his big knife and bad table manners.

When the simmering conflict between the two guys boils over, the stranger departs in the dead of night, so now they’ve got a pissed off survivalist with a wicked blade to worry about, as well as any furry, thousand-pound killing machines.

The terror starts to ramp up once the overconfident Alex gets them hopelessly lost without a map—shades of the best parts of The Blair Witch Project, sans jittery camerawork. Writer-director Adam MacDonald does a keen job of coaxing equal parts desperation and determination from his stars, although Peregrym’s performance proves strongest overall.

It all leads up to a scene of flat-out, primal horror that brings to mind how Werner Herzog might have felt listening to that tape of Timothy Treadwell’s final moments in Grizzly Man.

Happy camping!

The Gift (2015, STX Entertainment)

Review originally published on August 5, 2015

If you thought Jason Bateman could only play affable sad-sacks, prepare for a nice surprise with The Gift. The actor best known for his gentle portrayal of the put-upon Michael Bluth in Arrested Development discovers his dark side in a big way in this unsettling revenge thriller about the terrible cost of youthful misdeeds.

We first meet sales exec Simon (Bateman) and his interior-designer wife, Robyn (Rebecca Hall), as they’re being shown around a new home in the Hollywood Hills. The picturesque place comes equipped with a surplus of windows, but there’ll be a lot more peering in than out.

While out shopping one day the couple run into Simon’s old high-school buddy Gordon (first-time writer-director Joel Edgerton), who exudes a harmless demeanour but soon worms his way into their lives with unannounced visits to the new place. His strange behaviour leads an increasingly frustrated Simon to admit that his nickname back in the day was “Gordo the Weirdo”.

After one too many troubling interactions, Simon and Robyn cut social ties with Gordo and focus on their main goal—becoming parents—while Simon also aims for a big promotion at his computer-security firm. It’s around this time that the real story behind Gordo’s weirdness starts to reveal itself—along with Robyn’s vulnerable psyche and Simon’s simmering menace.

The sure-handed Edgerton sets a slow-burning pace in the lead-up to The Gift’s harrowing revelations, and all three leads give well-controlled performances, their conflict never stretching believability past the breaking point—at least, not until that climactic “gotcha” moment.

After striking it rich with demon-based, supernatural franchises like the Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and Sinister series, it seems as if charmed production company Blumhouse has found a winning way with human-based horror as well.

Goodnight Mommy (2015, Stadtkino Verleih)

Review originally published on October 9, 2015

Goodnight Mommy opens with a gentle lullaby–Brahms’ “Cradle Song”, to be exact–but that’s it for sweetness and light in this unnerving portrait of familial distrust and paranoia.

We first meet twin brothers Lukas and Elias (identical twins Lukas and Elias Schwarz) as they’re playing hide-and-seek in a cornfield, just seeming like regular nine-year-olds. But Lucas keeps disappearing–either in a pitch-black cave or under the dark surface of a lake–leaving Elias worried and calling out for him.

When mom (Susanne Wuest) returns to the family’s ultra-modern house in the Austrian woods her head and face are wrapped in bandages, and you’re not sure whether she’s been in a horrible car accident or just recovering from a facelift. The boys aren’t too sure about her, either, doubting whether she’s even their real mother. She does act pretty strange, wandering off into the woods and removing her clothes and peeling off the bandages and going all Jacob’s Ladder on our asses with that freaky blurred-out head-shaking.

No wait–that was just a nightmare.

As the action slowly unfolds in unsettling quietude the twins are shown to be pretty strange birds themselves. They collect huge Madagascar hissing cockroaches and place one on their mom while she’s sleeping, so we get to see that old bug-in-the-mouth trick. But waking up with a case of roach-throat is the least of mommy’s problems.

Similar in tone to last year’s creepy sleeper hit The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy reels you in with its anguished portrayal of a strained mother/child relationship headed for an ugly end. Writer-directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz craft an absorbing, lustrously shot tale of domestic dread and coax near-perfect performances from the three leads.

It’s the most unsettling identical-twin psycho-thriller I’ve seen since The Other–and that was back in ’72!

It Comes at Night (2017, A24)

Review originally published on June 7, 2017

First you had the awesome Get Out blowing scary-movie fans away with its shockingly sly take on racism in America. And now you’ve got It Comes at Night and its gloomy commentary on the Trump-inspired fear of outsiders.

Socially reflective horror is back bigly, baby!

But while Get Out took some blackly comic jabs at people’s perceptions of racial inequality, It Comes at Night offers no such witty relief. It is one dark and downbeat mofo of a movie.

The film opens with Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) saying her final goodbyes to her father. He’s covered in scabs and gravely ill; she’s wearing a gas mask to avoid ending up the same. Her tense husband Paul (executive producer Joel Edgerton, from The Gift) and teenage son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) carry the dying man outside in a wheelbarrow, shoot him in the head, and burn his body in a shallow grave.

That’s about as lighthearted as things get.

The mixed-raced trio–along with much-loved mutt Stanley–goes about its life in a big wooden house in the woods, having taken shelter from an unnamed plague that has apparently ravaged the world. But one night stranger Will (Christopher Abbott) breaks in and is taken captive by the ever-vigilant Paul, who eventually decides that–like himself–Will is just a good man desperately trying to keep his family alive. He agrees to take in these refugees–including Will’s young wife and toddler son (Riley Keough and Griffin Robert Faulkner)–in part because they have a supply of food (goats, chickens, canned goods) that his own family is in dire need of.

Once the two clans get settled in the fuse is lit on a slow-burning exercise in psychological dread, as the wary Paul must fight his gnawing fear that the outsiders aren’t really what they seem. The dingy house (no electricity) becomes a claustrophobic playground of paranoia, and what comes at night is not a horde of plague-infested invaders but man’s primal fear of the unknown, in this case the uncertain intentions of others.

Prepare to be disturbed.

Horns (2014, Dimension Films)

Review originally published on October 21, 2014

Who knew that a scary movie based on the bizarre idea of a mortal man growing devil horns could prove so damn captivating? Horns is right up there with The Cabin in the Woods as among the most engrossing horror flicks ever made in and around Vancouver.

The film opens with young lovers Ig and Merrin (Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple) professing their undying love for each other while sprawled on a blanket in the woods. “I’m gonna love you for the rest of my life,” he vows. “Just love me for the rest of mine,” she replies.

Ig then wakes up hungover on his kitchen floor to the nightmare that he’s the main suspect in Merrin’s brutal rape and murder, hounded by rabid media and townsfolk alike. “When they looked at me they saw a devil,” he says in a voiceover, “and maybe I did too. And now I had to look the part.”

That’s when those crazy horns start sprouting from his forehead and—as if he were Satan himself—most everyone Ig encounters proudly blurts out their darkest secrets and most depraved desires. Much hilarity ensues—especially when Heather Graham’s fame-obsessed psycho waitress makes the scene.

But the twisted humour in Horns is tempered by a whole lotta heart, much of it felt in coming-of-age flashbacks of Ig and Merrin’s star-crossed childhood. The performances from the array of teen and adult supporting actors—including James Remar, David Morse, Kathleen Quinlan, and Max Minghella—is first-rate all around, although particularly riveting is Joe (The Crazies) Anderson as Ig’s drug-addled musician brother Terry.

Director Alexandre Aja—who blew horror fans away with the grim gore epics High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes before bobbing for bent laughs with Piranha 3D—does a masterful job turning the offbeat premise into a romance-driven murder-mystery fable that keeps you guessing and giggling throughout.

And boy [shakes head in wonder], that shotgun scene is something else.

P2 (2007, Summit Entertainment)

Review originally published on November 7, 2007

As if underground parking wasn’t scary enough already. Ever try finding an empty spot in the Metrotown parkade on the weekend? The stress involved with that alone can kill ya. I just say, ‘Screw it,’ park out on the street somewhere, and deal with the pouring rain.

In the Big Apple you don’t always have that option, especially if you are like ambitious young executive Angela (Rachel Nichols of TV’s Alias). She’s working late on Christmas Eve, and by the time she leaves the office, the parking garage is deserted–apart from the uniformed security guy, Thomas (Weirdsville‘s Wes Bentley). When Angela’s car won’t start, he tries boosting it with a battery charger, to no avail.

He gets slightly miffed when the flustered blond fails to appreciate his efforts, but that’s nothing compared to how he reacts when she rejects his invitation to enjoy the turkey feast he’s whipped up at his guard station. Next thing you know, she’s been chloroformed, changed into a silk cocktail dress, and cuffed to a chair at Thomas’s dinner table.

The idea of a delusional man holding a beautiful woman captive isn’t exactly original, but in the skilled hands of screenwriters Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur–who’ve honed their suspense chops on the riveting High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes–the result is a thoroughly engrossing psycho-thriller that never lets up.

Nichols and Bentley fulfill their cat-and-mouse roles to perfection, she as the strong-willed, resourceful victim and he as the pitiful, voyeuristic psychopath. The movie has a few gruesome moments, but for the most part first-time director and cowriter Franck Khalfoun takes a subdued approach to the unfolding nastiness.

He refuses to rely on the blindingly fast edits and screeching sound effects common in today’s teen-oriented horror flicks. While avoiding those types of technical cop-outs, Khalfoun fashions one of the most wildly entertaining fright flicks of the year, an old-school nail-biter that’s sure to make late-night holiday shoppers think twice as they push the button marked P2 on the parkade elevator.

Way to ruin Christmas, Thomas!

T0 read more than 350 of my original reviews of scary movies released theatrically in North America go here.