[Editorial] 6 Best Streaming Services for Horror Film Fans

Horror movies have kept viewers of all ages up at night, afraid to turn off the light or look outside, let alone sleep -- which lends to the question: Why do we put ourselves through all that? Science has shown horror movies trigger the same fight or flight response as being confronted with the actual threat conveyed in real life. So, what makes horror fans, horror fans? Or, put another way, what makes us love getting scared out of our wits?

It turns out horror movies can actually help people, especially those with anxiety or trauma, to relieve "pent-up tension." As one study on horror fans during COVID found, those who watched horror movies regularly were more "psychologically resilient" during the pandemic.

Of course, if you’re a horror fan, you may not care about all this science. All you want to know is where to get your next big heaping of blood, gore and terror. TV services are a bit hit and miss when it comes to specialty programming like horror. With the limited time frame imposed by a real-time schedule of live airings, there’s only so much content a TV channel can air, even if that channel caters to an audience of horror fans.

With streaming, however, you have access to the service’s entire catalog of content on demand. And, if you subscribe to any of the particular streaming services below, you’ll have a graveyard full of options every time you turn on that screen for a good scare. All of these streaming services are available in the UK!

Shout Factory TV

Supported Platforms: The Roku player, Android, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV

Price: Ad-free starting at £2.99 per month; free, ad-supported viewing available

Countries Available: Worldwide, including the UK, US and Canada

Shout Factory TV (aka SFTV) specialises in pop culture and contemporary cult classics. Among its specialty lineup of channels is Scream Factory, playing all horror, all the time and holding events like the annual Summer of Fear Marathon. The service also includes among its family of channels, the fan-favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000.

In addition to a standalone subscription, you can also get SFTV as a branded channel on:

• Amazon Prime Channels

• Crackle

• IMDbTV

• LocalNow

• Plex

• Pluto TV

• Redbox

• The Roku Channel

• Roku Premium Subscriptions

• Samsung TV Plus

• Sling TV

• STIRR

• TCL

• Theta TV

• Tubi

• Twitch

• Vizio

• Xumo

Horror movies and TV shows on Shout Factory TV include:

• The Soul Collector - A man cursed to collect souls for the rest of time tries to atone for trading the soul of his own daughter in this eerie, tormented and dread-filled South African horror film.

• Elvira’s Movie Macabre - The Mistress of the Dark plays hostess in this six-season cult favorite from the 80s, delivering B-movie horror films with her own macabre brand of dark comedy.

Hammer House of Horror - This classic British horror anthology series brings you 13 different horror stories, each lasting an hour long. Subject matter includes werewolves, witches, ghosts, voodoo, devil-worship, serial killers, cannibalism and confinement.

Shudder

Supported Platforms: Amazon Fire TV (except in NZ,) Apple TV, Google Chromecast and Google Cast, Roku devices, Android TV, iPhone and iPad, Android phone and tablet, Mac and Windows web browsers, Xbox (except in AU and NZ,) LG Smart TV and Samsung Smart TV through AirPlay, VIZIO Smart TV through AirPlay and Google Cast and Sony Smart TV

Price: £5.99 per month or £56.99 annually

Countries Available: US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand

Shudder is another streaming service devoted exclusively to horror movies and TV shows. In fact, it claims to have the biggest and best selection of them, including exclusive premieres each week. Through its affiliation with AMC, Shudder also plays original AMC content like The Walking Dead and Eli Roth’s History of Horror. In addition to this lineup of on-demand classics, sleepers, premieres and original content, Shudder also offers its premium subscribers Shudder TV, providing "a constant stream of killer content." To help you find new horror films and series to watch, Shudder has put together several collections of programming centered on particular horror subgenres or themes. You can get Shudder on its own or through Amazon Prime Video or AMC+. Note that Shudder is not available with Nintendo or PlayStation devices.

Horror movies and TV shows on Shudder include:

• Mad God - This stop-motion horror animation took three decades to make, but it only takes 85 minutes to scare you like you've never quite been before. Its deceptively simple plot is this: a protagonist known only as The Assassin wanders a dismal and threatening world. Read Megan Kenny’s full Mad God review!

• Creepshow - This anthology series is based on the classic 1982 horror film of the same name which, in turn, was based on a classic comic book series. Like its predecessors in an anthology series, each episode in this Shudder exclusive tells two hair-raising horror stories. And, it’s all hosted by the same infamous Creepshow ghoul.

Alien Encounters Collection - Ok, this isn’t a single film or TV show itself but a collection of them, and they deserve their own mention here because they are some of the most legendary classic horror films of all time, including John Carpenter’s The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and They Live.

Netflix

Supported Platforms: The gamut of streaming media players, Smart TVs, game consoles, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, smartphones, tablets, PCs and laptops

Price: Starting at £10.99 per month

Countries Available: UK and nearly everywhere else in the world

There is virtually nobody who doesn’t know what Netflix is – essentially the Amazon of streaming (sorry Prime Video, but it’s true.) What people may not realise, however, is that its ocean of never-ending content includes torrents of terror and fathomless depths of fear and dread. This includes the new Netflix Original Series, Resident Evil, based on the terrifying video game franchise. If you like your horror with a bit of other genres occasionally sprinkled in, then Netflix might be the best option for you. Offering a selection of comedy, drama, sci-fi, romance, etc. in addition to horror, a Netflix subscription prevents you from having to subscribe to an additional streaming service for general content on top of a horror-only streaming service.

Horror movies and TV shows on Netflix include:

• Black Summer - Set in the same universe as the Z Nation series, this spinoff follows a group of refugees attempting to survive the zombie apocalypse.

• The Haunting of Hill House - In this dark, supernatural series told in two alternating storylines, a broken family faces the tortured memories of their former home and what forced them to leave it.

Bird Box - This post-apocalyptic nightmare starring Sandra Bullock had viewers terrified to leave their homes for weeks. In it, a woman tries to save her children from a horrific enemy that takes on the form of people’s worst fears and, so, makes anyone who sets eyes on it kill themselves.

Full Moon Streaming

Supported Platforms: The gamut of Smart TVs (Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, Fire TV, Xbox One, Chromecast), mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android), PCs and laptops and other game consoles, set-top boxes and Blu-ray players

Price: US $6.99 per month or US $59.99 per year

Countries Available: Worldwide, including the UK

This is the streaming service of Full Moon Features, an American B-movie film production company known for straight-to-video series like Subspecies, Trancers and Puppet Master and movies like Castle Freak, The Gingerbread Man, Demonic Toys and Killjoy. You may never have heard of most of the horror flicks in this catalog, but you also won’t find these titles anywhere else. Full Moon Streaming promises all your favorite horror-related sub-genres including classic horror, scary science fiction, cult favorites, exotic flicks and mondo retro. The service posts new features weekly, and you can sync content for viewing offline.

Horror movies and TV shows on Full Moon Streaming include:

• Snuff - An actress and her producer visit an unnamed South American country where they find themselves stalked by a vicious female biker cult.

• A Taste of Blood - H.G. Lewis, known as the Godfather of Gore, directed this 1967 exploitation film about a man who gets caught up with vampires.

• Dario Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome - Part violent murder mystery, part psychological thriller, this film starring its director’s daughter follows a police chief tormented by the mental and emotional scars of a violent sexual assault. To make matters worse, she mysteriously begins losing her mind every time she looks into a painting.

Also worth noting on Full Moon Streaming is Charles Band's Deadly Ten, serving you 10 new feature films produced live right in front of your eyes, and Delirium, the self-styled "world's freakiest horror, cult and fantasy film magazine."

Monsters and Nightmares

Supported platforms: Smart TVs compatible with Chromecast or AirPlay

Price: US $2.99 per month or US $29.99 per year

Countries available: Internationally

Monsters and Nightmares delivers exactly what it promises in its name. Specifically, it focuses on horror, thrillers, sci-fi and dark comedy.

Horror movies and TV shows on Monsters and Nightmares include:

• V/H/S - A found-footage film involving a band of misfit, amateur thieves who discover, in an abandoned home they’re sent to burglarize, a collection of TVs playing mysterious video footage and a dead body.

• The Host - Directed by Bong Joon Ho the award-winning South Korean director of the Best Picture film "Parasite," this big-budget monster movie set in Seoul involves a family’s quest to rescue a young girl from a creature residing in a nearby river.

Let the Right One In - Based on a bestselling novel, this vampire film involves an unlikely and fated friendship between a young human and a young-appearing member of the undead.

Dark Matter TV

Supported platforms: Samsung Smart TVs, LG Smart TVs, Google TV, Roku devices, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and as a smartphone app on the Apple App Store for iOS and the Google Play store for Android.

Price: US $4.99 per month "Unlimited" plan; also offers a free, ad-supported plan

Countries available: Worldwide

Dark Matter TV presents content from the Grimoire of Horror, a horror media company with two branches: the Yurei branch presents cult East Asian cinema and Eat Asian horror film and TV reviews, news and analysis, J-Horror, Japanese folklore, kaiju mythology and horror manga such as Junji Ito; the Banshee branch presents more mainstream horror, such as Western horror movies, true crime, horror culture, creepy mythology and "creepypasta" classic horror myths and legends.

Dark Matter TV is also your one-stop streaming source for horror-related news, reviews and current events, featuring: the Rabbit in Red blog providing "all things horror;" Horror Buzz providing horror-related news, reviews and events; Horror Fuel providing horror news, reviews, and interviews; El Primo de Ridley Scott (Ridley Scott’s Cousin) blog on science fiction, horror and fantastic film; Ginger Nuts of Horror: The Heart and Soul of Horror providing diversity in horror reviews.

Horror movies and TV shows on Dark Matter TV include:

• Train to Busan - A South Korean zombie film that takes place on–you guessed it–a train.

• #Screamers - While an interplanetary war rages, a military commander sent to negotiate peace on a devastated world finds the army’s front-line robots have become sentient, with deadly consequences.

A Bucket of Blood - This 1950s classic follows a bumbling would-be artist whose work grows increasingly gruesome as his acclaim increases.

Recap

If thrills and chills are what you crave when you sit down in front of the screen for some R & R, then a horror-focused streaming service could be just what the witch doctor ordered. Since many of the services offer free trials and/or free, ad-supported viewing, you can try out several of them and see which give you the biggest goosebumps.

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