The best horror movies on Amazon Prime right now

The feature film debut of writer-director Parker Finn, Smile stars Sosie Bacon as Dr. Rose Cotter, a psychiatrist who finds herself haunted by disturbing specters and other supernatural phenomena after one of her patients ends her life right in front of her. As the days and weeks go by, Rose starts losing her grip on reality, leading her to do a bit of investigating into her client’s demise.

Her discovery: a morbid and long-spanning connect-the-dots of self-mutilation. Leaning on jump-scares (albeit some very good ones) and measured performances to spin its terror threads, Smile may feel familiar to many fans of the genre, but who said wearing your influences on your sleeve has to be a bad thing?

In director Baltasar Kormákur’s 2022 film Beast, Idris Elba stars as Dr. Nate Samuels, a widowed father of two teenage daughters (Iyana Halley and Leah Sava Jeffries). On a vacation to the Mopani Reserve in South Africa, the trip that everyone needed quickly devolves into an all-out nightmare when a man-eating lion goes on a killing spree. It’s up to Nate and his children to think fast, act fast, and pray, as they do all they can to avoid becoming “prey” to the angry wildlife. Beast knows that it’s operating on an out-there premise that most of us are unlikely to experience, but watching Elba go into combat with an apex predator certainly makes for thrilling cinema.

The Collector takes all the mayhem and inventive murders of a film like Saw, removes any and all traces of relatable drama, and adds kerosene to the formula. The resulting conflagration is an exploitive mess that can be seen for miles, but we’ll be damned if we can’t turn away. Josh Stewart stars as ex-con Arkin, a man desperate to get some much-needed cash in the hands of his ex-wife, so he decides to rob a house. Not the best plan to begin with, but it just so happens that the targeted domicile has already been selected by a notorious madman who has rigged the residence with a series of inescapable death traps. During early development, The Collector was actually supposed to be a prequel to the Sawseries, which makes sense when you consider the narrative. It’s not groundbreaking genre cinema by any means, but if you need a good sister flick to the Saw canon, The Collector is bound to satiate.

Dare to speak his name? In the ghoulish tradition of urban legends like Bloody Mary, director Nia DaCosta’s 2021 film Candyman presents a decades-later sequel to the original 1992 Bernard Rose film of the same name. Starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Anthony McCoy, a Chicago-based painter seeking inspiration for his next set of works, the talented and curious craftsman dives deep into the lore of the infamous Candyman legend after a conversation with a Cabrini-Green resident (Colman Domingo) piques his interest in the man with a hooked hand. But as the bodies start piling up, the world of the paintbrush starts bleeding out into reality as the titular slasher returns once more. Candyman rocks a bold visual style with a kinetic story that comes to life through the film’s ensemble of players, particularly Mateen II as the manic artist who rapidly descends down a rabbit hole of disillusionment and decay.