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Amazon Prime features a huge selection of horror movies across more than a century of cinema history. There's everything from influential classics to recent releases, but all scary. Here are the ten best horror movies to stream on Amazon Prime Video.

UPDATE: 5/10/23

We've verified our links and are still confident these are the best horror movies streaming on Prime Video.

The Black Phone

Two horror forces combine when director Scott Derrickson (Sinister) adapts Joe Hill's short story The Black Phone. In suburban Denver in 1978, a serial killer known as the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) has been abducting local kids, and 13-year-old Finney Blake (Mason Thames) is his latest target.

Held captive in the Grabber's basement, Finney discovers a phone that allows him to talk to the ghosts of the Grabber's previous victims, giving him the strength and knowledge he needs to escape. Hawke makes for a menacing villain, and Thames bring earnest emotion to the coming-of-age story amid the horror.

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Candyman

Both a reboot and a sequel, the 2021 version of Candyman updates the story from the 1992 original while also continuing the saga of the title character. Originally played by Tony Todd, the Candyman is a hook-handed apparition who appears when someone says his name five times while looking in the mirror.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as a Candyman-obsessed artist whose ties to the killer go back to the first movie. Candyman is an embodiment of rage over centuries of racism and mistreatment, and the movie combines sharp social commentary with its visceral horrors.

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Creepshow 2

Although it's not the horror classic of the first Creepshow, Creepshow 2 is a solid continuation of the anthology movies based on Stephen King stories. The segments here feature a wooden Native American statue come to life to seek vengeance; a mysterious slime creature terrorizing teens at a lake; and a woman tormented by the ghost of a man she accidentally killed with her car. "The Hitchhiker" is the strongest of those segments, but all three capture the vintage pulp-horror feel that King and George Romero established in the first movie.

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Hellbound: Hellraiser II

The sequel to Clive Barker's Hellraiser, Hellbound: Hellraiser II is actually the highlight of the long-running franchise, giving more screen time to Doug Bradley's iconic villain Pinhead while also taking on a more surreal tone. It delves deeper into the horrifying hellscape inhabited by Pinhead and his fellow Cenobites, and showcases the dark, sadistic terrors they inflict on the victims who open the puzzle box known as the Lament Configuration.

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Related: The 10 Best Horror Movies to Stream for Free in 2023

Night of the Living Dead

The entire zombie genre owes its existence to George Romero's 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, which created the modern conception of zombies as shambling, flesh-eating corpses come back to life. The small-scale production is also a marvel of tension and ingenuity, trapping a handful of characters in a house as the zombie apocalypse rages around them.

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Related: The 10 Best Stephen King Movies to Stream in 2023

Rosemary's Baby

Mia Farrow experiences an amplified version of the fears of impending motherhood in Roman Polanski's classic Rosemary's Baby. Pregnant young wife Rosemary (Farrow) feels isolated and alone in her New York City apartment as her actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes) is increasingly busy and distant. Polanski brilliantly escalates Rosemary's dread and mistrust, which turns out to be more than justified when she learns the truth about her menacingly helpful neighbors.

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Saint Maud

The debut feature from filmmaker Rose Glass, Saint Maud focuses on the horrors of religious devotion. The title character (Morfydd Clark) is a nurse who's experienced a spiritual awakening, and she takes a job caring for a wealthy, terminally ill former dance star (Jennifer Ehle). Maud attempts to convert her patient via any means necessary, and Clark conveys the startling intensity of her religious fervor. That fervor eventually turns deadly, in a startling and hauntingly beautiful climax.

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Related: The 10 Best Horror Movies on Max in 2023

Smile

There's something uniquely unsettling about a smile with sinister intentions, and filmmaker Parker Finn takes full advantage of that in Smile. Sosie Bacon plays a psychologist who encounters the strange phenomenon of people being driven to kill themselves with demented smiles on their faces, a curse that seems to pass on to whoever witnesses each death.

When she becomes cursed, she attempts to track its origins while seeing deranged grins on everyone around her. It's a simple premise that provides for plenty of visceral horror, leading to a grim but inevitable outcome.

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Suspiria

The 2018 remake of Italian director Dario Argento's cult classic Suspiria takes the story in an even more impressionistic, hallucinatory direction. The movie stars Dakota Johnson as a seemingly naïve young American who comes to study at a sinister dance school in Berlin. Director Luca Guadagnino creates a haunting movie about ambition, jealousy, and bizarre cult activity.

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Train to Busan

Korean filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho puts a new spin on the zombie genre in international blockbuster Train to Busan, which takes place almost entirely on a commuter train from Seoul to Busan as a zombie outbreak overcomes the passengers. It combines the propulsive, self-contained momentum of a Hollywood action movie with the suspense and gore of a zombie thriller.

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