HBO is no stranger to horror. The premium cable channel was the home to the much-loved anthology series Tales from the Crypt in the late 80s and early 90s, it produced the animated superhero horror show Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, and I’m pretty sure the first time I saw the Jack Nicholson film Wolf was when it came on HBO one night after my parents had gone to bed. That movie deals with way more literary copyright law than you'd expect.

The point is, there’s an abundance of horror flicks available in HBO’s rotating vault of streaming movies. Some of them are must-watch classics, some are fun shlock, and some are The Nun. Luckily for you, I’ve combed through the HBO library and compiled a list of horror movies that fall into those first two categories and are absolutely worth your time. If you disagree with any of my picks, please understand that my taste is impeccable and the problem is therefore something to do with you.

For additional horror lists, check out our recommendations for the best horror movies on Netflix and the best horror movies on Amazon Prime.

Alien

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Director: Ridley Scott

Writers: Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Yahpet Kotto, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright

The first four Alien films are currently streaming on HBO, but Alien is the only one that was ever actually scary. When Alien originally released back in 1979, nothing else like it had ever existed in mainstream American cinema. It’s a haunted house movie set in space, but not the hopeful, adventurous space we’d seen in Star Wars. Space is an infinite bleak void in the world of Alien, a fact that is punctuated by the cyclopean landscape of LV-426, the planet our hapless crew of galactic truckers touches down upon to investigate a mysterious beacon. The crew discovers an alien ship that might be the first truly alien structure I’d ever seen in a film - its bizarre geometry doesn’t make any kind of logical sense outside of a nightmare. It is there that they collect the titular extraterrestrial stowaway, and then the film quickly becomes a torture dungeon loaded with intense scenes of subliminally sexual violence. It’s a movie designed to frighten and upset you on the most primitive levels, and it absolutely succeeds. No movie has ever scared me as badly as the first time I watched Alien. Granted, I was 10 at the time, but the fact that that record has held for almost 3 decades is saying something.

Unfriended

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Image via Universal

Director: Leo Gabriadze

Writer: Nelson Greaves

Cast: Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Renee Olstead, Will Peltz

Unfriended might be one of the most pleasant surprises of my career as a person who goes to the movies. My expectations for this found-footage horror film about a bunch of shitty teens trapped in a video chat with each other as a ghost kills them off one by one were comparable to the time I watched Melissa McCarthy’s Life of the Party on an airplane because my Nintendo Switch’s battery had died. But Unfriended turned out to be an impressive film, despite the apparent gimmickiness of its premise. The entire movie takes place on a computer screen as it switches between the various characters’ chat windows, Facebook tabs, internet search bars, and YouTube videos, and as unbelievable as it may sound, it actually creates a shockingly compelling narrative device. It’s a refreshingly creative entry in the found footage genre that has already spawned one truly excellent film (Searching, starring John Cho) and one raging trashfire of a sequel (Unfriended: Dark Web).

Us

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Image via Universal Pictures

Director/Writer: Jordan Peele

Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker

Jordan Peele’s evil twin movie was one of the best films of last year. Anchored by an incredible performance from Lupita Nyong'o, who expertly handles the dual role of a protective mother and a deeply unsettling psychopath, Us slowly suffocates you with a persistent feeling of dread that crescendos in a spectacular second act of home invasion zombie violence that is equal parts gruesome and unnerving. The final showdown between the two Lupitas eerily juxtaposes their discordant childhoods with the savage violence they have grown up to inflict on each other.

Peele makes simple but unobvious choices throughout the film and executes them perfectly, like having Red stalk Adelaide by walking backwards towards her through a maze of classroom desks. It’s well-crafted too, with so much packed into virtually every shot that you can still discover something new after several viewings. Also, the use of “I’ve Got Five On It” as the main theme of the movie’s creepy score works astonishingly well. And Winston Duke has forever cemented himself as the brass ring of dad goals. (In one scene Duke reflexively chucks a pillow at his young son as he goes running by while he’s watching a basketball game on TV and it might be the most pure moment of modern cinema.)

Happy Death Day

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Image via Universal Pictures

Director: Christopher Landon

Writer: Scott Lobdell

Cast: Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Ruby Modine

Happy Death Day is one of the most pleasant surprises in terms of PG-13 horror movies released after being stuck in development for 10 years that I can think of. That sounds like extremely backhanded praise, but I assure you this movie is great. Jessica Rothe plays Tree, a typical horror movie “mean girl” character that you barely feel bad for when she gets murdered right away. Tree does indeed get murdered in short order, but right after she dies, she wakes up back in her bed that morning with the events of the day reset. It’s like watching Groundhog Day while reading the Wikipedia plot summary of Scream because your parents brought home the wrong video from Blockbuster.

Tree essentially has to solve her own murder by dying over and over again, but there’s a limit on how many slayings she can endure before death becomes permanent, so the clock is ticking. It’s a remarkably unique take on a crowded genre, and it’s genuinely funny, thanks to an amazing performance by Rothe. The premise requires the audience to be restricted to Tree’s point of view, and Rothe carries the film gamely, managing to have an honest-to-god emotional arc in the middle of cracking jokes and getting her ass beat by a masked killer over and over again. It’s one of my favorite pop horror films of the past five years, and I would encourage you to watch it even if it wasn’t currently free on HBO (which it is, so you have no excuse).

The Fourth Kind

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Image via Universal Pictures

Director: Olatunde Osunsanmi

Writers: Olatunde Osunsanmi, Terry Lee Robbins

Cast: Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, Will Patton, Hakeem Kae-Kazim

Ok, hear me out on this one. The Fourth Kind received a lot of (deserved) criticism for using real murders and disappearances in the city of Nome, Alaska as the basis for a “true” account of alien abductions. The 2009 movie is also told in a bizarre quasi-documentary style, with actors playing the “real” victims in handheld camera footage purporting to be actual interviews, mixed with actors like Milla Jovovich and Will Patton playing themselves portraying the victims in reenactment footage. Whew.

But if you can deal with the movie’s somewhat exhausting format, there’s a genuinely creepy narrative hiding in this mostly forgotten sci-fi horror offering. I’m a big fan of any film that tries to make the flying saucer kind of aliens spooky, and The Fourth Kind delivers some truly unsettling sequences. It’s a little self-indulgent (the director, Olatunde Osunsanmi, takes advantage of the “documentary” format to cast himself in the film as a crusading truth-seeker), and the movie’s text-based epilogue is hilariously long, but it succeeds in creating a sinister mood that simmers admirably through its 98-minute runtime without ever coming to the in-your-face boil typically expected in modern pop horror. (That is, Jovovich does not battle the aliens in a dramatic final confrontation atop Mount Rushmore while wielding a ceremonial dagger. Minor spoilers.)

The Company of Wolves

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Image via ITC Entertainment

Director: Neil Jordan

Writers: Angela Carter, Neil Jordan

Cast: Angela Lansbury, David Warner

I can only offer a lukewarm recommendation for The Company of Wolves, the 1984 horror film directed by Neil Jordan, because watching it is like reading a boring fairy tale with gorgeously disturbing illustrations. The movie is a dreamlike anthology of werewolf stories, which is appropriate, since the whole thing takes place in the mind of a dreaming teenage girl. It's also extremely British, with a “we’ll get there when we get there” pace, which I recognize is not exactly everyone’s cup of tea. Get it? See, because it’s British.

But if you stick with it, you’ll find that The Company of Wolves is a got damn work of art. It’s essentially a retelling of the Red Riding Hood story, in that it takes the famous fairy tale’s central theme of the loss of childhood innocence (specifically, of a girl’s journey into womanhood) and spins it out into a handful of different-but-similar werewolf stories, accompanied by undeniably boss production design by Anton Furst (who later worked on Tim Burton’s Batman) to create a thickly Gothic atmosphere that you could cut with an eyeliner pen. Plus, Angela Lansbury and David Warner are in it. It’s probably not the best choice to throw on at a Halloween party, but it’s a good pick if you want to throw on a dark fantasy movie about people getting all horned up over wolves.

Upgrade

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Image via Blumhouse

Writer/Director: Leigh Whannell

Cast: Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson

Toeing the line of sci-fi thriller and sci-fi horror, Upgrade is like a particularly gnarly episode of The Twilight Zone. Written and directed by Saw co-creator Leigh Wannell, the movie follows a man named Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) who is paralyzed in an accident and gets a super-advanced chip implanted in his body that gives him the ability to move again. The chip, called STEM, has a bad habit of talking to Grey inside his mind and occasionally taking control of Grey’s body to inflict terrible violence.

Upgrade is a dazzling combination of revenge film, buddy comedy, body horror, and slasher flick that absolutely shouldn’t work but somehow totally does. It’s a blast from beginning to end, filled with some genuinely unexpected twists leading up to a truly chilling reveal. It’s not precisely a horror movie, but it rents a studio apartment in the same building as one, where it gets blackout drunk on a bare mattress every night.

Wishmaster

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Image via Live Entertainment

Director: Robert Kurtzman

Writer: Peter Atkins

Cast: Tammy Lauren, Andrew Divoff, Robert Englund, Kane Hodder, Tony Todd

Wishmaster is about an evil genie (called a Djinn) who is accidentally summoned in ‘90s New York and begins to wreak havoc for his own personal delight, which comes in the form of deliberately misinterpreting people’s wishes to inflict maximum body horror. It is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination. The story is absurd, the acting is hilarious, and the film has to do way too much work to shoehorn its premise into everyday conversation. (Every time a person sweatily makes an incidental wish within earshot of the Djinn will make your eyes roll all the way back into your head like a frightened turtle.) But the practical effects in the film are quite good, owing to the fact that the director, Robert Kurtzman, was a makeup effects artist on several classic horror films, including Evil Dead II, Predator, and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors. Plus, it’s loaded with cameos from horror mainstays like Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger), Kane Hodder (Jason), Tony Todd (Candyman), Ted Raimi (Evil Dead II), and Angus Scrimm (Phantasm). It’s a love-letter to horror fans and gore aficionados, and while it never actually manages to be scary, it is a whole lot of fun.