5 Horror Movies on Tubi You Should Watch Tonight

We are starting stupid on purpose. Bambi: The Reckoning takes the public domain version of everyone’s favorite orphaned fawn and turns him into a mutated, vengeance-crazed murder deer stalking a mother and her son through the British countryside after a car wreck. Yes, this is real. Yes, it is part of a whole cinematic universe of ruined childhood characters. No, I will not be taking questions.

This is not a good movie in any traditional sense. The CGI is rough, the story is nonsense, and the deer frequently looks like it wandered in from a video game cutscene. It is also a genuinely fun time with the right crowd and the right amount of snacks. The kills get creative, there is an all-timer involving a propane tank, and the whole thing knows exactly how ridiculous it is. Director Dan Allen is not trying to scare you so much as entertain you with a completely straight face.

Put this on when you want to laugh, heckle, and occasionally wince. Sober solo viewing is not recommended. This one is a group sport.

Watch this if you like: Cocaine Bear, the Winnie the Pooh horror movies, or yelling at your screen with friends.

Now we get classy. Ghost Stories is a British anthology in the grand old Amicus tradition, where a smug skeptical professor gets handed three unexplained cases of the supernatural and goes hunting for the rational explanation he is certain is waiting. Andy Nyman plays the debunker, and he and co-director Jeremy Dyson adapted the whole thing from their own hit stage play, which is why it moves like a machine that knows precisely when to make you laugh and precisely when to yank the floor out from under you.

Three stories, each with its own flavor of dread. A nightwatchman in a dead asylum. A teenager and a very bad drive home. Martin Freeman being tremendously Martin Freeman. Alex Lawther in particular does more with a shaking voice and wet eyes than most movies manage with a gallon of blood. The scares are patient and practical, and the wraparound has a final turn that is much better arrived at unspoiled.

It is the rare anthology where the connective tissue is the best part. Come for the segments, stay for what they quietly add up to.

Watch this if you like: Trick ‘r Treat, the old Amicus portmanteau films, or horror that respects your attention span.

Before Guillermo del Toro won every award in sight, he made this, his first American movie, and then spent the production fighting the Weinsteins over the final cut. You can feel that struggle in the seams. You can also feel, in every frame, that it is unmistakably a del Toro film, which is more than enough reason to press play.

Mira Sorvino stars as an entomologist who engineered a bug to wipe out a disease-carrying cockroach population, solved the crisis, and accidentally cooked up something far worse. A few years later, giant insects that have learned to mimic the rough shape of a human being are living under New York City, and they are hungry. It is a creature feature soaked in that rainy, gothic, cathedral-of-grime atmosphere del Toro would go on to perfect, with practical monsters that still look nasty and wet and real.

The movie does not entirely work. The studio meddling shows. But the design, the mood, and the subway-tunnel dread carry it, and it is fascinating to watch a master figuring out his own language in real time.

Watch this if you like: The Relic, early del Toro, or monsters that were clearly built instead of typed into a computer.

This is the one I will chase you down the street to recommend. Lake Mungo is an Australian faux documentary about a family quietly coming apart after their teenage daughter, Alice, drowns on an ordinary summer afternoon. It is told entirely through talking head interviews, home video, and photographs, and it studies the way grief makes people see things that are not there, right up until it starts asking what happens when the things are, in fact, there.

It is not a jump scare movie. It barely raises its voice. What it does instead is bury small, terrible details in the corners of the frame until you find yourself leaning toward the screen, dreading the next photograph. There is one image in this film that horror fans still discuss in hushed tones, and I am not telling you where or when it lands. Watch it in the dark, on a real screen, with your phone in another room.

Some horror scares you for ninety minutes. This one follows you home and sits at the foot of the bed. It is about loss far more than it is about ghosts, and it is one of the saddest, most quietly devastating things on the entire platform.

Watch this if you like: The Blair Witch Project, the dread of Hereditary, or crying a little while you are scared.

If you only press play on one thing tonight, make it this. The Blackening is a horror comedy with a killer hook, literally and figuratively. Seven Black friends reunite at a remote cabin for a Juneteenth weekend, get trapped by a masked killer, and are forced to play a grotesque board game that runs on the oldest rule in the genre. In a slasher, the Black character dies first. So what happens when the entire cast is Black?

Director Tim Story and writers Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins turn that question into the sharpest horror satire since Scream, and one of the funniest films the genre has produced in years. The cast, including Grace Byers, Jermaine Fowler, Antoinette Robertson, Sinqua Walls, Melvin Gregg, X Mayo, and a scene-stealing Perkins, bounce off each other like a great sketch troupe that happens to be running from a crossbow. It works as a real slasher too, with actual tension humming under the jokes.

This is the perfect Tubi Friday night. Loud, quotable, mean in the fun way, and best experienced with a full couch. Everyone in the room will be shouting at the screen by the halfway mark.

Watch this if you like: Scream, Bodies Bodies Bodies, or a horror movie that is smarter and funnier than it strictly needs to be.