Great Horror Movies That Shouldn't Have Skipped Theaters

In May 2024, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos made a strange claim to The New York Times. Discussing "Barbenheimer," Sarandos insisted that the success of "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" wasn't related to the fact that both were released in theaters and made an event out of physically going to the movies. "Both of those movies would be great for Netflix. They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix," he said. That suggestion seems ... unlikely. But Sarandos wasn't done. "There's no reason to believe that the movie itself is better in any size of screen for all people," he said. "My son's an editor. He is 28 years old, and he watched 'Lawrence of Arabia' on his phone."

Leaving aside what a travesty that example is, Sarandos is simply incorrect. Many movies are, indeed, better when they're bigger, because the theatrical experience is beneficial for two main reasons. First, you're seeing the most amount of detail possible in an image, and movies are primarily a collection of images. Second — and this is particularly crucial for horror films — there's something magical that happens when you have a collective experience with your fellow audience members. There's nothing quite like feeling the thrill that races through a room when a horror movie executes a scare perfectly.

Some horror movies, though, don't get their fair shake. Whether they've premiered on television, got dumped on streaming services, or went straight to DVD, the horror films on this list shouldn't have skipped theaters.

Director Dan Trachtenberg's 2022 film "Prey" might just be the best film in the entire "Predator" franchise. This time, the movie follows an earlier version of the alien who once fought the alien from "Alien," imagining what would have happened had a Predator crash-landed on Earth in the 1700s and encountered Comanche warriors. As such, instead of a massive sci-fi spectacle featuring futuristic weapons, "Prey" strips the action back and features battles involving bows and arrows. It's ingenious and extremely well-done.

Unfortunately, "Prey" was released straight to Hulu, even though it was filmed with a theatrical experience in mind. Trachtenberg told UPROXX that the movie came out on Hulu so that Disney could prove the streaming service was viable, explaining, "They're hoping to really ignite the platform to say, 'We're not just putting out the smaller, lower-budget fare.' That this is also a place to have giant cinematic experiences."

You know where else is a place to have giant cinematic experiences? The cinema! "Prey" features some gorgeous, lush cinematography, capturing the beauty of the American West as well as all the best Westerns. It would have looked incredible on a big screen, and the movie's inventive action sequences — one of which takes place in a forest filled with foggy mist — would've played even better with an audience. Here's hoping the "Prey" sequel gets a shot at the box office.

As SyFy's "Chucky" series proves, the killer doll might just be horror's most reliably-great villain. Unlike the majority of slasher franchises, "Chucky" has managed to maintain series continuity through many sequels and a jump to television (minus the one-off "Child's Play" reboot). Many fans, however, may not realize that the "Chucky" continuity also includes two straight-to-video films that came out in the 2010s.

Whereas "Bride of Chucky" and "Seed of Chucky" led the series down a decidedly campy route, 2013's "Curse of Chucky" took the foul-mouthed toy back to his horror roots. It's a haunted house movie, but instead of a ghost, it's Chucky who makes things go bump in the night. Original star Brad Dourif's daughter Fiona stars as Nica, a woman in a wheelchair, and the film is brilliantly inventive in exploring just how many ways it can terrorize her.

A few years later came "Cult of Chucky," a wintry horror movie set in an asylum. This one's even better, leaning in to the concept of Charles Lee Ray's soul being split into multiple Good Guy dolls. The demented killer now commands a doll army, which allows him to get up to even more slasher shenanigans. These two movies are excellent fun, and had they been released theatrically, it's likely that even more people would be following Chucky's adventures on television.

Maika Monroe has led the cast of several well-received theatrical horror movies, including "It Follows" (which is getting a sequel) and "The Guest." She's one of the best in the genre, which is why it was disappointing that her film "Significant Other" went straight to Paramount+. Its lush, green Pacific Northwest setting would've looked fantastic on the big screen, and while it doesn't necessarily have mass appeal, surely this would have picked up some great word-of-mouth from a limited run in smaller theaters. Instead, the movie was practically buried by the all-powerful streaming algorithm, and it hasn't yet found the fanbase it deserves.

It's about Ruth and Harry (Monroe and Jake Lacy), a couple who have been together a while, but they aren't sure what their future looks like. They set out on a multi-day hike, only to encounter something strange and frightening in the woods. This starts out as a slow, talky movie that might've made mainstream audiences check out, but Monroe and Lacy are both such strong actors that their conversation never gets boring.

As the movie slowly reveals itself, it goes to some deranged, delightful places that let Monroe and Lacy play. You have to stick with the relationship drama to get to the juicy, sci-fi/horror bits, but it's a journey well worth taking.

Plenty of movies feel like instant classics — "Get Out," say, or "Hereditary" — but others take a while to find the audience. Other films never even get a chance to build the word of mouth that sustains a movie's reputation. The Halloween-set anthology "Trick 'r Treat" from 2007 is one that Warner Bros. released straight to DVD instead of theaters. Still, because the movie is so solid, its popularity has only grown. In 2022 and 2023, the film even played in the theaters for the first time. 

One has to wonder whether things would have been different had the movie been released a little later. Anna Paquin would star in "True Blood" beginning in 2008, and Brian Cox would become more popular than ever when "Succession" began in 2018. Director Michael Dougherty would also go on to helm the well-received "Krampus" and "Godzilla: King of Monsters," suggesting that his films are indeed good enough for cinemas.

In the meantime, though, fans have had to discover the spooky adventures of a little guy named Sam all on their own. The burlap-clad pumpkinhead serves as the connecting tissue for a group of loosely-linked Halloween tales, some of which are silly and others of which are horrific. It's a spooky delight deserving of a spot on your regular fall rotation.

Carter Smith came out of the gate swinging. His debut film, 2008's "The Ruins," got a wide release. After that, the director scaled back. "Jamie Marks Is Dead" is a consciously low-budget affair, delivering contemplative chills rather than the gross-out thrills of "The Ruins." Then, he dropped not one but two movies in 2023; "Swallowed" is an all-out body horror gag-fest more akin to his debut, while "The Passenger" is another beast entirely.

The latter would have especially benefited from a theatrical release, because it features some killer sound design that would've been overwhelming on a massive speaker system. It follows a meek fast food worker named Randy (Johnny Berchtold) who gets bullied at his job. One day, his coworker Benson (Kyle Gallner) snaps. He walks out to his truck, grabs a rifle, comes back inside, and soon Randy finds himself in the middle of a mass casualty scenario. Only, Benson wants to teach him a lesson. Soon, Randy is Benson's passenger, taken along on a wild ride to settle old scores as the police close in.

The gunfire is explosive, the percussive sounds punching the audience in the chest, and a theatrical experience would've heightened that. A big screen would've also helped emphasize the nuanced, expressive work Berchtold and Gallner are doing, their characters locked in a dance that's by turns terrifying and touching.

Ryuhei Kitamura's "The Midnight Meat Train," based on a short story by Clive Barker, was released in 2008. Though the movie starred then-rising star Bradley Cooper, Lionsgate only released it briefly in about 100 theaters. Barker, understandably, was unhappy. "Though I mourn the fact that 'Midnight Meat Train' was never given its chance in theaters, it's a beautifully stylish, scary movie, and it isn't going anywhere," he told MTV News. "People will find it, and whether they find it in midnight shows or they find it on DVD, they'll find it."

Barker isn't wrong. "The Midnight Meat Train" is great, and in the years since its botched release, it found fans. Cooper plays Leon, a photographer who takes pictures of New York City's dark underbelly. One night, he snaps a girl who then goes missing on the subway, and he fixates on an image of the man he believes to be her captor. As Leon spirals into his obsession with the man (Vinne Jones), a butcher, Leon is drawn into a violent, brutal underworld lurking beneath the city streets.

The kills in "The Midnight Meat Train" are CGI-heavy, buried under layers of film grain. The resulting hyper-stylized violence looks like little else, as the CGI is not a cop-out but a tool, something for Kitamura to play with like how T-Pain uses autotune, or how Van Gogh used paint. Also, you'll never see the end coming.

Lupita Nyong'o cemented her place in horror history with her demented performance in Jordan Peele's "Us." She's fiercely sympathetic and also fiercely frightening, and it's a meme at this point to say that the way she calibrates those two extremes should have earned Nyong'o an Oscar nomination. "Us" wasn't Nyong'o's only 2019 horror performance, however. She also starred in "Little Monsters," a zombie flick that went straight to Hulu after debuting at the Sundance Film Festival. She's also excellent in that movie, and she reveals yet another facet of her talent: she's fiercely funny, too.

"Little Monsters" is a horror comedy about a school field trip that turns deadly thanks to a zombie outbreak. Nyong'o plays Miss Audrey Caroline, a schoolteacher tasked with keeping her tiny charges safe from the monsters at the door. (The zombies are monsters, but the kids are also little monsters... get it?) Josh Gad also stars as Teddy McGiggle, a children's entertainer who turns out to be something of a monster himself.

The violence is cartoonish and over-the-top; think "Shaun of the Dead" more than "Dawn of the Dead." Still, "Little Monsters" doesn't skimp on the gore, and this is the kind of horror comedy that doesn't forget about the horror either. If this movie had been in theaters that Halloween, it surely would've further established Nyong'o as a horror force to be reckoned with.

Like comedies, horror movies are often better with an audience. There's a collective thrill that runs through a crowd when you realize a horror movie is really going there, a collective gasp that happens sometimes that heightens the shock and awe. When a movie premieres on television, though, it's unfortunately hard to capture that specific feeling.

That's the case with "Body Bags," a Showtime Original horror anthology that aired in the early 90s. The film features segments directed by horror legends John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, and they're as delightfully twisted as you would hope. In "The Gas Station," a girl working an overnight shift must deal with rumors of an escaped maniac from a local mental hospital. In "Hair," a man played by Stacey Keach uses an experimental hair-growth solution and soon finds that he's sprouting in some very inconvenient areas of his body. Finally, in "Eye," Hooper directs the story of a baseball player who receives an eye transplant from a dead man, only to be haunted by psychosexual visions of terror.

There's a whole lot of body horror going on here, as the title indicates, and it's a deliciously grotesque experience that would've been even better to witness while surrounded by people gagging with disgust. Have some horror-loving friends over, and you're in for a great time.

It's easy to understand why John Hyams' "Sick" went straight to Peacock. After all, it's about COVID-19, a tricky proposition that most movies haven't managed to get quite right. Anyone remember the Michael Bay-produced "Songbird," which hit Hulu in 2020 while we were all still panicking about the state of the world? No? That's for the best.

"Sick," though, arrived on streaming in early 2023, in the middle of a full-on theatrical slasher renaissance. The two newest "Scream" films hit, as did Eli Roth's "Thanksgiving" and several others. "Sick" is even written by Kevin Williamson, who penned the original "Scream" movies and other genre classics like "I Know What You Did Last Summer." Surely — especially in January — audiences would've turned up to watch a classic cabin-in-the-woods slasher with a pandemic twist.

Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Beth Million) decide to wait out the early days of quarantine at a swanky forest home. Unbeknownst to them, there's a killer out for blood ... but how exactly do you escape a killer with a knife when you're afraid all he needs to do is breathe on you? "Sick" features some excellent chase sequences and some brilliant action, all of which would've played very well to audiences looking for entertainment in an uncertain theatrical landscape.

The original "Tremors" wasn't particularly successful when it was released in 1990. It took six years to scrape together a sequel to the cult classic creature feature, and stars like Kevin Bacon and Reba McEntire declined to return. Considering the fact that stores like Blockbuster were thriving in the 1990s, it's no surprise then that "Tremors 2: Aftershocks" went straight to home video. As a result, there have since been a ton of low-budget "Tremors" sequels, some considerably better than others, and the franchise has never again risen to theatrical viability.

If "Tremors 2: Aftershocks" had been released in theaters, though, fans might have realized sooner that it's one of the more fun entries in the series. This time, the gigantic underground "Graboid" worms have evolved, and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) is hired to face off against two-legged subterranean creatures that have an appetite for car engines. It's thoroughly ridiculous, but that's what makes it such a great time, and it stands as a great example of how even a flop horror movie can lead to more successful outings in the future.

Once upon a time, network television stations used to regularly air original films. Often, they weren't great, but sometimes, they were stellar. In 1981, CBS produced "Dark Night of the Scarecrow," a proto-slasher released before Freddy Krueger claimed his first victim and before Jason Voorhees found his hockey mask.

"Dark Night of the Scarecrow" is about a closed-minded small town full of people who take justice into their own hands. When a band of locals lynch a mentally-challenged man named Bubba (Larry Drake), hanging him like a scarecrow, they have no idea their unholy crime will come back to haunt them. Bubba may have survived, and soon, the townsfolk are picked off one by one.

The film features a performance by the always-reliable Charles Durning, and in addition to being genuinely tense and unsettling, it's a surprisingly-complex story of regret, vengeance, and prejudice. Plus, there's some incredible character design. When Bubba is executed, he's dressed up like a scarecrow, and the close-up shot of his terrified eyes behind the burlap mask is unforgettable. Had this film been released in theaters, Bubba might've become a horror icon alongside Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees.

While directors Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa's "Dead End" received a theatrical release in the United Kingdom, the movie went straight to DVD in the United States. That's too bad, because "Dead End" deserves to be mentioned whenever we talk about the best Christmas horror movies, and a theatrical release would've helped cement its reputation.

"Dead End" could almost work as a play. For the most part, the movie only features characters in a car, talking as they drive. Horror greats Lin Shaye and Ray Wise play the parents of a family headed through the woods to grandmother's house, but on this particular Christmas night, something's gone wrong. They manage to find themselves on a road that seems to go nowhere, stretching off endlessly through the forest. It doesn't take long before the neverending trip drives them insane.

Visions of a woman in white and a slow-rolling black car are ominous portents of death, and as their collective insanity spirals out of control, various members of the family drop like flies. There's a reason Lin Shaye is one of our favorite character actresses, as she's reliably great when she shows up in things like "Insidious," but she deserves more chances to play totally whacked-out crazy, as she does here. The movie is gory, demented, and occasionally funny, and there are jolts and scares galore that would've played well to an eager midnight movie audience.