If anyone wondered how strong of a platform Netflix is for today’s consumption of movies, take a look at Bird Box. The Netflix original movie reportedly had over 26 million viewers in its first week alone according to Nielsen ratings. Netflix themselves reported that over 45 million accounts watched the Sandra Bullock movie in the first seven days.
However, while that is a lot of viewers, there are a ton of thrillers on the streaming giant that deserves a watch as well. With 26 million people sitting at home waiting to watch Bird Box, it is clear that Netflix has become the go-to service for movies in today’s entertainment world. Here is a look at 10 of the best thrillers on Netflix for anyone looking for something similar to Bird Box on their next night at home watching TV.
10. Hush
Mike Flanagan has become one of the most promising film directors working today. Millions of Netflix subscribers got their introduction to Flanagan thanks to his Netflix original series The Haunting of Hill House last October. However, he is no stranger to Netflix originals.
In 2016, the Flanagan horror thriller Hush made its debut on Netflix as an original movie. Kate Siegel, who starred as Theo in Hill House, stars in this claustrophobic home invasion thriller as a deaf author who has to deal with an armed masked intruder in her home. It rises above similar home invasion movies and delivers a hero that is both sympathetic and realistically vulnerable.
9. Green Room
Released as an indie film originally in 2015, Green Room is a thriller on Netflix that remains known as the final movie starring Anton Yelchin before he passed away. The film is about a punk rock band that finds itself under attack by neo-Nazi skinheads after they witness a murder.
Yelchin stars in the film with Imogen Poots and Patrick Stewart. The movie itself was on many critics’ top 10 lists for 2016, which was the year that it began its limited release in theaters. While it flopped at the box office, it was a huge critical success and deserves a new life on Netflix.
8. Se7en
David Fincher is one of the top directors working in Hollywood, and while he doesn’t release as many movies as other more prolific names, when he does, it is guaranteed to be good. It seems almost hard to believe that Se7en was just his second directed movie as it remains a tour-de-force thriller.
Released in 1995, Se7en stars Brad Pitt as a young police detective who teams with the veteran in Morgan Freeman to search for a serial killer who is eliminating people using the Seven Deadly Sins. The end has one of the biggest gut punches in cinema and this is one of the best thrillers of the ’90s. It is available for everyone to rediscover on Netflix.
7. Gerald’s Game
The second Mike Flanagan movie on this list is another Netflix original thriller. This one is from the mind of Stephen King as Flanagan adapted the movie from the Master of Horror’s 1992 suspense novel of the same name.
Gerald’s Game stars Carla Gugino (who portrayed the mother in Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House) as a woman who ends up handcuffed to a bed in an isolated lake house after her husband has a heart attack and falls lifelessly beside the bed she’s in. She then begins to hear something that might be a predator outside the house. Stephen King was so impressed by the film that he gave the rights to his Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep, to Flanagan.
6. No Country For Old Men
The Coen Brothers won Oscars for their amazing 2007 thriller No Country For Old Men. Adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy, this film starred Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, a hitman who is trying to get back money that was stolen from a drug deal gone bad. That is bad news for Josh Brolin’s hapless Llewelyn Moss, the man who found the money.
This thriller on Netflix has a lot to love. It also has one of the most interesting villains in movie history in Chigurh, a character who has been compared to the Grim Reaper from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal; someone who comes for the guilty and lets nothing get in his way.
5. The Departed
In 2006, Martin Scorsese released yet another brilliant crime thriller in The Departed and had Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson in tow. What some people might not realize is that this was a remake of a Hong Kong crime thriller called Infernal Affairs. Scorsese even lifted some scenes shot-for-shot from that movie!
However, that doesn’t mean that Scorsese didn’t direct yet another modern day classic. The Departed won Scorsese an Oscar and the movie took home the biggest award of the night as well. This thriller on Netflix tells the story of two men going undercover; one as a mole in the police department and the other as an informer in a criminal organization.
4. It Follows
Released in 2014, It Follows is a psychological thriller that tackles one of the most unique monsters in horror cinema. After a girl named Jay has an intimate encounter with a new boyfriend, he knocks her out afterward. She wakes up bound to a wheelchair and he tells her that there is a creature that will start to stalk her.
The only way to stop it from ending her life is to pass on the curse to someone else through sex. However, if the person who inherits the curse perishes, it goes back to the one before; meaning that he needs her to survive and pass it on for him to live as well. It Follows is on Netflix and remains a modern day horror classic.
3. The Sixth Sense
While M. Night Shyamalan was considered a joke for a number of years, he started out directing one of the best thrillers of all-time in The Sixth Sense. While Shyamalan is back in style again thanks to his Unbreakable trilogy, he looked at one time to be the next Steven Spielberg thanks to this horror movie.
Bruce Willis stars as a child psychologist named Malcolm Crowe who was traumatized when a patient he failed comes to see him and takes his own life in front of him. He tries to get back on his feet when he starts to treat a new young boy named Cole (Haley Joel Osment), who claims that he can see dead people and they won’t leave him alone.
2. Train To Busan
For people who think that the zombie genre is oversaturated and there is nothing new, check out Train to Busan. This horror thriller on Netflix was released in 2016 in South Korea, the highest grossing film in that territory for the year of its release. As a matter of fact, it was so well received that James Wan has already said he plans to produce an American remake.
The movie follows a divorced man who agrees to take his estranged daughter to visit her mom for her birthday. However, the day they are set to board the train, a zombie outbreak occurs and they end up fighting to stay alive on the train that is headed for what is thought to be the last safe city for survivors.
1. Cape Fear
The best thing about watching the best thrillers on Netflix is that some of them are older movies that new viewers can discover for the first time. Cape Fear was another Martin Scorsese remake; this one being a remake of the classic thriller from 1962 that starred Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck.
The 1991 version on Netflix starred Robert De Niro as the psychotic Max Cady, a convict who tracks down the attorney who didn’t do everything he could to defend him in a violent case from 14 years earlier. Nick Nolte is the attorney and Cady targets his family, including his young daughter (Juliette Lewis), trying to break the man who couldn’t keep him out of prison.
