Five Horror Movies to Stream Now

‘We Need to Do Something’

Stream it on Hulu.

A family of four gathers in their spacious bathroom as a storm rages outside. The teen daughter (Sierra McCormick) anxiously texts someone who’s not responding. Her alcoholic dad (Pat Healy) is suspicious of who’s calling his wife (Vinessa Shaw). The little brother (John James Cronin) thinks a “giant tornado” is on the way.

Then the lights go out, and no matter how hard the family pushes the door to escape, it won’t budge. What happens next is what it looks like when hell breaks loose inside four walls.

This pulsing, nerve-plucking feature film debut from Sean King O’Grady tells a darkly comic existential tale about a teen girl’s coming-of-age and a family’s disintegration by forces outside their control. As if being trapped in a room with your dysfunctional relatives isn’t scary enough, it also serves up shocks of gore and a startling death.

“We did something bad,” the daughter tearfully confesses at one point, one of several unexpected turns the film takes as it reveals how evil showed up at this family’s front door. Make that their bathroom door — this goes on my list of delightfully sinister films set in one location.

‘Hellblazers’

Stream it on Tubi.

This new Tubi original, written and directed by Justin Lee, is a horror movie that’s not scary and a comedy that isn’t all that funny. It doesn’t know what it is. I don’t either.

So why recommend it? Because it has a terrific supporting cast, it’s free, it’s just under 90 minutes and fans of VHS-era horror will savor its dollar-bin flavors.

Supposedly set in the ’80s, the story has something to do with robed cult members who terrorize the little town of Hope Valley. But get a load of who’s in town: Billy “Dead Calm” Zane as a satanic conjurer, Tony “Candyman” Todd as a nice guy with combat skills, Meg “They Live” Foster as a waitress and Adrienne Barbeau as — get this — a radio D.J., the same role that she so memorably played in “The Fog.”

But it’s Bruce Dern, in a too-small role as a cantankerous Vietnam War veteran, who strikes comedy gold. If only the entire film let Dern run wild, as he does in a brutally funny scene with the exasperated sheriff (Ed Morrone) — a totally improvised conversation, I’m guessing — that preposterously implicates Purdue University in hippie evil.

‘Last Radio Call’

Stream it on YouTube.

A documentary crew is making a film about a woman named Sarah (Sarah Froelich) and the unsolved disappearance of her police officer husband, who vanished while investigating a disturbance at an abandoned Texas hospital. His body cam shows him creeping down dark hallways and encountering a coffin in the chapel. When Sarah comes across additional footage, she suspects that fiendish hands got a hold of her husband that night.

This effective faux doc was written and directed by Isaac Rodriguez, who based it on his seriously rattling short film “The Cop Cam.” The actors aren’t convincing as documentary subjects, but your skin will crawl when the film switches to its unnerving body cam scenes. The decayed setting — much of the film was shot at an old hospital in Yorktown, Texas — hits the low-budget found-footage jackpot, and the sound design is killer.

My suggestion: Turn off the lights, put on your headphones and let this movie scare your ears off. It’s free on the new horror movie YouTube channel from the distributor Terror Films.

‘Broadcast Signal Intrusion’

Rent or buy it on most major platforms.

It’s 1999, and James (Harry Shum Jr.) is archiving old TV news tapes when he stumbles across a 1987 interview that was interrupted by an unusual video. In it, a ghoulishly robotic masked figure makes aggressive digital noises from an anodyne living room. As it turns out, video pirates hacked into programming that year for reasons not even the F.C.C. could uncover, and the dates of the hijacked signals matched those of women who went missing.

There are also rumors of a third broadcast intrusion around the time James’s own wife disappeared. Only as he probes further does James realize that solving this mystery is his best chance at coming to terms with his grief.

Jacob Gentry’s film is a taut conspiracy thriller in the paranoid spirit of “The Parallax View” and, with its geeky analog detective angle, the new Netflix series “Archive 81.” The film really gets creepy when Gentry hands it over to the effects artist Daniel Martin, who’s credited with the macabre, formally radical tape sequences that Gentry has said were inspired by a creepypasta video called “I Feel Fantastic.” They’re haunting mini-nightmares.

‘The Wasteland’

Stream it on Netflix.

The setting is war-torn 19th-century Spain, and at a family’s remote homestead, Salvador (Roberto Álamo) hopes to toughen up his young son, Diego (Asier Flores), by telling him about the Beast, a creature without eyes who sees everything. His wife, Lucia (Inma Cuesta), is more emotionally protective of their boy, who would rather peel potatoes than club a rabbit for food.

When Lucia and Diego are left to fend for themselves, it’s Mom who teaches her son how to knife an intruder to death. It’s a good thing, too, since the Beast is zeroing in.

This Spanish folk-horror survival thriller, directed by David Casademunt, is a passionate riff on “The Babadook” from a frightened boy’s point of view. The film’s sweeping vistas and claustrophobic interiors are striking, but the story loses steam as it focuses on Diego’s survival against an unseen evil. When the creature finally appears, the scariest thing about it is that it’s tall.

The beating heart of the film belongs to Flores, who gives a tender, confident performance as a young protector grappling with an absent father, a paranoid mother and his harrowing childhood trauma.