The Best Free Modern Horror Movies on Kanopy Right Now

Kanopy is free with a library card from most U.S. public libraries and universities, and its horror shelf is shockingly good: festival darlings, international nightmares and indie gems you won’t find on the big streamers. These are the best modern horror movies on Kanopy right now, all released from 2010 on, pulled from my obsessive watching of the genre, including picks from the best horror movies of the 2020s and the best horror movies of the 2010s. You’ll find favorites like The Beast, Hereditary and Titane, plus deeper cuts worth seeking out. Every pick is streaming in the U.S. right now, and I’ll keep the list updated as titles come and go.

In the mood for something other than horror? Here are the best movies on Kanopy right now, all hand-picked from my reviews.

Availability last updated October 16, 2026.

THE BEAST (2023)

Bonello runs one couple through three centuries and an AI process for purging emotion, with a Los Angeles incel chapter in the middle. A masterbeast.▶ Watch on Kanopy

TITANE (2021)

A woman with a titanium plate in her skull kills, gets pregnant by a car, binds her body flat and passes herself off as a fire captain’s missing son. Ducournau’s Raw was my favorite film of 2017, and this one bites harder.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

THE BABADOOK (2014)

Childrearing has never been so horrifying in this Australian import that might actually just all be a mental breakdown. Star Essie Davis is phenomenal.▶ Watch on Kanopy

PEARL (2022)

A farm girl in 1918 auditions for a dance troupe as her escape and murders her way toward it. She thinks she can hide her budding psychopathy behind a Hollywood-worthy performance. The trouble is she’s not all that great an actor.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

UNDER THE SKIN (2013)

Scarlett Johansson is a sexy alien (and naked a lot) who comes around to empathizing with the humans she’s been consuming. I dare you to watch without subtitles.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

TALK TO ME (2022)

Teens pass around an embalmed hand that lets a spirit ride you for ninety seconds, and film each other doing it. Shakes itself into your conscious and roots deeply. Without a doubt the horror movie of its year.▶ Watch on Kanopy

KILL LIST (2011)

Spanning a multitude of subgenres (crime, cult, killers, etc.) this twisty hell-ride from Ben Wheatley (his best film yet) is intensely unpredictable and all the more horrifying for it. Close your eyes if you dare.▶ Watch on Kanopy

POSSESSOR (2020)

A corporate assassin drives other people’s bodies to commit murders, and one host starts driving back. Gore resides in Vos’s soul and on the screen, and Riseborough’s turn as the chilly killer is searing.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

SHUTTER ISLAND (2010)

Scorsese’s foray into proper psychological horror boasts Leo, a topsy-turvy Dennis Lehane whodunnit, and whizkid technical elements. The ending is perfect (and not open to interpretation, despite what you may think.)▶ Watch on Kanopy

TOGETHER (2025)

A twisted, tactile meditation on love, compromise, and the bodily cost of staying too close for too long, brought to life by Michael Shanks’ sharp direction and a pair of knockout performances from Alison Brie and Dave Franco. Together, they make the film’s grotesque intimacy feel oddly, disturbingly relatable.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

MOTHER! (2017)

Biblical myth meets anarchical atom bomb in Darren Aronofsky’s intensely provocative arthouse experiment that attempts to tell the modern history of the world through the lens of an enbattled couple.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

HEREDITARY (2018)

The death of a controlling matriarch sparks the implosion of a family unit in this horrifying study of grief amidst supernatural angst. Toni Collette was robbed. Heads should roll.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

THE INNOCENTS (2021)

Four kids in a Norwegian apartment block discover telekinetic powers over one summer, and one of them has no reason not to use them. Vogt’s direction is taut and the child performances are great. Empathy and psychopathy in children too young to understand either term.▶ Watch on Kanopy

10 CLOVERFIELD LANE (2016)

An unexpected sequel that launched a mini-verse, 10 Cloverfield Lane isn’t necessarily better for its connection to the previous Cloverfield entry but succeeds by virtue of brutally tense filmmaking and great performances from Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman.
▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

WHEN EVIL LURKS (2023)

Possession works like communicable disease here, with a rulebook everyone knows and nobody follows in time.▶ Watch on Kanopy

THE DEVIL’S CANDY (2015)

Heavy metal is evil again as a father/artist falls into a productive (but costly) trance when he moves into a home with a killer history in this steely-eyed creeper from the director of The Loved Ones.▶ Watch on Kanopy

X (2022)

A porn crew rents a Texas farmhouse in 1979, and the elderly couple who own it want something the crew has.▶ Watch on Kanopy

HOUSEBOUND (2014)

New Zealand remains the king of horror-comedy, this time presenting a maybe-haunted-house story about a pissy jailbird under house arrest, contending with a possible possession and a definitely annoying mum.▶ Watch on Kanopy

RELIC (2020)

Three generations of women in a house that grows corridors as the grandmother’s dementia advances. The script complicates the dynamic with implied unpleasant histories without severing that unbreakable bond of family.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

THE INVITATION (2015)

Ignorance certainly isn’t bliss when a man attends a dinner party at his ex’s (and her new lover’s) house. Something is off, or so he believes. Karyn Kusama dials the tension up, up, and away.▶ Watch on Kanopy

THE UGLY STEPSISTER (2025)

A confident, stomach-churning debut that cements Emilie Blichfeldt as a thrilling new voice in horror. Fairytale whimsy and grotesque body horror collide in a nightmarish fable about the violence of beauty standards, anchored by a breakout performance from Lea Myren.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

COHERENCE (2013)

Stretching a heady sci-fi concept to razor-wire tautness, this eerie mindfuck also turned a nothing budget into a hazy intellectual exercise in minimalism and paranoia. Trust no-one, stay inside.▶ Watch on Kanopy

THE LODGE (2020)

Two kids are snowed into a remote cabin with their father’s new fiancée, the lone survivor of a suicide cult, and the heat goes out. Franz and Fiala’s style is as icy as the oblivion they set it in.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

SIGHTSEERS (2012)

An odd couple’s U.K. road trip turns into a serial killing spree in this sardonic anti-rom-com from horror auteur Ben Wheatley.▶ Watch on Kanopy

COME TO DADDY (2020)

A hipster answers a letter from the father who abandoned him and finds a beach house, a stranger, and a genre change every twenty minutes.▶ Watch on Kanopy

COME TRUE (2020)

A runaway joins a university sleep study, and every subject turns out to be dreaming the same shadow figure standing in the same doorway. Sarah gets driven further from everyone and closer to the cusp of sanity.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

LONGLEGS (2024)

An FBI agent with a psychic streak works a case of family annihilations where the killer never enters the house. We literally never see how long his legs are.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

GAIA (2021)

A ranger stumbles onto two survivalists in a South African forest worshipping a fungal god that grows through people. A triple feast for the eyes that’s also super horned up, with Carel Nel giving off major Klaus Kinski energy. Even the trees are vaginal.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022)

In a future without pain, a performance artist grows novel organs and has them removed in front of an audience. The surgery of Dead Ringers, the kink of Crash, the transformations of The Fly. All of Cronenberg’s favorite fetishes have come out to play.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review

IN THE EARTH (2021)

A scientist and a ranger hike into a plague-era English wood to find a missing colleague and meet a man worshipping whatever is under the soil. An audio-visual blitz where Wheatley genre hops like a mad man. The squeamish body horror stuff is just aces.▶ Watch on Kanopy · Read the full review