5 Netflix Horror Series You Won’t Dare Watch Alone This November

Netflix has quietly turned into a horror factory. Yes, Mike Flanagan is a big reason for that, but there are a bunch of other titles on the platform that swing from jump-scare fun to existential dread. I pulled five that are absolutely worth your time, including the obvious heavy-hitters and a couple of shows that slipped under the radar.

• Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities
• Archive 81
• Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre
• The Haunting of Hill House
• Midnight Mass

Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities

Del Toro has been crowned a modern horror master for a reason. He blends fairytale melancholy with gnarly, creature-feature nightmares, and his anthology series is the perfect sampler of what he loves: cosmic horror, gory dread, and a little dark fantasy for seasoning. If you know him from 'Crimson Peak' (2015) or the Oscar-winning 'The Shape of Water' (2017), this scratches the same beautifully macabre itch.

The episode lineup hits a lot of flavors: in 'Lot 36,' a bitter veteran buys a storage locker and unearths something occult and hungry; 'Graveyard Rats' throws a treasure-hunting grave robber into a claustrophobic maze beneath a cemetery; 'The Autopsy' strands a medical examiner with a mystery that gets under your skin and stays there; 'The Outside' turns beauty culture into body horror via a too-good-to-be-true lotion; 'Pickman's Model' adapts Lovecraft with paintings that should never have been seen; 'The Viewing' lures strangers into a reclusive tycoon's lair for a night that goes sideways fast; 'Dreams in the Witch House' follows a man who uses dangerous means to reach his dead twin; and 'The Murmuring' gently devastates with grief, ghosts, and birdwatching.

Quick note because I see this mixed up a lot: if you read a synopsis claiming 'The Murmuring' is about a drug that opens a portal to bring back a dead sibling, that belongs to 'Dreams in the Witch House.' 'The Murmuring' is the quiet, haunted one about ornithologists and loss. Personally, 'The Autopsy' is the MVP here; it builds dread with surgical precision and pays it off right to the end.

Archive 81

This one is a moody tech-noir with a found-footage pulse, adapted from the hit horror podcast. The hook: Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie), an archivist who restores damaged videotapes, gets hired by a very rich, very mysterious client and sent to an isolated facility to piece together a batch of tapes. On those tapes: Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi), who might have stumbled into a cult, an urban legend, or something much, much bigger.

Launched in January 2022 on Netflix and created by Rebecca Sonnenshine, the series runs one season and leans into Lovecraft-y vibes: cult activity, cosmic horror, alternate dimensions, and that 'we probably weren't meant to see this' feeling. It has the thriller energy of found footage without pinning the whole show to the gimmick. The less you know going in, the better.

Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre

Junji Ito is the manga maestro of beautiful nightmares (if you know 'Uzumaki,' you know), and this Netflix anthology serves up a platter of his short stories. It is brisk, varied, and kind of relentless. You get cursed oddities, body horror, and everyday situations sliding into pure uncanny terror.

The series pulls from a bunch of Ito's hits, including 'The Strange Hikizuri Siblings: The Seance,' 'The Story of the Mysterious Tunnel' and 'Ice Cream Truck,' 'Hanging Balloon,' 'Four x Four Walls' and 'The Sandman's Lair,' 'Intruder' and 'Long Hair in the Attic,' 'Mold' and 'Library Vision,' 'Tomb Town,' 'Layers of Fear,' and yes, a take on 'Tomie.' It is a quick binge, but these shorts lodge in your brain and set up camp.

The Haunting of Hill House

The show that made a lot of people say 'oh, Flanagan is the real deal.' Premiering in October 2018, this 10-episode miniseries reimagines a haunted house saga as a family drama about grief, guilt, and the memories that won’t stop knocking. The Crain siblings bounce between their childhood in Hill House and the fallout years later as buried things refuse to stay buried.

Flanagan weaves dual timelines with surgical control, delivering jump scares you remember and emotional punches you feel. He also litters the frame with ghosts you might not catch on a first watch, the kind of show-offy nightmare fuel that scratches the same itch James Wan hit with 'The Conjuring' — only here, it is welded to a story about trauma that sticks the landing.

Midnight Mass

For my money, this is one of Netflix's best shows, full stop. Released September 24, 2021, and told across seven episodes, 'Midnight Mass' starts as a small-island drama and mutates into something bolder, stranger, and, yes, more controversial. A disgraced local (Zach Gilford) returns to Crockett Island just as a magnetic new priest (Hamish Linklater) arrives and 'miracles' start rippling through the community. Kate Siegel and Rahul Kohli round out a cast that gets long, chewy monologues and earns every one of them.

Themes of faith and doubt, grief, religious extremism, and human frailty run straight through it, and the slow-burn approach pays off with real existential bite. It uses supernatural horror to poke at uncomfortable questions — the kind that stick with you long after the final shot.

Why these five?

Because they push beyond cheap jump scares. Del Toro, Ito, and Flanagan all prove the genre is stronger when the story matters, the stakes are real, and the characters are worth your time. If you want a sampler that swings from moody and philosophical to gnarly and fun, this lineup gets it done.

All five are streaming now on Netflix in the U.S. What are you queuing up tonight?