The best half-decent horrors on Netflix to get you in the mood for Halloween

The Exorcist

This horror has been so often copied, imitated and parodied in the 48 years since it was released, it's actually kind of astonishing to me that the film still retains the power to shock and frighten a first-time viewer.

The Exorcist is a part of the absolute high-water mark of a Hollywood golden age. Sometime in the early to mid-1970s, the young filmmakers who trained and cut their teeth in the breakthrough years of the late 1960s – Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola most famously, but Exorcist director William Friedkin is a part of the same generation – were ready to make their own feature films as the new decade rolled in.

Friedkin's breakout was an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Hitchcock famously told the young Friedkin off in front of the crew, for not wearing a tie while directing.

In 1971, Friedkin made the brilliant The French Connection – and two years later, The Exorcist.

The film debuted to enormous controversy, accusations of corruption at the American censor's office that allowed it to be released as an “R”, not a more restrictive “X” – and eventual acclaim.

The Exorcist was the first horror film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar – and it remains one of the most influential and admired movies of the 1970s.

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Crawl

From the sublime to the happily ridiculous, this is an animals-attack horror stripped down to it's bare bones (as are several of the cast) and presented in a single location.

A father – Barry Pepper – and daughter – Kaye Scodelario – are trapped in the basement of their Florida home. Flood waters have delivered a gang of massive and very hungry alligators into the storm drains and sewers of the town.

Crawl is exactly the sort of horror movie I like. The plot is simple and propulsive, the action is relentless and well-staged and the film never takes itself too seriously.

For a couple of hours on the couch that you won't ever have to think about too hard, Crawl is pretty much perfect.

The Platform

This reminded me – a lot – of the mighty 1997 cult sensation Cube, but with an added layer of social satire that maybe even surpasses it.

In an unnamed prison, the inmates are kept in stacked cells. Each cell has a hole in the ceiling and the floor. Once a day, a platform full of food descends from the top floor. As it passes down the levels, the food is eaten, until, by the time it arrives at the lower floors, there may be nothing left for the people there.

At random intervals, the prisoners are drugged and then reassigned to a higher or lower floor.

The metaphor is blunt, the action is terrific and the sense of dread just keeps on building. The Platform is a gem.

In The Tall Grass

And lastly, because this column should also warn you of the stinkers, this is hands-down one of silliest and funniest – unintentionally – alleged horrors I've seen in years.

Stephen King and son Joe Hill's short story is a great read. But the same material stretched to feature- length, with a fumbling cast and some wildly unconvincing special effects – not so much.

There's teenagers, there's a wheat field, there's some sound effects and eventually there's a bloody great big papier-mâché boulder. That's not a lot of content to fill a 90-minute running time – and it shows.

In The Tall Grass very quickly becomes laughable. In the right mood, with the right friends, you might even enjoy it a lot.