Halloween night can be a frightening time. Only a fool would dare leave the house and brave the inky black outside, teeming as it is with ghouls, goblins and all manner of undesirable. The safest move would be to stay in, where all a person has to worry about is whether that sound – there it is again! – is the washing machine or a murderer closing in on his prey. In that spirit, the Guardian has assembled a guide to the spookiest films produced and/or released by Netflix for those with a taste for thrills and chills. Leave out the customary take-one candy bowl and hit play on one of the following:

10. Hush

2016’s Don’t Breathe added blindness to the home-invasion thriller formula to ratchet up the tension. That same year, the festival circuit saw a markedly similar film structured around deaf-mutism – albeit to slightly lesser results, the Antz to Don’t Breathe’s A Bug’s Life. Kate Siegel can neither hear nor speak as author Maddie Young, which should make her easy pickings for the intruder (an unsettling John Gallagher Jr), but she’s a measure wilier than that. Drawing on all her resourcefulness, she learns how to use her disabilities to her advantage; she won’t go down without a fight, and while the terms of their conflict are novel, the execution betrays director Mike Flanagan as a talent still developing.

9. Calibre

Another sojourn into the great outdoors with a grim forecast for the stag party in question, only this one privileges slow-burn ambient suspense over Bruckner’s straight-down-the-middle horror. An oil-and-vinegar pair of mismatched friends (Jack Lowden and Martin McCann) panic following a hunting accident turned lethal, but when the townspeople take the news a little too well, they’re twice as worried. A late-phase gear-shift from the coolly excruciating to a far more aggressive timbre kicks the film into overdrive, and the pals both sink to depths of desperation neither could have imagined 48 hours earlier. Remember, check twice that what you’re aiming at really is a deer before you pull the trigger.

8. 1922

Steven King took his talents to 1920s Nebraska for this heartland sonata of transgression and guilt, brought to the screen by Zak Hilditch. Strong, silent type Wilfred (Tom Jane) discovers just how vulnerable he really is upon a request for divorce from spouse Arlette (Molly Parker), and the thought of losing half his farm drives him to terrible, violent measures. Choosing to implicate his innocent son (Dylan Schmid) in his misdeeds means dragging the boy down to join him a pit of self-imposed, Tell-Tale Heart-ish torment chock-a-block with bloodcurdling fantasy imagery. Those with aversions to rats, consider yourself warned.

7. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

Oz Perkins’ mood piece unfolds with all the delicacy of the cobwebby novels penned by Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss), a crumbling retiree placed in the care of nurse Lily (Ruth Wilson, formerly of The Affair). There’s madness in the air at the stifling Massachusetts mansion they jointly inhabit, and it wants to get inside Lily’s brain, a process that Perkins represents with only the most minimal techniques. He subscribes to the philosophy that less is most definitely more, preferring to bathe his audience in unplaceable dread that sticks with them the rest of the day than cow them with grisly overkill. Most horror films behave like classic rock or punk; this one’s all classical.

6. Malevolent

In a scant few appearances – the brooding, brilliant Lady Macbeth, David Mackenzie’s medieval epic Outlaw King, Park Chan-wook’s upcoming TV miniseries The Little Drummer Girl – 22-year-old Florence Pugh has established herself as English screen acting’s next big thing. She keeps the hot streak going in this doozy of a riff on Poltergeist, playing one half of a scammer outfit masquerading as paranormal investigators. Little do they know! They run afoul of one mark that won’t be swindled, and director Olaf de Fleur holds nothing back once the homicidal cat gets out of the bag. Cringeworthy body mutilations may be over the line for some, but for those of us without any sense of where that line might be, the overkill is just right.

5. Gerald’s Game

If you’re gonna give entry-level bondage a whirl, it never hurts to have a spotter. Jessie Burlingame (Carla Gugino) certainly wishes as much in this take on Stephen King’s 1992 novel that moves more like a two-person play. She’s been chained to a bed by her husband Gerald (Bruce Greenwood), who then promptly dies of a heart attack and leaves her to wriggle out of the cuffs before starvation and dehydration take her. As she gauges just how badly she wants to go on living, she hashes out some personal issues with her hubby’s hallucinated ghost and confronts childhood trauma in a defiant grasp at self-determination. BDSM: it’s not for the faint of heart.

4. Cargo

Endlessly renewable through an infinite supply of fresh angles, the zombie flick cannot be killed – kind of like, er, a mummy. Aussie directing team Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke stake out a patch of novelty by taking the question of survival out of the equation. Andy (a weatherbeaten Martin Freeman) has been infected by the flesh-necrotizing germ, he’s got 48 hours to live, and he just wants to find somewhere safe to stash his infant daughter. The sadness running expectedly strong through the film hews closer to the elegiac than the miserable, a dutiful illustration of how precious life becomes the moment you realize it’s coming to an end.

3. Before I Wake

Mike Flanagan has earned the distinction of being Netflix’s golden boy for horror, helming Gerald’s Game, the new It series The Haunting of Hill House, and this traumatizing sojourn through the oneiric dream-plane. A couple (Tom Jane, back again, now with Kate Bosworth) takes in an apple-cheeked moppet (Jacob Tremblay, naturally) to replace their deceased son, and the boy can be quite a handful – not in the “drawing on the walls” sense, more in the “his night-terrors spring out of his slumbering mind to prey on the waking” sense. Most notable among them is “the Cankerman”, a phantom from the boy’s past whose true nature doubles as an object lesson in pediatric psychiatry. In sleep, our fears look scarier than ever, and with his finest film to date, Flanagan plunges his viewers into a nightmare without end.

2. Apostle

Fans of Gareth Evans’ series of The Raid movies might spend the first hour of this beguiling bait-and-switch waiting for the white-knuckle action to get going. But while the director does include brief snatches of the handheld hand-to-hand footage his fans crave, he’s running an entirely different gameplan. Dan Stevens plays a dissolute lout sent to retrieve his abducted sister from a religious cult’s lush island keep in Wales, and for a while, Evans follows the trail previously blazed by The Wicker Man that the summary suggests. But when things take a turn, they turn so sharply that viewers who haven’t buckled in will be fully thrown, unprepared for the shift into an adjacent subgenre of horror. As soon as you get an idea of what you’re in for, Evans yanks the rug out from under you – revealing a pit of poison-tipped spears.

1. Ravenous

Kilometers removed from the strain of disreputable B-movies known as “Canucksploitation”, Robin Aubert’s film suggests a thoughtful new direction for Canada’s national horror cinema. He massaged social currents from the Quebec region – a vocal faction of separatists calling for a sovereign state, a fluctuating cultural identity – into a haunting parable wherein the undead create a mystifying culture all their own and engage in bizarre rituals that we humans cannot hope to understand. They’re zombies all right, but they’re closer to actual characters than flesh-starved forces of nature. They can multitask between obeying their hunger and pursuing loftier goals, all the more frightening for possessing motivations beyond the biological. Once human, they’re not entirely not.