The Best Horror Movies Streaming This Month Get Romantic For Valentine’s Day (February 2025)

It’s February! The month of cold weather, the Super Bowl, and of course, Valentine’s Day! Yes, Valentine’s Day, the most ridiculous of holidays, one that seemingly only exists to sell overpriced heart-shaped boxes of disappointing chocolates. If the onset of Valentine’s Day has you in a romantic mood but you’re still craving the blood and guts of the horror genre, you’re in luck! This month’s horror streaming column is devoted to romance-tinged horror flicks you can watch with your significant other, or all by your lonesome. 

Streaming on Shudder, The Criterion Channel, Tubi, Kanopy.

It’s probably fair to say that “Audition” is the film that really introduced filmmaker Takashi Miike to a wider Western audience. In this nasty piece of work, a middle-aged man named Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) who lost his wife seven years ago teams up with his friend, a film producer, to help him find a new bride. Rather than go about this in a normal, healthy way, the two cook up a scheme that sees women (all of them considerably younger than Shigeharu) come in to audition for a film. Of course, the film doesn’t actually exist: the women are instead being tricked into auditioning to be Shigeharu’s new wife. The “winner” of this process is Asami (Eihi Shiina), and it quickly becomes clear to the audience (but not Shigeharu) that there’s something … abnormal about this young woman. “Audition” has crossed into the pop culture consciousness, so even if you’ve never seen the film, you likely know where it’s headed. But even if you do, the film’s finale still has the power to shock and disturb. 

Streaming on Peacock.

People still talk about “Call Me By Your Name,” but for my money, the best Luca Guadagnino/Timothée Chalamet collaboration is “Bones and All.” This beautiful, bloody love story introduces us to Maren (Taylor Russell), a young woman with a secret: she has an urge to eat people. Yes, Maren is a cannibal, but “Bones and All” treats cannibalism as almost a supernatural force; an unbeatable urge that certain people must satisfy, like a vampire seeking blood. After getting in trouble at home, Maren hits the road, and her journey eventually leads her to Lee (Chalamet), another cannibal, or “eater” as he calls them. The two end up in a tragic romance, with danger and death lurking around the edges (Mark Rylance makes a real impact as yet another cannibal who seems helpful and friendly at first, only to quickly reveal himself to be a terrifying threat). Gruesome and poetic, “Bones and All” feels like it deserves more attention than it got (it was a box office failure). 

Streaming on Shudder, Pluto TV.

Panos Cosmatos’s psychedelic freak show “Mandy” starts out with the love story of Red (Nicolas Cage) and Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), two damaged souls who just want to be left alone to live off the grid in the woods. Unfortunately for them, cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) is smitten with Mandy, and orders a gang of satanic bikers to abduct her. But when Mandy rejects this foolish goon, Sand has her murdered — and Red wants revenge. Violent, stylish, and strange, “Mandy” is lots of things, including a reminder that Nicolas Cage really is a great actor when he has the right material to sink his teeth into. 

Streaming on Tubi, Pluto TV.

Few films understand the crushing weight of loneliness like Lucky McKee’s “May.” Angela Bettis plays the title character, a painfully lonely young woman who just wants someone, anyone, to love. May also has a bit of a fetish for various body parts — hands, legs, she doesn’t discriminate. The problem is, these body parts are all attached to different people, and most of these people reject her. Wouldn’t it be perfect if she could, say, cut off all those parts and assemble them into the perfect partner? A wicked, darkly funny riff on “Frankenstein,” “May” is romantic in a gruesome way. 

Streaming on The Criterion Channel.

If you’re still reeling from the death of David Lynch (I know I am), why not revisit one of his greatest films? “A love story in the city of dreams,” as the tagline states, “Mulholland Drive” tells the story of aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts, in her breakout performance), who comes to Hollywood and meets Rita (Laura Harring), who is suffering from amnesia. As these two women attempt to find out who Rita really is and what happened to her, they also end up falling for each other. But ah, that makes it sound like “Mulholland Drive” has a cut and dry narrative, and that’s obviously not the case. Lynch continually pulls the rug out from the viewer, introducing new characters and storylines that all feel threatening, dream-like, and downright scary. I’m not an Oscars guy, but this really should’ve landed Lynch a Best Directory trophy (the award went to Ron Howard for “A Beautiful Mind” instead, which, lmao, lol, etc.). 

Streaming on Shudder, Pluto TV.

In “My Bloody Valentine,” a group of miners get trapped in a mine shaft in a small Canadian mining town. When rescue crews were finally able to get into the mine, they were horrified to find that the only survivor, a guy named Harry Warden, resorted to cannibalism to survive. Harry also went on to murder the supervisors he felt were responsible for the whole ordeal — because they left their posts to attend a Valentine’s Day dance. Now, twenty years later, the town is set to throw the Valentine’s Day dance for the first time in two decades, and the body count is about to climb. Someone dressed in a miner outfit is on a killing spree, and horny Canadians are in serious danger. Is it Harry Warden back for blood? No one knows for sure, but the dance is to blame, which kind of makes “My Bloody Valentine” like a slasher riff on “Footloose” when you really think about it. 

Streaming on Prime Video, Tubi.

The “My Bloody Valentine” remake, which is also known as “My Bloody Valentine 3D,” is surprisingly good, all things considered. It ramps up the gore and violence, throws in Tom Atkins, and  — since it was shot in 3D — is loaded with scenes where blood (and in one case, a severed jawbone) flies directly at the screen. The premise is more or less similar to the first film: after a mining tragedy, a slasher decked head to toe in mining gear picks up a pick-axe and begins killing people around Valentine’s Day. While it doesn’t quite have the scuzzy grindhouse charms of the original, “My Bloody Valentine” 2009 is a lot of fun, and makes for good Valentine’s Day horror viewing. 

Streaming on Shudder, Kanopy.

“Possession” is as wild and crazy as you’ve heard, and then some. Andrzej Żuławski’s flick has gained plenty of notoriety over the years for its utterly bizarre material, but I don’t want to give you the impression that this is some impenetrable oddity — it’s a legit great movie full of some of the most disturbing scenes you’ll ever witness. It lives up to the hype, and then some. As the film begins, a spy named Mark (Sam Neill) returns home from a mission and is almost immediately told by his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) that she wants a divorce. Mark doesn’t take this news very well, and things only grow worse from there, as it’s soon revealed that Anna has not one but two different lovers: a guy named Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), and an ooey, gooey Lovecraftian tentacle monster. Doesn’t that sound romantic? Adjani’s performance is perhaps the most remarkable thing here — an unhinged, terrifying bit of acting that has heavily influenced countless other horror performances over the years.

Streaming on Tubi.

The “Return of the Living Dead” franchise went into a weird new direction with the gross-out extravaganza “Return of the Living Dead 3.” In this installment, teenager Curt (J. Trevor Edmond) is distraught when his beloved girlfriend Julie (Melinda Clarke) is killed in a motorcycle accident. As (bad) luck would have it, Curt’s father is a Colonel stationed on a military base experimenting with a toxic gas that has the power to reanimate corpses (the military wants to use this to create zombie soldiers, naturally). Curt is able to bring Julie back from the dead, and while Julie isn’t a mindless, speechless shuffling ghoul, she is hungry for brains, which leads to all sorts of problems (and deaths). The only thing that can keep her insatiable hunger for human flesh at bay is self-mutilation, and soon Julie decks her body out with spikes and glass and other gruesome paraphernalia (and it’s somehow very hot). The end result is a film that’s suitably strange and nasty, resulting in one of the most unconventional zombie movies ever made.

Streaming on Tubi. 

A blend of Lovecraft and the “Before” trilogy, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s “Spring” is one of the most romantic horror movies ever made, and a reminder that Benson and Moorhead can push a small budget to great heights.. After the grief over the death of his mother leads to a violent altercation, American guy Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) flees to a small Italian town, where he instantly falls for local girl Louise (Nadia Hilker). But while Louise may be beautiful, she also has a dark secret: she’s an ancient amphibious monster that feeds on humans whenever she morphs back into her creature form. Don’t you hate it when that happens?