As the weather cools off and pumpkin spice begins to appear, the spooky season is upon us. With Halloween just around the corner, this is the perfect time to enjoy horror films. However, many of the films Netflix bills as horror are not particularly scary, and it is difficult to determine which ones will truly evoke nightmares.

The five films presented here are not only likely to have you crawling under a blanket or clinging to a loved one while watching them, but they are also great films in their own right, utilizing fear and horror in clever storytelling and layered character development. These are both the scariest and best films on Netflix.

It doesn't feel so scary when someone walks steadily toward you with leisurely steps, but when that person comes from every direction and never stops until they reach you and kill you, the foreboding is all the more terrifying. Such things happen to characters in screenwriter David Robert Mitchell's creepy film about a curse that can only be broken by sexual contact.

Micah Monroe plays a young woman who is cursed by a man she thought was her boyfriend to be stalked by a dangerous entity that looks like anyone else. Mitchell instills a sense of endless dread, making the viewer constantly aware of the threat that could happen at any moment. The dreamlike tone lends the film the atmosphere of a waking nightmare.

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Lupita Nyongo gives two outstanding performances in Jordan Peele's disturbing film about doppelgangers taking over the lives of ordinary people. Two families on vacation are attacked by people who seem to be distorted reflections of themselves. Nyongo alternates between being the hero and the villain of the film as the diabolical Red, protecting his wife and mother, Adelaide.

As always, Peele combines social commentary with horror, but "Us" is less overt in its message than his other films. For the most part, Peele just wants to scare the audience, and he creates a lot of disturbing images, led by the so-called tasers, people in blood-red jumpsuits with golden scissors. Their appearance is only the first sign that nothing is right anymore.

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The plot of this debut feature from writer-director Brian Bertino basically sounds like your average home invasion thriller. However, Bertino's approach to the subject matter makes it absolutely terrifying, with unrelenting tension and terror for both the characters and the audience. Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler play a friendly couple who spend the night in an isolated villa, where they are attacked by three masked strangers.

The three strangers have no motive or purpose for their actions, making it impossible to reason with them or get rid of them. Bertino maintains a heightened sense of fear and anxiety throughout the film's running time, and Speedman and Tyler give strong, grounded performances despite the fact that the characters are fighting for their lives. Eventually, the scene where the strangers explain how they chose their victims is one of the most chilling lines in horror history.

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Steven Spielberg famously kept an attacking great white shark off screen for most of "Jaws" because the animatronic props didn't work well, and as a result, the characters were left in invisible, violent The result was a wonderful escalation of suspense as the characters were killed by the invisible, ferocious animals. Between Spielberg's point-of-view camera and John Williams' iconic music, "Jaws" is most frightening when the title character remains hidden.

But thanks to Spielberg's creation of the threat, Jaws is scary enough even after the shark appears in the frame. The peaceful coastal town of Amity Island is threatened by a shark attack, and the local sheriff (Roy Scheider) joins forces with a visiting oceanographer (Richard Dreyfuss) and a gray-haired sea captain (Robert Shaw) to exterminate the ravenous beast. Jaws launched the shark movie subgenre, but nothing else has matched its visceral, heart-pounding thrills.

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The scares in Oz Perkins' film are more atmospheric than immediate, but that doesn't make the film any less scary. The unnerving cinematography captures a setting that seems to exist outside of time, even though it is set in the present. Brilliant narration that could have come from a Henry James or Edgar Allan Poe story adds to the sense of displacement, as if the main character, Lily Saylor (Ruth Wilson), is simultaneously living in several different time periods. [Lily shares some connection with the former occupant of the creaky old house, who is hired as a caretaker for a sickly old horror writer (Paula Prentiss). The lines between past and present, fiction and reality, the living and the dead blur. The creeping decay of the house eventually overtakes everything.

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