Availability can vary by country and change over time, so check your local Tubi catalogue before settling in.
Good Boy
Let's start with Good Boy, the Norwegian one, because Good Boy is exactly the sort of movie that sounds ridiculous until you actually watch it. - directed and written by Viljar Bøe, the film follows Sigrid, a young woman who meets wealthy Christian through a dating app. Everything initially seems perfect - until she discovers that Christian lives with a man named Frank who dresses and behaves like a dog.
And yes, you read that right, a grown man as a fucking dog, and the movie also somehow manages to turn that bizarre setup into something genuinely uncomfortable rather than simply treating it as a joke, where the clever part is how Bøe gradually changes the audience's understanding of what is happening, as what initially looks like some bizarre millionaire eccentricity becomes more sinister, and Sigrid's attempt to remain open-minded starts looking like a very bad idea.
This film was also Bøe's feature debut, and the film has since developed a cult following among people who like their horror extremely weird, and you've almost certainly never seen a horror movie quite like this one.
Caveat
If you want something genuinely creepy rather than something that simply throws gore at you, Caveat should be near the top of the list - written and directed by Damian McCarthy (Oddity and Hokum), the film follows Isaac, a drifter suffering from partial memory loss who accepts a strange job looking after a psychologically troubled woman in an isolated house on an island, but here's a catch well, actually, there are several.
The house is horrible, the situation is horrible, and Isaac is eventually required to wear a leather harness connected to a chain while he's left alone in part of the property, which is exactly the sort of sentence that should make you ask why the fuck he didn't simply leave.
McCarthy made the film for roughly £250,000, and the entire thing demonstrates how far atmosphere can stretch a small horror budget, and the film is also full of horrible little details - strange noises, disturbing imagery, an unsettling house and the feeling that something is wrong long before you know exactly what that something is.
Triangle
If you've somehow managed to avoid Triangle, stop reading and put this one on - starring Melissa George, Liam Hemsworth and Michael Dorman, Christopher Smith's 2009 horror thriller starts with a group of friends sailing into trouble when their yacht is hit by a storm, before they eventually find what appears to be salvation in the form of a huge ocean liner called the Aeolus, but it isn't salvation, obviously.
The film mixes slasher horror, science fiction, psychological horror and time-loop mechanics, but crucially, Smith doesn't throw the explanation at you immediately, as you have to work this one out, and when it clicks, the movie becomes considerably more disturbing.
Melissa George is particularly good here too, carrying a huge amount of the film's emotional weight while the story keeps folding back in on itself, and if you like horror movies that make you sit there afterwards trying to work out exactly what the fuck just happened, this is for you.
Tourist Trap
Now we're going properly old school.
Tourist Trap is one of those bizarre 1970s horror movies that feels like it escaped from somebody's nightmare - directed by David Schmoeller and starring Chuck Connors, Tanya Roberts and Jocelyn Jones, where a group of young travellers who become stranded near a roadside museum, and the museum is filled with mannequins, o the owner also has telekinetic powers.
The atmosphere in this one is strange, the masks are deeply unsettling and those motionless faces become increasingly creepy as the film progresses, costing only around $350,000 to make before going on to gross roughly $4 million.
And yes, you absolutely should watch the uncut version if that's the one available to you.
Lowlifes
Much like Triangle, if you've never seen Lowlifes, don't read too much about this one either, just watch it, as while the setup of a road-tripping family getting stranded is a familiar setup, the film soon starts pulling the rug out from under you, and then it pulls it out again.
The movie plays around with the backwoods-horror formula really well, mixing black comedy, violence, and some genuinely nasty twists, where it also became one of those rare Tubi originals that horror fans actually started recommending to one another rather than simply forgetting about five minutes after watching it.
Vacancy
Vacancy is one of those horror films people seem to have forgotten about, which is a shame - directed by Nimród Antal, the movie follows married couple David and Amy, who are forced to stay at a remote motel after their car breaks down, where they discover hidden cameras, and then they realize the snuff films they're watching on the motel television were filmed in the very room they're occupying.
No supernatural nonsense involved here, as it's just two people trapped somewhere horrible with people who have been watching them - Antal had previously made the Hungarian cult film Kontroll, and Vacancy became his Hollywood debut.
Well worth watching, and talking about.
Match
If you skipped Match because it was a Tubi original, you've again potentially made the classic horror mistake of assuming a streaming original must be shit, although I don't blame you, we all do it - directed by Danishka Esterhazy, the movie follows Paola after she matches with an attractive man online and agrees to meet him, and when she arrives at his house, things get weird, violent and slightly disgusting.
The film is only around 99 minutes, but Esterhazy packs a surprising amount into it, particularly once the seemingly straightforward dating-app setup gives way to increasingly deranged horror, and this is also one of those movies where the practical effects deserve a mention too.
Deadstream
Deadstream is what happens when you take found footage, livestream culture and a haunted house and throw them into a blender - it follows disgraced internet personality Shawn Ruddy, played by co-director Joseph Winter, who decides the perfect way to revive his career is to spend a night alone in a supposedly haunted house while livestreaming the entire thing.
Winter co-directed the movie with Vanessa Winter, and the pair also wrote, produced and edited it, and the result is a surprisingly effective mixture of horror and comedy, with the livestream interface becoming part of the storytelling rather than just a gimmick.
The production also has a great bit of horror folklore attached to it - the house used for filming was reportedly considered genuinely haunted by some members of the crew, with the filmmakers saying there were rooms people didn't particularly enjoy being alone in.
Deadstream is funny and inventive, and is one of the better examples of found footage horror in recent years.
Grave Encounters
If you haven't watched Grave Encounters, you've missed another one of the found-footage movies that actually understands why the format works, where a paranormal reality TV crew enters an abandoned psychiatric hospital to film an episode - the budget was reportedly only around $120,000 too, where the film was also shot in just 12 days, partly because the production had limited access to its abandoned mental institution location, where the filmmakers also let the actors improvise in places despite having a complete script.
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