What to Watch This Week: The Creepiest Film on Hulu Is Leaving Fans Disturbed

Hulu has a long list of fascinating horror films, and any one of them could become your best pick for the weekend. Hulu has Bong Joon Ho’s The Host (2006), who is now also working on his first animated feature film, Ally. Ranging from romance-gone-wrong types of horror and psychological thrillers to Thanksgiving slasher, Hulu has everything for everyone. 

However, there is one suffocatingly tense horror film on Hulu that leaves you questioning what is real. Coming from the director of The Monkey and Keeper, the flick takes you on a journey full of unsettling but sorrowful experiences that could induce panic from the literal manifestation of the Satanic Longlegs himself.   

This cold, nightmarish film earned a hefty amount of praise from both critics and audiences, so it is now successfully going to turn into a franchise. At CinemaCon 2026, it was officially announced that Paramount will be the distributor of the next standalone film, and Neon is breaking up. Perkins is returning to direct with Nicolas Cage reprising Longlegs. The film will be released on January 14, 2028.  

The creepiest film on Hulu is… 

Longlegs is about a young FBI agent, Lee Harker (played by Maika Monroe), who is in pursuit of clues to an occult crime. She must solve the clues before the killer continues his killing spree. The film followed themes like mind manipulation and Satanic worship, fused with a crime story narrative and creepy doll props.

Oz Perkins explained that the film is not based on any true story but tried to draw thematic inspiration from the 1970s/80s Satanic Panic era, when the fear of occultism loomed. The irrational fears of devil worship and related conspiracies had infiltrated America. The film makes use of the same 90s true-crime aesthetics to build upon real-life fears, personal traumatic experiences, and famous criminal incarnations. 

Since the film scoops out dread from the audience using real-life semblances in the film. Personal family influence remains the highlight of many themes of the film, which are deeply ingrained in the lives of the director and actor Nicolas Cage, who portrayed the titular character. According to People.com, Perkins mentioned that a mother protecting her child is the real-life truth that was inspired by his own mother. She protected her children from knowing the truth of their father’s sexuality.  

Similarly, Nicolas Cage created his version of Longlegs by pointing to his late mother. Most of Cage’s childhood was spent seeing her struggling with her mental illness, sometimes involving shock treatments. The Hollywood Reporter reported him saying, 

“It’s the voices, it’s not really him; he’s been hijacked by something else. I’ve often thought what was it that happened to my mom — if I’m any good in this movie, it’s because of my mother.” [Source] 

Hence, the elements from real life are mashed together horrifically in Longlegs, where loving families murder each other, which forces the audience to fathom whether the events are purely psychological or only fabricated for shocking storytelling.  

The film proves that real life is scarier than horror movies, which is rooted in its unambiguous ending, leaving fans wondering whether Lee Harker joined the vicious cycle of evil or ended it in reality. The feeling of watching the pale, long-haired, terrifying character that appears mysteriously in the frames that are off-center, without sometimes showing his full face, makes the viewers uncomfortable.

The cinematography was such that it made bright, rural, everyday settings feel heavily suffocating. It did not require dark corners of the house to make it feel unsettling. The audience is left with no choice but to create a distorted perception of the unseen and unknown. It further challenges them to fill in those gaps of the ‘unknown’ with their own fear, even within the well-lit scenes of snowy daylight.

Hulu clearly knows how to feed horror fans, and Longlegs stands out as one of the platform’s most disturbing must-watch films—the kind that has you double-check the shadows in your home at night, half-expecting a spookish doll somewhere.