7 Great Horror Movies Available Free From Local Libraries

SEATTLE, WA - If you have a Seattle or King County library card in your pocket, you can watch hundreds of movies for free online through the streaming service Kanopy. The collection isn't as vast as Netflix or Amazon Prime, but Kanopy has some really great movies - including some good scares for Halloween.

We combed through the Kanopy database to bring find some of the choicest, scariest, most chilling movies available for free. Check them out:

What We Do In The Shadows (2014)
Let's start with something funny. From the crew behind "Flight of the Conchords" (and the director of "Thor: Ragnarok"), WWDITS is one of the best vampire movies ever made and definitely the funniest. It's about a group of vampires living in an apartment in modern day Wellington, New Zealand. They have a beef with a local crew of werewolves, they try to get into the dating scene, and make friends with a human computer programmer named Stu.

Let The Right One In (2008)
Another great vampire movie, but "Let The Right One In" is a tearjerker. It's a love story about Oskar and Eli, two preteens who bond over being outcasts. The girl, Eli, just happens to be a powerful vampire. Eli commits multiple bloody murders, but Oskar sticks by her side - and she returns the favor.

"Society" (1989)
Bask in the 1980s glory of this classic gross-out horror flick. A young teen begins to suspect something weird is going on with his ultra-rich Beverly Hills family. He, unfortunately, figures out what's going on in one of the grossest scenes ever filmed. Fun fact: Director Brian Yuzna wrote the family film "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids" the same year "Society" came out.

"Preservation" (2014)
"Preservation" fits in a sub-genre of horror/thriller movies about gangs of murderous teens who roam semi-rural public parks. Pretty specific. This isn't the best of the genre (see "Eden Lake" with Michael Fassbender or the Australian "Killing Ground"), but scary enough. A young couple visits a state park somewhere in California for a camping trip. Soon after they arrive, a band of violent teens riding BMX bikes begin terrorizing them.

"Southbound" (2015)
This is an anthology of short films from some of the best new horror directors. All the entries are good, especially director Roxanne Benjamin's "Siren" about a weird meat-eating cult.

"Pieces" (1983)
It's kind of unbelievable that an ultra-violent movie like "Pieces" is available from your local library, but here it is. Spanish director Juan Piquer Simon made this in the wake of American slasher classics like "Halloween" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," but apparently thought those movies didn't have enough dismemberment scenes.

"My Friend Dahmer" (2017)
There's almost nothing creepier than watching the formation of a serial killer. This movie documents Jeffrey Dahmer's high school days, when he built a reputation as a spastic class clown - one who also liked to experiment with dead animals in a shack in the woods.

You can access Kanopy through the Seattle Public Library or King County Library websites.

Caption: American actor James Arness holds up his claw-like hands in a publicity still from the horror film 'The Thing (From Another World),' 1951. In the movie, Arness plays a pilot, discovered frozen in a spacecraft in the Arctic by researchers, who thaws out and is revealed to be not of this earth.

Photo by Hulton Archive