October is the perfect month to watch great horror movies on streaming, and a new entry into the genre is dominating the streaming charts. The past few weeks on streaming have seen recent movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Bring Her Back find streaming homes, with Zach Cregger’s Weapons set to make its streaming debut on HBO Max later this month. Horror fans checking out one of the genre’s latest streaming hits may recognize a familiar face from the Harry Potter and Star Wars franchises.
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Kathryn Hunter, who starred as Mrs. Arabella Figg in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and as Eedy Karn in nine episodes of Andor from 2022 until 2025, stars in Vicious. The movie, from The Strangers’ Bryan Bertino, premiered on Paramount+ on October 10th and quickly broke into the streaming Top 10. It is currently the top-ranked movie on Paramount+ in the world, according to FlixPatrol, outranking other movies like Top Gun: Maverick, Novocain, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, and Night Hunter, which round out the Top 5. The movie ranks No. 1 in several countries and currently sits at No. 2 in the U.S.
In Vicious, Hunter stars as The Woman, a mysterious woman who serves as a catalyst for the movie’s terrifying events when she delivers a mysterious box to Dakota Fanning’s Polly late at night with a set of instructions to place three items inside: something she needs, something she hates, and something she loves. Polly soon finds herself pulled into a surreal and shifting nightmare.
Vicious Is a Streaming Success Despite a 42% Rotten Tomatoes Score
The movie’s dominance on the streaming charts comes in spite of a lackluster critical reception. Despite a star-studded cast and a director with a strong history in the horror genre, the movie holds a rotten critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes of just 42%, and the audience score isn’t any better, sitting at just 30%, making it one of the lowest-rated movies in both Fanning and Hunter’s careers.
Vicious has been panned by critics for a messy and inconsistent script, cheap scares, and an unsatisfying ending. Variety described the film as a “numbing slog” that “devolves into something inexact and thoughtless, without anything distinct to recenter it.” Loud and Clear reviews said, “Vicious is a horror film that never quite figures out how to scare you.”
Where Vicious does earn praise, though, is in its performances, particularly from Fanning. Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com wrote that Fanning “gives a committed performance in what is largely a one-woman show,” with other reviews agreeing that the actress effectively carries the movie with a raw and emotionally demanding performance.
Vicious is now streaming on Paramount+.
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