Movies Like Poltergeist
If you loved Poltergeist's Horror storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.
★ Top Picks
Presence
A couple and their children move into a seemingly normal suburban home. When strange events occur, they begin to believe there is something else in the house with them. The presence is about to disrupt their lives in unimaginable ways.
Bring Her Back
Following the death of their father, a brother and sister are sent to live with a foster mother, only to learn that she is hiding a terrifying secret.
Hereditary
Following the death of the Leigh family matriarch, Annie and her children uncover disturbing secrets about their heritage. Their daily lives are not only impacted, but they also become entangled in a chilling fate from which they cannot escape, driving them to the brink of madness.
Lights Out
Rebecca must unlock the terror behind her little brother's experiences that once tested her sanity, bringing her face to face with a supernatural spirit attached to their mother.
The Keeping Hours
A supernatural love story that centers on two parents whose life together falls apart after their son dies. The man, now a successful lawyer, and the woman, now married and an author, get a chance at reconciliation ten years later.
Insidious: Chapter 2
The haunted Lambert family seeks to uncover the mysterious childhood secret that has left them dangerously connected to the spirit world.
Insidious
A family discovers that dark spirits have invaded their home after their son inexplicably falls into an endless sleep. When they reach out to a professional for help, they learn things are a lot more personal than they thought.
More Movies Like Poltergeist
Thir13en Ghosts
Arthur and his two children inherit his uncle's estate: a glass house that serves as a prison to twelve ghosts. When the family, accompanied by a nanny and an attorney, enter the house they find themselves trapped inside an evil machine 'designed by the Devil and powered by the dead' to open the Eye of Hell. Aided by a ghost hunter and his rival, a ghost rights activist out to set the ghosts free, the group must do what they can to get out of the house alive.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
After a family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. Still haunted by Betelgeuse, Lydia's life is turned upside down when her teenage daughter, Astrid, accidentally opens the portal to the Afterlife.
Cobweb
Eight year old Peter is plagued by a mysterious, constant tapping from inside his bedroom wall—one that his parents insist is all in his imagination. As Peter's fear intensifies, he believes that his parents could be hiding a terrible, dangerous secret and questions their trustworthiness.
Daddy's Head
A boy and his stepmother fear for their safety after an eerie creature resembling the boy's recently deceased father visits them.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe
Father and son coroners receive a mysterious unidentified corpse with no apparent cause of death. As they attempt to examine the "Jane Doe," they discover increasingly bizarre clues that hold the key to her terrifying secrets.
The Cellar
When Keira Woods' daughter mysteriously vanishes in the cellar of their new house in the country, she soon discovers there is an ancient and powerful entity controlling their home that she will have to face or risk losing her family's souls forever.
Silent Hill
Rose, a desperate mother, takes her adopted daughter, Sharon, to the town of Silent Hill in an attempt to cure her of her ailment. After a violent car crash, Sharon disappears, and Rose embarks on a horrific journey to get her back and begins to uncover the truth behind the apocalyptic disaster that burned the town 30 years earlier.
The Babadook
A grieving single mother and her child fall into a deep well of paranoia when an eerie children's book manifests in their home.
Martyrs Lane
Leah, 10, has terrible nightmares. Her mother seems distant somehow, lost in her thoughts. A small, nightly visitor brings Leah comfort, but soon Leah will realize that her little visitor offers knowledge that might be very, very dangerous.
Fright Night
Charley Brewster, a high school student, accidentally discovers the true and creepy nature of Jerry Dandrige, his dashing and enigmatic new neighbor; but no one seems willing to believe him.
Eli
A boy named Eli with a rare autoimmune disorder is confined to a special experimental clinic for his treatment. He soon begins experiencing supernatural forces, turning the supposedly safe facility into a haunted prison for him and his fellow patients.
The Entity
A single mom is raped by an invisible force. Her psychiatrist believes the experience stems from childhood trauma, while she knows something supernatural is at play.
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with Poltergeist (1982): Horror themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of Poltergeist.
See full details for Poltergeist (1982)