12 scary documentaries on Netflix for Halloween 2022

American Murder: The Family Next Door

There’s not much scarier than discovering the person you thought you could trust the most is actually evil. That’s also the case in American Murder: The Family Next Door, the Netflix documentary following the 2018 Watts family murders. The film was directed by Jenny Popplewell and came out in September 2020.

If you’re familiar with this story, you’ll know the husband Chris Watts turned out to be the murderer, but the documentary doesn’t start with his arrest. Instead, it uses real footage from the day his wife Shanann and their children went missing, and the film plays out like a mystery. Chris plays the part of the devastated husband, cooperating with law enforcement as they try to figure out what happened to his family.

As more and more is uncovered, viewers learn that Chris and Shanann did not have a picture-perfect marriage; it was far from that. American Murder: The Family Next Door is a disturbing look at domestic violence that will leave you shocked.

Unsolved Mysteries

As unnerving as the documentaries on this list are, viewers can find some type of closure in most of them when seeing the resolution. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with the popular show Unsolved Mysteries. As the name suggests, the docuseries follows cold cases that to this day have never been answered, which can be both intriguing and frustrating.

Unsolved Mysteries began back in the late 1980s and was brought back multiple times by different networks before being rebooted by Netflix in 2020. Similar to the original, the current show explores different mysterious cases of true crime and paranormal happenings, explaining the different theories as to what might’ve happened. As always, we never truly find out. And that fact alone is very frightening.

The third season debuts on Netflix this month, with three episodes coming out every week for three weeks starting on Oct. 18.