Horror & Thrillers

Best Indie Movies on Tubi Right Now

September 6, 2026 • Victoria Taylor

September 6, 2026 13 min read Updated September 8, 2026

Updated September 2026

Independent cinema is where filmmakers are often able to take the biggest risks.

Smaller budgets can mean fewer resources, but they can also mean greater freedom: unusual stories, unconventional characters, difficult subjects and filmmaking choices that would struggle to survive the development process of a major studio production.

And if you’re looking for indie movies to watch free, Tubi has developed one of the more interesting libraries of independent cinema available on a mainstream streaming platform.

Its current selection moves from acclaimed festival films and cult favourites to independent horror, comedy, drama, romance and thrillers — including movies that can be surprisingly difficult to find elsewhere without renting them individually.

This isn’t a general ranking of the greatest independent films ever made. Nor is it another list of the best horror or thriller movies on Tubi. Instead, we’ve selected some of the best independent movies currently available to watch free on Tubi, across a deliberately wide range of genres.

Availability changes regularly and may vary by territory.

1. The Witch (2015)

Robert Eggers’ debut feature is one of the defining independent horror films of the last decade.

Set in 1630s New England, The Witch follows a Puritan family forced to establish a farm on the edge of an isolated forest after being banished from their settlement.

Then their infant son disappears.

What follows is not conventional supernatural horror. Eggers builds the film through suspicion, religious terror, repression and a family slowly destroying itself from within.

Anya Taylor-Joy made her breakthrough as Thomasin, the family’s eldest daughter, while the film’s extraordinary production design and historically influenced dialogue create a world that feels genuinely alien.

Made on a comparatively modest budget before becoming an international success, The Witch is also a good example of what independent genre cinema can accomplish when atmosphere is more important than scale.

Best for: Folk horror, slow-burn tension and distinctive filmmaking.

2. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) poster

Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is difficult, fragmented and deeply unsettling.

Tilda Swinton plays Eva, a mother trying to understand both her relationship with her son Kevin and the horrific act he eventually commits.

Rather than telling that story chronologically, Ramsay moves through memory.

Moments repeat. Images connect across different periods. Colour, sound and visual association become as important as dialogue.

Ezra Miller plays Kevin with an unnerving mixture of intelligence, hostility and emotional distance, but the film refuses to offer easy explanations for either him or his mother.

This is independent cinema at its most uncompromising: formally ambitious, psychologically uncomfortable and uninterested in reassuring the audience.

Best for: Psychological drama and challenging character studies.

3. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

A classified advertisement reads: “Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me.”

Three magazine employees travel to investigate the man who placed it.

That wonderfully simple premise becomes something much warmer and stranger than you might expect.

Aubrey Plaza plays Darius, a disillusioned intern who begins spending time with Kenneth, played by Mark Duplass, a supermarket employee who genuinely appears to believe he has constructed a time machine.

Director Colin Trevorrow and writer Derek Connolly use science fiction as the starting point for a film really about loneliness, regret and finding somebody willing to believe you.

Safety Not Guaranteed is precisely the kind of movie independent cinema does particularly well: a modest premise, strong characters and an idea that doesn’t need a huge budget to work.

Best for: Offbeat romance, low-budget science fiction and character-driven comedy.

4. Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

Ryan Gosling gives one of his most unusual performances as Lars, an intensely shy man who introduces his family to his new girlfriend.

She is a life-size doll called Bianca.

That premise could easily have produced a broad comedy. Instead, director Craig Gillespie and writer Nancy Oliver approach Lars with enormous compassion.

His family, doctor and eventually much of the surrounding community decide to participate in his belief rather than humiliate him.

The result is funny, but also unexpectedly moving.

The film is ultimately about loneliness, grief and the ways communities can help somebody reconnect with the world.

It is a reminder that independent cinema doesn’t have to be bleak to take unusual ideas seriously.

Best for: Humanist comedy-drama and unconventional romance.

5. Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

Nicolas Cage won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Mike Figgis’s bleak independent drama.

He plays Ben Sanderson, an alcoholic screenwriter who travels to Las Vegas intending to drink himself to death.

There he meets Sera, a sex worker played by Elisabeth Shue, and the two develop an unusual relationship built around an agreement not to try to change one another.

There is very little sentimentality in Leaving Las Vegas.

Figgis doesn’t turn the story into one of redemption. Instead, he concentrates on two damaged people briefly finding companionship.

The result is painful, intimate and exceptionally well acted.

It also remains one of the clearest examples of 1990s American independent cinema producing performances and subject matter that mainstream studios might have softened considerably.

Best for: Serious drama and outstanding performances.

6. But I’m a Cheerleader (1999)

Jamie Babbit’s cult comedy has become far more celebrated with time.

Natasha Lyonne plays Megan, a high-school cheerleader whose family decides she must be a lesbian and sends her to a conversion therapy camp.

Rather than treating the setting with realism, Babbit constructs an aggressively artificial pastel world filled with exaggerated gender roles, bright colours and deliberately absurd behaviour.

Clea DuVall co-stars as Graham, another teenager at the camp who helps Megan begin to understand herself.

What initially received mixed reviews has developed into an enduring cult film, partly because its visual style and satire are so distinctive.

It’s also a great example of how independent cinema can approach serious social subjects through comedy rather than solemnity.

Best for: Cult comedy, satire and coming-of-age stories.

7. Dinner in America (2020)

Adam Rehmeier’s punk romantic comedy has grown steadily through word of mouth.

Kyle Gallner plays Simon, an abrasive musician who crosses paths with Emily Skeggs’ awkward, eccentric Patty.

They shouldn’t work together.

They absolutely do.

The film begins with confrontational humour and characters who seem almost deliberately difficult to like, then gradually reveals something much sweeter underneath.

Its Midwestern locations, punk soundtrack and oddball performances give it a personality that would be difficult to manufacture through conventional studio development.

For viewers searching Tubi for something genuinely offbeat rather than merely inexpensive, Dinner in America is one of the better discoveries in the catalogue.

Best for: Punk comedy, unconventional romance and cult-film energy.

8. Vivarium (2019)

Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots play a young couple looking for their first home.

An estate agent takes them to a new housing development called Yonder.

Every house is identical. Every street is identical. And when they try to leave, they return to exactly the same place.

Lorcan Finnegan takes the anxiety of suburban domesticity and turns it into an increasingly surreal science-fiction nightmare.

The artificially perfect houses, featureless skies and endless repetition create the sensation of being trapped inside an architectural simulation.

Vivarium is deliberately strange and won’t satisfy viewers looking for straightforward answers.

But that is part of its appeal.

Best for: Existential science fiction, surrealism and unsettling concepts.

9. Blood Star (2024)

Bobbie Torres watching the road in Blood Star

Independent filmmaking often works best when its limitations become part of the movie’s identity.

Blood Star is a good example.

Shot across the desert with a small crew and a short production schedule, the film strips the thriller down to its essentials: a woman, an isolated road and a sheriff who has selected her as his next victim.

Rather than trying to reproduce the scale of a studio action film, the production uses desert highways, abandoned spaces and long stretches of empty landscape to create tension.

The story follows a young thief travelling through the American Southwest who is stopped by a small-town sheriff.

She soon discovers that his interest in her isn’t routine police harassment.

He has done this before.

What follows becomes a psychological and physical contest between predator and potential victim, combining elements of road thriller, desert noir and survival horror.

Blood Star played genre festivals internationally before its digital release and is now available free with ads on Tubi.

Best for: Independent thrillers, desert noir and lean genre filmmaking.

10. The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)

The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) poster

Marielle Heller’s feature directorial debut stars Bel Powley as Minnie, a teenage aspiring cartoonist growing up in 1970s San Francisco.

The film combines conventional live action with animation and Minnie’s drawings, giving her internal life a visual presence within the story.

Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgård co-star.

The subject matter is deliberately uncomfortable, particularly Minnie’s relationship with her mother’s boyfriend, but Heller refuses to reduce her protagonist to a simple moral lesson.

Instead, the film is interested in adolescence as confusing, contradictory territory.

Powley’s performance is fearless, funny and emotionally direct.

Best for: Coming-of-age cinema and inventive visual storytelling.

11. Palo Alto (2013)

Gia Coppola’s debut feature adapts stories by James Franco into a drifting portrait of teenage life in suburban California.

Emma Roberts, Jack Kilmer and Nat Wolff lead the young cast.

Rather than building toward a conventional dramatic plot, Palo Alto observes characters moving through parties, relationships, boredom and bad decisions.

Its dreamy photography and loose structure give it the feeling of memory rather than narrative.

The film belongs to a tradition of American independent cinema interested less in what happens than in what it feels like to be a particular age in a particular place.

Best for: Coming-of-age drama and atmospheric filmmaking.

12. Jungle (2017)

Daniel Radcliffe stars in the true-story-inspired survival drama about Yossi Ghinsberg, an Israeli backpacker whose journey into the Amazon rainforest becomes a fight to stay alive.

Director Greg McLean — best known for Wolf Creek — brings considerable physical intensity to the survival material.

As the expedition falls apart, the film becomes increasingly centred on isolation, exhaustion and the psychological effects of being alone in an environment that simply doesn’t care whether you survive.

Radcliffe gives a committed physical performance, carrying large sections of the film almost alone.

Best for: Survival stories, wilderness adventure and true-story-inspired drama.

13. The Blackening (2022)

Tim Story’s horror comedy begins with a familiar genre setup: a group of friends spend a weekend in an isolated cabin.

Then it starts dismantling the assumptions behind that setup.

The film takes the long-running horror trope that Black characters are disproportionately likely to die and turns it into the foundation of a self-aware comedy.

A murderous game forces the group to decide which of them is supposedly “the Blackest,” while the characters argue, joke and attempt to survive.

It is both a legitimate slasher movie and a satire of slasher movies.

More importantly, the central group actually feels like a group of friends, which gives the comedy energy beyond the premise.

Best for: Horror comedy, ensemble casts and genre satire.

14. King of New York (1990)

Abel Ferrara’s crime film stars Christopher Walken as Frank White, a drug lord returning to New York after prison.

He immediately begins rebuilding his criminal empire while claiming that some of the money will be used to help a struggling hospital.

Whether that represents redemption, hypocrisy or simply another form of ego is one of the film’s central tensions.

Walken is magnetic, while Laurence Fishburne gives an explosive supporting performance.

Ferrara’s New York is nocturnal, violent and strangely glamorous.

The film sits somewhere between independent crime movie, gangster film and urban nightmare, and its influence can be felt throughout later American crime cinema.

Best for: Crime films, antiheroes and cult 1990s cinema.

15. The Beach Bum (2019)

Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum is perhaps the least responsible film on this list.

That’s largely the point.

Matthew McConaughey plays Moondog, a poet who drifts through Florida in a permanent haze of alcohol, drugs, boats, parties and increasingly absurd encounters.

Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Jonah Hill, Zac Efron and Martin Lawrence pass through his orbit.

There isn’t much conventional plot.

Instead, Korine creates a sun-soaked succession of comic episodes centred around a protagonist who appears almost entirely immune to consequences.

Whether you find Moondog hilarious or unbearable will probably determine whether the movie works for you.

But nobody could accuse it of feeling like a film designed by committee.

Best for: Eccentric comedy and unapologetically strange filmmaking.

What Do We Mean by an Indie Movie?

“Independent film” is a surprisingly flexible term.

At its simplest, it describes a movie produced outside the traditional major-studio system. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a film was made for almost nothing.

Independent cinema can include:

micro-budget movies made by tiny crews;
privately financed features;
films financed through independent production companies;
festival films later acquired by major distributors;
international co-productions;
and films produced independently but released through companies connected to larger studios.

That is why an indie movie can range from something made by a handful of filmmakers to a production starring internationally recognised actors.

The more useful distinction is often creative. Independent films frequently have greater freedom to tell stories that don’t fit obvious studio categories. They can be stranger. Smaller. More personal. More difficult. And occasionally much more original.

Why Tubi Is Particularly Good for Independent Movies

Most streaming services concentrate heavily on their own original productions and high-profile licensed titles.

Tubi’s enormous free catalogue works differently. Alongside mainstream studio films, it maintains a dedicated collection of independent movies, festival favourites and lesser-known films, which makes browsing beyond obvious releases much easier.

That matters for independent cinema because discovery has always been one of its biggest problems.

Making an independent feature is difficult. Getting audiences to know it exists can be even harder.

Free ad-supported streaming removes one of those barriers: viewers don’t have to decide whether an unknown film is worth an additional rental or subscription. They can simply try it.

What Indie Movie Should You Watch First?

If you want serious independent horror, watch The Witch.

For an intense psychological drama, choose We Need to Talk About Kevin.

If you want something warm and unusual, try Safety Not Guaranteed or Lars and the Real Girl.

For cult comedy, watch But I’m a Cheerleader or Dinner in America.

If you’re looking for science fiction with a genuinely strange premise, choose Vivarium.

For independent crime, try King of New York.

And if you want a lean contemporary independent thriller, Blood Star is streaming free on Tubi.

Watch Blood Star Free

If discovering independent movies is the reason you’re browsing Tubi in the first place, Blood Star is very much a product of that filmmaking tradition.

The feature was made with a small production team, limited resources and real desert locations, using those constraints to build a stripped-down road thriller around performance, landscape and suspense.

A young woman travelling through the desert encounters a small-town sheriff who hunts women travelling alone. Once she realises what he is doing, surviving means finding a way to turn his own methods against him.

Blood Star is currently available to watch free with ads in the USA.