Looking for the Next Streaming Cult Classic? Try Arrow.

Over the past several months, we’ve examined and recommended several streaming services for the discriminating movie lover — sites and apps for those whose tastes run toward titles a bit more esoteric than the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Our latest entry spotlights a terrific subscription streamer for genre film fans.

The subscription streaming service Arrow has its roots in a boutique physical media distributor much beloved by cinephiles: Arrow Video, established in England in 2009 as an offshoot of the theatrical distributor Arrow Films. The company quickly established itself as a favorite among genre film fans, offering painstaking restorations of long-neglected horror and cult titles on discs packed with copious bonus features; they were one of the reasons so many American collectors invested in all-region disc players, before the company expanded to the U.S. market in 2015.

Arrow was one of several companies to enter the subscription streaming space during Covid lockdown, with their platform launching in October 2020. Their initial offerings numbered around 400 titles; they’ve since doubled that number, bolstering their library with short films, documentaries and curated “Selects” collections from name-brand directors like Roger Avary, Eli Roth and Edgar Wright.

Horror is unsurprisingly well-represented on Arrow, which makes it an ideal spooky season addition to your streaming menu; the scary movie offerings are so plentiful that one can even deep-dive into subgenres like slashers, giallo, J-horror, zombie movies and once-banned “video nasties.” But there’s more than mere horror in the catalog, which also features offbeat Westerns, science fiction, yakuza crime epics, martial arts movies galore and cult movies of all stripes and decades. Acclaimed directors such as George A. Romero, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci get well-deserved spotlights, along with lesser-known (to the general public, at least) auteurs like William Grefé and Seijun Suzuki.

Arrow’s interface is smooth and easy to use, and the pricing is agreeably reasonable: $6.99 per month or $69.99 for the year, with a current promotion (code: SHOCKTOBER24) cutting 50 percent of the price for the first month. Its offerings are certainly specialized; this is not a Netflix replacement. But viewers with a fondness for the esoteric (and we know you’re out there) will be hard-pressed to find more quality bang for their streaming buck.