Derek Malcolm has been covering the worlds of tech and entertainment for more than two decades.
Before coming to How-To Geek in 2025, Derek was a contributing editor and writer for the A/V and Home Theater section at Digital Trends, where he wrangled and wrote everything from what to watch on Netflix to reviews, explainers, and guides on the latest Bluetooth speakers, turntables, projectors, and other A/V gear.
Based in Toronto, Derek graduated from Humber College's Journalism program in 1999, after which he started covering the worlds of music, movies, TV, and celebrity for publications such as TV Guide, Hello! magazine, and Inside Entertainment. He then got the bug for covering tech and gadgets in 2006, when he served as editor-in-chief of Canadian tech magazine Connected for more than a decade.
An avid skier, when all the snow's gone Derek can be found at home spinning vinyl with his daughter or cheering on his favorite F1 team, McLaren.
Some movies are not comfort food. Some are the ones you brace for—punishingly realistic war epics that flatten you, thrillers that put your nerves through the shredder, true-crime documentaries that make you check your locks at night. You watch them once, feel all the feels, and then file the experience away for good.
That's what this list is all about: eight extreme Netflix movies that only need a single viewing. Maybe it's because they offer essential knowledge or perspectives (like my must-see top pick at the end of the list) or hard-to-swallow emotional truths, or maybe they're gloriously unhinged and over-the-top. Either way, they're all great single-serving watches. Queue them up accordingly.
Director Mike Flanagan did the impossible with 2017's Gerald’s Game—he turned what many believed to be an unfilmable Stephen King novel into a notorious horror film, and a launching pad for an epic Netflix run. When a kinky little getaway weekend at a remote lake house goes incredibly wrong, Jessie (Carla Gugino) is left handcuffed to the bed after her husband, Gerald (Bruce Greenwood), dies of a heart attack.
Gugino's largely solo performance is mesmerizing, but the infamous "degloving" escape scene is something you’ll only ever manage to sit through once.
Fall is proof positive that a $3 million thriller can put you on the edge of your seat as much as any blockbuster, and it leaves Netflix on August 17, so consider this fair warning. OK, so it's not a great movie, but my teenage daughter and I enjoyed every minute of this vertigo-inducing survival thriller—have never spoken of it again.
From twisted mysteries to edge-of-your-seat crime dramas — can you identify
these Netflix original thrillers from just a clue?
A seemingly perfect suburban mom discovers her neighbor is harboring a dark secret,
leading her down a rabbit hole of lies, manipulation, and murder in this 2018 Netflix limited series
based on a bestselling novel.
A New York City bookstore clerk becomes obsessed with a woman he meets, going to
increasingly disturbing lengths to insert himself into her life — all while narrating his actions
with unsettling charm.
A financial advisor relocates his family to a lakeside Missouri town to launder
money for a drug cartel, making increasingly desperate decisions to keep his family alive in this
slow-burn crime drama.
FBI agents travel across the country in the 1970s interviewing imprisoned serial
killers to understand the psychology of violence and build the foundations of modern criminal
profiling.
A woman wakes up with no memory of who she is or what she's done, only to discover
she may be more dangerous than the people hunting her in this action-heavy 2020 Netflix original
film.
A true crime docuseries that investigates the mysterious death of a woman on a
hiking trail, raising questions about whether local authorities ignored key evidence in their rush
to close the case.
In this Spanish-language thriller, a group of students and professors are taken
hostage inside the Royal Mint of Spain by a criminal mastermind known only by a city name, who
orchestrates the heist from a remote location.
A wealthy family's patriarch dies under mysterious circumstances, and as each
sibling fights for control of the family business, long-buried secrets begin to surface in this 2018
psychological thriller series set in Florida.
