As Pauline Kael once wrote, “If you’re afraid of movies that excite your senses, you’re afraid of movies.” This proves most true with audiences when it comes to horror and thriller films. That’s why last year we created a list of films that will let you take a calculated risk while getting away from the same safe picks on the seasonal lists. We’ve also added new films this year to help you plan your watch parties, no matter who you’re watching with.
WATCH WITH A FRIEND GOING THROUGH DIVORCE: THE BROOD
Often considered within David Cronenberg’s filmography to be the white-haired rage child hidden in a chalet, The Brood is due for rediscovery in this era of maybe you’re all doing therapy a little too hard. Coming out of his own acrimonious divorce, Cronenberg was never this vulnerable again as a filmmaker and the script and performances remain astonishing. Oliver Reed is the most frightening therapist ever but it’s Samantha Eggar, as a woman who gives birth to literal rage babies, who should have won an Oscar for that placenta scene alone.
WATCH WITH YOUR FRIEND WHO IS MOST FREAKED OUT BY AI: HARDWARE
Seeing Richard Stanley’s debut movie is the moment Brian can personally pinpoint going from a Fangoria subscriber to a Flipside subscriber. A music video wunderkind, Stanley scored cameos from oldsters like Iggy Pop and Lemmy along with the insurgent music of the coming 1990s, including Ministry, Gwar, and Psychic TV. They’re all perfect for this near-future story of a genocidal war drone inadvertently brought to sentient life in a London squat of artists and immigrants. Movies should be cool, and Hardware—relentlessly trippy, violent, and roughhewed—is still cool thirty-five years later.
WATCH WITH YOUR MOM: THE FINAL GIRLS
The Final Girls came out well before Happy Death Day but while that much more lucrative time loop film stayed in the slasher lane, Todd Strauss-Schulson’s film gleefully goes everywhere from meta-levels to cheap jokes. The cast is full of alt comedy pinch hitters like Adam DeVine and Alia Shawkat, but the realistic relationship between Taissa Farmiga and her scream queen mother Malin Åkerman is what makes this genre riff so special. Come for the machete battle, stay for the hugs.
WATCH WITH DRAG QUEENS: SLEEPAWAY CAMP
Tasteless, offensive, indefensible, and absolutely fun, Sleepaway Camp is the Johnny Guitar of slasher films. It pulls a gender inversion on the genre, with all the cast acting like it’s a regional production of Suddenly, Last Summer. There are pervy flashbacks and a twist ending that gay-married your brain forever if you watched this back on VHS. Emily distinctly remembers being shown this one as a teen and a friend saying, “I really want to know what you think of Sleepaway Camp.” That’s called profiling.
WATCH WITH YOUR ANTIFA SOCCER LEAGUE: BACURAU
Equal parts acid western and The Wicker Man, this movie is pure tension as the audience teases out the mystery of what’s happening in Bacurau, a fictional town in the back country of Brazil. What makes it a great film is the patience directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles take in showing us the town. By the time the ugliest Americans since Cannibal Holocaust show up, we are living in Bacurau and know all the gossip. When the locals are forced to defend their town there’s no question whose side we’re on.
WATCH WITH YOUR WANNABE INFLUENCER FRIEND: NOPE
Nope was technically a hit but we’ve long had a feeling that it went over the audience’s heads with a Kubrickian leap. It may take years for us to catch up to how unnerving and subversive Nope is, especially in what it says about being seen/not being seen as a core part of human nature. That Jordon Peele does this all at a rollicking Spielberg pace only adds to the sense of mystery and genre mash-up. There’s also an alien that looks like a Björk dress.
WATCH WITH YOUR CANADIAN DAD: MY BLOODY VALENTINE
“My Bloody Valentine has a whimsical level to it. Like if Bill Forsyth made a slasher film.” Read our epic talk about Canada’s contribution to the slasher canon here. But be aware that if you watch this with your Canadian Dad he’s going to interrupt with wandering digressions about Moosehead beer, or say things like, “That ain’t no way to wear a safety helmet.”
WATCH IF YOU’RE 1980s OBSESSED: DEMONS 2
Demons, the first one, is a classic of a different kind of Italo-horror film. Demons 2, however, tones down the gore and cranks up the new wave and post-punk soundtrack for total hairspray chaos. Plot? Sure, let’s try. Residents of a high-tech condo tower in Hamburg are watching a documentary about, um…the first Demons movie? From there, fiction crosses over to reality through the power of a sad birthday girl listening to the Smiths, and soon all the tenants—including the armed patrons of a muscle gym—are under siege by demons. Really, the less sense it makes the more fun you’re having.
WATCH IF YOU’RE ON OZEMPIC: THE STUFF
Larry Cohen’s The Stuff opens at a mining site with a liquid bubbling up that turns out to be delicious, and addictive. From there, it’s a quick rise to the number one selling food in America and a lot of questions, including: Is the Stuff not just alive, but sentient? No one combined grind-house commerce with satirical anarchy like Cohen did and the charm of The Stuff is it’s both polished—they hired a Madison Ave. firm to create the branding for the fictional food—and rough around the edges. As if Cohen was too excited to fill out his one-page pitch to script length and just started filming.
WATCH WITH YOUR SIBLINGS: RAISING CAIN
What could drive Brian De Palma, in mid-career, to make his craziest, most belief-beggaring thriller? Maybe even his masterpiece? Becoming a new father! An act that’s apparently traumatizing for many artists. From there, just add an ensemble cast of John Lithgow, John Lithgow, John Lithgow, John Lithgow, and John Lithgow.
WATCH WITH A CLASSICS MAJOR: THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS
With the most apocalyptic ending since Planet of the Apes, this story of a girl being transported across a world destroyed by a zombie-generating fungal infection—no, it’s not The Last of Us. Instead, Girl With All the Gifts is based on a British novel that came before the video game and proudly wears its own references on its sleeve, from The Day of the Triffids to I Am Legend, and the Pandora myth. By the time you finish, you’ll have earned your A levels.
FOR DADS TO WATCH WITH THEIR DAUGHTERS: CRAWL
It’s called kin work, and it inordinately falls to women, especially when they must save their estranged fathers from being trapped in a basement full of alligators during a hurricane.
WATCH WITH THE KIDS: NIGHT OF THE ZOOPOCALYPSE
On the face of it, Night of the Zoopocalypse is a remake of John Carpenter’s The Thing for the Pixar age bracket, which is cool enough. And it is a fun, gorgeously animated film. But within the story are more radical themes of society, wildness, and identity, played out in a zoo setting. Look at the writing credits and you’ll see Clive Barker, who probably gave the story its Nightbreed “Fuck the law” energy.
WATCH WITH YOUR BEST FRIEND: GRETA
We’ve already discussed why Greta is the greatest psychological thriller you’ve never seen so now it’s up to you to make this a true cult classic. Bring on the 4k boxsets, the drinking games, the Isabelle Huppert costumes!
WATCH WITH A CANCELLED FRIEND: DREAM SCENARIO
This story of Nicolas Cage as mild-if-annoying professor Paul Matthews haunting the dreams of strangers arrived maybe a year too early. (Taylor Swift however has better timing.) Still, it’s an amazing follow-up to Sick of Myself, Kristoffer Borgli’s breakout film. Working now on a studio scale, Borgli builds Dream Scenario into a Scandinavian version of Nightmare on Elm Street and the film isn’t afraid of the cringe—the date fart!—or truly unnerving dream sequences.
WATCH IF YOU THINK YOUR FRIEND IS A SOCIOPATH: DON’T DELIVER US FROM EVIL
Notorious as “The French film banned in France!” Don’t Deliver Us From Evil walks a fine line between exploitation and arthouse as it follows two schoolgirls who read Les Chants de Maldoror and decide to become evil. Drawing loosely on the real-life Parker-Hulme murder, director Joël Séria imbues the film with a spirit of genuine anarchy, from the scene of the giggling girls biking away in joy from their first murder to their performance art finale that anticipates Big Black’s Kerosene by 15 years.
WATCH WITH YOUR WELSH SEPARATIST FRIENDS: THE FEAST
We’ll just say it: the “folk horror” revival of the 2010s was the “college rock” of horror films—a term that codified legit practitioners but mostly served to excuse a lot of boring films with no sense of purpose other than “someone wanders a forest, fearing something something.” Released in 2021, The Feast may look like that, but it’s not. It’s like the unholy child of Lars von Trier and Takashi Miike, performed entirely in Welsh. Myn diawl!
As the film opens, Cadi is the temp help for a wealthy and dysfunctional mining family’s very important dinner party. She’s impassive, mostly silent, and also trails black dirt behind her. After a Kubrick-uncanny opening act, with jaw-dropping cinematography, The Feast becomes a blood-drenched fairy-tale, proving that mining power is no match for witch power.
WATCH AFTER A THREE-HOUR CALL WITH YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE PROVIDER: THE TOXIC AVENGER (2023)
Like its 1984 source film, Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger is full of ultra-violent provocations and stupid-on-purpose humor. Where it bests the low-budget original is the performances, with Peter Dinklage alongside a perfectly cast David Yow and an obviously having-the-time-of-his-life Kevin Bacon. There’s also the gooey beating heart that the film wears on its sleeve. Even Emily, who had never seen the original, was won over by this film’s love letter to outsiders and its (severed) middle finger to power brokers.
WATCH WITH A FRIEND WHO WON’T SAY WHAT THEY DO FOR A LIVING: FRANKENHOOKER
There’s no gloss on a Frank Henenlotter film, especially one with the tagline “A terrifying tale of sluts and bolts.” But all his films have an honest humanism that carries far past the exploitation and dumb humor. Frankenhooker is no different and it might have one of the most accidentally feminist endings of any horror movie.
WATCH WITH A VENTRILOQUIST DUMMY NEXT TO YOU: TOURIST TRAP
The Elder Gods among our readers may have memories of this PG (!) rated film from childhood. If you don’t, trust us, this combination of evil doll film and Texas Chainsaw Massacre is still terrifying, as if it was completely made of cursed images.
WATCH BEFORE YOU BUY A $1 HOME IN ITALY: THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS
Like film noir, Italy’s giallo genre has a steep quality drop-off after you hit all the classics. But there are still buried nuggets like Pupi Avati’s 1975 film about an art restorer summoned to a village—with secrets!—to work on a disturbing mural of Saint Sebastian. Less a mystery and much more a demented gothic thriller, House with Laughing Windows explores deeper themes of sadism and corruption. Avati had co-written Salò with Pasolini a few years before, and you could almost call Laughing Windows an answer film about artistic morality. Still, it’s as Italian as talking with your hands and surprisingly creepy—all the way to the twist ending that passes go and is sent straight to gender studies.
WATCH WHILE EATING CHEESY GARLIC BREAD: NIGHTMARE CITY
In a world of crazy Italian zombie movies it pays to be the craziest. And Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City most definitely is. After a radioactive plane full of generals and politicians lands, a toxic strain of zombie-ism spreads through Rome. Noted for being the very first fast zombie movie, the undead also look ridiculous here, with what can only be described as burnt mozzarella on their faces. Come for the aerobics studio massacre. Stay for the earnest message about nuclear war.
WATCH WITH A NEW YORKER: C.H.U.D.
Believe me, C.H.U.D. is way better written and better acted than any film called Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers needs to be. I also firmly believe it’s in the same cinematic universe with Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, given that it shares the same 1983 Soho/East Village locations, and John Heard.
WATCH WITH AN INDIE FILMMAKER: BAGHEAD (2008)
As far as we know, Baghead is the only mumblecore horror film and it somehow works. This early Duplass Brothers joint with Greta Gerwig manages to capture cabin-in-the-woods creepiness at the same time as taking the piss out of the pretensions and petty rivalries of no-budget filmmaking.
WATCH WITH YOUR FRENCH BOYFRIEND: DOUBLE LOVER
In François Ozon’s horny tribute to De Palma’s Sisters, Chloe is a docent in Paris with phantom stomach pains no one can diagnose. As a last-ditch effort to understand the cause she’s sent to Paul, a psychiatrist played by Jérémie Renier. His brand of therapy is saying very little and being very handsome. Paul also has a secret twin brother, Louis, but that’s the least of the twists in Double Lover, so be prepared. There’s even a twist ending after the twist ending.
WATCH WITH A THEATER MAJOR: PEARL
Ti West’s prequel to his hick horror tribute X turned out to be a truly moving, unnerving story about psychopathy and how outsiders are made. Mia Goth’s country girl Pearl dreams of dancing in Hollywood against the wishes of her icy German mother. The audience wants Pearl to succeed, except she is in no way sane and she knows it as much as we do. (We won’t spoil the scarecrow scene.) As a movie, Pearl is patient and loving with all its characters, even when it dispatches most of them in a climax that has the moral symmetry of a Flannery O’Connor story.
WATCH IF YOU HATE DINNER PARTIES: THE INVITATION (2015)
If there’s a horror movie list on the internet it will invariably contain Jennifer’s Body. And you know what? Karyn Kusama has made other movies, goddammit. Great ones, like The Invitation. As a concept it looks even more prescient ten years later with its Hollywood Hills death cult. Kusama and her writing partners Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi work the limited location with ruthless efficiency until the ending, which uses a simple symbol to suggest a global catastrophe. Never has surviving one night of terror felt so much like losing as in The Invitation’s final seconds.
WATCH WITH A NOVELIST: IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS
We love this late-period John Carpenter banger, even if the idea is silly that a novelist—a novelist—is so influential he could drag humanity into Lovecraftian-madness and call forth the end of the world. Most novelists emotionally shut down if asked for a blurb, let alone when asked if they could take in some shoggoth rescues.
WATCH WITH THE ROOMMATE WHO STOLE YOUR HAIRSTYLE: SINGLE WHITE FEMALE
Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female is always unfairly lumped in with the erotic thrillers of the early 1990s gang. While there are butts to be seen, Single White Female aims to be a real movie and succeeds. Schroeder definitely saw Persona, the acting battle between Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh is intense; it’s lensed by Argento collaborator Luciano Tovoli; and the script by Don Roos knows when to be logical and when to take the audience into horror and slasher territory. One lingering question: where to find an apartment that big in New York?
WATCH WITH YOUR POD DURING THE NEXT PANDEMIC: REC
The found footage horror movie might be on its last recording seconds, but if you go back to its early days you’ll find that REC is in its own nonstop terror class. A news crew is trapped inside a building being sealed off from the world during what looks like an outbreak and all the fun tropes are there including “Keep filming!” But the demented twist in the last act could only happen in a Spanish film.
WATCH WITH A LETTERBOXD SNOB: PSYCHO (1998)
Artists have been as drawn to Hitchcock as much as filmmakers have. (I’ve seen Douglas Gordon’s numbingly meditative 24 Hour Psycho video installation.) Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho exists somewhere between the disciplines—a conceptual studio cash grab that was critically savaged for it at the time. It’s easy to focus on the intended differences: the camp colors, the subliminal inserts. But what alters the DNA of the original the most turns out to be the performance choices. A young Vince Vaughn goes full demon twink as Norman Bates, while Julianne Moore plays crusading sister Lila Crane as…neurodiverse? Repeat these talking points and claim it’s better than the original and you’ll be a true Cinema Dirtbag!