The 50 Best Horror Movies on Hulu Ranked (March 2024)

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The 50 Best Horror Movies on Hulu Ranked (March 2024)

In terms of comparing the major streaming services, it’s easy to think of Hulu as “the TV-focused one,” but that’s not entirely fair—the service also has a healthy number of movies at any given time, although its overall library is nowhere near the size of Netflix’s or (especially) Amazon Prime’s. Still, horror geeks who happen to have a Hulu subscription actually have access to a surprisingly large library of quality films.

Kudos to Hulu for eventually creating a horror-specific subcategory instead of “horror and suspense” jumbled together into one category that somehow contained the likes of both The Babadook and Snowden. Now at least everything you see when you visit the “horror” tab makes sense being there.

In 2024, it’s clear the Hulu horror library got a major upgrade. In fact, our Hulu horror list is now even longer than our Netflix one, and in terms of quality they’ve easily surpassed the world’s largest streamer. Particularly in terms of indie horror, Hulu has made its mark as one of the better streaming services.

You may also want to consult the following horror-centric lists:

The 100 best horror films of all time.
The 100 best vampire movies of all time.
The 50 best zombie movies of all time.
The 50 best movies about serial killers.
The 50 best slasher movies of all time
The 50 best ghost movies of all time.
The best horror movies streaming on Netflix.
The best horror movies streaming on Amazon Prime.
The best horror movies streaming on Shudder.

So without any further ado, here are the 50 best horror movies streaming on Hulu:

1. AlienYear: 1979
Director: Ridley Scott
Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto
Rating: R

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Conduits, canals and cloaca—Ridley Scott’s ode to claustrophobia leaves little room to breathe, cramming its blue collar archetypes through spaces much too small to sustain any sort of sanity, and much too unforgiving to survive. That Alien can also make Space—capital “S”—in its vastness feel as suffocating as a coffin is a testament to Scott’s control as a director (arguably absent from much of his work to follow, including his insistence on ballooning the mythos of this first near-perfect film), as well as to the purity of horror as a cinematic genre. Alien, after all, is tension as narrative, violation as a matter of fact: When the crew of the mining spaceship Nostromo is prematurely awakened from cryogenic sleep to attend to a distress call from a seemingly lifeless planetoid, there is no doubt the small cadre of working class grunts and their posh Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) will discover nothing but mounting, otherworldly doom. Things obviously, iconically, go wrong from there, and as the crew understands both what they’ve brought onto their ship and what their fellow crew members are made of—in one case, literally—a hero emerges from the catastrophe: Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the Platonic ideal of the Final Girl who must battle a viscous, phallic grotesque (care of the master of the phallically grotesque, H.R. Giger) and a fellow crew member who’s basically a walking vessel for an upsetting amount of seminal fluid. As Ripley crawls through the ship’s steel organs, between dreams—the film begins with the crew wakening, and ends with a return to sleep—Alien evolves into a psychosexual nightmare, an indictment of the inherently masculine act of colonization and a symbolic treatise on the trauma of assault. In Space, no one can hear you scream—because no one is listening. —Dom Sinacola


2. Day of the DeadYear: 1985
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Lordi Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Richard Liberty
Rating: R

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Although Dawn will probably always have more esteem, and is significantly more culturally important, Day of the Dead is my personal favorite of George Romero’s zombie films, and I don’t think it ever quite gets the respect it deserves. It comes along at a sort of sweet spot–bigger budget, more ambitious ideas and Tom Savini at the zenith of his powers as a practical effects artist. The human characters this time are scientists and military living in an underground bunker, which for the first time in the series gives us a wider view of what’s been going on since the dead rose. This film reintroduces the science back into zombie flicks, finally making one of the main characters a researcher (Matthew “Frankenstein” Logan) who has had some time to study the zombies in the relative safety of a lab. As such, the movie redefines the attributes of the classic Romero ghoul–they’re dumb, but not entirely unintelligent, and some of them can even be trained to use tools and possibly remember certain aspects of their previous lives. That of course brings us to “Bub,” maybe the single most iconic zombie in Romero’s oeuvre, who displays a unique level of personality and even humor. Day of the Dead ultimately takes a monster that audiences thought they knew pretty well at this point and suggests that perhaps they were only just scratching the surface of zombies’ potential. —Jim Vorel


3. The Descent

Year: 2005
Director: Neil Marshall
Stars: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, MyAnna Buring, Nora-Jane Noone
Rating: R
Runtime: 100 minutes

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True camaraderie or complex relationships between female characters isn’t so much “rare” in horror cinema as it is functionally nonexistent, which is one of the things that still makes The Descent, nominally about a bunch of women fighting monsters in a cave, stand out so sharply all these years later. But ah, how The Descent transcends its one-sentence synopsis. The film’s first half is deliberately crafted to fill in the personalities of its group of women, while slowly and almost imperceptibly ratcheting up the sense of dread and foreboding. As the characters descend deeper into the cave, passageways get tighter and the audience can feel the claustrophobia and dankness creeping into their bones—and that’s before we even see any of the resident troglodytes. Neil Marshall’s screenplay makes masterful use of dubious morality, infusing its protagonists, particularly the duo of Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) and Juno (Natalie Mendoza), with numerous shades of gray. Not content to simply paint one of the two as flawed and the other as resourceful and ultimately vindicated, he uses a series of misunderstandings to illustrate human failing on a much more profound and universal level. Ultimately, The Descent is as moving a character study as it is terrifying subterranean creature feature, with one hell of an ending to boot. —Jim Vorel


4. The BabadookYear: 2014
Director: Jennifer Kent
Stars: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman
Rating: NR

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Classifying Jennifer Kent’s feature debut, The Babadook, is tricky. Ostensibly this is a horror film—freaky stuff happens on an escalating scale, so qualifying Kent’s tale of a single mother’s fractious relationship with her young son with genre tags seems like a perfectly logical move. But The Babadook is so layered, so complex and just so goddamned dramatic that categorizing it outright feels reductive to the point of insult. There’s a grand divide between what Kent has done here and what most of us consider horror. You’ll spend your first week after the experience sleeping with the lights on. You will also come away enriched and provoked. Australian actress-turned-filmmaker Kent has made a movie about childhood, about adulthood and about the nagging fears that hound us from one period to the next. There’s a monster in the closet—and under the bed, and in the armoire, and in the basement—but the film’s human concerns are emotional in nature. They’re not aided by the ephemeral evil lurking in the dark places of its characters’ hearts, of course; going through personal trauma is enough of a chore when you’re not being stalked by the bogeyman. —Andy Crump


5. The Omen

Year: 1976
Director: Richard Donner
Stars: Gregory Peck, Harvey Spencer Stephens, Lee Remick, David Warner, Billie Whitelaw
Rating: R

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In the canon of “creepy kid” movies, the original 1976 incarnation of The Omen stands alone, untainted by the horrendous 2006 remake. It has a palpable sense of malice to it, largely because of the juxtaposition of restraint and moments of extremity. Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) isn’t this little devil boy running around stabbing people, he’s full of guile, deceit and, scariest of all, patience. He knows that he’s playing the long game–it will be years and years before he achieves his purpose on the Earth, which gives him the uncomfortable attitude of an adult (and a pure evil one) in a child’s body. The film is brooding, sullen, broken up by staccato moments of shocking violence. In particular are the infamous scene wherein a sheet of glass leads to a decapitation, or the fate of Damien’s nurse in the film’s opening. The Omen can genuinely can get under your skin, especially if you’re a parent. —Jim Vorel


6. Titanetitane-poster.jpgYear: 2021
Director: Julia Ducournau
Stars: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Laïs Salameh
Rating: R

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Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) had an early connection with cars. Her insistence on using her voice to mimic the rev of an engine as a young girl (played by Adèle Guigue) while her irritated father (French director Bertrand Bonello) drove was so undaunted that one day she caused him to lose control of the vehicle. The accident rendered her father mostly unscathed, and Alexia with a titanium plate implanted in her skull. It was a procedure that seemingly strengthened a curious linkage between her and metal and machine, an innate affection for something hot and alive that could never turn away Alexia’s love. As the doctor removes Alexia’s surgical metal headgear, her father looks on with something that can only be described as disdain for his child. Perhaps, it is because he knew what Alexia would become; perhaps, Alexia was just born bad. Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or-winning follow-up to 2016’s Raw crunches, tears and sizzles. Bones break, skin rips, libidos throb—the human body is pushed to impossible limits. It’s something that Ducournau has already proved familiarity with, but the French director takes things to new extremes with her sophomore film. Titane is a convoluted, gender-bending odyssey splattered with gore and motor oil, the heart of which rests on a simple (if exceedingly perverted) story of finding unconditional acceptance. Eighteen years following the childhood incident, Alexia is a dancer and car model, venerated by ravenous male fans aching to get a picture and an autograph with the punky, sharp-featured young woman. She splays her near-naked form atop the hood of an automobile to the beat of music, contorting and touching herself with simmering lust for the inanimate machine adorned with a fiery paint job to match Alexia’s sexuality. Pink and green and neon yellow glistens on every body (chrome or otherwise) in the showroom, but Ruben Impens’ cinematography follows Alexia as she guides us through this space where she feels most at home. Titane persists as a boundary-pushing exploration of the human form, of gender performance, masculinity and isolation; Ducournau’s script is surprising, shocking, titillating at every turn. And despite her cruelty, and the relative distance from and lack of insight into her character, Alexia remains an empathetic protagonist. This is in no small part thanks to Rousselle’s commanding portrayal which astonishingly doubles as her feature debut. Titane is not just 108 bloody minutes of bodily mutilation and perversion, but of blazing chaos inherent in our human need for acceptance. Ducournau has wrapped up this simple conceit in a narrative that only serves to establish her voice as one which demands our attention, even as we feel compelled to look away. Yes, it’s true what they’ve said—love will literally tear us apart.—Brianna Zigler


7. Tucker & Dale vs. EvilYear: 2010
Director: Eli Craig
Stars: Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden, Jesse Moss
Rating: R

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Let’s face it, hillbillies and their ilk have been getting the short end of the pitchfork in movies since the strains of banjo music faded in 1972’s Deliverance. And whether due to radiation (The Hills Have Eyes) or just good old determined inbreeding (Wrong Turn and so, so many films you’re better off not knowing about), the yokel-prone in film have really enjoyed slaughtering innocent families on vacation, travelers deficient in basic map usage skills, and, best of all, sexually active college students just looking for a good time. But fear not, members of Hillbillies for Inclusion, Consideration & Kindness in Screenplays (HICKS)—writer/director Eli Craig has your hairy, unloofahed back. His film, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, answers the simple question: What if those hillbillies are just socially awkward fellows sprucing up a vacation home and the young college kids in question are just prone to repeatedly jumping to incorrect, often fatal, conclusions? Think Final Destination meets the Darwin Awards. —Michael Burgin


8. The Autopsy of Jane DoeYear: 2016
Director: André Øvredal
Stars: Emile Hirsch, Brian Cox, Olwen Catherine Kelly
Rating: R

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Men don’t understand women. It’s the oldest cliché in comedy, in psychology, in nearly every book Dave Barry has ever written, in men’s and women’s health magazines alike. In André Øvredal’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe, the cliché is no less clichéd, but he does appropriate it for use in a powerful metaphor for male blindness to female traumas: The film is about a woman’s invisible suffering, the kind experienced beneath her exterior and which men can neither see nor comprehend, even when they have the benefit of being able to literally peel back her layers. You can probably guess from the title exactly what layers are being peeled, which is to say that you’ll know right off the bat whether The Autopsy of Jane Doe is for you or not. What you won’t discover without watching the film is the source of Jane’s anguish, though by the time Øvredal is done with us, you may wish you’d never looked close enough to learn for yourself. —Andy Crump


9. I Saw the Devil

Year: 2010
Director: Kim Jee-woon
Stars: Choi Min-sik, Lee Byung-hun
Rating: NR

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I Saw the Devil is a South Korean masterpiece of brutality by director Kim Ji-woon, who was also behind South Korea’s biggest horror film, A Tale of Two Sisters. It’s a truly shocking film, following a man out for revenge at any cost after the murder of his wife by a psychopath. We follow as the “protagonist” of the film makes sport of hunting said psychopath, embedding a tracker in the killer that allows him to repeatedly appear, beat him unconscious and then release him again for further torture. It’s a film about the nature of revenge and obsession, and whether there’s truly any value in repaying a terrible wrong. If you’re still on the fence, know that Choi Min-sik, the star of Park Chan-Wook’s original Oldboy, stars as the serial killer being hunted and turns in another stellar performance. This is not a traditional “horror film,” but it’s among the most horrific on the list in both imagery and emotional impact. —Jim Vorel


10. The Cabin in the Woods

Year: 2012
Director: Drew Goddard
Stars: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, Jesse Williams, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford
Rating: R

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Drew Goddard’s deep knowledge and clearly slavish devotion to the tropes of the horror genre are on display in Cabin in the Woods, which neatly breaks down the “five man band” of camp-style slashers while being simultaneously uproarious and gratifyingly unique. Another film that sat in development hell after completion because studios weren’t sure how to market it, the movie can probably thank the Hollywood ascendancy of Chris Hemsworth for the fact that it eventually got a release, but the powerhouse performances come from Kristen Connolly, Fran Kranz, and especially Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins, whose wry commentary as this horror story’s puppet masters is indispensable and never short of side-splitting. In the end, it’s the little things that Cabin in the Woods does so right—from the properly grizzled “harbinger” who warns the kids of their impending doom, to the running jokes around mermaids that finally see themselves to a very satisfying conclusion. Every loose thread is accounted for en route to a decidedly punk rock finale. —Jim Vorel


11. Censorcensor-2021-poster.jpgYear: 2021
Director: Prano Bailey-Bond
Stars: Niamh Algar, Nicholas Burns, Vincent Franklin, Sophia La Porta, Adrian Schiller, Michael Smiley
Rating: NR

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If Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio and Alexandre Aja’s High Tension had a kid and raised it on Vinegar Syndrome releases, that kid would grow up to be Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor. A demonstration of refined craftsmanship and a gleeful embrace of horror’s grimiest mores all at the same time, Censor is the ultimate “have cake, eat it too” film, being both exceptionally well-made and stuffed to the gunwales with everything that makes horror worth watching: Creeping dread, paranoia, gross-out violence and inspired fits of madness, with a side of smirking defiance for the conservative pitchfork mobs that have tried to pin all the world’s ills on the genre since always. Bailey-Bond’s film is in conversation with history, the era of Margaret Thatcher and cultural garment-rending over the proliferation of video nasties among impressionable Brits. Enid (Niamh Algar), a film censor, fills her days watching graphically staged dramatizations of brutality, then cutting down their countless offenses to an acceptable size. One such picture too closely resembles a horrible incident from her childhood, one resulting in the disappearance of her sister—or more specifically, it’s the lead actress in the picture who too closely resembles her sister. The encounter sets Enid on a quest to recover her long-lost sibling, which takes her on a descent into insanity…plus a few choice gore shots. But as much as Censor connects with Britain’s past, it connects with horror’s past, too, in keeping with the genre’s tradition of self-awareness and self-critique. When social forces come together to blame horror for the existence of darkness, it’s because those forces can’t stand their own self-reflections. They need an easy way out, and moral panic is easy. Horror knows who the real villains are, and so does Bailey-Bond. Don’t take that as a warning sign, though: Censor isn’t stuffy or preachy, not at all. It’s the reason we go see horror movies in the first place.—Andy Crump


12. Preyprey.jpgYear: 2022
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Starring: Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Stormee Kipp, Michelle Thrush, Julian Black Antelope
Rating: R

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Filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator prequel Prey succeeds by daring to embrace what prior sequels did not: Simplicity. The basics of Predator cinema boil down to skull trophies and rival combat, but most of all, the thrill of an uninterrupted hunt. With brutal ease, writer Patrick Aison translates Predator codes to hunter-gatherer dichotomies in Native American cultures. There’s nothing scarier than the laws of natural hierarchies on display in their most elemental forms, and that’s what Prey recognizes with menacing regard. Trachtenberg understands what Predator fans crave, and executes without mercy. Set in the Northern Great Plains of 1719, Prey pits a Predator challenging any species’ alphas—wolves, bears, people—against a Comanche tribe. Taabe (Dakota Beavers) leads other boys on hunts while his sister Naru (Amber Midthunder) practices her deadliest skills in secrecy. She’s dismissed by most for her gender, but not by Taabe. Naru’s chance to defeat a lion (thanks to Taabe) and earn her warrior’s rite of passage fails when a Predator’s alien technology distracts from afar—which no one believes. Only Naru can protect her family and tribespeople from the unknown Yautja threat since no one will listen, which will be the warrior-wannabe’s ultimate test. Prey is inarguably the best Predator since the original. The film gets so much right, paying homage to John McTiernan’s 1987 masterwork—through cigars and direct quotes that it’ll have fans hooting—and adding Indigenous representation with real cultural strength. Trachtenberg and Aison keep things simple, and that’s the special sauce. The performances are tough-as-nails, action sequences absurdly gory and intensity streamlined like a high velocity arrow. By going back to beginnings, Prey sheds pounds of franchise dead weight for a leaner, meaner Predator prequel with all the spine-tearing, one-liner-spouting gladiatorial conquest that fans desire—computer-generated or not. —Matt Donato


13. Personal Shopper

Year: 2017
Director: Olivier Assayas
Stars: Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Sigrid Bouaziz, Anders Danielsen Lie, Ty Olwin
Rating: R

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The pieces don’t all fit in Personal Shopper, but that’s much of the fun of writer-director Olivier Assayas’s enigmatic tale of Maureen (Kristen Stewart, a wonderfully unfathomable presence), who may be in contact with her dead twin brother. Or maybe she’s being stalked by an unseen assailant. Or maybe it’s both. To attempt to explain the direction Personal Shopper takes is merely to regurgitate plot points that don’t sound like they belong in the same film. But Assayas is working on a deeper, more metaphorical level, abandoning strict narrative cause-and-effect logic to give us fragments of Maureen’s life refracted through conflicting experiences. Nothing happens in this film as a direct result of what came before, which explains why a sudden appearance of suggestive, potentially dangerous text messages could be interpreted as a literal threat, or as some strange cosmic manifestation of other, subtler anxieties. Personal Shopper encourages a sense of play, moving from moody ghost story to tense thriller to (out of the blue) erotic character study. But that genre-hopping (not to mention the movie’s willfully inscrutable design) is Assayas’s way of bringing a lighthearted approach to serious questions about grieving and disillusionment. The juxtaposition isn’t jarring or glib—if anything, Personal Shopper is all the more entrancing because it won’t sit still, never letting us be comfortable in its shifting narrative. —Tim Grierson


14. Dog SoldiersYear: 2002
Director: Neil Marshall
Stars: Sean Pertwee, Liam Cunningham, Kevin McKidd, Emma Cleasby
Rating: R

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If someone ever asks me to venture an opinion on the best-looking practical effects/full-body werewolf suits used in a feature-length horror film, the choice of Dog Soldiers will be an easy one to make. This isn’t exactly a character-driven tale, a la American Werewolf in London, but instead an action-packed wolf yarn that pits a squad of soldiers against a rampaging family of lycanthropes in the Scottish Highlands. It borrows the basic structure of Night of the Living Dead to do so, having our group of protagonists holed up in a rickety farmhouse that is under siege by a large group of werewolves. As members of the squad are slowly picked off in increasingly grisly ways, the only question is who, if anyone, will survive. Dog Soldiers is a stylish (although sometimes a bit dark and hard to see) entry in the genre, with great pieces of action and, as previously mentioned, some really spectacular werewolf designs. I love the odd proportions they give the monsters—humanoid bodies with long, somewhat thin limbs which give the werewolves an imposing height, but heads that are straight-up wolves rather than a mixture of wolf and man. They look utterly alien, and it’s great.—Jim Vorel


15. The Empty Man

Year: 2020
Director: David Prior
Stars: James Badge Dale, Owen Teague, Stephen Root, Marin Ireland
Rating: R

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From the start, everything about The Empty Man is misleading. Its title sounds like the absolutely terrible Bloody Mary-esque The Bye Bye Man or the botched adaptation of Slender Man, where spooky too-long shadow dudes creep up on some doltish teens. Those bad high school urban legend films (that this trailer is cut oh-so-specifically to evoke) don’t usually stray from the 90-minute mark. Even Candyman, maybe the best and most ambitious example of this type of film, is barely 100 minutes. The Empty Man’s 137-minute runtime clearly has more to do than kill off a couple of kids for failing to be superstitious enough. Rather than falling into that traditional type of stock schlock, The Empty Man follows a troubled ex-cop investigating the root causes of an incident that could’ve been the entire plot of one of those movies. “We knew we weren’t making that movie and nobody wanted to make that movie,” writer/director/editor David Prior told Thrillist. “But it turns out, the people who inherited the movie wanted that kind of movie.” It makes sense that the ever-expanding, ever-spiraling photos-and-folders paranoid conspiracy of The Empty Man can feel a bit like getting sucked into the kind of heady, hyper-specific hell that festers in the underbellies of Zodiac, Se7en or Mindhunter. That ‘70s thriller structure, dedicated to the paper trail, merges in The Empty Man with a downright otherworldly horror (used here in the literal sense, as opposed to terror) aesthetic that’s sheer scope makes a mockery of the movie’s shoe-leather detective work. But even The Empty Man’s start is a delightful little horror film all its own, a mythological amuse-bouche set on snowy Bhutan peaks where set design and some solidly naturalistic acting sell the scares. Great! Solid. Sold. And then the movie keeps going, as if to literally push past your expectations. Its narrative evolves into something increasingly strange and engaging. It’s like A Cure for Wellness, another cult favorite, in its dedication to piling on an investigator’s hallucinogenic obsession and repulsion as he finds himself suddenly so deep that climbing back out—or, perhaps, out for the first time—proves impossible. Prior’s grasp of tone and savvy subversion of different modern monster tropes, alongside a staggering and committed James Badge Dale performance, position the film as one that understands and appreciates studio horror movies, but has much bigger things on its mind. In short, it rules.—Jacob Oller


16. Sea Fever

Year: 2020
Director: Neasa Hardiman
Starring: Hermione Corfield, Dougray Scott, Connie Nielsen, Ardalan Esmaili
Rating: NR

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Talk about bad timing. Or good timing? Whether Sea Fever’s release coinciding with the pandemic is to either the film’s benefit or detriment is a question without a concrete answer, but like Nicolas Pesce’s The Grudge, it’s all a matter of strange kismet. How else to take a horror movie about people stuck in tight quarters together, endangered by a heretofore unknown entity that transmits to hosts with but a touch and kills in geysers of blood? And the one person in the cast smart enough to make deductions and offer advisories on how to proceed is routinely ignored by everybody else, especially when that person identifies self-isolation as the safest course of action. Prescient! Sea Fever, however, isn’t about a virus but an undiscovered lifeform that inhabits the photic zone, basically a gargantuan tentacled thing that passes on its spawn to other organisms, which then explode violently from said organisms’ eyeballs. The creature menaces the crew of a fishing trawler off the West coast of Ireland, including Siobhán (Hermione Corfield), the introverted marine life expert brought on board to sort out “anomalies” in the catch. She’s also the only one capable of figuring out what’s happening to the boat, and the crew, in what reads as an amalgam of The Thing and Leviathan, with maybe a bit of The Abyss in there as well. Sea Fever’s gory, claustrophobic paranoia is only part of its pleasure. There’s terror in the depths, but bioluminescent beauty, too, the kind that inspires Irish folklore when it should inspire a moratorium on fishing. Sea Fever didn’t get to pick its moment, but the moment is ripe for movies like it to help put in perspective the matter of quarantine. A great movie at any time, but an unexpectedly thought-provoking movie for the time that we’re in. —Andy Crump


17. Hatchinghatching-movie-poster.jpgYear: 2022
Director: Hanna Bergholm
Stars: Siiri Solalinna, Sophia Heikkila, Jani Volanen, Reino Nordin, Saija Lentonen
Rating: NR

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Pubescent pressures are compounded by the presence of a horrifying mutant doppelganger in Hatching, Finnish director Hanna Bergholm’s debut feature. Written by Ilja Rautsi, the film is a domestic drama at its core, detailing the toxicity inherent to a controlling mother-daughter dynamic. However, what elevates Hatching to the upper echelons of the familial horror-drama is its inspired use of practical effects and puppeteering, resulting in a genuinely unsettling movie monster that appears all the more uncanny in its originality. While the finer plot details might not feel as fresh as its central doppelganger entity, Hatching hits the right emotional cues nonetheless—instilling its fair share of thrilling scares while stirring adolescent pathos. — Natalia Keogan


18. Werewolves WithinYear: 2021
Director: Josh Ruben
Stars: Sam Richardson, Milana Vayntrub, George Basil, Sarah Burns, Harvey Guillen, Michaela Watkins
Rating: R

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With the release of his feature film debut Scare Me last year, director Josh Ruben put himself on the horror-comedy map with his tale about horror writers telling scary stories. With Werewolves Within, Ruben further proves his skills as a director who knows how to walk that delicate line between horror and comedy, deftly moving between genres to create something that isn’t just scary, but genuinely hilarious. The cherry on top? This is a videogame adaptation. Werewolves Within is based on the Ubisoft game of the same name where players try to determine who is the werewolf; Mafia but with shapeshifting lycanthropes. Unlike the game, which takes place in a medieval town, Ruben’s film instead takes place in the present day in the small town of Beaverfield. Forest ranger Finn (Sam Richardson) moves to Beaverfield on assignment after a gas pipeline has been proposed to run through the town. But as the snow starts to fall and the sun sets behind the trees, something big and hairy begins hunting the townsfolk. Trapped in the local bed and breakfast, it’s up to Finn and postal worker Cecily (Milana Vayntrub) to try to find out who is picking people off one by one. But as red herrings fly across the screen like a dolphin show at the local aquarium, it feels almost impossible. Just when you think you’ve guessed the killer, something completely uproots your theories. Writer Mishna Wolff takes the core idea (a hidden werewolf in a small town where everyone knows each other), and places it in an even more outlandish and contemporary context to pack an even funnier punch. While the jokes never stop flowing in Werewolves Within, Ruben and Wolff never lose sight of the film’s horrific aspects through plenty of gore, tense scares and one hell of a climax. This film full of over-the-top characters, ridiculous hijinks and more red herrings than you can keep track of is a great entry in the woefully small werewolf subgenre.—Mary Beth McAndrews


19. Honeymoon

Year: 2014
Director: Leigh Janiak
Stars: Rose Leslie, Harry Treadaway
Rating: R

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The cool thing about horror is that if you just have the vision, you can make something like Honeymoon with no more resources than an empty cabin and a few weeks of spare time. The film only has four actors, and two of them barely appear, leaving everything on the shoulders of the two young stars, Rose Leslie (Ygritte from Game of Thrones) and Harry Treadway. This is the right decision to make: If you’ve got a few solid, young actors, why not let the film just become a statement of their talents? The story is extremely simple, with a newlywed couple going on their honeymoon in a remote cabin in the woods. When Bea, the wife, wanders away one night and has some kind of disturbing event in the woods, she comes back changed, and it begins to affect both her memory and sense of identity. The next hour or so is a slow-burning but well-acted and suspenseful journey for the two as the husband’s suspicions grow and the warning flags continue to mount. By the end, emotions and gross-out scares are both running high. —Jim Vorel


20. Bone Tomahawk

Year: 2015
Director: S. Craig Zahler
Stars: Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, Sid Haig, Fred Melamed
Rating: NR

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The aesthetic of the gritty, bone-crunching horror western remains alive and well in the world of modern indie horror, and Bone Tomahawk is likely its totem. Benefitting from an unusually strong cast beyond headliners Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson and Matthew Fox, Bone Tomahawk can boast supportive turns from the likes of Richard Jenkins, Sid Haig and Fred Melamed, giving it an unusual degree of gravity for a film that eventually delves into some of the grossest sequences of dismemberment committed to the screen in the last few decades. Playing out like an 1890s spin on The Hills Have Eyes, the film pits lawman Russell and his posse against a tribe of feral, cannibalistic natives, shunned even by their fellow native tribes and referred to as “Troglodytes.” Unrelentingly savage, its antagonists are particularly memorable examples of the human depravity so often associated with wilderness horror. —Jim Vorel


21. Castle Rockcastle rock poster (Custom).jpgYear: 2018
Director: Various
Stars: Andre Holland, Melanie Lynskey, Bill Skarsgård, Sissy Spacek, Lizzy Caplan, Tim Robbins
Rating: NR

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Castle Rock is easy to love if you’ve already given yourself up to Stephen King’s brand of campfire story, with all the hokey chuckles and midnight palm-sweating that comes with it. I know I have—I just finished enjoying King’s latest, The Outsider—which makes me a prime target (though, I suspect, not the only target) for Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason’s Hulu original series, based on King’s mythos. Michael Uppendahl directs the solid pilot, which pushes artistry and literary fidelity into its compellingly sketched mystery, and the hooks only sink in deeper over the rest of season one. The plot and environment (because one is inevitably entangled with the other) use the stories of Stephen King as their knitting fiber, intertwining both meta- and textual characters and themes into the afflicted town of Castle Rock (home of Cujo and The Dead Zone). Along with It’s Derry and the oft-abbreviated Jerusalem’s Lot, Castle Rock makes up the Bermuda triangle of fictitious Maine haunts that King keeps coming back to. King’s work loves a polluted system, and towns work just as well as prisons or hotels. The atmosphere works because the series’ thematic and artistic construction do each other plenty of favors. For example, the show treats religion and the supernatural as forces that aren’t necessarily on equal footing, but are certainly enabling each other, like a father pushing his child higher and higher on the swing set. Which is which never stays the same. There’s misguided righteousness, dangerous excitement, and legitimate goodness caught up in the battle for Castle Rock’s soul, which is an exciting spin on the conventional Exorcist-like binary questioning of faith. —Jacob Oller


22. Mandy

Year: 2018
Director: Panos Cosmatos
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Ned Dennehy
Rating: NR

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More than an hour in, the film’s title appears, growing lichen-like, sinister and near-illegible, as all great metal album covers are. The name and title card—Mandy—immediately follows a scene in which our hero forges his own Excalibur, a glistening, deformed axe adorned with pointy and vaguely erotic edges and appurtenances, the stuff of H.R. Giger’s wettest dreams. Though Red (Nicolas Cage) could use, and pretty much does use, any weapon at hand to avenge the brutal murder of his titular love (Andrea Riseborough), he still crafts that beautiful abomination as ritual, infusing his quest for revenge with dark talismanic magic, compelled by Bakshi-esque visions of Mandy to do her bidding on the corporeal plane. He relishes the ceremony and succumbs to the rage that will push him to some intensely extreme ends. We know almost nothing about his past before he met Mandy, but we can tell he knows his way around a blunt, deadly object. So begins Red’s unhinged murder spree, phantasmagoric and gloriously violent. A giant bladed dildo, a ludicrously long chainsaw, a hilarious pile of cocaine, the aforementioned spiked LSD, the aforementioned oracular chemist, a tiger, more than one offer of sex—Red encounters each as if it’s the rubble of a waking nightmare, fighting or consuming all of it. Every shot of Mandy reeks of shocking beauty, stylized at times to within an inch of its intelligibility, but endlessly pregnant with creativity and control, euphoria and pain, clarity and honesty and the ineffable sense that director Panos Cosmatos knows exactly how and what he wants to subconsciously imprint into the viewer. Still, Mandy is a revenge movie, and a revenge movie has to satiate the audience’s bloodlust. Cosmatos bathes Red (natch) in gore, every kill hard won and subcutaneously rewarding. There is no other film this year that so effectively feeds off of the audience’s anger, then sublimates it, releasing it without allowing it to go dangerously further. We need this kind of retribution now; we’re all furious with the indifferent unfairness of a world and a life and a society, of a government, that does not care about us. That does not value our lives. Mandy is our revenge movie. Watch it big. Watch it loud. Watch yourself exorcised on screen. —Dom Sinacola


23. Cobweb

Year: 2023
Director: Samuel Bodin
Stars: Lizzy Caplan, Antony Starr, Cleopatra Coleman, Woody Norman
Rating: R

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Samuel Bodin’s upstart Cobweb arrived seemingly out of nowhere in the summer of 2023, and was sadly given very shoddy marketing that doomed it to a quick and uneventful theatrical release before it settled into the morass of VOD availability. That’s a shame, as Cobweb is a very skillfully directed horror yarn from the young filmmaker, unraveling a tangle of familiar tropes in a manner that is able to refresh almost all of them. The film has been expertly framed as a perspective we are seeing entirely from child height, featuring a grimy layer of nightmare unreality through which young Peter (Woody Norman) begins experiencing nightly disturbances from within the walls of his bedroom. It all has the feeling of dark fantasy or fairytale rather than the cold light of our own reality, helped along by scenery-chewing sinister performances from Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr as Peter’s not-at-all-suspicious parents. There are moments here still helplessly bound by cliche like a fly caught in a spider’s web, but Cobweb’s genuinely unnerving visuals, oppressive atmosphere, Halloween-rich setting and gonzo third act lift it above so many other superficially similar stories. —Jim Vorel


24. After Midnightafter-midnight-poster.jpgYear: 2019
Director: Jeremy Gardner, Christian Stella
Stars: Jeremy Gardner, Bea Grant, Henry Zebrowski
Rating: NR

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Hank (Jeremy Gardner) has a problem: Abby (Brea Grant), his longtime girlfriend and the weathervane of his existence, has up and left with only a vague note to explain her sudden disappearance. All Hank has to hang onto now is his family’s old home, which he and Abby had made their home together, plus a bottomless case of peanut wine. Oh, also, there’s that damn monster that batters Hank every night after the clock strikes 12. That’s a problem, too. After Midnight could be read as anything other than a horror film, but if there’s a worse horror to live with than the horror of knowing your short-term future is going to be defined by monster attacks, well, Gardner doesn’t care. Following his usual tack, he wrote this movie, co-directed this movie and put himself in front of the cameras while they rolled: There’s more budget to speak of than his other work (like The Battery), considering the involvement of effects studio MastersFX (see: Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight), but most of the money goes toward…well, wait for the final 10 or so minutes to find out. Everything that’s left over goes toward creating a sadsack world for Hank to live in and pity himself in, his stunted emotional growth being the bugbear holding him back from going anywhere with his life and with Abby. “Manchildren but make it scary” sounds like a terrible elevator pitch, but Gardner’s been making low-budget, high-tension, higher-atmosphere movies in his sleep for his whole career, and After Midnight is the most refined example of his vision yet. —Andy Crump


25. Come Truecome-true-movie-poster.jpgYear: 2021
Director: Anthony Scott Burns
Stars: Julia Sarah Stone, Landon Liboiron
Rating: NR

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Come True, Anthony Scott Burns’ horror first, sci-fi second hybrid film essentially dramatizes what filmmaker Rodney Ascher gets at in his 2015 sleep paralysis documentary The Nightmare. What if your worst fears manifested in the real world? What if you couldn’t tell the difference between the land of the waking and the realm of the slumbering? What if the difference doesn’t even matter because, whether the nightmares are real or not, they still smother you and deny you rest, respite and sanity? Conceptually, the movie is frightening. In more practical terms it’s deeply unsettling, a terrific, sharply made exercise in layering one kind of dread on top of another. “Don’t you ever feel like you’re seeing something that you’re not supposed to?” Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) asks Riff (Landon Liboiron), the scruffy Daniel Radcliffe stand-in conducting an ill-advised science experiment masquerading as a sleep study. The ever-present unnerving sensation that follows—that unspeakable terror is hovering over your shoulder—puts the film in close company with It Follows, another movie about disaffected youth on the run from evil they don’t understand and can’t fight. It’s contemporary, atmospheric and cuts deep—and more than that, it’s original. Burns conjures horror so vivid and tactile that at any time it feels like it might leap off of the screen and into our own imaginations or, worse, our own lives.—Andy Crump


26. Infinity PoolYear: 2023
Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Stars: Mia Goth, Alexander Skarsgard, Cleopatra Coleman
Rating: R

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Getting too deeply into what exactly happens in Infinity Pool is like outlining the recirculating edge of its title’s horizon-flouting construction. It won’t take away from its pleasures, but you can’t really understand until you’re in it. Until Cronenberg drives you down an unlit backroad, long enough that you start wondering if you’re dreaming or awake. But what’s clearest in this gallows comedy is that its characters exist. The people who think they’ve solved reality, the conceited class with the luxury of being horny for death, because death has never been real to them. Infinity Pool’s inspired critique of this crowd is fierce and funny, its hallucinations nimble and sticky, and its encompassing nightmare one you’ll remember without needing to break out the vacation slideshow. —Jacob Oller


27. Crimes of the Futurecrimes-of-the-future-poster.jpgYear: 2022
Director: David Cronenberg
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Don McKellar, Scott Speedman
Rating: R

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Sharing a title with Cronenberg’s second film, the latest from the body horror auteur is a return to (de)form after two decades of more dialed-back drama. Digging into the art world’s juicy guts and suturing it up as a compelling, ambitious sci-fi noir, Crimes of the Future thrills, even if it leaves a few stray narrative implements sewn into its scarred cavities. The dreamy and experimental Crimes of the Future (1970) sees creative cancers develop in a womanless world ravaged by viruses. New organs are created (and sometimes worshiped) in a broken society now run by fetishists and hurtling towards a dire, damnable biological response. While Cronenberg’s 2022 do-over on the subject of organic novelty in a collapsing society isn’t a remake by any stretch of the new flesh, it addresses the same pet interests that’ve filled his films since the beginning. Thankfully, it does so with new subtextual success and a far more straightforward and accessible text (despite the full-frontal nudity and graphic autopsies). Unlike Cronenberg’s early work, this movie has color, diegetic sound and movie stars. It embraces traditional dramatic pacing and supplements its perversion with cutting-edge effects. And at least now the characters speak to each other—in that detached, psychology-textbook-meets-FM-2030-essay style—while the camera dives deep into the guts that fascinate us. Specifically, the guts of Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen). He and Caprice (Lea Seydoux) are performance artists whose medium is the generation and removal of neo-organs. Saul builds them up, Caprice slices them out. Our destruction of the world, filling its oceans with plastic and its air with pollution, allowed this to happen. Humanity is now literally numb. People slice each other with knives at clubs, or in the street. Recreational surgery is commonplace. Many can only feel real pain while asleep. This unconscious suffering is just one of many sharpened sides of Crimes’ metaphor. Art is evolving to meet this nerve-deadened world on its terms. Humans are too, literally. That’s why Saul’s able to squeeze out nasty new lumps of viscera and why National Organ Registry investigators Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart), as well as radical transhumanist Lang (Scott Speedman), find him fascinating. The trio help narratively blend the dystopian bureaucracy and thriving, subversive multimedia generated by Cronenberg’s nihilistic predictions. When we eventually ruin things, there will just as surely be new cogs in old machines as there will be new rebels in old resistances. Erudite and exploitative, gory yet gentle, Crimes of the Future shows the new kids on the chopping block that an old master can still dissect with the best. But Crimes of the Future’s more meaningful impact is in its representation of a trailblazer finally seeing the horizon. Cronenberg’s view of the future understands that the true death of an artist and the death of society at large result from the same tragic failure to evolve—even if that innovation is simply renovation.—Jacob Oller


28. The MenuYear: 2022
Director: Mark Mylod
Stars: Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, Ralph Fiennes, Hong Chau, Janet McTeer, Judith Light, John Leguizamo
Rating: R

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Early in The Menu, director Mark Mylod’s beautiful, intricate dark comedy set amid the trappings of exclusive restaurant culture, a character explains that, for him, art doesn’t matter. Films aren’t important. Neither are books, paintings or music. Food, he tells us, is the purest and best art form, because a great chef’s medium is “the raw materials of life and death.” Like just about every piece of dialogue in the film, written with fiendish joy by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, it’s both funny in the moment and unexpectedly profound in the larger context of The Menu’s dark game. Yes, the enigmatic master chef at the heart of film is playing with the raw materials of life and death on his plates—seafood, fungi, roast chicken, flash-frozen microgreens and plenty of artful foam—but the menu he’s developed, and the film that depicts it, is also dealing with the raw materials of human human life and death. The list of ingredients is long, the techniques complex, but everything is whipped like egg whites into something so light and airy you barely notice the bitterness until it smacks you in the teeth. The restaurant at the heart of this heady recipe is Hawthorne, a fabulously expensive establishment run by the demanding, precise Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes, sharp as carbon steel) from a private island where all the ingredients are local and a seat at the table will set you back more than a grand. Hawthorne serves just 12 diners per service, and on the night we journey to the island, they include everyone from a couple of regulars (Judith Light, Reed Birney) to a renowned and famously hard-to-please food critic (Janet McTeer) to a fading movie star trying to build a second career as a travel show host (John Leguizamo). The film is interested in each of these personalities to varying degrees, but turns particularly sharp focus on Margo (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a mismatched couple with very different views of what they’re about to experience. Yes, all the ingredients are treated with care, and the film’s early developments are placed with the precision of a single sprig of chives tweezed onto a plating, but the film’s dark secret is that it’s not here to be subtle. Its true strength is not in tweezers, or carefully engineered molecular gastronomy, but in the furious swipes of a cleaver coming at your head. The complexity, both tonally and visually, is there to tease out the film’s black genre heart, and it’s that heart that makes The Menu a delicious and deeply filling experience that will make you beg for a second helping.—Matthew Jackson


29. Scream

Year: 2022
Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Stars: Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Courteney Cox, Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Jack Quaid, Mason Gooding, Jasmin Savoy Brown
Rating: R

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Among many things that ended up winning me over about Radio Silence directing group members Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Scream, the main one was that—like its predecessors—it understood how we were going to feel about it before we even got to see it. It knew that I would be torn about its existence. And that, folks, just scratches the surface on why the new Scream, in all its meta-for-a-modern-time goodness, is the best installment since the Wes Craven original. The fifth installment—which takes place 25 years after the original—doesn’t hold back when it comes to analyzing the inner workings of a classic reboot down to the bones. Scream has always been a franchise for film lovers—and it’s never been afraid to be meta as hell, as meta as it needed to be to get its point across. Big questions are raised and left in the air to hang: Are we really just the monsters we create? Are we the monsters that created us, and do we have to be? What is so toxic about loving something with everything you have and wanting it to stay good? Like you’d expect from the franchise, it doesn’t necessarily offer answers to those questions, but the fact that it poses them at all feels right. It is a welcomed dimension to the films that highlights the larger themes that have come into play as the Woodsboro legacy has aged. Sure, the gags about elevated horror and getting back to the roots of slashers, the film trivia, the dedication to the craft of movies—it’s all part of the show. But it’s the fifth movie, and really, why make it if not to send a love letter to the fans? —Lex Briscuso


30. The Clovehitch KillerYear: 2018
Director: Duncan Skiles
Stars: Dylan McDermott, Charlie Plummer, Madisen Beaty
Rating: NR

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Life in small-town Christian America can have a stultifying effect on a person, sucking out all personality and vitality, replacing all individual identity with better living through dogma. In The Clovehitch Killer, director Duncan Skiles replicates this bait-and-switch through cinematographer Luke McCoubrey’s camera. The film is shot stock-still, the camera more or less fixed from one scene to the next, as if affected by the vibe of routine humming throughout its setting of Somewhere, Kentucky. Almost none of the characters we meet in the movie have a spark; they’re drones tasked with maintaining the hive’s integrity against interlopers who, god forbid, actually bother to be somebody. Caught up in this dynamic is Tyler (Charlie Plummer), awkward, quiet and shy, the son of Don (Dylan McDermott), a handyman and Scout troop leader, which brings no end of unexpressed consternation to Tyler as a Scout himself. On the surface, Don looks and acts like an automaton, too, with occasional hints of humor and warmth in his capacity as father and Scoutmaster. Beneath, though, he’s something more, at least so Tyler suspects: The Clovehitch Killer, a serial killer who once tormented their area with a horrific murder spree long completed. Or maybe not. Maybe Don just has a real kink fetish and keeps rope around for fun in the bedroom. Either way, fathers aren’t always who or what they appear.

Horror movies are all about the squirm, the nerve-wracking build-up of tension over time that, done properly, leaves viewers crawling out of their skin with dread. In The Clovehitch Killer, this sensation is wrought entirely through craft instead of effects. That damn camera, motionless and unstirred, is always happy to film what’s in front of it, never one to pan about to catch new angles. What you see is what it shows you, but what it shows you might be more awful than you can stomach at a glance. This is a devilish movie that does beautifully what horror films are meant to—vex us with fear—through the most deceptively simple of means. —Andy Crump


31. Flux GourmetYear: 2022
Director: Peter Strickland
Stars: Asa Butterfield, Gwendoline Christie, Ariane Labed, Fatma Mohamed, Makis Papadimitriou, Richard Bremmer, Leo Bill
Rating: NR

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In Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet, there are whole ecosystems of sound: Noises warble and moan and serrate, each one with its own finicky, unpleasant rhythms, until they cohere into something bigger. In Strickland’s world, this is “sonic catering,” an immersive form of performance art which relishes in the peals and clunks of kitchen appliances and foodstuffs. The saucepans and blenders are mic’d; steam is plucked at like a zither; a performer will sometimes writhe on the ground naked and bloodied in an effort to assume the likeness of a dying pig. Sound is reinventing itself constantly and Strickland is determined to materialize its every flavor. —Saffron Maeve


32. Bad Hairbad-hair-poster.jpgYear: 2020
Director: Justin Simien
Stars: Elle Lorraine, Jar Pharoah, Lena Waithe, Kelly Rowland, Laverne Cox
Rating: NR

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The truest statement anyone can make about Justin Simien’s horror-comedy Bad Hair is that it’s very much a Justin Simien movie. Like his breakout feature debut, Dear White People, and the Netflix TV series he wound up spinning the film into, Bad Hair unpacks Black American identities through social and cultural lenses, mixing straight-faced character studies with sharp banter and humor. Unlike Dear White People, Bad Hair has issues balancing the two in tandem with the horror side of the scales, and often finds itself thrown out of equilibrium in the final measurement. Simien’s work is funny, and spooky, but never both together. Comedy and horror historically go together well. Genre film, particularly the grotesque, straddles a fine line, and the grotesque has a way of tipping easily into comedy. In Bad Hair the two share a split-custody agreement: They visit the viewer only in every other scene. —Andy Crump


33. Runrun-hulu-poster.jpgYear: 2020
Director: Aneesh Chaganty
Stars: Sarah Paulson, Kiera Allen
Rating: NR

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Under 90 minutes and without an ounce of fat, Run buzzes with anxiety even in the quietest scenes where technically all’s well but nothing’s right: Repeated sequences, like a daughter’s ritualized mealtimes, grow increasingly uneasy as her questions about her mother and the truth slowly evolve into suspicions and then, at last, fully blossom into horrified disbelief. What would you do if you found out the person you call “mom” may not actually be your mom at all? Earlier in 2020, The Craft: Legacy clumsily posed and answered the same question, but Chaganty and his Searching co-writer Sev Ohanian map Run around that fearful betrayal and give real thought to its consequences—and Chloe’s response. —Andy Crump


34. Warm Bodies

Year: 2013
Director: Jonathan Levine
Stars: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich, Rob Corddry, Dave Franco
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 98 minutes

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It would be easy to cast this Nicholas Hoult “rom-zom” film aside as simple teen fluff, but Warm Bodies is more entertaining than the serious horror geek might expect, and if your significant other isn’t so fond of exploding heads or people being torn apart in typical Romero-esque fashion, this film might be exactly what you’re looking for. Hoult plays “R,” a rather morose zombie whose days are spent endlessly wandering a defunct airport with hundreds of his brethren as the last vestiges of his humanity slip further and further from memory. That is, until he sees Julie (Teresa Parker) for the first time, and his cold, dead heart inexplicably begins to beat once again. What follows is something of a “Romero and Julie” situation, as we’re combining star-crossed zombies with the threat of Julie’s dictatorial father (a “I heard there was a paycheck here to be collected” John Malkovich).

Still, the best things in Warm Bodies aren’t necessarily the romantic aspects, but the amusing camaraderie between its characters. “R” has what amounts to a zombie bro, played by Rob Corddry, and their minimalistic, coworker-esque small talk is a highlight that is nicely integrated into the plot as the other zombies begin experiencing some of the same awakenings as “R.” Likewise, Julie’s own teenage existence in a heavily gated, walled survivalist community is the sort of thing you don’t often get a chance to see in more serious, horror-centric zombie fiction. All in all, Warm Bodies is a pleasant surprise that will appeal to the romantic comedy enthusiast and the zombie buff in equal measure. —Jim Vorel


35. The Vigilthe-vigil-poster.jpgYear: 2021
Director: Keith Thomas
Stars: Dave Davis, Menashe Lustig, Malky Goldman, Fred Melamed, Lynn Cohen, Nati Rabinowitz
Rating: PG-13

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Yakov (Dave Davis) has recently left the Hasidic Jew community after experiencing a trauma that dismantled his faith. He’s struggling to adapt to the outside world—particularly with money—and in the midst of this struggle, he’s approached to serve as a shomer, someone who watches over a body until it is buried. Typically a shomer is a family member, but in desperate circumstances, someone will be paid to serve this role. So Yakov takes up his post looking over the body of the deceased Mr. Litvak. But this isn’t going to be a night for easy money. As soon as Yakov settles in for his five-hour shift, strange things immediately start happening. He sees shadowy figures lurking in dark corners, he hears strange whispers and feels as if something is watching his every move. As the night progresses, he discovers that a mazzik, a type of demon, is haunting the home, its family and Yakov himself. It is feeding on them, using their grief and trauma to fuel its evil. Central to the power of The Vigil is Davis’ performance as Yakov, created by both Davis’ performance and Thomas’ writing. The film has a short and sweet runtime of 90 minutes, and with that short amount of time, Davis and Thomas are able to create a complex character that has gone through a life of both love and despair. Davis’ frustrated and sorrow-filled face tells a story of a man who just wants to live a life that is his own. Paired with those facial expressions, Thomas’ script quickly and effectively showcases both Yakov’s naivety in the world of technology and women—as he literally Googles “how to talk to women”—and his strength, as he prepares to face off with the mazzik. This is not a generic horror character that blends into the wallpaper, but someone worth cheering for until the credits roll. This is a story that, while following the expected story beats of possession films, still feels unique thanks to Thomas’ specificity and dedication to creating something lean and mean.—Mary Beth McAndrews


36. No One Will Save You

Year: 2023
Director: Brian Duffield
Stars: Kaitlyn Dever
Rating: PG-13

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Kaitlyn Dever heroically carries what’s essentially a one-woman show as townie Brynn Adams, a lonesome soul fighting off bug-eyed gray trespassers. That’s…pretty much it. She’s seen scribbling letters to a presumed deceased Maude Collins before the flying saucers appear, but then sci-fi terror begins and Duffield channels everything from Signs to The McPherson Tape. Brynn dashes around her creaky wooden childhood home, Brynn hides from alien entities, and Brynn flees from an unknown fate should the cosmic outsiders catch her in their spaceship tractor beams. The craftsmanship behind No One Will Save You showcases Duffield’s strengths with restricted resources. Visual effects studio ​​DNEG nails the creation of traditional X-Files-lookalike aliens down to their bulbous craniums and slender-freaky figures, but that’s only one component. Duffield does a splendid job collaborating with cinematographer Aaron Morton to frame his interstellar guests as stalkers, often peering just out of frame before swelling in size and entering with emphasis. No One Will Save You adheres to a golden creature feature rule by showing Brynn’s adversaries early and never shying away from full-screen reveals, which wafts an appropriate air of confidence. As Brynn cowers behind refrigerator doors or turns her hatchback into an impromptu firebomb, the aliens always hold their impressive on-screen presence. —Matt Donato


37. Little Monsterslittle-monsters-poster.jpgYear: 2019
Director: Abe Forsythe
Stars: Lupita Nyong’o, Alexander England, Kat Stewart, Diesel La Torraca, Josh Gad
Rating: R

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As Lupita Nyong’o was picking up her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2013, one probably wouldn’t have expected that she would be starring in not one but two different critically acclaimed horror films in 2019, but here we are. Most of the horror attention on Nyong’o last year was understandably derived from her scintillating turn in Jordan Peele’s Us, but Little Monsters feels sadly overlooked. This is a frequently uproarious zombie comedy, set in Australia, starring actor Alexander England as a slacker uncle to a precocious young child, and Nyong’o as the kid’s supremely dedicated and charming kindergarten teacher. And wouldn’t you know it—the class field trip to the farm/petting zoo just happens to be interrupted by a massive outbreak of the undead, leaving Nyong’o to shepherd her little flock to safety, all while concealing from them the seriousness of these events. She pulls off a performance that is both touching and generates the occasional belly laugh, while also showing off such a consistent talent for musical performance that you can’t help but wonder if the film was calculated as the launching point for yet another side career. Josh Gad also shows up as a children’s entertainer in a role that takes full advantage of his irritating talents, but the film really belongs to Nyong’o. —Jim Vorel


38. A Quiet Place Part II

Year: 2020
Director: John Krasinski
Stars: Emily Blunt, Cillian Murphy, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Djimon Hounsou
Rating: PG-13

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Serving as both prologue and epilogue to the original film, flashing back to the day the sound-averse killer aliens landed on Earth, A Quiet Place Part II is an exercise in diminishing returns. As our Tim Grierson pointed out in his review of the first high-concept movie, “the risk with such films is that, eventually, we’ll grow accustomed to the conceit and get restless.” Even if much of A Quiet Place’s power didn’t come from its relatively restrained worldbuilding and potent use of its near-silent sensory gimmick, the years it took for this sequel to be released were a long time for its simple hook to live out in the pop cultural world. But thanks to the strengths of its core ensemble and returning director John Krasinski’s ability behind the camera, A Quiet Place Part II’s technical merits mostly drown out the franchise’s increasingly noisy flaws. That leaves A Quiet Place Part II to be a charmingly unambitious, ultimately enjoyable step down of a sequel: A controlled expansion where novelty fades to reveal technical prowess and contempt starts peeking out behind familiarity. Krasinski’s milked this franchise and its gimmicks to provide us with his two best showings behind the camera, but he—like its characters—needs to grow beyond it, or else be trapped as its returns finally disappear entirely. —Jacob Oller


39. Backcountry

Year: 2014
Director: Adam MacDonald
Stars: Missy Peregrym, Jeff Roop, Eric Balfour, Nicholas Campbell
Rating: R

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Much was made of the brutality and naturalism of the bear attack sequence in Alejandro Iñárritu’s The Revenant in 2015, but a year earlier, little-seen Canadian wilderness horror Backcountry delivered an even more gore-streaked recreation of a similar incident, this time involving two people instead of one. Backcountry is the story of Alex (Jeff Roop) and Jen (Missy Peregrym), two lovers who run afoul of their own hubris when they head into a national park forest with more unearned confidence than sense, and then run afoul of a particularly tenacious black bear. Unrepentant in its brutality and realism, Backcountry chronicles both the ill-advised trek out into the wilderness, and the incredibly painful fight to crawl back to the safety of civilization. Featuring smart subversions of an expected Deliverance or Straw Dogs-type plot, Backcountry instead becomes a film about a relationship weathering an impossible trial, punctuated by incredibly bloody and disturbingly realistic scenes of injury and suffering. This one isn’t a casual, entertaining weeknight watch, but it does illustrate the raw power of the wilderness. —Jim Vorel


40. Skinamarink

Year: 2023
Director: Kyle Edward Ball
Stars: Lucas Paul, Dali Rose Tetreault, Jaime Hill
Rating: NR

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This is a daring, unsettling, inscrutable and at times deeply boring venture into the farthest boundaries of horror esotericism, utterly unlike anything that most viewers will have ever seen before. If someone hosted a filmmaking competition where the stated goal was to engineer a work as divisive as it possibly could be, surely Skinamarink would be a shoo-in to win the grand prize. Created on a budget of $15,000 (Canadian!) as the feature debut of filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball, and dedicated to assistant director Joshua Bookhalter, who passed away during post-production, Skinamarink is an exercise in experimental, sensory-driven horror filmmaking. Now, when one says “sensory-driven” in this context, one might expect that to imply a certain lushness that overwhelms the senses, a la James Cameron’s approach in Avatar: The Way of Water. Skinamarink, however, is more like the opposite—the film’s ultra grainy visual aesthetic and muddy audio (with cleverly hardcoded subtitles) slowly but surely hypnotizes the viewer into a state of heightened suggestibility, until the viewer’s mind begins to provide its own hallucinatory meaning to what it is seeing. Ostensibly, Skinamarink is about a pair of siblings: four-year-old Kevin and six-year-old Kaylee. They live in an unassuming little house with their unseen father, with the status of Mom a veiled mystery that hints at pain and separation. One night, they awake to find that the house seems changed—doors and windows have disappeared, and any parental presence is missing. Objects are strewn around in seeming patterns, while a deep, gargling voice whispers from the darkness. “Oneiric” is the most perfect single word for the experience. Its images are like watching closed circuit security camera footage of someone’s mental projections during a fever dream. Its sounds recall things heard in the dead of the night from a childhood bedroom, and then blissfully forgotten by morning, only to be recalled in a moment of terror decades later. I look forward to watching the wider world discover Skinamarink, feeling for all purposes as if they’ve blundered into a parallel dimension. Like the titular child of The Twilight Zone’s “Little Girl Lost,” they’ll watch as a familiar place becomes a seeming prison, bound by dream logic, boundless and empty. I certainly won’t forget it.—Jim Vorel


41. The Feastthe-feast-poster.jpgYear: 2021
Director: Lee Haven Jones
Stars: Annes Elwy, Nia Roberts, Julian Lewis Jones
Rating: NR

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Jones suffuses slow-burn tension, disturbing visual elements and murky folk horror into a film that’s foundation rests on creeping uncertainties—making The Feast pleasantly obscure and occasionally quite upsetting. This is sustained by the world as seen through the eyes of cinematographer Bjørn Ståle Bratberg, whose scenery is as richly textured in the countryside of Wales as in the pristine, vacant modernity of Glenda’s home. The Feast is, among other things, obsessed with space. The empty space of the natural world that surrounds the family like a constant threat; the space within their vast, sterile domicile that separates body from body; the space within Glenda’s private meditation room, her pride and joy, yet which Mair likens to a prison cell. And the space that we, as humans, have imposed between ourselves and the very Earth that we live on. We alienate ourselves from the landscape we need to survive as we turn green into black. We become something uncanny, something not quite human. In The Feast, Mother Nature fights back, but we are more a danger to each other than the Earth could ever be. —Brianna Zigler


42. 28 Weeks Later

Year: 2007
Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Stars: Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Harold Perrineau, Catherine McCormack, Imogen Poots, Mackintosh Muggleton, Idris Elba
Rating: R

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28 Weeks Later is an often interesting, often scary, often powerful and often frustrating film for zombie/horror genre geeks. As a sequel to 2002’s supremely influential 28 Days Later, it’s a partial success. It does a wonderful job of transplanting that film’s nihilistic, hopeless streak of terror and what one person is willing to do to survive–especially in the masterful opening scene, where Robert Carlyle’s character abandons his wife while fleeing from zombies in a soul-crushing chase across the fields of England as tears of guilt stream down his face. On the other hand, the film’s true main characters, his children, aren’t nearly as interesting–nor is the collection of military suits who have locked down England in the post-Rage virus cleanup. The film also violates one of the unwritten rules of zombie cinema, which is, “There shouldn’t be a ‘main zombie.’” In this case, when Robert Carlyle’s Don becomes infected and escapes, it hurts the story’s ability to be legitimately suspenseful, as we know the kids aren’t in any real danger during any of their encounters with the infected, because zombie Don is still unaccounted for. If the audience knows that the script will require this one infected person to be present for a conclusion, then it robs all the other infected of being perceived as legitimate threats. Still, despite all that, 28 Weeks Later is well-shot and full of shocking, gritty action sequences. It’s not without its flaws, but certain scenes such as the opener are so powerful that we’re willing to forgive a lot. —Jim Vorel


43. Underwater

Year: 2020
Director: William Eubank
Stars: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr., Mamoudou Athie
Rating: PG-13

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Underwater turned out to be the most unusual type of Lovecraftian adaptation for the 2020s–a film that didn’t advertise itself as one, and instead left the association as a third act reveal of sorts. And even then, this is one of the odder takes on Lovecraft’s arcana, for the simple fact that we don’t usually see this mythology in the context of what is essentially a big budget action/disaster movie. Lovecraftian stories are most typically marked by their intimate settings and most scope–a family under attack, or an obsessed researcher delving into materials he should know better than to explore. Lovecraftian monsters slither into the frame (or linger outside it) with slowly building suspense–they don’t usually topple underwater research stations in a cacophony of explosions and screeching metal. And yet that’s what we have in Underwater, a genuine Lovecraftian monster/disaster movie. —Jim Vorel


44. Hellraiserhellraiser-poster.jpgYear: 2022
Director: David Bruckner
Stars: Odessa A’zion, Jamie Clayton, Adam Faison, Drew Starkey, Brandon Flynn
Rating: R

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I wanted very much to enjoy Hellraiser 2022. The first movie leaves room for variation, expansion or reinterpretation, and this certainly isn’t a by-the-numbers remake of the old movie’s plot. (There are many Hellraiser sequels, and this appears to be more of a fresh crack at one of those than a full reboot.) Bruckner has a command of oppressive mood, the Cenobite designs are first-rate and some of the movie’s imagery (like an impossible contraption integrated into one poor human’s body in grisly pursuit of new pleasures) will stay with me for a while. The movie itself, however—the actual sum of these sliced and stretched parts—is elusive, and at times inert. As much attention as Riley draws in the movie’s protracted opening, the rest of her cohort feel like warm bodies necessary to show off the requisite gore. —Jesse Hassenger


45. Shadow in the Cloudshadow-in-the-cloud-poster.jpgYear: 2020
Director: Roseanne Liang
Stars: Chloe Grace Moretz, Taylor John Smith, Beulah Koale, Nick Robinson, Callan Mulvey
Rating: R

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The blow-off cliché for describing movies focused predominantly on one actor is to say they’re on screen for the entire picture, even if they’re not literally on screen for the entire picture. Other than the handful of moments where Liang’s cinematographer Kit Fraser peeks down to remind the audience that 30,000 feet is a long, long way away from solid ground, Chloe Grace Moretz is genuinely on screen for all of Shadow in the Cloud. Liang doesn’t let the men into the frame until she’s good and ready, and until Moretz has staked her claim as Queen Ass Kicker on the “Fool’s Errand” by shooting down enemies and fighting off monsters. Even at 23 years old, Moretz has little to prove, having amassed a filmography running the gamut from trashy superhero movies (Kick-Ass) to highbrow French Cinema (Clouds of Sils Maria) to psychothrillers (Greta). In Shadow in the Cloud, she proves herself anyway. —Andy Crump


46. False Positivefalse-positive-poster.jpgYear: 2021
Director: John Lee
Stars: Ilana Glazer, Justin Theroux, Pierce Brosnan, Sophia Bush
Rating: R

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Motherhood is a pretty scary thing. Particularly when it comes to the typical nine-month gestation period that produces a newborn child, the horror genre has been a hotbed of filmmakers exploring the visceral terror inherent in the body-altering state of pregnancy and the bloody act of giving birth. Perhaps this is why False Positive feels so fractured within this realm—for all of the diverse and interesting explorations within this subgenre, co-writers Ilana Glazer and John Lee limit their film by exclusively riffing on the notoriously inimitable Rosemary’s Baby. —Natalia Keogan


47. Splinter

Year: 2008
Director: Toby Wilkins
Stars: Shea Whigham, Paulo Costanzo, Jill Wagner, Rachel Kerbs
Rating: R

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Splinter begins with a strong, though bordering on cliché, hook. Two (naturally, young) people driving from a campsite spot a woman in the road and are soon carjacked by her hick cohort. When forced to drive away, they hit and kill something monstrous in the road, quickly combining both the “something’s in the woods” theme with the less politically correct but frequently more frightening “rednecks are serial killers” concept. From here, though, the film becomes less interesting, as the cast ends up locked into a gas station, fighting to escape If Splinter incorporates a third type of horror film, it’s the zombie movie. Whenever the monster strikes someone with its quills (which, incidentally, should’ve been the title for the movie: Quills), the victim becomes a creature as well. The film especially emulates the disembodied hand concept of Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn, and with some good reason. For how low-budget the production clearly is, the design on the monster is inspired and doesn’t look like anything else out there. It’s a case of better-than-average production design elevating a film out of forgettable territory. —Sean Gandert


48. Would You RatherYear: 2012
Director: David Guy Levy
Stars: Jeffrey Combs, Brittany Snow, Enver Gjokaj, Charlie Hofheimer, Sasha Grey, John Heard
Rating: NR

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Would You Rather is the kind of somewhat reductive horror film that follows in the wake of the Saw and Hostel generation of the 2000s, where characterization is just an excuse to reduce each character to one driving motivation. Here’s our heroine–oh, she needs money to pay for the treatment of her sick brother, but what will she do to get it? Films like this are careful to not present any of the other characters as equally or more sincere in their desire than that protagonist, because that would introduce real moral ambiguity rather than the illusive choices here. Regardless, you’re not watching for the story–you’re watching to see what a bunch of strangers will be forced to do to each other in order to win a demented millionaire’s payday. ‘80s horror icon Jeffrey Combs plays that villain, and although he’s clearly having a good time, there’s some spark of vitality to his performances in Re-Animator or From Beyond that has long since been reduced to paycheck-minded professionalism. If this movie had been made in 1985, perhaps it would have been a minor classic. —Jim Vorel


49. Alien: ResurrectionYear: 1997
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Dan Hedaya, J. E. Freeman, Brad Dourif, Michael Wincott
Rating: R

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Easily the strangest entry in what we were originally calling the “Alien Quadrilogy” before modern Hollywood kept looking for a way to pump out more xenomorphs, Alien: Resurrection surpasses even David Fincher’s Alien 3 on the scale of WTFs-per-minute. Much of this is thanks to the inspired but still-surprising decision to hand off the directorial reins to French experimental director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who cribs inspiration from his own City of Lost Children in reimagining the Alien universe, its creaky starships, and the presence of his favored muse Ron Perlman. This results in a totally unique visual language for the series, full of hyper-kinetic camera movement and editing, which pairs rather strangely with a story about feminist icon Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) being resurrected, now empowered with alien DNA. What follows is a lurid tonal mishmash with some genuinely horrific bits–like Ripley discovering all of her failed clones–and material that can’t help but make you laugh, like the wonderful Brad Dourif as an addled scientist cooing with love over an alien baby that promptly murders him. This is a wildly uneven entry in the Alien franchise, but one of the most visually remarkable. —Jim Vorel


50. Freshfresh-hulu-poster.jpgYear: 2022
Director: Mimi Cave
Stars: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sebastian Stan
Rating: R

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App dating gets its Bumbling psychothriller with Fresh, a movie that Hinges upon its literal and allegorical human meat Grindr. Music video director Mimi Cave adds some glitz to Adam McKay disciple Lauryn Kahn’s script in her feature debut, but the film lacks the necessary bite either in its body horror or humor to truly pull off its cannibalistic commentary. To even get to the fun, Fresh asks a high price: Weathering Noa’s (Daisy Edgar-Jones) played-out dating app horror stories and a psychopathic meet-cute with grocery store creep Steve (Sebastian Stan) that’s clearly leading nowhere good. This goes on for a good half-hour—during which the starry-eyed and bland Noa claims Steve is cute (he is, in a movie star way), funny (he is not, even in a movie star way), and charming (he doesn’t openly neg her)—before we finally get to the title card and the meat (ha!) of the movie. It’s a bold move that would’ve worked wonders if it all didn’t feel a little predictable. —Jacob Oller

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