CREEPY ANTHOLOGY FILMS
Southbound - Interwoven vignettes set on a lonely patch of desert highway. Welcome to Nightvale meets Silent Hill.
V/H/S - Mainstream but totally deserves watching. A found footage movie made up of short, unrelated films that still somehow manage to build up to a crescendo.
A Christmas Story - Add this to your holiday watch list. A series of unnerving events unfolding in one town on Christmas Eve. Campy in all the right ways, and with a wonderfully satisfying ending.
Extraordinary Tales - Animated re-tellings of Edgar Allen Poe stories.
Three Extremes - Did you somehow miss this when it was making a splash a few years ago? If so, watch it now. A trio of short films by Asian directors, all of them wonderfully unsettling.
HOME INVASION MOVIES
Hush - A home invasion movie featuring a deaf protagonist defending herself ingeniously.
You’re Next - A home invasion goes sideways when one of the targets turns out to have some impressive survival skills.
Funny Games - A movie that hates its audience almost as much as it hates itself. Hard to watch, but it gets referenced so often that you really should watch it so you can talk about it convincingly at the next horror movie snob cocktail party.
Don’t Breathe - You probably heard of this one when it came out. Attempts to rob a blind old man go sideways when he turns out to be more than they bargained for. Featuring an extremely uncomfortable scene involving a turkey baster.
CREATURE FEATURES
The Ritual - A group of camper get more for they bargained for when encountering a jotunn in the forest. A+ creature design.
Willow Creek - Found footage movie. An amateur documentary about Bigfoot takes a dark turn. Possibly the only thing I’ve ever seen that makes Bigfoot genuinely terrifying.
Grabbers - Horror-comedy about an alien invasion in Ireland that can only be solved by, well…getting really drunk. A fun popcorn flick.
PSYCHOLOGICAL
Dread - A psychology student and amateur filmmaker team up to make a project documenting people’s deepest fears – and then using those fears against them.
Salvage - A girl is murdered, only to wake up and re-live her life pursued once more by the killer. Or is she? Small budget horror done right and a satisfying ending.
The Invitation - A guy reluctantly goes to a dinner party at his ex-girlfriend’s house and it’s a bad idea. A very, very bad idea.
They Look Like People - A guy reconnects with a childhood friend who is convinced of an invasion only he can prevent. A quiet, slower-paced story that’s mostly about love and friendship and mental illness but has one of the most heart-rendingly tense climax scenes.
Re/Cycle - Asian horror about a novelist and her trek through hell. Absolutely worth watching. Content warning for abortion references (but I promise it’s not what you think)