The Wretched

Ben, staying with his father at a lakeside town for the summer, becomes convinced that the woman in the house next door is not human: she is an ancient witch who inhabits and discards human bodies, and who makes people forget their own children ever existed.

The Pierce brothers made a solid, old-fashioned creature feature elevated by one quietly unsettling idea: the witch erases herself from memory as she takes each victim, so nobody believes Ben and the erased children simply cease to have existed.

It became an unlikely box-office story, topping the American chart for weeks during the 2020 cinema shutdown when almost nothing else was playing.

The creature design, a gnarled thing wearing skins, is good and used sparingly.

It is a well-made, unpretentious teen horror with a properly creepy central conceit.