The films

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Attachment

A Danish-Jewish folk horror about a dybbuk, a mother, and a relationship the mother will not permit.

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Hellbender

Made by one family during lockdown for almost nothing, and it looks better than films with fifty times the budget.

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Sissy

An Australian wellness influencer at a hen weekend. Much sharper and much nastier than the premise suggests.

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You'll Never Find Me

A stranger knocks during a storm at a caravan-park trailer, and neither of the two people is quite what they seem.

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The Coffee Table

A Spanish couple buy a hideous coffee table, and then the worst thing imaginable happens in the first act.

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Huesera: The Bone Woman

Mexican, and the best pregnancy horror since Rosemary's Baby. The joint-cracking sound design is the thing.

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Deadstream

A disgraced livestreamer broadcasts himself alone in a haunted house for the clout, and gets exactly what he deserves.

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The Blackening

A group of Black friends at a cabin play a racist board game that traps them, and the whole film is the joke that the Black character always dies first.

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The Front Room

A pregnant woman is forced to care for her husband's monstrous, dying, evangelical stepmother.

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Enys Men

A lone woman on a Cornish island in 1973, a flower, a standing stone, and time coming apart.

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Azrael

A near-wordless survival film in a post-apocalypse where a cult has cut out their own tongues.

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Birth/Rebirth

A morgue technician and a grieving mother reinventing Frankenstein without any of the theatrics.

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Censor

A BBFC examiner during the video nasties panic starts to come apart. Essential viewing for this site specifically.

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In a Violent Nature

A slasher shot entirely from behind the killer, at walking pace, with no score. A formal experiment that works.

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Incantation

A Taiwanese found-footage film built around a curse the film itself tries to pass to you.

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It Lives Inside

An Indian-American teenager unleashes a demon from Hindu folklore while trying to assimilate.

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Oddity

Irish, small, and it contains one of the best-constructed scares of the decade. The wooden man.

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Skinamarink

Ninety minutes of ceilings and corners at 4am. Either the scariest thing you have seen or nothing at all.

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Piggy

Spanish, a bullied teenager, and a moral problem she is left holding alone.

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The Dark and the Wicked

Bryan Bertino's bleakest film. Two siblings return to the family farm as their father dies and something takes the household apart.

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In the Earth

A scientist and a guide walk into a forest during a pandemic and find a man, and a spirit, that do not want them to leave.

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No One Will Save You

A woman alone in a farmhouse fends off an alien home invasion, with almost no dialogue in the entire film.

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Sting

A girl raises a spider that fell from space in a New York apartment block, and it grows.

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The Sadness

Taiwanese, and among the most extreme things released this decade. Go in warned.

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When Evil Lurks

Argentinian, merciless, and it establishes early that the film will not spare anybody. It means it.

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The Devil's Bath

Austrian, based on real 18th-century court records, and about a form of despair almost nobody has filmed.

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You Won't Be Alone

A Macedonian witch story told as a Malick film, and it is about what it is to be a person.

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Hatching

A Finnish girl raises a monster from an egg, and it is about a mother's Instagram-perfect lie.

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The Medium

Thai-Korean, a documentary crew following a shaman, and the last twenty minutes are relentless.

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Host

Shot over lockdown on Zoom in twelve weeks, runs 56 minutes, and is better than it has any right to be.

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Relic

Dementia as a house that grows corridors. The last ten minutes are unexpectedly tender.

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Strange Darling

Told out of order in six chapters, shot on 35mm by Giovanni Ribisi. The structure is the whole trick.

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Watcher

An American in Bucharest who cannot speak the language and is not being believed. Quietly excellent.

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Possessor

Brandon Cronenberg working the family seam without embarrassment. The practical effects are appalling in the right way.

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Woman of the Hour

Anna Kendrick's directorial debut, about the serial killer who appeared on The Dating Game mid-spree.

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Exhuma

Two shamans and two geomancers exhume a cursed grave in Korea, and what is under it is worse than the curse.