The films

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The Platform

A vertical prison and a descending table of food. The metaphor is a brick and the film is effective anyway.

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Companion

A weekend away with a reveal in the first act rather than the third, which is the smart choice.

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The Descent

Six women, an uncharted cave, and a group dynamic already poisoned before anything goes wrong.

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The Invisible Man

Reworks Universal's monster into a film about being disbelieved. The empty corners of the frame do the work.

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28 Years Later

Boyle and Garland back together, shot largely on iPhones rigged in arrays. Stranger than the sequel anybody expected.

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Cube

Six strangers in a lethal maze of identical rooms, shot on one set for under 400,000 Canadian dollars.

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Deliverance

Not marketed as horror and the founding text of an entire horror subgenre.

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The Mist

Frank Darabont's third King adaptation, and the ending he changed is one of the cruellest in cinema.

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Battle Royale

A class of Japanese schoolchildren are dropped on an island and made to kill each other. Kinji Fukasaku's last major film.

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A Quiet Place

A high-concept gimmick executed with real discipline. The nail on the stair is the whole film.

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28 Days Later

Shot on DV, made them fast, and restarted the whole genre for fifteen years.

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Misery

Kathy Bates won the Academy Award, which is one of two horror performances ever to do it.

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Jaws

The mechanical shark did not work, so Spielberg shot around it and accidentally made the best one.

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Saw

Two men chained in a bathroom, made for 1.2 million dollars in eighteen days, and it is far better than its franchise.

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Train to Busan

The best zombie film since Romero, and the only one that makes you cry.