The films

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I Saw the TV Glow

Barely a horror film and one of the most upsetting things on this site. About a life not lived.

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Speak No Evil

Danish. About politeness, and the ending is the bleakest thing in this decade of horror.

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Confessions

A teacher calmly tells her class she knows two of them killed her daughter, and that she has already taken revenge.

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Sleep Tight

The concierge of a Barcelona apartment block cannot bear that a tenant is happy, so he makes sure she is not.

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The Bad Seed

The Production Code would not let a child murderer go free, so it ends with a spanking. See it anyway.

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The Invitation

A dinner party where you spend ninety minutes unsure whether the host is grieving or dangerous.

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The Vanishing

A man spends three years looking for his girlfriend and is finally offered the answer on one condition.

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A Tale of Two Sisters

The highest-grossing Korean horror film ever, and it is really a family drama with a haunting in it.

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Climax

A dance troupe, spiked sangria, and Gaspar Noé's camera refusing to cut. Unbearable by design.

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Thelma

A Norwegian student with a repressive religious upbringing discovers her desire has physical consequences.

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Pearl

Technicolor melodrama with a pitchfork. Mia Goth's final monologue is a single unbroken take.

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The Empty Man

Dumped by the studio with no marketing, runs 137 minutes, and has a 20-minute prologue people rave about.

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The Innocents

The Turn of the Screw done perfectly, and it never once tells you whether the ghosts are real.

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Triangle

A yacht, a storm, an ocean liner, and a loop that keeps folding back on a single mother.

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Bug

William Friedkin directing a two-hander in a motel room about shared delusion, and it is not what the trailer sold.

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Cat People

Val Lewton was told to make a film from a title and a poster. He made one about a woman afraid of her own desire.

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Goodnight Mommy

Austrian, cold, and it works out its own twist early enough that the dread is the point.

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The Night House

Rebecca Hall carrying a film about grief with unusual use of negative space.

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Vampyr

Dreyer shooting through gauze at a plot that barely exists. Closer to a bad dream than a film.

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Coherence

A dinner party the night a comet passes, and reality starts to fork. Shot in one house in five nights.

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MaXXXine

The weakest of West's trilogy and still a better-shot 1985 Los Angeles than most films manage.

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The Wailing

Two and a half hours, and it withholds whether the shaman is helping right until the end.

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Malignant

James Wan spending studio money on something deranged. The third act is one of the great swerves.

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Candyman

The shadow-puppet sequences are the best thing in it. A sequel that is actually about the original.

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Jacob's Ladder

A Vietnam veteran in New York whose reality will not stay put, and the demons move wrong on purpose.

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Scanners

Everybody remembers the head. The film underneath is about a pharmaceutical company and a custody dispute.

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The Babadook

A film about a widowed mother who resents her son, wearing a monster as a coat.

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Vivarium

A young couple cannot leave a show home. Bleak, airless, and about mortgages.

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Talk to Me

An embalmed hand, a ninety-second rule, and teenagers filming it. The Philippou brothers' first feature.

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Beau Is Afraid

Ari Aster's three-hour anxiety odyssey, and it is horror only in the sense that being alive is.

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Heretic

Two missionaries, one house, and Hugh Grant enjoying himself enormously as the worst man alive.

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Longlegs

Marketed better than almost any horror film this decade. The first hour earns it, the last act is arguable.

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Peeping Tom

Ended Powell's career in Britain because it puts the audience behind the camera and knows it.

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Perfect Blue

Satoshi Kon's animated thriller about a pop idol losing herself, and Aronofsky bought the remake rights just to reuse a shot.

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Repulsion

Polanski's first English film. A flat, a woman, and hands coming out of the walls.

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Videodrome

Predicted most of what people now say about the internet, using a Betamax slot in a man's stomach.