Survival

WATCHcanon

28 Days Later

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

WATCHcanon

28 Years Later

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

WATCHcanon

A Quiet Place

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

WATCHcult

Azrael

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

WATCHknown

Bacurau

A remote Brazilian village disappears from the map and finds itself hunted for sport. Weird, angry and unclassifiable.

WATCHcanon

Barbarian

Go in knowing nothing. The structure is the point and every synopsis ruins it.

WATCHcanon

Battle Royale

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

WATCHcult

Bedevilled

A Seoul bank worker visits the island she grew up on. Everybody there has been failing one woman for years.

WATCHcanon

Companion

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

WATCHcanon

Cube

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

WATCHknown

Dead Snow

Nazi zombies in the Norwegian mountains, and it knows exactly how silly it is.

WATCHcanon

Deliverance

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

WATCHcanon

Dog Soldiers

A squad on exercise in the Highlands versus werewolves, and it is closer to a war film than to horror.

WATCHcanon

Gerald's Game

The King novel everyone said was unfilmable. One bed, two handcuffs, and a degloving.

WATCHknown

Green Room

A punk band plays the wrong venue. Jeremy Saulnier does not flinch and neither does the film.

WATCHcanon

Heretic

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

WATCHcult

Hounds of Love

A Perth couple abduct a teenage girl, and the film is about the fracture between the two of them.

WATCHcult

Impetigore

An Indonesian folk horror about a woman who returns to a village that has been waiting for her.

WATCHcanon

Jaws

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

WATCHcult

Kill List

Starts as a kitchen-sink drama about money, ends somewhere else entirely. The turn is brutal.

WATCHcult

Long Weekend

A couple with a failing marriage treat a beach with contempt. Nothing supernatural happens.

WATCHcanon

Misery

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

WATCHknown

Night of the Comet

A comet turns most of Los Angeles to dust, and two Valley girls inherit the city.

WATCHcult

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.

WATCHcult

Piggy

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

WATCHcanon

Ready or Not

A bride versus her new in-laws and their family obligation. Very funny and mean.

WATCHknown

Revenge

Reworks the structure with the assault largely off screen, which removes nothing it needs.

WATCHcanon

Saw

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

WATCHknown

Sleep Tight

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

WATCHcult

Sting

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

WATCHknown

The Chaser

A former detective running an escort agency works out that his missing women all went to the same client.

WATCHcult

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.

WATCHknown

The Hills Have Eyes

A nuclear family against a family mutated by nuclear testing. By the end there is no difference in method.

WATCHcanon

The Invisible Man

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

WATCHknown

The Lodge

Two children snowed in with their father's new partner, who has a history with a cult.

WATCHknown

Them

A French couple terrorised in a house at night, 77 minutes, and it claims to be true.

WATCHcanon

The Mist

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

WATCHcanon

The Platform

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

WATCHknown

The Vanishing

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

WATCHcanon

Train to Busan

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

WATCHcanon

Tremors

The monster has rules and the film obeys them. A perfectly built piece of engineering.

WATCHknown

Triangle

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

WATCHknown

Watcher

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

WATCHcult

Who Can Kill a Child?

Opens with eight minutes of real famine footage, then asks its title question literally.

WATCHknown

Wolf Creek

Three backpackers in the Australian outback. The first hour is a holiday film and it is not padding.

WATCHobscure

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.