Is there anything more thrilling than scaring the living daylights out of yourself with a completely terrifying and MESSED up horror movie? If you’re like me – a Halloween enthusiast who starts celebrating the creepy and cool spooktacular season the moment September begins – then the answer to that is simple: NOPE. But when you’ve seen Poltergeist and The Shining for the hundredth time, it might be time to step up your horror movie game. These five freaky films starring the likes of a demonic goat, a sinister spa in the Swiss Alps, and a forest-dwelling cult, are just the movies to give your September a screaming start.
5 The Boy
The Boy is a 2016 mystery-horror that follows Greta (Lauren Cohan) an American woman who escapes her abusive ex-boyfriend by traveling to England to take a position nannying for a young boy. Greta is hired by an eccentric elderly couple, the Heelshires, who are well known in their quaint village for shutting themselves away in their manor house after suffering a great tragedy. Their son Brahms, as it turns out, the very son Greta came to England to tend to, died in a fire decades earlier when he was just a child. But that doesn’t mean his parents are willing to let him go.
Greta is tasked with caring for a life-sized porcelain doll crafted in Brahms’ likeness, a doll his parents believe contains his spirit. Given a set of rigid rules to follow to care for him, like feeding him meals, Greta’s new gig is exactly as freaky and full-body-chill inducing as it sounds.
Greta spends her days largely in solitude in the sprawling Heelshire manor. With only the weekly visit of the grocery man Malcolm (Rupert Evans) to break up the long stretches of solitude Greta’s incredulity and boredom bleeds into anxiety. After violating the rules one time too many, Greta incurs Brahm’s wrath. Her possessions go missing, giggles echo through the halls, and banging and thumping noises assault the walls night and day. But don’t confuse The Boy’s Brahms with Chucky from Child’s Play or Annabelle from The Conjuring universe. This peculiar doll isn’t simply possessed by a disturbed child’s ghost . . . the truth is far more disturbing. The most powerful elements of The Boy are its knife-sharp tension and how deftly it taps into our emotions. Director William Brent Bell’s deliberate camera work and eerier set design make our anxieties about what’s lurking around the corner of the hallways rise. We too, feel the mounting dread and claustrophobia of the ancient, vacant house closing in. Just as Brahms’ parents refuse to let him go, Brahms refuses to let Greta go and we are here for every eerie moment.
4 Hush
Hush is a 2016 home invasion horror flick helmed by Oculus director Mike Flanagan. Inspired by classic slasher flicks, Hush sets itself apart by taking a sledgehammer to the final girl trope. Boldly subverting audience expectations while also playing out in a simple, straightforward narrative, Hush revolves around a deaf and mute young author Maddie Young (Kate Siegel of The Haunting of Hill House) who, while writing her newest novel one night, is trapped in her remote home by a murderous masked man. Filmed on a shoestring budget of just $1 million in a mere two locations with a scant cast of characters, Hush could’ve been a disaster. Instead, it’s a tightly-written and genuinely unsettling horror-thriller that’s alarmingly grounded in reality.
With an easy to follow plot, the characters are able to dominate the screen and drive everything along. The performances in Hush — especially Siegel’s as Maddie are phenomenal. Siegel’s onscreen presence makes the most of body language and a natural talent for expressing Maddie’s intense emotions without verbal dialogue. Her performance is so dynamite and exceptional that she alone carries the majority of the film.
Whenever a character is confined to one location for the duration of a movie, let alone a horror movie, it runs the risk of being excruciatingly slow and boring or bogged down by cliches. Hush avoids both with Siegel’s next gen horror heroine, and its effective use of sound, superb cinematography and minimalist lens.
One of the most extraordinary things about Hush is how Flanagan and Siegel make it a point to acknowledge Maddie’s Deafness in a way that doesn’t tokenize or victimize her. Her disability isn’t a death sentence and Hush is a surprisingly effective and a powerful showcase of her resiliency, resourcefulness, and her uncompromisingly will to survive.
A must-watch for anyone who’s even remotely a fan of the home invasion/stalker horror genre Hush is currently streaming exclusively on Netflix.
3 A Cure For Wellness
A Cure For Wellness is a 2016 art-house horror film from renowned director Gore Verbinski. The movie begins when Lockhart, (Dane DeHaan) an arrogant young Wall Street executive is dispatched to Switzerland to retrieve his firm’s CEO, Pembroke, from a remote spa in the Alps. Lockhart’s straightforward mission to drag Pembroke back to New York and go back to business as usual goes awry, though, when the man refuses to leave. Uncharacteristically evasive and nearly unrecognizable he insists that he’s unwell, and only by staying in the Institute and taking Dr. Heinrich Volmer’s (an especially suave Jason Isaacs) vitamin treatments and drinking the spa’s miraculous healing water can cure him.
When a near-fatal car accident lands Lockhart in the Institute himself, he becomes embroiled in the sinister and secretive world Dr. Volmer and his bizarre team of eerily detached nurses and doctors. What follows is two hours of a strikingly original narrative that’s unmistakably rife with a Lovecraftian and even Twilight Zone ambiance. Filmed on location in Germany, Luxembourg, and even an 11th-century German castle, as well as a German sanatorium from the 1890s, the show-stopping visuals and scene locations in the movie bolster up a cast of intriguing and memorable characters. Newcomer Mia Goth is especially exceptional in her role as Hannah–the youngest patient at the Institute. With her porcelain doll features, naivete, and seemingly preternatural perception, Goth’s Hannah is the perfect foil to DeHaahn’s cynical, jaded and increasingly frantic Lockhart.
A Cure For Wellness flips the script for medical horror films with its jaw-droppingly gorgeous cinematography and its antagonists. A Cure For Wellness ditches CGI in favor or human antagonists, and all of the disturbing and deranged quirks they have. Without fantastical camera-generated creatures prowling around a new sense of dread and realness sets in. There’s much to be said about horror films where the monsters aren’t the oft used digital demons but inarguably human especially such a visual-heavy film as this one. From its perilous character-driven and tension-filled plot to its stunning production design and camera work, the artistry in A Cure For Wellness is unlike any other psychology body and medical horror film out there.
2 The Ritual
The 2017 horror-mystery The Ritual is one of the most terrifying films currently on Netflix. Directed by David Bruckner this indie British horror follows four friends – Dom, Hutch, Luke, and Phil – who embark on a lads holiday to Sweden six months after the sudden and violent death of their friend Rob (Paul Reid).
An accident on their hike along the Kungsleden, or, “Kings Trail”, leads the men to take a detour through the middle of the dense, dark woods. What awaits the men are some of the most visually chilling sequences in recent horror. The wilderness is first filled with trees with ancient runes carved deeply into their trunks. Then abandoned cabins home to headless effigies, and, as they proceed even deeper, savaged bodies of animals suspended high above the forest floor, pierced on the skewer like tree branches and gutted, with piles of entrails seeping into the ground. Nauseating and visceral The Ritual doesn’t degrade into a bloody and gory slasher fest but instead balances sharply on the edge of reality and fantasy.
As the woods become increasingly claustrophobic the men are stalked by an unseen force. Haunted by nightmarish visions both day and night and suffering from exhaustion, starvation, and desperation the foursome soon find themselves being picked off one by one. Dominating the screen (and our attention) with its atmospheric setting, predator versus prey dynamic and flawed but compelling characters The Ritual amplifies our deeply rooted, instinctive human fears to new heights. It’s a harrowing psychological horror and monster movie that takes the supernatural and occult and weaves it with the horrors humanity is capable of. Fans of Midsommar and Ari Aster owe it to themselves to experience The Ritual!
1 The Witch
It’s 1630 when Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), her siblings, and her fervently religious parents are ousted from the safety and security of their colonial village because of their fanatical Puritan beliefs. Cast out to a rural, unsettled land surrounded by uncharted wilderness it’s not long before malevolent forces taint their idyllic homesteading life. One afternoon Thomasin’s infant brother is snatched away – sinking her mother, Katherine (Kate Dickey) into a deep depression and startling her father William (Ralph Ineson) into action.
When their crops begin to fail, their animals begin to sicken, and raging fevers sweep throughout the household Katherine, William, young Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) and toddler-aged twins Jonas and Mercy quickly determine a witch is among them lurking in the woods or their very house.
As much about the human condition as it as a slow burn supernatural horror, The Witch is an immersive and potent take on isolation, paranoia, and grief. Masterfully crafted by writer-director Robert Eggers‘ The Witch is a bone-chillingly atmospheric study in immersive, high-wire tension, and original storytelling. With attention-grabbing, intoxicating performances from the cast (and a goat!) punctuated by authentic 17th-century dialogue and stunning cinematography, this Puritan-era psychological horror trip is a modern-day movie masterpiece.