The Sonata (2018)
A film where a violinist is drawn in to the mystery of a piece of classical music with occult properties, this is a classy and well-made production above the mill of the average horror film
We Are Zombies (2023)
A zombie comedy from the Quebecois trio who were responsible for Turbo Kid, this takes place in a world where zombies are less a horde than an annoyance who have been relegated to the fringes of society
Miss Zombie (2013)
A remarkable little Japanese zombie film about a family who adopt a zombie maid. This is shot kitchen sink style and becomes a study in the way her blank presence begins to affect everyone around her
Influencers (2025)
Influencer with Cassandra Naud as a psycho who targets and then impersonates social media influencers was a modest hit, filled with a series of sharp whiplash twists. This is a sequel
Hoppers (2026)
The 30th film from Pixar, a strange take on Avatar where a young conservationist enters a robotic beaver body in order to venture out among the animals. Directed with a good deal of likeably snappy humour
Exit 8 (2025)
Enigmatic adaptation of a Japanese videogame where the protagonist is trapped inside a railway platform tunnel and must walk through the same corridor that repeats itself with minute variations to find the exit
From the Dead of Night (1989)
A tv mini-series where Lindsay Wagner has a near-death experience and is then haunted by people come back from the dead to kill her. From the author of The Howling
Relentless (1989)
A popular thriller in its day about a cop tracking a serial killer (played by Brat Packer Judd Nelson). This prefigures The Silence of the Lambs in some interesting ways. Several sequels followed
Night Watch (1973)
Called the only horror film Elizabeth Taylor ever appeared in (although one would dispute that somewhat), this feels like a Hammer psycho-thriller made with an A-list cast
A Knight’s War (2025)
An unusual, visually fascinating fantasy film where a knight enters into the realm of demons to save a girl, while being granted a talisman that allows him to continually be killed and resurrected
Darken (2017)
A film that comes with an interesting sounding premise where a woman ventures through a doorway into a labyrinth world of interconnected rooms and ends up in a fight against the ruling theocracy
Sweeney Todd: Slice & Dice (2025)
Another version of the Sweeney Todd legend. Rather than a musical, this is a straight horror version, produced on low-budget. Here we learn that Sweeney is on a mission to kill off members of the aristocracy
Bulk (2025)
Ben Wheatley has gained a cult following in recent years with films like Kill List and High Rise. Here he sets out to make a deliberately low-tech multiverse film that becomes a real head-scratcher
Witchboard (2024)
A remake of the 1980s horror Witchboard. The original was just a VHS release and here is given a better budgeted workover, but disappears among a host of ouija-titled films of recent years
The Blood Rose (1970)
Influenced by the classic Eyes Without a Face, this is a work of French Gothic about an aristocrat trying to find the right woman to use her face for his disfigured wife
Ditto (2000)
A South Korean film that came out around the same time as Frequency and has an almost identical premise about two people who start talking by radio while separated in time by twenty years.
Jekyll & Hyde (2021)
An enterprising low-budget adaptation of the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story, which has been filmed numerous times. This offers the most radical spin on the story of any adaptation to date
Timecut (2024)
A time travel film produced by Christopher Landon that has a number of similarities to Totally Killer in which a girl travels back in time to 2003 to prevent her sister being murdered by a serial killer
Omni Loop (2024)
A timeloop film with a difference where Mary-Louise Parker takes pills that help her go back and relive the previous five days as she seeks to find ways to travel back even further
Chain Reactions (2024)
A documentary that interviews five people, including Stephen King and Takashi Miike, about the influence that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had on their lives. The results are fascinating and illuminating
Vicious (2025)
Bryan Bertino has become a Must Watch director ever since The Strangers. Here he makes a film where Dakota Fanning receives a cursed box and will die unless she places several requested items inside
Rome 2072 (1983)
Lucio Fulci was a cult Italian horror director. This was the only occasion that Fulci visited the SF film, a low-budget ripoff of Rollerball by way of Mad Max featuring futuristic gladiatorial games
Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders (2006)
A True Crime film based on the Hillside Stranglers case, or at least the arrest of one of the killers. From a director who makes True Crime films but throws out the facts and makes up his own story about what happened
The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1962)
Third of the German thrillers of the 1960s featuring the criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse, a remake of the 1933 film where Mabuse continues his criminal schemes via mind control despite being confined to an asylum
The Dogs (2025)
Canadian actress Valerie Buhagiar directs a film about a mother and son fleeing an abusive relationship. The surprise is beyond the film’s arthouse ambitions is that it is a regular ghost story
A Breed Apart (2025)
A surprisingly good film about social media influencers trapped on an island of rabid killer dogs. This plants tongue considerably in cheek and welcomely treats its influencers with some sarcastic amusement
We’re All Gonna Die (2024)
A giant alien tentacle has appeared in the sky and randomly teleports to different locations. This concerns two oddball characters caught in one of these shifts and the quirky road journey they embark upon
The Bride! (2026)
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s reinterpretation of The Bride of Frankenstein is the first spectacularly bad film of the 2020s. Jessie Buckley gives an absurdly unrestrained performance and the film’s tone veers all over the place
In the Grip of Terror (2025)
Scottish director Lawrie Brewster, a promising newcomer on the genre horizon, has obtained the rights to revive the Amicus Films name and conducts a strong homage to the studio’s signature anthology film
Before I Hang (1940)
Boris Karloff plays a mad scientist who creates an experimental formula to reverse aging and injects himself with it, only for it to turn into a split personalitied killer
Picture Mommy Dead (1966)
Bert I. Gordon, best known for his giant bug films of the 1950s, makes a torrid psycho-thriller about a young girl being cheated of her inheritance as people around her are being killed possibly by the ghost of her mother (Zsa Zsa Gabor)
Animals (2009)
Adaptation of a novel by Splatterpunk authors Skipp and Spector, this sits halfway between being a monster movie and an erotic thriller. Disowned by its director who hides behind a pseudonym
Hubcap (2021)
A film about a small town affected by a killer hubcap. This gives strong vibes of Quentin Dupieux’s hilarious Rubber, although surprisingly enough this plays the concept seriously
Pedro Paramo (2024)
A standout adaptation of a classic work of Mexican literature in the Magical Realist tradition. This creates an incredibly haunted mood as it follows a man’s quest for his past to a town that seems to exist inside a twilight zone
Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025)
An extraordinarily stylised homage to the 1960s spy movie, which strips everything down to a series of provocative, stylised high-end fashion poses. The visuals in the film are quite extraordinary
Dust Bunny (2025)
A completely indescribable film about a young girl who befriends a hitman and asks him to protect her from an imaginary monster. The result falls somewhere between Leon/The Professional and a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film
The Unwanted (2014)
An interesting adaptation of the classic lesbian vampire story Carmilla. This modernises and relocates it to Middle America and plays the vampirism with a psychological ambiguity
The Phantom Gunslinger (1970)
A mind-boggling oddity – a slapstick comedy Western where there seems no limit on how nutty things are allowed to go, including characters venturing to Heaven and Hell
Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story (2007)
A documentary about William Castle, the horror director of the 1950s/60s who specialised in sensationalistic promotional gimmicks. This does an excellent job in telling Castle’s story and those behind his films
Spiders on a Plane (2024)
From prolific producer Scott Chambers, a film that describes itself perfectly in the title. This follows the formula established by Snakes on a Plane and has regular and giant spiders amok on board a plane flight
Spider in the Attic (2021)
From incredibly prolific B-budget British producer/director Scott Jeffrey, a film about a radio broadcaster who ventures to the home of a scientist to find it overrun by genetically engineered spiders
Easter Evil (2024)
There have been a growing number of Easter horror films in recent years. This is perhaps the worst of them all. It concerns a killer Easter bunny and is a film that appears to have been entirely ad libbed in a hotel room
Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)
James Cameron makes a third venture into the world of Pandora. The question is whether he finds any new territory to explore. What you cannot deny is that he creates a pretty and absorbing picture out of it all
Send Help (2026)
Sam Raimi returns with a desert island drama but things soon get twisted. Think Cast Away by way of Misery – but where Annie Wilkes gets to be the sympathetic heroine
Magic Cop (1990)
One of the crazy Hong Kong blends of supernatural and slapstick, featuring a detective who employs supernatural methods to fight drug dealers that are using the resurrected dead as couriers
Painted Skin (1992)
A Hong Kong supernatural fantasy that has been made as a copy of the ground-changing A Chinese Ghost Story. The last film directed the legendary King Hu, the man who created the Wu Xia film
The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead (2018)
This is a Russian dark fantasy that has been misleadingly titled as a mermaid film in English release. It in fact concerns an avenging rusalka water spirit who haunts a small lake
The Tune (1992)
The first film from the inimitable Bill Plympton, a work of bizarre surrealist animation and strange satiric transformations as a man sets out on a journey to find the final line for a tune
Silent Rage (1982)
A Chuck Norris horror film! One of his earlier films where Chuck is pitted against a psycho who is resurrected from the dead and becomes a near-invincible killing machine
Abraham’s Boys (2025)
Adaptation of a Joe Hill story where Van Helsing has relocated to California and is trying to teach his sons about the art of vampire hunting as his wife becomes infected by a vampire bite
Scream 7 (2026)
The Scream series drags itself for another sequel but at least performs a course correction by bringing back original screenwriter Kevin Williamson in the director’s chair, along with appearances of many past cast
Scarlet (2025)
Mamoru Hosoda conducts the bizarre notion of an anime version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is a Hamlet that Shakespeare would barely recognise, following a heroine as she makes a journey across the afterlife
The Savage Bees (1976)
There has very rarely been a good killer bee movie. This is one exception, a directorial effort from no less than the creator of Mission: Impossible that gains its effectiveness by using real rather than optical bees
Locusts (2005)
A formula Syfy Channel film variant on the bugs gone amok film, starring Lucy Lawless as a government official who fights to stop a genetically-engineered swarm of locusts miles wide
Bigfoot (1970)
The public obsession with Bigfoot grew out of a piece of amateur film shot in 1967 purporting to show a Bigfoot in the world and led to a spate of films and throughout the 1970s. This has the distinction of being the first ever Bigfoot film
Cyborg 2087 (1966)
The film that inspired The Terminator! Michael Rennie plays a cyborg who travels back in time to prevent a machine-dominated future coming about, while being hunted by two killer androids sent back to stop him
Misery (1990)
A classic Stephen King adaptation from Rob Reiner with writer James Caan imprisoned by psycho fan Kathy Bates, who gives a terrifying performance that won her an Academy Award
Cannibal Comedian (2023)
A film that fairly much sells you in its deliberately ridiculous title concept – a cannibal who sets out to find success as a stand-up comedian.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2025)
A completely mad and all over the place film with Sam Rockwell as a time traveller (or madman) arrived at a diner to recruit six people on a mission to save the world from the development of an evil A.I.
War Machine (2026)
The military action film is a genre that does nothing for me. But this does have a furious, survival-oriented pace as it pits Alan Ritchson and a detachment of soldiery up against an alien killer robot
Ogre (2008)
A Syfy Channel film about the present-day discovery of a lost, still extant 19th Century village that has conducted a deal to preserve themselves by annually sacrificing someone to an ogre
The Secret Village (2013)
A low-budget film about a journalist’s modern-day investigation into a secret village located near Salem, Massachusetts that results in paranoia and suspicious treatment by the locals
Love Me Deadly (1972)
An obscure but fascinating 1970s film where Mary Wilcox is an heiress who has an obsession with necrophilia who is then drawn into the activities of a strange cult
Spare Parts (1979)
A German thriller about a newlywed couple in the US where the husband is abducted and the wife’s attempts to find him take her into the midst of an illicit organ harvesting operation
The Melies Mystery (2021)
A documentary that offers the best discussion of the life of Georges Melies to date. Much of the film is focused on the recent rediscovery of a complete trove of negatives of Melies’s film
Dangerous Animals (2025)
At variance to the assorted other films about survival in shark-infested waters, this features Jai Courtney in a completely crazed performance as a serial killer who feeds his victims to sharks
Beast of War (2025)
From the director of the Wyrmwood films, an Australian-made film about a group of soldiers during World War II who become stranded in a sea of sharks following a shipwreck
In the Blink of an Eye (2026)
Former Pixar director Andrew Stanton, known for Finding Nemo, Wall-E and John Carter, makes a cross-historical work in the vein of Cloud Atlas that takes place between prehistory, the present and the future
The Strangers: Chapter 3 (2026)
The concluding chapter in a desultory trilogy of films based on the eerie home invasion classic The Strangers. The surprise is that this ends up being the best of the three films
Love Object (2003)
This could be Lars and the Real Girl the horror version where a sex doll comes to life (maybe?) and makes Desmond Harrington’s life a misery. An outlandish premise and a film that does become quite twisted
The Doll (1962)
A strange and fascinating Swedish film about a lonely security guard’s obsessive love affair with a mannequin, which duly comes to life. Or does it? The film sits in a place of ambiguity whether he is imagining it or not
School Spirit (1985)
In the vein of frat house comedies of the era like Animal House and Porky’s, this is an embarrassingly cringey film about a teen who is killed while trying to get laid and insists on lingering about to finish the job
Amphibious 3D (2010)
A film from genre regular Brian Yuzna that takes place in Indonesia with people at siege on a fishing platform as it comes under attack by a sea monster. One of the films made in the 3D process following the huge success of Avatar
The Sudbury Devil (2023)
Fascinating film set during Puritan witchery as men travel into the woods to confront a witch, this has many similarities to Robert Eggers’ The Witch: A New-England Folktale. Made by an historian who makes everything authentic to the era
Hallow Road (2025)
Locke as a ghost story. A really good film that takes place during a car journey as a married couple race off to help their daughter who has had an accident. A tight, twist-filled script with some great performances
Lord of the Flies (2026)
A tv mini-series remake of William Golding’s classic novel about a planeload of schoolboys stranded on a desert island and their descent into barbarism. This gets the essence of the book with a raw primality that makes for exciting viewing
Return to Silent Hill (2026)
Silent Hill was one of the best videogame film adaptations and created a genuinely uncanny atmosphere. That film’s director returns to the franchise here with more of the same but misses the mark
Battle of the Stars (1978)
The success of Star Wars saw a host of copies made over the next few years. This was one of several low-budget Italian space opera knockoffs of this period, featuring invading aliens from Ganymede
2 + 5 Mission Hydra (1966)
An Italian space opera where a professor and associates are abducted after finding an alien craft. The film’s main distinction was being redubbed in English under the title Star Pilot to be released as a copy of Star Wars
The Curse of the Clown Motel (2023)
This was the second film set around the real-life Clown Motel in Nevada. Despite which this is not another killer clown films and is focused around the awakening of vengeful Native American spirits
The Owl Service (1969-70)
A British children’s tv mini-series about a mysterious dinner service that presages the playing out of a Welsh myth, this is seen as one of the original influences on the Folk Horror genre
Hanky Panky (2023)
A gonzo comedy about an alien invasion that takes place during a getaway at a remote cabin by assorted comically dysfunctional characters including a man who is accompanied by a talking handkerchief
The Home (2025)
A ridiculous film where petty criminal Pete Davidson is given a job at a retirement home only to discover that sinister activities are occurring all around him. From the director of The Purge films
The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024)
Rather good New Zealand made horror film set in a geriatric home with Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow engaged in a series of psychological games as a stroke-impaired Rush tries to stop a murderous Lithgow
28 Years Later … The Bone Temple (2026)
A follow-up to 28 Years Later …, made even before the first film was released. This gives a deeper exploration of the character of Dr Kelson and proves a surprisingly good complement to its predecessor
Mercy (2026)
Director Timur Bekmambetov makes a film in the Screenlife process where the screen becomes a computer screen. Set a near future L.A. where the judicial system has been replaced by an A.I
Into the Mirror (2003)
A South Korean entry in the fad for Asian ghost stories that were popular in the 2000s following the successes of Ring and Ju-on/The Grudge. This later underwent remake as Alexandre Aja’s Mirrors
Hansel and Gretel (2007)
Confusingly, despite the title, this is not an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairytale but a cryptic and often baffling South Korean horror film about people trapped by children at a sinister house in the forest
Repligator (1996)
A film about a teleportation experiment that has the unforeseen effect of turning men into woman and then into human-alligator hybrids. We are in extremely bad movie stakes here
Tales from the Hood 3 (2020)
Tales from the Hood was a horror anthology made by African American filmmakers that worked familiar horror themes in around race issues. It has developed a small cult reputation. This was the second of two sequels
Margaux (2022)
Group of young people get away to a smarthome for the weekend, which then tries to kill them. We have had a spate of films of recent about smarthome A.I.’s run amok. This is the possibly the most ridiculous
Cells At Work (2024)
A rather hilarious live-action manga adaptation that depicts the inner workings of the human body in terms of a series of talking blood cells. Not dissimilar to the US-made Osmosis Jones
Primate (2025)
Johannes Roberts is a director that has been producing some solid work since the 2000s. Here he makes a film about a rabid killer chimpanzee that ratchets up some great tension
We Bury the Dead (2024)
The zombie film underwent a major revival in the 2000s but by the mid-2020s a horde of low-budget copycats has exhausted most creative possibilities. This shows there is still some originality to be found
Dead Dudes in the House (1989)
Known under various titles including Dead Dudes in the House and The House on Tombstone Hill, a film about a group of young people who go to renovate a house but find themselves trapped inside being killed
Farmhouse (2008)
A film about a couple who break down on a country road and seek help at a sinister farmhouse, before everything turns into Torture Porn territory. And then things get weird
The Lost Missile (1958)
A film from the heyday of Cold War hysteria made not long after the launch of the first ICBM about a mysterious hypersonic missile that is possibly of alien origin that terrorises the US
The Whispering Star (2015)
The very strange Japanese director Shion Sono makes a film about an intergalactic package delivery android, although this is anything but a regular SF film. Filmed in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone.
Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970)
Mario Bava essentially created the giallo film. Here he returns to the genre and delivers an entry about an man obsessed with killing brides that comes filled with exquisitely stylish surroundings and directorial set-pieces
Osiris (2025)
Soldiers in the middle of a warzone are abducted by aliens and wake up aboard an alien facility. An interesting set up that dissolves into massive amounts of artillery fire and action