Crimson Peak
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Guillermo del Toro offers a masterful take on vintage gothic horror with Crimson Peak. Del Toro channels the Brontë sisters and Hammer horror productions in equal measure with this ghostly romance set in the late 19th century. Mia Wasikowska plays a young heiress swept off her feet by an English baronet (Tom Hiddleston). He marries her and brings her to his crumbling mansion, which is full of dangerous secrets, most held by his cruel sister (Jessica Chastain).
His House
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A pair of refugees from South Sudan are haunted by traumatic memories as well as an evil spirit from their homeland when they settle into government housing in London. His House blends traditional haunted house spookiness with a meditation on trauma and displacement, putting an engaging (and disturbing) new spin on a familiar kind of story.
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Hush
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Before creating the popular Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, Mike Flanagan directed the tense home-invasion thriller Hush, about a deaf woman (Kate Siegel) fighting off an implacable intruder. Flanagan ingeniously incorporates the main character’s deafness into the suspense, placing the audience in her shoes as she fights for her life.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
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Starting with its eerie title, writer-director Oz Perkins’ I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House creates a sustained mood of discomfort. Ruth Wilson plays a live-in nurse caring for an elderly writer in a house that may be the site for actual tragic events depicted in the author’s most famous novel.
Both the nurse and the ghost of a woman who died in the house drift through the mostly empty rooms, their fates become intertwined as Perkins immerses the audience in an atmosphere of languid dread.
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It Follows
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One of the scariest things in horror movies is a danger that is unrelenting and inexplicable, and that’s what the characters face in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. Young people pass along a curse via sexual contact, and whoever is the current recipient is stalked by a silent, slow-moving presence that takes the form of strangers or sometimes familiar faces. Mitchell creates an unsettling, off-kilter atmosphere, with the constant specter of death over his protagonists.
The Perfection
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Allison Williams and Logan Browning play dueling cellists in Richard Shepard’s twisty, over-the-top psychological horror movie The Perfection. Both Charlotte (Williams) and Lizzie (Browning) are students of the same strict and demanding teacher (Steven Weber), who provokes their increasingly violent rivalry. Shepard plays with expectations via multiple plot twists, keeping the audience guessing about the characters’ true relationships even as they torment each other mercilessly.
RELATED: The 10 Best Horror Movies on HBO Max in 2022
Piranha
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Although Netflix doesn’t feature the movie in its original 3D, Alexandre Aja’s Piranha still showcases plenty of old-school campiness. With just the right sense of its own absurdity, this B-movie remake about killer prehistoric fish delivers ample gore and nudity, as spring breakers at a lakeside resort in Arizona are gobbled up by newly unearthed creatures.
An all-star cast including Elisabeth Shue, Adam Scott, Christopher Lloyd, and Richard Dreyfuss brings a level of talent and enthusiasm that elevates the silliness.
Sweetheart
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Kiersey Clemons is the only person onscreen for most of Sweetheart‘s running time as the apparent lone survivor of a shipwreck who is stranded on a deserted island. Or is the island actually deserted? Director J.D. Dillard uses the looming threat of a monster from the deep to tell a story about a woman finding her reserves of inner strength and taking her power back.
Under the Shadow
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Set in the Iranian capital of Tehran during the 1980s, Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow combines the terror of living in a warzone with the terror of a supernatural menace. Navari creates a harrowing drama about warfare that’s also an eerie horror movie drawing on Middle Eastern folklore.
While her doctor husband is away serving in the military, Shideh (Narges Rashidi) stays in the city with her young daughter. They endure missile attacks as well as the possible presence of a djinn, an evil spirit that attaches itself to people via personal objects.
Unfriended
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Depicting an entire story solely via the images on a computer screen may sound like a ridiculous gimmick, but the clever, intricately designed horror movie Unfriended pulls it off with its basic but effective story about a group of teenagers targeted for revenge from beyond the grave. The movie perfectly captures the online lives of its characters while also delivering a satisfying and scary ghost story.
