Crawl (2011)
Champion swimmer Kaya Scodelario goes to make sure her Florida Man dad Barry Pepper is taking shelter from a gnarly hurricane, only to be confronted with a house full of hungry alligators. French director Alexandre Aja (High Tension, Piranha 3D) delivers the goods in this toothy crowd-pleaser.
The Ghoul (2016)
A London cop feigns mental illness in order to investigate a psychologist he suspects of murder…or does he? Or is he the victim of an occult conspiracy? This ultra-low budget 2016 effort offers no easy answers, but it does present a remarkably sustained tone of subtle unreality that steadily grows to subsume both the protagonist and the viewer in horrifying insanity.
Midsommar (2019)
Grieving after the death of her family, Florence Pugh follows her boyfriend and his mates on a getaway to idyllic rural Sweden, where she and they find themselves at the mercy of a pagan cult. The thing is, submitting to the cult’s strange ways may be a better option than the emotional trauma of life in the modern world. A kind of daylight take on The Wicker Man, the second film by Ari Aster sees him flexing the already impressive chops displayed in Hereditary, giving us a visually striking, queasily disturbing and shockingly violent slice of folk horror.
The Monster Squad (1987)
A gaggle of middle school monster fans find themselves responsible for saving the world when Dracula and the rest of the Universal Monsters gang (Wolfman, The Mummy, Gillman and Frankenstein’s monster) try to bring about The End of All Things. Director Fred Dekker and writer Shane Black deliver a loving tribute to classic horror movies.
