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The Black Phone
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Two horror forces combine when director Scott Derrickson (Sinister) adapts Joe Hill’s short story The Black Phone. In suburban Denver in 1978, a serial killer known as the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) has been abducting local kids, and 13-year-old Finney Blake (Mason Thames) is his latest target.
Held captive in the Grabber’s basement, Finney discovers a phone that allows him to talk to the ghosts of the Grabber’s previous victims, giving him the strength and knowledge he needs to escape. Hawke makes for a menacing villain, and Thames bring earnest emotion to the coming-of-age story amid the horror.
Candyman
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Both a reboot and a sequel, the 2021 version of Candyman updates the story from the 1992 original while also continuing the saga of the title character. Originally played by Tony Todd, the Candyman is a hook-handed apparition who appears when someone says his name five times while looking in the mirror.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as a Candyman-obsessed artist whose ties to the killer go back to the first movie. Candyman is an embodiment of rage over centuries of racism and mistreatment, and the movie combines sharp social commentary with its visceral horrors.
Creepshow 2
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Although it’s not the horror classic of the first Creepshow, Creepshow 2 is a solid continuation of the anthology movies based on Stephen King stories. The segments here feature a wooden Native American statue come to life to seek vengeance; a mysterious slime creature terrorizing teens at a lake; and a woman tormented by the ghost of a man she accidentally killed with her car. “The Hitchhiker” is the strongest of those segments, but all three capture the vintage pulp-horror feel that King and George Romero established in the first movie.
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
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The sequel to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, Hellbound: Hellraiser II is actually the highlight of the long-running franchise, giving more screen time to Doug Bradley’s iconic villain Pinhead while also taking on a more surreal tone. It delves deeper into the horrifying hellscape inhabited by Pinhead and his fellow Cenobites, and showcases the dark, sadistic terrors they inflict on the victims who open the puzzle box known as the Lament Configuration.
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Night of the Living Dead
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The entire zombie genre owes its existence to George Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, which created the modern conception of zombies as shambling, flesh-eating corpses come back to life. The small-scale production is also a marvel of tension and ingenuity, trapping a handful of characters in a house as the zombie apocalypse rages around them.
Paranormal Activity
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Although it spawned a repetitive franchise and many tiresome imitators, the original Paranormal Activity is one of the strongest examples of found-footage horror. Director Oren Peli puts a new spin on a familiar haunted house story by setting it in a prefab suburban home and having his main characters document their supernatural investigations.
The mythology gets convoluted as the series goes on, but this first movie explores both domestic tension and demonic possession with equally unsparing effectiveness.
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A Quiet Place Part II
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Sci-fi horror sequel A Quiet Place Part II expands on the world of the first movie without losing the simple premise that made it such a massive unexpected success. Director and co-writer John Krasinski returns in a flashback as the patriarch of the Abbotts, who kept his family safe from the deadly—but blind—aliens in the first movie.
Following his death, his wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and their children leave the family compound, encountering new dangers but also renewed hope. Krasinski recreates many of the first movie’s thrills while finding new ways to build suspense around alien attacks.
Saint Maud
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The debut feature from filmmaker Rose Glass, Saint Maud focuses on the horrors of religious devotion. The title character (Morfydd Clark) is a nurse who’s experienced a spiritual awakening, and she takes a job caring for a wealthy, terminally ill former dance star (Jennifer Ehle). Maud attempts to convert her patient via any means necessary, and Clark conveys the startling intensity of her religious fervor. That fervor eventually turns deadly, in a startling and hauntingly beautiful climax.
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Suspiria
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The 2018 remake of Italian director Dario Argento’s cult classic Suspiria takes the story in an even more impressionistic, hallucinatory direction. The movie stars Dakota Johnson as a seemingly naïve young American who comes to study at a sinister dance school in Berlin. Director Luca Guadagnino creates a haunting movie about ambition, jealousy, and bizarre cult activity.
Train to Busan
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Korean filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho puts a new spin on the zombie genre in international blockbuster Train to Busan, which takes place almost entirely on a commuter train from Seoul to Busan as a zombie outbreak overcomes the passengers. It combines the propulsive, self-contained momentum of a Hollywood action movie with the suspense and gore of a zombie thriller.
