The best and scariest horror films to watch now on Max

Barbarian is the kind of film that leaves you speechless—which is why everyone will tell you to go into it knowing as little as possible. Zach Cregger (Whitest Kids U Know) directs from his own screenplay, revealing a talent for storytelling that horrifically marries the absurd and the relatable. A plain description of the events of this film—which won’t be spoiled here—might sound like a prank from a masterful comedian. But Cregger steadily ratchets an escalating sense of tension that pulls viewers into the absurdity, making them believe an outlandish heart-pounding scenario. In other words, his debut as a horror filmmaker is impressive.

Described sparingly, Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at an Airbnb in Detroit to discover that it’s been double-booked. Her surprise roommate Keith (Bill Skarsgård) seems nice, but his presence immediately unsettles Tess. Keith eventually charms her into lowering her guard, but an eerie wake-up call raises those defenses when she discovers a secret passageway burrowed into her rental’s basement. [Leigh Monson]

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Whatever its flaws as a film, a none-too-scary monster chief among them, The Blob is a uniquely compelling monster movie. The decision to shoot in Technicolor, largely on real locations in Pennsylvania, invests it with a high-’50s feel money couldn’t buy. The remarkable seriousness the actors, particularly method disciple Steve McQueen, bring to the material makes the film difficult to dismiss as mere camp. So does a finale that unites the entire town, teens and grown-ups alike, in an all-metaphors-aside fight against an alien threat, a moment that seems to confirm historian Bruce Eder’s description of The Blob as “like watching some kind of collective home movie of who we were and who we thought we were.” Or maybe it’s simply the best film ever to pit hot-rodding teens against a mass of silicone. It delivers the goods any way you look at it. [Keith Phipps]

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Anyone stumbling into The Cabin In The Woods because of its generic horror-movie title won’t have to wait long before they figure out they’ve come to the wrong place. Strolling through a lab, a pair of engineers played by Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins talk about weekend plans, baby-proofing, and minor marital woes before a third engineer (Amy Acker) informs them that “Stockholm just went south,” news they receive without much concern. After all, whatever just happened in Stockholm couldn’t happen to them. Whatever they’re talking about, it doesn’t feel like horror-movie business at all until the credits announce the title. Then it starts to feel like horror-movie business in a hurry. Cabin touches on everything from The Evil Dead and Friday The 13th to the mechanized mutilations of the Saw series while digging deeper into the Lovecraftian roots of horror in an attempt to reveal what makes the genre work. The answers prove unsettling, both within the world of the film and in their implications for the world outside it. It’s an exercise in metafiction that, while providing grisly fun, never distances viewers. And it’s entertaining, while asking the same question of viewers and characters alike: Why come to a place you knew all along was going to be so dark and dangerous? [Keith Phipps]

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Herk Harvey is said to have directed more than 400 movies in his three decades of filmmaking. Almost all of them, however, were educational and industrial training films, which he shot, on time and under budget, for the Centron Corporation in Lawrence, Kansas. The chief exception—and Harvey’s only feature—was 1962’s Carnival Of Souls, an eerie, low-budget horror yarn that’s become a bona fide cult favorite in the half-century since it was first released. The film, about a church organist (Candace Hilligoss) haunted by leering specters after a car accident, approximates the feeling of a nightmare that won’t end. Both David Lynch and George Romero have cited it as an influence on their own early, shoestring shockers, while the twist ending anticipated several decades of climactic rug pulls. But like a lot of cult classics, Carnival Of Souls—a recent inductee of the Criterion Collection—was unappreciated in its own time. Audiences ignored the movie, the distributor went bankrupt, and Harvey returned to his day job, never to make a full-length film again. Centron’s gain was our loss; surely, there were better uses of the director’s talents than warning kids about the dangers of cheating. [A.A. Dowd]

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As an exercise in classical scare tactics, delivered through an escalating series of primo setpieces, The Conjuring is often supremely effective. Set in the early ’70s, an era [James] Wan evokes through careful period detail and a heavy coat of “look, it’s the past” sepia, the film dives into the real-life case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, married paranormal investigators whose biggest claim to fame was the Amityville incident. The two are played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson and are introduced via an on-the-job prologue. (Wan gets bonus points for opening on the dead, fixed eyes of the world’s creepiest doll.) Following a thunderously portentous title card, which strains to position The Conjuring as this era’s answer to The Exorcist, the focus shifts to parents Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor, who move their family of seven into a roomy Rhode Island farmhouse. The subsequent supernatural happenings—slammed doors, rearranged belongings, yanked limbs—are nothing audiences haven’t seen before, but Wan stages them for maximum heart-in-throat suspense. By tracking his camera through the entire home early on, he can play on viewers’ familiarity with the space. And he refuses to show a fearsome bedroom specter, opting instead to train his lens on the terrified preteen who can see it, pledging his allegiance to the power of suggestion. [A.A. Dowd]

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The most noticeable difference with Evil Dead Rise compared to the previous films is the setting: After four outings in the woods, the body, as it were, of Evil Dead Rise takes place in a condemned Los Angeles high-rise. (There is a slightly distracting framing device that does have a cabin in the middle of nowhere.) As with the 2013 Evil Dead, there is no Ash in sight, not even a cameo from Campbell, who was the heart and soul of the franchise. So the new film feels more like a sequel to the remake than part of the canonical Raimi films. It’s hard to quantify, but the amount of fake blood spilled this time around certainly feels like a record for the franchise, which is quite an accomplishment. If you have even the slightest queasiness at the sight of gallons of spurting blood or outlandish mutilations or, toward the end, a grotesque multi-limbed, demonic hybrid of what were once characters we cared about ... you should definitely give this a pass. But for fans of the franchise, Evil Dead Rises marks a welcome return to the seamless blend of humor and genuine scares and creepiness that Raimi created 42 years ago. [Andy Klein]

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When it was released on American screens, Georges Franju’s elegant 1960 horror film Eyes Without A Face was re-titled The Horror Chamber Of Dr. Faustus and paired with something called The Manster, the macabre tale of a half-man/half-beast with two heads. Beyond the fact that Franju’s film includes neither a horror chamber nor a villain named Dr. Faustus, the double feature must have seemed curious to the drive-in crowd, who had to wonder what these two films could possibly have in common. Yet Eyes Without A Face owes more to the American horror tradition than to French art cinema, which was slow to acknowledge the genre’s legitimacy, much less its potential. Caught between cultures, the film was greeted with scandal in its home country and mistreatment in the U.S., but it endures as a gorgeous fusion of opposing sensibilities, a lyrical monster movie with visceral thrills and moments of unforgettable visual poetry. [Scott Tobias]

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There’s a scene about halfway through The Exorcist, the highest-grossing film of 1973, where Father Damien Karras pauses mid-prayer. Karras is a Jesuit priest, but he’s also a psychiatrist, employed by Georgetown University to counsel the other priests. An actress named Chris MacNeil has come to him, desperate. Something is wrong with MacNeil’s daughter. MacNeil thinks that maybe she’s possessed, even though she knows that seems impossible. Karras says that, if he were to give anyone an exorcism, he’d “have to get them in a time machine and get them back to the 16th century.” But Karras meets this girl, Regan, and something is definitely wrong.

In church, thinking about all this, Karras gives the liturgy of the Eucharist, and he pauses for just a second. Something crosses his face. In that heartbeat, while talking about the body and blood of Christ, Karras seems to recognize something about Catholicism—about its connection to some ancient druidic barbarism. He seems to decide that only ancient mysterious good can combat ancient mysterious evil. Right away, he goes to his Church superiors and recommends an exorcism… [Tom Breihan]

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Like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to malevolent life, Häxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages remains a silent-era stunner of profane imagery and feverish socio-historical commentary. Danish director Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film (co-financed by a Swedish production company) combines animation, non-fiction, and fictional elements to investigate the history of witchcraft, and the persecution of women over the course of centuries. That topic is given gloriously demented visual life by Christensen, who drenches his black-and-white vignettes in dark shadows, brimstone fire and smoke, and all manner of unholy sights, from grave robbing and cannibalism to the Devil’s worshippers pledging allegiance to their horned master by kissing his naked ass. [Nick Shager]

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Of all the blood-curdling images conjured up by Hereditary, the most traumatically terrifying new horror movie in ages, one sticks out as particularly definitive: Toni Collette, face twisted into a grotesque grimace of fear, staring off screen at a ghastly something we’ll soon have the bad luck of laying eyes on too. Her recurring expression of fright and pain is more than just a perfect mirror, reflecting back the audience’s own mounting distress. It also captures, in shuddery microcosm, the tactics of this relentless, ingenious shocker, the way it builds its haunted house on a foundation of raw and ugly emotion. The real horror—a tempest of unspoken, unspeakable feeling—lurks behind the safer, faker kind, enhancing every macabre funhouse moment. [A.A. Dowd]

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1977’s House is a classic of what writer Chuck Stevens calls “le cinéma du WTF?!,” and it’s one of our favorites of the genre here at The A.V. Club. (We even inducted it into the New Cult Canon a few years back.) Written by director Nobuhiko Obayashi based on one of his young daughter’s nightmares, House is like an episode of Scooby-Doo directed by Richard Lester while he was utterly zonked out on psychedelics. Or maybe it’s like a ghost story told around the campfire by a precocious preteen who’s also out of her mind on psychedelics. You know what, maybe just watch the trailer. [Katie Rife]

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Insidious makes up in old-fashioned tension what it sometimes lacks in originality. Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne star as a typical suburban couple, moving into a spacious suburban fixer-upper with their two young sons. There are early signs that the house is haunted—a misplaced book here, a creaky floorboard there—but nothing too serious until their eldest child falls from a ladder in the attic and drops unaccountably into a coma. When the comatose boy returns home, the terror amplifies with each day, getting so bad that Wilson and Byrne resolve to move. Yet the hauntings continue unabated, prompting them to invite an exorcist (Lin Shaye) and her two bungling assistants (Angus Sampson and Whannell) to cast out the demons. Director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell are not seeking to reinvent the tropes that have served haunted-house movies for decades, but they invest them with a deranged energy that’s both bracing and silly. [Scott Tobias]

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Watching the big-screen version of It only emphasizes how strange Stephen King’s novel really is. Adapting a more than 1,000 page book into a feature film—or half of it, as director Andrés Muschietti has done here—is a daunting task in and of itself, let alone a novel that features a cosmic turtle and an immortal shape-shifting clown who feeds off of the fear of children. In adapting It for the screen, writers Chase Palmer, Gary Dauberman, and Cary Fukunaga (the latter of whom was also attached to direct at one point) have made some significant changes from King’s book. Some are for the better and some are for the worse, but they’re all in the service of conventional three-act storytelling… [Katie Rife]

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Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 anthology film Kwaidan (the title translates simply as Ghost Stories) isn’t the kind of movie you watch when you want to be scared out of your wits. None of its four tales of the supernatural goes for the jugular, and several of them deliberately telegraph their chilling conclusion, undermining any suspense. Kobayashi, who adapted all four from collections of Japanese folk tales assembled by Lafcadio Hearn, expected local audiences to be familiar with the basic narratives, the same way that an American audience would know what’s coming in a filmed version of, say, “The Hook.” What makes Kwaidan singular is the combination of Kobayashi’s almost maddeningly patient, methodical approach to drama (as exemplified by 1962’s Harakiri, also available via Criterion) and his expressionistic experiments with color, sound, and theatrical artifice. [Mike D’Angelo]

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James Wan is a conductor of fear, and in more ways than one. Watch Insidious or The Conjuring, and it’s easy to picture the director standing in front of the screen as though it were an orchestra, baton in hand… Wan’s new movie, Malignant, is more ride than symphony. But it’s a ride to remember. The film returns its director to his original genre wheelhouse after a stint in the CGI waters of comic-book cinema. The opening frames make that lurch back onto land literal, as we skim the surface of a choppy sea to find a surely haunted hospital looming on the cliffside above like a Transylvanian manor. Over the two hours that follow, Wan will riffle through his bag of tricks with a renewed sense of diabolical purpose: zooming through peepholes, leering from the inside of washing machines, ripping down hallways, pushing invasively into the pale faces of his actors. When a gust of wind blows back the curtain of an open window, revealing the towering specter it was previously concealing, you can almost see the superimposed skeleton grin of the director, cackling through his rudimentary but expertly timed gag. [A.A. Dowd]

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A soapy, surreal, serial drama co-created by Hill Street Blues veteran Mark Frost and film director David Lynch, Twin Peaks arrived on network television like an atom bomb, debuting April 8, 1990, and putting the question “Who killed Laura Palmer?” on the lips of tens of millions of people. Almost inconceivably, 14 months later the show went out with a whimper, euthanized by ABC with a bundled two-episode send-off following a shuffling of time-slots and a hiatus of nearly two months. The series was a supernova, and it left the medium of television changed forever.

Why, then, did Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, arriving in theaters less than two and a half years (a mere blink of the eye in the pre-internet era) after its progenitor’s unlikely takeover of mainstream culture, land with such a thud—commercially, and especially critically?

The brilliant, ahead-of-its-time film, celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2022, has taken a long and winding road to redemption, both within Lynch’s larger canon and among fans of Twin Peaks, which of course was continued with 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return. [Brent Simon]

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A cost-effective merging of The Strangers, Straw Dogs, and the original Scream, Adam Wingard’s You’re Next adds a bracing dose of eccentricity to the home-invasion thriller. What the film lacks in originality it mostly makes up for in personality—a quality fatally lacking from too many contemporary extreme-horror offerings. Written by Simon Barrett, another purveyor of micro-budget carnage, You’re Next boasts a sometimes-uneasy blend of comedy and horror. It’s fun to laugh at co-star Joe Swanberg still talking shit with an arrow sticking out of his back, but what of a mother sobbing over the death of her youngest daughter? The film’s true strength lies not in its gallows humor, but in how it both plays to and subverts expectations: Though the big twist arrives not a moment too soon, right around the time that Wingard has exhausted his basic scenario, there’s plenty of pleasure in anticipating some of the more inevitable money shots—as when, for a grisly example, one character gets a running start on her own demise. And what did Chekhov say about a booby trap introduced in the second act? [A.A. Dowd]

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Subtitled “A New England Folktale,” The Witch could be seen as an origin story of American fanaticism—one of the many tall tales that might have inspired a group of young girls to start pointing fingers at their friends and neighbors. Just as easily, however, given the film’s self-advertised stabs at historical accuracy, one could read this singular shocker as something even more disturbing: a kind of fright-flick answer to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, presenting a revisionist national history in which true evil exists and religious hysteria is the proper response to it. That’s a lot of freight, perhaps, to put on a movie co-starring a demonic ram. But The Witch, like The Exorcist before it, invites serious engagement; to question its implications—historical and religious—is to acknowledge that this is not just some run-of-the-mill exploitation of superstitious fears. As straight horror, The Witch is something special, transporting audiences to a bygone era that would look plenty frightening even without the paranormal activity that engulfs it. [A.A. Dowd]

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