Sign up for Video Village, a new weekly newsletter in which David Sims unearths cinematic gems and brings readers into his movie obsession.
Horror has been a particularly vital playground in the movie world of late. As studios make fewer and fewer mid-budget dramas and comedies, major names such as Jordan Peele and Ari Aster have made inroads via low-budget horror. Recently, promising new filmmakers (along with some more established veterans) have come out with an especially exciting crop of movies in this genre. Because I haven’t written about many of them yet, here are my 10 favorite horror flicks from this year thus far, presented in reverse order.
10. Buffet Infinity (streaming on Shudder and AMC+)
This is one of the strangest entries I’ll be recommending, but it’s a fascinating movie to throw on at home. Simon Glassman’s debut film imitates the experience of a local TV broadcast, playing out as a series of commercials and news segments with an ’80s aesthetic. At first, it’s all cheap fuzzy graphics, tinny music, and useless-sounding products, but as the movie goes on, a plot begins to emerge—inexplicable events are happening in Westridge County, Alberta, where rival businesses work around a mysterious sinkhole within which something evil may lurk. It’s a bit of a challenge to latch on to, but if you can get on its wavelength, the creepy ending is very rewarding.
9. Hokum (streaming on Hulu and Disney+)
I have really enjoyed the work of the Irish horror-meister Damian McCarthy. His first two films, Caveat and Oddity, were low-budget tidbits of modern folk horror that were effective and spooky. Hokum has the same vibe on a slightly bigger scale, starring Adam Scott as a cynical writer who shacks up at a countryside hotel in Ireland to finish what he intends to be his final novel. Guess what? The hotel is haunted! But it’s haunted in a fun and peculiar way, with multiple beautifully designed scares built into its architecture. Although Hokum has one too many plots (there’s a whole strand of the protagonist’s backstory that should have been completely excised), the film has some truly creative thrills in its high-octane final act.
8. Obsession (streaming on Peacock)
I confess: The box-office phenomenon that is Obsession caught me by surprise this summer. The director, Curry Barker, who was previously known for his YouTube skits, has created a wily piece of horror with a darkly comic twist. The protagonist wishes his crush loved him more than anyone; quickly, that turns into a never-ending nightmare as she pursues him with monstrous intensity. The film works, I think, because Inde Navarrette’s performance as the supernaturally “obsessed” Nikki is so sympathetic, but I found the movie more unpleasant and discomforting than scary on my first viewing. It went on to make more than $500 million (roughly 500 times what it cost to produce) and will be getting a major Oscar campaign, so I probably owe it a second viewing.
7. It Ends (available for rent online)
I reviewed It Ends when it was released in August, and still think quite highly of it. It’s another low-budget indie that does an exceptional job stretching its dollar to maximize its scares, which are mostly of the existential sort. The film follows a group of friends who get stuck driving on a road they can’t get off of, frozen in a weird limbo that makes them all go mad in differing ways. Where some indies find innovative approaches to gore and others lean into shocking jump scares, It Ends sources terror from mounting dread and aimless uncertainty.
6. Exit 8 (streaming on Shudder and AMC+)
Liminal horror has become the latest trend in the genre, and video-game adaptations are also all the rage. The Japanese film Exit 8 delivers both, re-creating a well-received adventure game in which the player is trapped in an eerie, endlessly repeating subway station with no way out and a confusing puzzle to solve. Imposing a narrative on something so vague and mysterious can be challenging, but the director Genki Kawamura does that well, effectively using this bizarre scenario as a metaphor for his protagonist feeling stuck on a major life decision. Be warned, though—things get pretty yucky by the end.
5. Backrooms (streaming on HBO Max)
The most popular liminal-horror hit of the summer was the adaptation of a viral YouTube series from the distressingly young Kane Parsons (who was, no kidding, 20 years old when he made it). Backrooms was such a box-office success that studios are now scrambling to copy it, snapping up the rights to every spooky “creepypasta” video they can find. But I think the movie will not be so easily imitated; it’s effective because of Parsons’s incredible control of mood and tone through his production design and visual effects, throwing the viewer and his characters into weird, looping hallways and jumbled-together office spaces that feel like half-remembered dreams.
4. Resident Evil (in theaters now)
Even though this is yet another video-game adaptation, Resident Evil takes a big swing at the most famous horror-video-game intellectual property that exists. Zach Cregger (who has become a huge name in the horror genre) constructed a film that is intense, action-packed, and very creative with its CGI gore. But I like it most of all because it captures the sweaty experience of gaming, making its hero (played by Austin Abrams) a lovable avatar for any of us who’ve struggled through waves of zombie attacks on our consoles at home.
3. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (streaming on MUBI)
Jane Schoenbrun’s knowing satire is a horror movie about horror movies, particularly the ways that both corporate studios and devoted fans try to remake and reinterpret them for new generations. This film succeeds by never feeling too academic or self-reflexive, partly because of its sharp script and partly because of the outstanding chemistry between its leads: Hannah Einbinder, who plays a young filmmaker obsessed with a moribund slasher franchise, and Gillian Anderson as that franchise’s reclusive, retired lead actor.
2. Chronovisor (in select theaters now)
This movie has been the find of the year for me. It’s a bizarre debut from Jack Auen and Kevin Walker about an academic who stumbles across an odd urban legend in her research, a “time viewer” that allows the viewer to see events from the past (such as the Crucifixion). As she delves deeper and deeper into the writing on this topic, the texts she’s reading flash on-screen, along with snippets of videos; it’s like a found-footage movie, but most of the footage has been written down. (Trust me, it’s spookier than it sounds.) The ending is impossible to describe and a wonder to behold. The movie is touring around the country right now—if you can catch it in a cinema, I can guarantee a unique viewing experience.
1. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (streaming on Netflix)
For me, no horror movie has quite compared with the thrilling rush I got from seeing Nia DaCosta’s entry in the 28 Days Later series. The Bone Temple is a sequel to Danny Boyle’s excellent 28 Years Later, centering on that film’s best supporting character, a kindly doctor named Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who is cultivating a sculptural memorial to the Rage Virus’s victims decades after the pathogen turned Britain into a zombie apocalypse. The Bone Temple has some harrowing material (focused mainly on a roving gang torturing its way across the British Isles), but it’s also lovely and, in its hard-rock third act, genuinely rousing.
An Essay I Enjoyed
Music for the Movie-Brained
By Spencer Kornhaber
In the video, the 20-something Canadian wears a purple hoodie and wired earbuds to work out in a dimly lit Sheraton gym. No music-video freakiness happens—it’s not like the stationary bike turns into a Harley. But [Sophia] Stel just seems so blissed-out as she sweats to lyrics about being interesting and hot (“I’m tortured, you love it, you hate it / You think about me naked”). At the end, she bounds out into a beige hallway—her inner self changed, her outer world not.
The video helps explain how Stel earned the distinction of being one of the first artists signed to A24 Music. Yes, A24, as in the movie studio behind dozens of acclaimed indies, including Moonlight, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and this year’s mind-bending hits Backrooms and You Can See Everything. Since launching in 2012, A24 has become so revered that its branded baseball hats are now hipster totems. In 2025, the record label that it had previously used to distribute soundtracks started to sign singers with no apparent connections to its films. The studio’s press-shy leaders have maintained mystery about their intentions, but Stel’s music, at least, fits the larger trend that A24 has helped drive: a cultural rethinking of the meaning of cinematic.
Coming Attractions
Halloween week is among the slowest at the box office, as studios take a pass on trying to compete with the holiday. But there are still fun releases out there—Clayface, Other Mommy, The Devils—for viewers looking to catch up on spooky stuff. That said, the in-theater experience people seem to be seeking out the most right now is Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s outstanding documentary, You Can See Everything, which has reached a rare level of saturation among my casual moviegoing pals: Parents at my daughter’s school are hiring babysitters to go see it, the highest compliment one can pay. The film even saw its box-office gross go up last weekend (partly because it expanded to more screens), and that trend will likely continue, opening up the possibility that it’ll be the first documentary nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, a milestone that its distributor, A24, is certainly gunning for.
Meanwhile, the Skydance merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. continues to have the expected shrinking effects on the already shrinking world of big studios. The company is mandating five days in office and offering voluntary buyouts as it reorganizes into a new conglomerate (coming on the heels of Netflix cutting around 1,000 jobs earlier this month).
What Else I’m Watching
- There aren’t many new releases to recommend during Halloween week, but there are plenty of smaller indie titles getting released in more theaters that are worth a look. Last week I shouted out Wildwood and Wicker. This week I want to highlight The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, a finely observed New York thriller about an old-fashioned small-time thief (played by John Turturro) who gets in over his head with some very new-school gangsters. Turturro’s melancholy performance is the must-see element here, but this film, from Noah Segan, is also a throwback of sorts—it feels like the kind of fun little flick audiences used to enjoy all the time in the ’90s.
- I also want to highlight some of the films that readers have recommended after I offered up my list on the most decade-defining movies thus far. Obviously, I wasn’t exactly proffering my favorites there—it was more of a survey of some of the 2020s’ biggest tone-setters—but some of the best titles that got shouted out included Challengers (from Gareth R. and Alexander M., among others), Sinners (Wade P.), Barbarian (Justin H.), One Battle After Another (John P.), The Secret Agent (Pat K.), The Zone of Interest (Katrina R.), Titane (Elias B.), and Another Round (Tom C.). If there are 2026 horror gems that I have missed out on, please send in recs—I’ll try to check them out for future newsletters!