The Horror, the Horror

We've got a dirty slimy bag of horror movie recommendations for you

What better day than Election Day to offer up some horror recommendations? Where we can help you mask the real horror with some made up horror. Sure, this was supposed to come last week during the spooky season but we’re nothing if not a little lazy here at Gas Station Cuisine, so now it’s an election day salve.

If you are one of those people who enjoy the jump scare, the creeping dread, or the feeling of dire hopelessness in an already hopeless world, you can click on this 100 “best” horror movies list published by Variety and be on your own merry little way down a dark and cursed road of scary movies. It’s got a chock full of suggestions that run the gamut of cute, cuddly horror to what the fuck is going on horror (seriously, there should be warning stickers on both The Human Centipede 2 and Salo) and will satisfy the traditional horror fan for many hours.

Is it comprehensive? Of course not. The only comprehensive list on the internet is the one you’ve personally created and curated. And that’s where Kyle and I come in because we’re not the type to let Variety tell us what is the be all end all of horror cinema. We’re out there doing the work, overturning theater seats and barging into old video rental stores to provide you with some titles that you may not have heard of but will definitely give you the scare you’re craving.

To make things easier I have created some categories and even loosely adhered to them!

And of course I’ve asked Kyle for assistance here as he is a much bigger horror connoisseur than I and I know he will deliver. Yes, we started with the intent to provide a list of off the beaten track horror movie recommendations, but it kinda morphed into something more, much like many of the scientists in The Thing. Did I think Kyle was going to take “off the beaten track” literally and recommend a movie about people hiking in New Zealand who go off the beaten track and… well I won’t ruin it for you here and then you too can be bored by some New Zealand horror film where nothing happens and the guy you’re supposed to be rooting for annoys the shit out of you.

CATEGORIES:

2024
Found Footage
Foreign
Classic
What Did I Just Watch
Let’s Fix a Horror Movie

2024

KYLE: WELL WE’RE OFF TO A SUPER START!

OK, gotta focus here. I think it’s actually been another very strong year for horror, and I’m going to go ahead and give you my top ten to this point (though I note that there’s still a bunch of stuff I intend to get to in the next few weeks):

1. In A Violent Nature

2. I Saw The TV Glow

3. The Substance

4. It’s What’s Inside

5. The First Omen

6. Late Night With the Devil

7. A Quiet Place: Day One

8. Loop Track¹

9. Cuckoo

10. Terrifier 3

Most of those will end up in my overall top 30 of the year, including several in the top ten. In A Violent Nature, in particular, is sublime. A Canadian film from a first-time feature director (Chris Nash), I found IaVN to be wildly inventive, with some of the best kills I have ever seen. (There’s one water sequence that is simply phenomenal.) If you’ve heard anything about it, it’s likely that it’s a slasher movie that is told from the slasher’s perspective, and while that’s an undeniably cool idea, in lesser hands I could easily see it going awry. But not here. There’s a languidness to some of the death sequences that almost give the film a hypnotic quality. I also can’t get the ending out of my head. Watch this one, folks.

Now, because I can’t resist, here are six more films–while each a bit flawed in their own ways–that are worth checking out:

1. Oddity

2. Abigail

3. Exhuma

4. New Life

5. You’ll Never Find Me

6. Immaculate

Prepared to defend the position (or, if needed, the horror bona fides) of all of those above, but that might get tedious. 

Instead, I think I’m going to shill briefly for Shudder. If you have even a passing interest in horror, Shudder is the best five bucks² you’ll spend most months, as you’re all but guaranteed to watch a minimum of 2 - 3 new indies that are worth your while, plus an ever-expanding roster of classics. If we were doing this this time last year, I’d probably have said “sign up for three months, watch as much as you can, then cancel for three months” but it’s officially reached keeper status for me. 

CHRIS: I’m so torn. On the one hand I want to warn everyone not to watch Loop Track, but on the other hand I don’t want to say anything so they can sit through it like I did when you said it was “really great.” 

(editor’s note: It would be here where I would include the trailer for Loop Track, however it gives away kinda the whole concept of the movie and while I personally didn’t like it, I also don’t think that’s very fair to both the movie and the audience. So, I encourage you, if you’re curious to just go watch it (it’s free to watch on both Tubi and the Roku channel.))

I have barely drunk from 2024’s horror spigot, mainly because its offering hasn’t overwhelmed me. I’ve been whelmed. Whelmed by the horror of 2024. (Still wondering why Hollywood hasn’t come to me asking for blurbs for the back of their horror DVD boxes.) After the marketing campaign of Longlegs I so desperately wanted it to be good and it missed that mark by a Shaquille O’Neal free throw. I will lukewarmly toss Chime out there, a short, Japanese film which will have you scratching your head through much of it. But I think that’s the point. Not to get too much into it I believe a lot of the movie deals with how much or little we take those small moments out of our hectic lives. But I’ll stop there. It’s available to rent on Apple or Amazon, or… if you’re online adventurous there are other ways to see it, and no I don’t mean Pirate Bay or anything like that. Take a pause and look around; it’s here if you want to find it.

KYLE: Yeah, Longlegs is my biggest film disappointment of this year…and it’s not particularly close. (Chime didn’t really click for me either—I just don’t think I got it/cared enough to try to figure it out.)

Found footage

CHRIS: Found footage isn’t only about the Blair Witch or paranormal activity in someone’s house. In fact, it’s pretty much its own sub genre these days, and I have watched my fair share, including two centered around Bigfoot in the past year. It is definitely its own sub genre and you can get lost in the Tubi menu of found footage movies. Are a lot of them bad? Yes. I also watched one about clowns. Clowns doing clown things and then so not so clown things.

But that’s neither here nor there, because done well, a found footage movie can be terrifying. If you haven’t seen Rec, about a zombie outbreak in an apartment (it’s Spanish) I highly recommend that, as well as As Above So Below, a found footage movie about a group of people searching for stuff down in the Parisian catacombs. 

KYLE: Rec rules. This is an excellent shout. As Above So Below isn’t streaming in Canada, so I might need to take the plunge and rent it. 

In terms of new stuff in this space, only Late Night With the Devil would get my enthusiastic recommendation, though I feel obligated to note it cheats a little bit (both with behind-the-scenes interstitials that don’t qualify as FF and a final ten minutes that drop the conceit more or less entirely, for reasons I don’t want to get into). But, for the vast majority of its runtime, it absolutely crushes the late 70s talk show vibe while progressively ratcheting up tension for viewers.

V/H/S is a found footage anthology series featuring up-and-coming horror directors³ that’s been around since 2012 but seems to have picked up momentum since it was acquired by Shudder, as we’ve received new editions each of the past four years. Unfortunately, it seems that it’s a case of diminishing returns, as 2023’s V/H/S/85 was pretty middling and this year’s V/H/S/Beyond lowkey stinks. I have heard it mentioned that these V/H/S entries are very low risk, as, if you don’t like a particular segment, it’ll only be a few more minutes until something else comes on, but this seems to ignore that (a) one bad minute of found footage somehow feels like an hour, and (b) WHAT IF THE ONE AFTER THE ONE THAT SUCKS ALSO FUCKING SUCKS??

CHRIS: Yeah I did the first V/H/S and...I did not rewind after watching. It was all kinds of whatever, and felt pieced together based on the premise and not quality. But I also heard the latest in the series has a sci-fi/horror vein running through it which piqued my curiosity at least a little. 

KYLE: Of the five this year, I mildly enjoyed the first segment (Stork), elements of the third segment (Live and Let Dive), and the final segment (Stowaway,⁴ in Horror Queen Kate Siegel’s directorial debut, written by her husband, Mike Flanagan), and found the rest to be completely skippable and/or actively bad.⁵

For something older, I’d recommend 2015’s Hell House LLC, which is genuinely chilling. (No need to bother with the inferior sequels.) 2020’s Host was also a very pleasant surprise. 

CHRIS: Love Hell House LLC - genuinely creepy. Haven’t seen any of the sequels but the most recent, Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor, along with being a pain in the ass for the poor sap who’s in charge of movie theater marquees, has a decent review on Letterboxd. So maybe there’s still a chance for a decent sequel in this franchise!

KYLE: Creep (2014) kept coming up at the top of a bunch of found footage lists, so I took a look this week. A solid Mark Duplass performance (he also produced and co-wrote). It’s somehow exactly what you’d expect,⁶ yet also fairly satisfying. Worth checking out. 

In researching this part, I came across an article hyping Milk & Serial, a free, found footage movie billed as a “hidden gem.” Feel like I gotta give this a spin. Same goes for 1992’s Ghostwatch, which has come up a couple of times on The Big Picture.  

Foreign

CHRIS: What would you do in a world where possession and evil spirits didn’t just exist, but also acted as a virus that could overtake whole towns? I have no idea either, but the crazy part about When Evil Lurks? That’s not even the plot - just the background. Set in Argentinian farm country, things go from desolate to absolute terror pretty quickly and… never really recover.  The first two thirds of the movie are phenomenal, build a somber and hopeless landscape with ease, so much so that the final act just can’t carry all the weight of the premise, but it’s still very worth watching.

KYLE: In retrospect, When Evil Lurks was so hyped up that it was basically impossible for it not to be a letdown, though I agree it’s still worth checking out (and contains multiple scenes I will–ultimately: much to my dismay–never be able to forget). 

CHRIS: Yeah but you also enjoyed Loop Track so…

KYLE: I’M SORRY YOU DON’T APPRECIATE [REDACTED]!⁷

Finally got around to watching Possession (thanks to a remastered copy made available by–all together now–SHUDDER), but I truly hated it, so...can’t go with that. Hmmmmmm.

Red Rooms (2024)? It’s not quite horror, but the Montreal-set film is undeniably unsettling. Does it stick the landing? Not especially, no. 

madS (2024)? French, zombie, and one continuous shot. Bundle that with your free space and you’re 80% of the way to Horror Bingo. Again, I didn’t love this but it’s worth the watch for the technical aspects alone.

 The original Speak No Evil (2022) feels like a bit of a copout, particularly since I’ve already talked about it here before (when discussing the Speak No Evil (2024) trailer), but, given that it was my favorite film of 2022, I believe I am contractually obligated to mentioned it here.  

Classic

CHRIS: Choosing The Exorcist here would be a lame copout, because if you’re a horror fan you’ve seen it and there’s nothing much else to say about it these days. And if you haven’t seen it by now, you can go on living in your comfortable pea soup enjoying days and never be the wiser. 

No, I’m not going to tell you to watch The Exorcist, but I AM going to tell you to watch The Exorcist III. No need to mess with The Exorcist II because it’s dumb and doesn’t matter to the continuity of the Exorcist universe. III is a direct sequel to the events of the original, 20 odd years later and it contains both one of the best jump scares in horror movie history as well as Patrick Ewing playing an angel. If neither of those things elicit some form of curiosity for you then I’m not sure you have a soul.

KYLE: obviously love The Exorcist and would frankly prefer to pretend The Exorcist II simply does not exist. I’ve never seen III, but you’re at least the third or fourth person to reference this epic jump scare. Making a point of getting to this soon. 

I picked up the first four Fridays the 13th⁸ on sale through Apple a few weeks ago, and finally got around to watching the first one with my wife and daughter last weekend. Turns out (a) I’ve never seen it (literally not one second of the first part, as far as I can tell), and (b) it’s fucking terrible! 40+ years later, it’s kind of amazing it got a sequel, let alone a twelve-film universe. Out of boredom, I let it auto-play Part 2 (1981) and, I shit you not, the first ten minutes of Part 2 is just the final ten minutes of Part 1. Astonishing levels of hubris. I turned it off in disgust. Unclear if I’ll go back but I suspect I’ll at least finish 2. 

For a proper classic, you obviously can’t go wrong with Rosemary’s Baby,⁹ the slow burn of all slow burns. I think you can make a pretty compelling case for Mia Farrow’s work here being one of the finest acting performances of all-time. As the walls start to close in around her and she begins to question her own sanity, you will too. A masterclass in building paranoid tension. One of the greatest endings ever, to boot. 

To this day, I swear this film is 80% of the reason that I do not trust the elderly. PROVE ME WRONG, CHRIS. 

What the fuck was that?

CHRIS: I can’t in good conscience put a big ol’ recommend stamp on I Saw the Devil. It will grab the soul out of you, crumple it up and force you to eat it… and laugh at your damaged insides. It is not a movie to fuck with casually on a Friday night date jamboree. 

Ostensibly about a man seeking revenge on a serial killer who murdered his wife, it rapidly descends into a madness few stories dare to plumb.

This is a fuck-you-up-in-the-head grind for over two hours, shifting sympathies and ultimately challenging your faith in… well I think this movie murders faith. I will not include the trailer since, as usual, it goes into a level of detail that, should you choose to watch this, dulls the intensity of the movie moments that matter. You’ve been warned. 

KYLE: Damn…I feel like I don’t have a lot to add here, except that I settled in to watch I Saw the Devil on the very last night it was supposed to be on Tubi, only to discover that it had already been taken down. Screwed by the International Date Line yet again! So, yeah, still need to watch this one, though I can vouch for South Korean horror largely being batshit insane. 

Let’s Fix a Horror Movie

CHRIS: About the previously-mentioned found footage clown movie, Behind the Sightings… I wanted it to be so good, because really, who doesn’t want to settle into a creepy movie about malevolent dancing clowns? But, this just didn’t work. After about six minutes I was actively rooting for the clowns in this.

But here’s the thing… with a little polish here and there it could have become a low budget cult classic. Not Citizen Clown Kane, , but something stoned college students would smoke some hash with and cheerfully recommend it to their friends. I mean sure, evil clowns might be a little bit of a curve ball when it comes to subject matter until you learn all this was based on a real life event. 

Like many movies out there, the improvement lies within another voice… a voice who looks at things logically and emotionlessly and can make the hard decisions. Because it’s easy to get wrapped up in the moment and think everything you’re doing is awesome… that’s all great until it comes to the editing room and you realize what you have is not what you thought you had. Low budget movies HAVE to have a lot of work done waaaaaay before the camera roll.

Honestly if the movie was just 90 minutes of the first 15 minutes, I think it would have worked great.

Anyway, I can’t recommend it, but… I’ve seen worse.

KYLE: there’s gotta be an easier way to trick me into watching a film slashing 2.4/ 3.6 / 1.5,¹⁰ but I suppose I have to watch this now. 

My vote would be to fix M. Night Shymalan’s Trap so that even one single thing made the slightest amount of sense, but–for reasons beyond comprehension–I seem to be in the minority here? 

I think that only leaves one option: FULL LONGLEGS REWRITE. 

Anything else?

I’ve got one more recommendation and it’s a bit of a doozy, so if you stopped reading right now, you’d have a great list of films to thrill and scare you, and not have to deep dive into the cosmic, existential dread of what I watched. Having nothing to do the other night as the baseball season ended so abruptly a few weeks ago when the Phillies were cheated out of advancing by some cheating team that will go unmentioned here, I figured to eschew my Letterboxd watchlist and go Tubi surfing for something. First, props to the programming director of Tubi, as he/she/they have delivered a huge library of off-beat horror that doesn’t show up anywhere else. No, not all of it is gold; in fact a lot of it is… low-budget, poorly produced stuff you’ve never heard of before, but also? That’s kind of great! I appreciate a platform that is open to giving views to stuff out there that didn’t get run in theaters.

Second, this is where I stumbled across The Void…

Here is the Letterboxd summary:

In the middle of a routine patrol, officer Daniel Carter happens upon a blood-soaked figure limping down a deserted stretch of road. He rushes the young man to a nearby rural hospital staffed by a skeleton crew, only to discover the patients and personnel are transforming into something inhuman. As the horror intensifies, Carter leads the other survivors on a hellish voyage into the subterranean depths of the hospital in a desperate bid to end the nightmare before it’s too late. 

Now that description? It’s a perfectly fine description that touches upon some of the stuff that happens in the film.

HOWEVER

Folks, I’m here to tell you it’s got a teensy bit more than that going on…

I don’t want to get into spoilers and ruin the viewing experience, should you decide to take this on, but I will say this: This movie goes hard, like jackhammer-to-the-head hard. It’s not perfect; there are definitely some leaps of logic that you kinda shut your brain off for a little bit, but the pace moves things along enough so that you don’t really have time to question anything, because it’s moved on to the next thing in the deep, black corner. And let me tell you - there are a lot of deep black corners, and a lot of things in them. It is lean, it is low budgeted and plays in the cosmic horror sandbox but gets there in such a way that you won’t be ready for it.

So there you have it, a full slate of horror and gore to get you through the long week, And not to speak for Kyle too much here, but we had so much fun doing this, I think we’re going to create a monthly “movie check in” column to highlight stuff we get into, in hopes of giving you more fun recommendations, not just of horror, but movies in general that maybe don’t always get the fully glare of Hollywood. So until next time…

GO VOTE!

1. I’m sure Chris won’t have anything to say about this one at all.

2.  $7 in Canada. I’m guessing the US price.

3. Not always the case, mind you, as V/H/S/85 had a segment directed by Scott Derrickson, co-writer and director of, among other things, Doctor Strange and The Black Phone.

4. Though it’s likely best not to spend even a single second contemplating how this found footage could, indeed, ever be found.

5. Your mileage may vary re: the fourth segment–Fur Babies, co-directed by Justin Long—which was, at least, going for something, but it wasn’t for me.

6. The “twist”—if you can even call it one–is pretty quaint by 2024 standards.

7. Man, Substack doesn’t let you change the text color or insert redaction black lines! What a downer. We officially need a third person to see this so that we can discuss in the comments.

8. SEE WHAT I DID THERE

9. This is my lame copout, minus the part where I substitute it with some more daring. Shit.

10. Letteboxd (out of 5) / imdb (out of 10) / your letterboxd score; yes, I’m trying to make “slash line” happen while discussing movies. It’s such a good term that it would be criminal to limit it only to baseball.