Radio static rarely improves a horror character’s evening, but Banshee Chapter makes it practically grounds for evacuation. A journalist investigating a friend’s disappearance follows connections between experimental drugs, government research, and an unexplained broadcast. Katia Winter provides the determination; Ted Levine supplies wonderfully disreputable company as a counterculture writer. Director Blair Erickson borrows from Lovecraft and the history of MKUltra without pretending the resulting nightmare is a documentary. Expect nasty jolts, cosmic paranoia, and some deeply unwelcome noises from the speakers. | © Sunchaser Entertainment
Magic involves an unreasonable amount of admin in A Dark Song. A grieving mother hires an occultist, seals herself inside a remote house with him, and submits to an exhausting ritual with strict rules. Catherine Walker and Steve Oram make their increasingly poisonous partnership compelling long before anything supernatural needs to show itself. Repetition, deprivation, and distrust give the ceremony weight: these people are working for their encounter with the beyond, and neither is especially pleasant company during the process. | © Samson Films
Accepting a job that requires you to wear a chained leather harness should probably involve a conversation with HR. Isaac, a drifter with memory problems, takes it anyway, agreeing to watch over a troubled woman in an isolated house. Damian Mc Carthy makes every doorway feel like an ambush, while a grotesque toy rabbit supplies the least reassuring company imaginable. The scares depend on where you’re looking—and how long you can bear to keep looking. | © HyneSight Films
The photographs are the problem. Blurred, badly framed, and taken during a massacre in an Arizona border town, they suggest something far worse than the crime authorities pin on the lone survivor. Savageland builds its mockumentary around these still images, trusting your imagination to supply the movement. Interviews expose the racism shaping the official account, but those pictures keep interrupting the comfortable explanations. You’ll want a closer look at them. You’ll also wish you hadn’t bothered. | © The Massive Film Company
A Vatican investigation into a possible miracle sounds reassuringly procedural: install cameras, inspect the church, expose the trick. Unfortunately, this remote English parish has problems beyond creative bookkeeping. Released in some territories as Final Prayer, Elliot Goldner’s found-footage horror benefits enormously from the bickering rapport between Gordon Kennedy and Robin Hill. Their conversations make the investigation feel like an actual job, which becomes increasingly unfortunate for the people doing it. Save this one for a night when claustrophobia sounds recreational. | © Metrodome Distribution
Don’t blink: the figure in the tunnel gets closer whenever you do. That playground-ready nightmare fuels Butterfly Kisses, in which a struggling filmmaker discovers tapes documenting two students’ investigation of an urban legend. His attempts to authenticate the footage become another documentary, complete with people questioning whether he fabricated everything. Director Erik Kristopher Myers makes that skepticism part of the horror; watching someone chase a filmmaking breakthrough becomes almost as uncomfortable as searching the background for an approaching silhouette. | © Four-Fingered Films
Yakov needs money, which makes an overnight job watching over a deceased man difficult to refuse. Having recently left his Hasidic community, he returns to perform the Jewish practice of sitting as a shomer—and discovers that the house contains more than a body and its grieving widow. The Vigil gives Dave Davis room to make Yakov vulnerable, awkward, and sympathetic. The cramped setting and Jewish demonology turn a quiet obligation into something horribly intimate, with guilt providing the intruder an opening. | © BoulderLight Pictures
Working in a film archive ought to be a reasonably safe occupation. Then David discovers footage linking his own home to an old murder, just as his marriage begins falling apart. Ivan Kavanagh’s The Canal makes decaying images feel infectious, as though whatever was recorded can contaminate the person watching. Rupert Evans anchors the story with an increasingly desperate performance. Between suspected infidelity, spectral intrusions, and a deeply unpleasant atmosphere, even the ordinary domestic scenes feel overdue for a window opening. | © Park Films
An entire Buenos Aires neighborhood appears to have developed a supernatural infestation, and the experts sent to investigate look distressingly underqualified for the evening ahead. Demián Rugna’s Terrified, also known as Aterrados, moves between neighboring homes instead of making one family endure every outrage. Its great trick is making stillness unbearable: a figure sitting at a table can demand more nervous attention than something charging down a corridor. Don’t expect a reassuring explanation to arrive before the next horrible discovery. | © Machaco Films
Listen closely to Sator and the woods seem busy with something you cannot locate. Jordan Graham’s largely solitary production follows an isolated man whose family has a troubling relationship with an entity his grandmother describes as familiar. Graham incorporates his own grandmother’s accounts into the fiction, giving her appearances an unsettling texture that conventional exposition couldn’t reproduce. Dialogue is sparse, darkness occupies much of the frame, and the film asks for patience. Prefer your forest demons clearly visible and helpfully explained? Bad camping trip. | © Mistik Jade Films
First-night nerves are understandable. Voices in a nearly empty police station deserve a stronger response. Rookie officer Jessica Loren has been assigned to watch a closing precinct while waiting for a hazardous-materials collection, but its connection to a violent cult makes the shift increasingly impossible to manage. Juliana Harkavy carries much of Last Shift alone, giving its barrage of disturbances a human anchor. Anthony DiBlasi turns institutional corridors and fluorescent lighting into convincing reasons to reconsider a career in public service. | © Skyra Entertainment
Vanessa Redgrave’s voice hangs over a house crowded with religious objects, and that alone should discourage any enthusiastic inheritance plans. An antiques dealer returns to his late mother’s home, where her devotion to an angel-worshipping cult complicates the business of sorting through her possessions. Rodrigo Gudiño lets the camera linger on statues, rooms, and apparently empty spaces until the clutter feels watchful. Beneath the supernatural menace sits a sadder story about estrangement, making the house difficult to dismiss as merely creepy. | © Rue Morgue Cinema
How much would you pay for proof that death isn’t the end? Miles, whose fear of dying has overtaken his life, offers a cash reward and investigates the responses with his protective mother. Clark Freeman and Annette O’Toole give We Go On an unusually grounded double act, balancing skepticism, affection, and exasperation. Directors Andy Mitton and Jesse Holland understand the flaw in Miles’s plan: discovering that ghosts exist might answer his question without doing anything useful for his anxiety. | © Untethered Films
A documentary crew arrives in northeastern Thailand to film Nim, a medium who believes a local goddess inhabits her. When her niece begins behaving strangely, a story about spiritual inheritance becomes much harder to interpret. Banjong Pisanthanakun spends time establishing the family’s beliefs and tensions before letting the possession horror become vicious. That groundwork matters: you understand why these people trust particular rituals, then have to watch that confidence buckle. The cameras keep recording well past any sensible employee’s resignation point. | © GDH 559
Keep track of the apparently unrelated details in Noroi: The Curse: television appearances, strange noises, psychic demonstrations, and accounts of a vanished ritual. Kōji Shiraishi assembles them into the investigation of a paranormal researcher whose own disappearance frames the film. Its documentary texture makes the connections feel discovered rather than conveniently delivered by a screenplay. At nearly two hours, this Japanese horror film takes its time building the case, until an incidental clip you barely registered starts looking like something you should have feared immediately. | © Oz Company
Freddy’s sweater, Michael’s mask, that staircase in The Exorcist—you could probably draw your Halloween watchlist from memory. But picking a horror movie gets harder when you already know who survives and exactly when the cat jumps out. These 15 lesser-known scary movies put a little uncertainty back into the evening. Give the familiar killers a night off; you don’t need a seventh viewing to confirm they’re bad news.
