No Real Danger

35 Head of the Family (1996) – Small-time hustlers run afoul of a freakish family headed by a big-brained creep. Objectively clunky (and horny) but it’s such a bizarre movie with such strange logic that it’s worth a watch. Impressive low-budget creature effects.

34 Hallowarrior (2026) – A lonely girl in a post-apocalypse farmhouse is visited by strangers who may not be friendly. Milly Shapiro is great as the kid at the end of her psychological rope fighting for survival. Decent kills and some welcome practical effects.

33 Death Machine (1994) – A psychopathic incel develops a killbot at an evil corporation. Scene chewing, rudimentary CGI, winky character names, and first draft dialogue, but it somehow works and is a lot of fun?

32 The Darkest (2019) – A couple find that they are not alone while camping in the remote wilderness. Scary, dark, and intriguing first half pissed away with a lame reveal and lamer ending.

31 Heresy (2024) – An infertile woman is accused of being a witch in a tiny medieval Dutch village on the edge of cursed woods. Beautiful, immaculately paced horror film with moments of intense violence and gore.

30 The Seasoning House (2012) – A deaf girl used as a sort of Judas goat in a sex slave den reaches her breaking point. Bleak fucking subject with brutal violence.

29 The Hole in the Ground (2019) – What if almost all of the runtime of The Descent was a slow Irish Fairy folktale? Great performance by the lead, but a bit boring and predictable.

28 The Untamed (2016) – This is Possession part 2 (unofficial). This movie starts off with weird sex and doesn’t let up from there. Strange, cosmic, horny weirdness and family drama. 

27 Ice Cream Man (1995) – Clint Howard witnessed the tragic killing of an ice cream man as a child and grows up to be a killer ice cream man (natch). Not very good but weirdly entertaining for how ineptly cobbled together it is. 

26 Come to Daddy (2019) – Hipster softboy visits his estranged dad who is pretty weird… or is he? Great performances and a decent amount of humor make this watchable, but it’s not the most memorable.

25 Brutal (2017) – Miniscule plot of 2 killers with unknown purpose. Edgy shocker that wallows in cynical brutality but tries to end with some sort of message that definitely doesn’t land.

24 The Forest of Lost Souls (2017) – Young woman and a middle-aged man walk through a suicide forest contemplating ending things but also, it’s a slasher? Beautifully photographed black and white attempt at existential horror bogged down by trite slasher plot turn.

23 R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead 2 (2026) – Sam, Becka, and Rusty are back and trying to reverse the curse. This one felt a lot more like an extended episode of the original series than the first one did. Take that as you will. 

22 From Inside (2008) – A pregnant woman on a grim train traverses a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Mixed format animation serves this bleak tale well but too much of the runtime is “motion comic” and the message (if i interpreted it correctly) is too preachy.

21 Rabbit Trap (2025) – A noise art musician couple living in rural Wales become entangled in a strange local child’s fears. Creepy, slow burn folk horror at its arthouse finest.

20 V/H/S/Mixtape (2026) – Another mixed bag of shorts framed by extremely lame gross-out “humor” starring Gwar. A couple of shorts are really good and a couple are boring or out-of-place.

19 Scarecrows (1988) – A band of thieves trapped in a field with killer scarecrows. Surprisingly well-done for what would seem to be a corny (eyebrow waggle) premise on paper. Good scares, hateable characters, and shocking gore. No wonder it’s something of a cult fav!

18 Good Boy (2025) – A dog and his sickly owner stay in a haunted house. Very impressive, making the dog the main character. Creepy visuals and sound design do most of the horror heavy lifting but there are some great scenes with an unsettling entity. Indy deserves an Oscar!

17 Marshmallow (2025) – A dorky kid finds that the summer camp boogeyman is real! A twisty kid-centered mystery summer camp slasher that really kept me guessing until the end!

16 Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) – A young filmmaker visits the reclusive original final girl of the franchise she’s trying to reboot. Schoenbrun has once again captured creepy vibes and distorted reality on film in a very stylish and distinctive way. 

15 Undertone (2025) – Paranormal investigator podcasters listen to a series of recordings of a woman talking, walking, and singing in her sleep. There is a lot of great creepiness in this story but it crams a bit too much in with backwards children’s songs, unwanted pregnancy, and elder care/neglect/possession. 

14 Primate (2025) – Seems like the whole movie was poorly built around the cannabis-influenced question, “what if a pet chimp got rabies and went ape shit!?” Character logic is absent, dialogue is unnatural, and chimp strength and sentience varies wildly from one scene to the next.

13 Artik (2019) – Hulking weirdo tries to make a young boy his serial killing apprentice but a straight edge punker throws a wrench in that plan. Not a bad effort at all. I liked the killer’s idiosyncratic way of speaking and I’m always happy to see Chase Williamson and Lauren Ashley Carter!

12 Alice, Sweet Alice (1976) – Is the troubled asshole of a kid a killer or what? A decent whodunnit with sprays of bright red blood and plenty of hateable characters. Not quite exciting enough to have earned its cult status.

11 Dolly (2025) – A gruesome backwoods killer story with a classic silent hulk menacing those who run afoul of… her! Twist! The kills are gory and Fabianne Therese cements her place among the ranks of scream queens.

10 Landlocked (2021) – An eerie, melancholic tale of loss and memory. Uses real home movie footage from the father and sons lead actors to create an effective sense of dread.  

9 Noroi: The Curse (2005) – Found footage is always a crap shoot and I’m disappointed more often than not. This one is actually pretty good with some creepy visuals and an engaging mystery to follow.

8 Return to Silent Hill (2026) – Dude looks for his dead wife in a cursed town. Gans fails once again to harness the disorienting, thrilling horrors of the Silent Hill games. I appreciate his (mostly) sticking to the story of SH2, but not his overuse of laughable CGI. 

7 The Pied Piper (1986) – Incredibly detailed and morbidly dark retelling of the classic tale from a genius animator. The blend of stop-motion, live action, and traditional 2D animation works perfectly to tell this dark story of a town full of selfish, greedy assholes.

6 Scanner Cop (1994) – Scanner cop goes after a mind-controlling cop killer. Without Cronenberg writing or directing, this strange offshoot of the Scanners series lacks the creative vision of the auteur but delivers some good weirdness nonetheless. A solid straight to video effort with clever hallucinatory freakouts (and the requisite head bursts).

5 Evil Dead Burn (2026) – Asshole dies, his family is awful, deadites show up. A brutally fun entry into the modern ED universe with just the right amount of nostalgia-stoking fan service. It does a good job of injecting some humor back into the franchise while keeping things tense and gory. 

4 Deadly Friend (1986) – Boy genius makes a robot out of his dead girlfriend. This one gave us a great head popping gif but rightfully didn’t leave much of a mark in the annals of horror filmdom. It’s pretty hokey and the makeup effects are not the best but it wasn’t wrong about not trusting AI I guess.

3 Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026) – The Exorcist in mummy wrap. An overlong, muddled, and mis-titled possession story that wastes too much time wheel spinning between decent gory set pieces. 

2 The A-Frame (2024) – Woman and sketchy physicist try to cure cancer with disastrous results. A very watchable homage to Cronenberg’s The Fly with an antagonist who will remind viewers of the tech bros who are recklessly chipping away at society in the name of “changing the world”.

1 Cube (2021) – A misguided remake that replaces characters who are deliberately written to be up to the challenge of the mysterious experience with characters who are just warm bodies, and swaps an inscrutable psychological experiment with magical tech bullshit (and maybe something about child abuse?).