104 reviews in this category.
Tilman Singer's Cuckoo arrives with the kind of premise that horror fans dream about: a remote Alpine resort, a mysterious half-sister who cannot speak, a father who is clearly hiding something, and a creature that mimics the young to replace them.…...
HBO's The Last of Us is the rare video game adaptation that doesn't just work but transcends its source material.…...
The Insidious franchise has been running for sixteen years now, and what keeps it going is not worldbuilding or lore, it is the same thing that has always powered the best horror films: the primal fear of losing the people you love.…...
The End of Oak Street is a tight, 99-minute family survival thriller that spends its runtime on exactly what the premise demands: parents trying to keep their children alive in an impossible situation.…...
Eli Roth returns to his grindhouse roots with Ice Cream Man, a summer horror that knows exactly what it is: a bloody, darkly comic crowd-pleaser about a demonic ice cream vendor terrorizing an idyllic small town.…...
The Silence of the Lambs is that rare film whose reputation is not inflated by nostalgia.…...
Psycho is Alfred Hitchcock's most influential film and one of the few movies that genuinely changed what cinema was allowed to do.…...
Thrash is a shark movie that knows exactly what it is and does not pretend otherwise.…...
John Carpenter's The Thing was a commercial failure and critical punching bag in 1982, released two weeks after E.T. and savaged by reviewers who found its nihilism and body horror repellent.…...
Stranger Things Season 1 is the rare cultural phenomenon that earns every ounce of its acclaim.…...
Scary Movie (2026) is not a good movie in any conventional sense. It is a loud, crude, aggressively stupid 96-minute assault on taste, logic, and the human attention span.…...
Leviticus is a competent horror film with a very clear ideological mission: to argue that religious communities opposed to homosexuality are not just wrong, but monstrous....
Hungry knows exactly what it is: a survival horror film about a hippo in the Louisiana bayou. It does not pretend to be anything else, and within that frame it delivers a tightly constructed 93 minutes of sustained tension....
Let me tell you the most surprising thing about Knock at the Cabin: it is a film about gay people that arrives at a verdict more theologically conservative than anything Hollywood has produced in a decade....
The Kraken is real. That is the only premise Kraken (2026) needs, and to the film's credit, it commits to that premise without reservation....
The Alien franchise has been waiting for someone to bring the xenomorph to Earth in a serious way since at least the 1990s. Two Alien vs. Predator films tried and largely failed.…...
Alien is 47 years old and it still works. That says something about the quality of its construction....
Squid Game Season 3 is the conclusion Hwang Dong-hyuk was always building toward. It is bleak, morally committed, and technically excellent. Whether you find it satisfying depends almost entirely on whether you share his politics....
The original Crow is one of those films that should not work as well as it does. Brandon Lee plays a murdered rock musician who comes back from the dead to kill the people who murdered him and his fiancee, guided by a literal crow.…...
The Shining is the most debated horror film ever made. Room 237, a documentary about fan interpretations of the film, dedicates ninety minutes to theories about what Kubrick was really doing, including the theory that the film is a confession that he…...
Let's get something out of the way first: The Exorcist is not a woke movie. It is the opposite of a woke movie.…...
There is a version of this review that starts with the film's feminist credentials and works backward. That version is not this review.…...
The final season of Stranger Things carries the weight of a cultural event. This is a show that built a genuine audience relationship over nearly a decade across five seasons. The finale has to be worth that investment. It mostly is....
Midsommar is a genuinely good film. That's the most important thing to say before everything else, because it shapes how dangerous it is....
A Quiet Place is, without question, one of the most pro-family mainstream studio films of the past decade. That's not a political argument. It's a description of what the movie is about....
The Australian zombie film has developed a distinct subgenre identity in recent years, and We Bury the Dead belongs to the thoughtful end of it. This is not a film about survival.…...
Backrooms is A24's biggest box office success to date, and it earns that crown by delivering a genuinely unsettling horror experience that respects its source material.…...
The 1976 Omen is one of the great supernatural horror films. Robert Thorn is an American diplomat who discovers his son may be the Antichrist. The film is about a father trying to protect his family from a truth too terrible to accept.…...
Here is what Curry Barker understands that too many horror filmmakers get wrong: the scariest thing isn't a monster. It's what a person does to themselves when they're desperate enough....
Corporate Retreat is a survival horror film that uses the corporate team-building setting as a pressure cooker for examining moral choice, loyalty, and the true measure of a person under existential threat.…...
Here's the question VirtueVigil readers want answered: is Evil Dead Rise just another female-led horror film where the message is that men are useless and women are the only ones capable of defending what matters? Short answer: no.…...
Gothic horror has always understood something that secular literary culture keeps forgetting: the past does not stay buried....
A man's wife died. He couldn't let her go. So he invented a way to keep watching her....
Evil Dead: Burn is the franchise asking the same question it has asked since 1981: what does it take to survive when the people you love try to kill you?...
Stephen King's It is one of the longest novels ever written by a major American author. It is also one of the most thematically traditional.…...
Let's be direct about what Get Out is. It is a very effective horror film built on a very specific political argument: white liberals are the primary threat to Black Americans, they disguise their predation behind progressive language, and the approp…...
Deep Water is Renny Harlin's return to the shark-thriller genre that made Deep Blue Sea a classic. The film centers on a ship in open water where a shark encounter forces the crew into a desperate survival situation.…...
Hunting Matthew Nichols is a microbudget Canadian found footage horror film that punches well above its $275,000 weight.…...
Ryan Coogler made a vampire movie set in Jim Crow Mississippi and turned it into one of the best films of 2025. That sentence should not work. It does.…...
Sequels to successful horror films face a specific structural problem: the first film worked because you did not know what was coming. The second film's audience does.…...
Here is what horror films used to understand and largely forgot: the scariest thing in the world is not what you can see. It is what you almost see. What you hear from the next room.…...
Here is what you need to know about The Woman in the Yard before you buy a ticket: this is not a haunted house film. There is no monster. The Woman standing in Ramona's yard is Ramona.…...
Ishana Night Shyamalan's directorial debut is a better film than its 27% Rotten Tomatoes score suggests and a less complete film than its atmospheric first act promises. The gap between critical reception and audience response (27% critics vs.…...
There's a store at the Highland Place mall called Free Eden. It sells cupcake-scented candles, charm bracelets, and the kind of overpriced cotton sundress that costs more than your rent. The employees are gorgeous. They have their own slang.…...
Here's something you don't expect to say about a Faces of Death remake: it has something on its mind....
Let's start with the premise, because the premise is everything....
Horror has always been one of cinema's most reliable delivery systems for traditional values. At its best, the genre insists that evil is real, that families are worth fighting for, and that some things are worse than death.…...
Smile opened to $22 million on a $17 million budget and eventually grossed $217 million worldwide.…...
Hereditary opened to $13.5 million and eventually grossed $80 million worldwide on a $10 million budget. It holds a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score and an 87 Metacritic, making it one of the most critically acclaimed horror films of the decade.…...
Cast Away is one of the most stripped-down films Hollywood has ever produced. A FedEx systems analyst named Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) survives a plane crash in the South Pacific and spends four years alone on an uninhabited island.…...
Thanksgiving is exactly what it needs to be. That's not as easy as it sounds....
Jordan Peele's Us has a problem that Get Out didn't have: it's trying to do too many things. Get Out was a scalpel. Us is a Swiss Army knife that doesn't quite close back up properly....
Together is a body horror film about codependency that takes its central metaphor more literally than any relationship drama has any right to.…...
Return to Silent Hill is an adaptation of Silent Hill 2, which has been called the greatest psychological horror narrative ever made.…...
Clown in a Cornfield is a competently made slasher with a clear political agenda that it conceals until past the midpoint and then delivers with zero ambiguity. If you enjoy slasher genre mechanics, the first half delivers them.…...
Sally Hawkins ruins you in Bring Her Back. There is no other honest way to start this review.…...
The Menu is a slick, well-crafted class satire that will make you laugh and make you uneasy, sometimes at the same time. It is also a film whose ideological message is more muddled than its admirers want to admit....
Jordan Peele's third film is his most formally ambitious and his most politically restrained, which may be why it polarized audiences in ways his earlier work didn't.…...
Art the Clown is back. He is dressed as Santa Claus. And he is going to ruin your Christmas in the most graphically violent way imaginable....
Scream VI moves the franchise from Woodsboro to New York City, trades Sidney Prescott for the Carpenter sisters, and delivers exactly what a Scream sequel is supposed to deliver: a satisfying whodunit structure, escalating kill sequences, meta-commen…...
Scott Derrickson's The Black Phone 2 is a sequel that earns its existence by asking a genuinely good question: what happens to the kids who survive?...
Parker Finn's Smile 2 is a bigger, louder, more technically ambitious horror film than its predecessor. It is also, paradoxically, a more traditionally structured morality tale.…...
M3GAN became a cultural phenomenon in January 2023. The viral dance clip. The meme economy. The gay icon discourse. The TikTok explosion. None of that tells you anything about what the film actually argues....
It's Valentine's Day in Seattle. A serial killer called the Heart Eyes Killer is hunting couples. Jay and Ally are coworkers pulling overtime who have made it professionally painful that they cannot stand each other.…...
The Nun II is the best entry in the Conjuring Universe since the original Conjuring.…...
Cocaine Bear is the rare case of a movie that fully delivers on its premise without apology or pretension. You came to see a bear on cocaine commit grievous violence against an ensemble of unlucky bystanders.…...
Until Dawn is the rarest thing in video game adaptations: it is honest about what the source material is and makes smart choices about what to translate.…...
Emilie Blichfeldt looked at Cinderella and asked the question nobody wanted answered: what would the ugly stepsister's story actually feel like if you told it honestly? The answer, it turns out, involves tapeworms, butcher knives, and more blood than…...
The Gorge is a high-concept premise executed with genuine craft. Two elite soldiers, one American and one Lithuanian, are posted to guard towers on opposite sides of a remote classified gorge for one year. No contact with each other.…...
Weapons is the rare horror film that conservatives do not need to apologize for enjoying. In fact, they may find themselves grinning through it....
Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! is a film that tells you exactly what it is from the very first frame, and it does not care if you approve. That was true before release, and it is doubly true now that audiences and critics have had their say....
Five Nights at Freddy's is not a great horror film. But it is something rarer and more interesting: a mainstream Hollywood production built on a conservative Christian creator's values, made with his direct creative control, and released at a moment …...
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come takes the original's eat-the-rich horror-comedy formula and dials it up to a global conspiracy. Whether that's a feature or a bug depends entirely on how you felt about the first film.…...
Take Cujo, replace the dog with a chimpanzee, move it to a gorgeous Hawaiian cliff house, and crank the gore to eleven. That is Primate in a sentence, and honestly, that sentence sells it better than any marketing campaign could....
This review contains detailed plot analysis and reveals key story elements including the film's ending....
Twenty-six years after the original and thirteen years after the widely reviled Scary Movie 5, the Wayans brothers are back. And they're bringing a flamethrower to the culture war....
Ti West's X trilogy ends the way it began - with a woman who refuses to apologize for wanting more.…...
Wolf Man is a small, grim, effective horror film that works best when it stops trying to say something and just lets you watch a man fall apart....
Drop is the best contained thriller since Searching (2018) and one of the most effectively constructed genre films in recent memory.…...
Speak No Evil is one of the most uncomfortable films of 2024. It's a clinical, precise horror film about a man who cannot protect his family because he has spent his adult life outsourcing confrontation to social norms. Deeply effective.…...
Twenty-five years after the original Final Destination, the franchise delivers its best installment. That's not faint praise -- Final Destination (2000) was a genuinely clever horror film, and Bloodlines earns comparison to it.…...
Presence is the most technically inventive horror film of early 2025. It is also a quietly progressive film wearing an arthouse horror mask....
The Bone Temple is better than it has any right to be. After the messy second half of 28 Years Later, expectations for this direct sequel were low.…...
28 Years Later is two movies welded together, and the seam shows....
A Quiet Place: Day One is a frustrating film to score because it's genuinely well-made and carries real emotional weight, right up until you look at what it's actually saying....
The Conjuring: Last Rites is not the best film in the franchise. That distinction still belongs to James Wan's 2013 original.…...
Sam Raimi has been making gloriously unhinged movies for over 40 years. From the cabin in the Tennessee woods to the streets of Manhattan to the multiverse itself, the guy runs on one fuel: controlled chaos delivered with a grin.…...
Robert Eggers' Nosferatu is one of the most uncompromisingly traditional horror films made by a major director in the past decade.…...
Longlegs is the most unnerving American horror film of 2024 and one of the few in recent memory that takes Satanism seriously as a moral force rather than as ironic aesthetic.…...
Lisa Frankenstein is Diablo Cody's Jennifer's Body with worse reviews and a better aesthetic. That sentence is both a description and a verdict....
This review contains spoilers. Iron Lung earns its ending and the ending requires discussion....
Sydney Sweeney spent years developing Immaculate as a vehicle that would let her operate in the horror genre while carrying a message she clearly believed in.…...
Luc Besson's Dracula: A Love Tale is a strange, kitschy, deeply sincere movie. And that sincerity is precisely what saves it....
Alien: Romulus is the best Alien film since James Cameron's Aliens (1986). That is not faint praise.…...
Abigail does exactly what it promises and does it with more craft than the premise deserves. That is meant as a compliment....
Hollywood has always fed on its own. Stars rise, burn bright, and are discarded - usually on a schedule dictated by age, gender, and the appetite of an industry that treats women as decorative objects with expiration dates.…...
The original The Strangers (2008) earned its place in horror history with a deceptively simple premise: three masked killers, a couple, an isolated house, no explanation offered and none needed.…...
This preview is based on available trailers, creative team history, and pre-release information. Scores and verdict reflect our prediction only and will be updated upon release....
Let's not dance around it. Heretic is not a horror film that happens to touch on religion.…...
For audiences who agree with progressive critique of celebrity, capitalism, complicity: film works. For conservative audiences or those seeking entertainment: film is betrayal dressed in transgression. Woke trap real.…...
