Have A Spook-tember: 5 Films You Need to Watch From the Horror Movie Renaissance

You shouldn’t have to wait to watch horror movies until October. There are only so many films you can actually fit into 31 days, and why would you want to wait when we’re in the midst of one of the absolute best decades for new and inventive horror movies since the 1980s? The 2010s are a veritable renaissance of horror, and I’ve curated a list of a few films to start adding to your typical canon. Why wait until October when you can have Spook-tember?

“The Neon Demon” (Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn, 2016)

The latest opus from the director of “Drive,” one of the best films of the decade so far, “The Neon Demon” is an artsy, giallo-inspired tale of a novice model (played by a never-better Elle Fanning) who realizes that her fellow models may be more than jealous of her beauty—they may want to take it by force. “The Neon Demon” has little in the way of traditional plot, but it’s an indelibly beautiful movie that stages its scares and gore into Goya-esque tableaus. Cliff Martinez’s synth-drenched score, often the most underrated aspect of any good horror movie, creates an ambience of pure dread from the first frame. The film also stars the excellent Jena Malone, Abbey Lee, Christina Hendricks and a campy Keanu Reeves.

“The Invitation” (Dir. Karyn Kusama, 2016)

Have you ever wondered why people turn to cults? How could people take solace in organizations that the outside world views as creepy and even a little nefarious? “The Invitation’s” titular organization is certainly creepy, though the nature of its ultimate nefariousness remains the driving question of this tense little thriller. An effectively staged one-location film, “The Invitation” tracks a dinner party from hell. The homeowners (played by the riveting Tammy Blanchard and the louche Michel Huisman) have recently joined The Invitation, and they politely entrap their houseguests and try to sell them to their new way of life. However, Blanchard’s ex-husband (Logan Marshall-Green) and his new girlfriend (Emayatzy Corinealdi) sense something wrong. But who’s truly crazy: the insiders or the outsiders?

“Darling”(Dir. Mickey Keating, 2015)

“Darling” is a simple film, wrapping up in a neat 78 minutes, but it sinks its teeth into the audience from the first scene. For most of its running, the movie solely focuses on Darling, played by Lauren Ashley Carter in an absolutely star-making performance. Tasked with caring for a haunted 19th-century brownstone in New York City, Darling swiftly falls victim to its spirits and inherent madness, and those who cross paths with her (a smarmy “nice guy” played to the hilt by Brian Morvant and a scene-stealing Sean Young) soon wish they hadn’t. The movie would feel slight if it wasn’t for Carter, who does better acting with merely her saucer-wide eyes in 78 minutes than many famous actors have accomplished in a lifetime. Keating’s black-and-white cinematography takes to her like a cat to milk, and the results are spellbinding.

“It Follows” (Dir. David Robert Mitchell, 2015)

On paper, “It Follows”has the most basic concept out of these recommended films. Hapless teens are stalked by a shape-shifting curse that is passed from person to person after hooking up. Essentially, as one fellow Chronicle staffer so eloquently put it, the titular “it” is a “STDemon.” However, director David Robert Mitchell takes this concept to terrifying extremes. The nebulous demon’s forms range from the mundane to the terrifying, and the film creates masterful jump-scares from merely panning to an unknown person. Could they be a stranger, or a killer? “It Follows” is one of the rare horror movies that maintains its level of horror until the final battle, a pitfall in which lesser films plunge into stupidity or boredom. The tense, pool-set showdown here is arguably the highlight of the whole movie.

“The Babadook” (Dir. Jennifer Kent, 2014)

Unlike the other movies on this list, “The Babadook” is Australian. Don’t be fooled, though: the film eschews the creature-feature trappings so overused by Australian horror cinema (do we really need another giant crocodile movie?) for a solemn meditation on motherhood and grief that just so happens to have a frightening, top hat-wearing monster. Essie Davis plays Amelia, a recently widowed mother whose son, Sam (Noah Wiseman), is acting out against his schoolmates and family. One night, she reads him a picture book called “The Babadook” and unleashes its titular monster in their already fragile home. While the movie itself is plenty scary, its horror derives not from the Babadook, but from the unbearable tension between mother and son. Some of the scariest moments in the film result from Sam’s pettiness and Amelia’s reactions, and supernatural forces only heighten the natural drama that arises from such a situation.