After a glorious 2025, horror has continued to be a major talking point in 2026. And what lies ahead: ‘Victorian Psycho’, ‘Adolescence, Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’, ‘Sanguine’ (winner at Sitges), ‘Werewolf’… Besides the already reviewed ‘Resident Evil’ (in cinemas), ‘Your Own Hell’ (in cinemas), ‘Backrooms’ (Filmin, HBO, Movistar) and ‘Obsession’ (rental), we recommend ten recent titles to watch tonight for Halloween.
Exit 8 (Genki Kawamura)
What a surprise. The adaptation of the famous psychological horror video game based on liminal spaces promised to be one of those films whose premise runs out after half an hour, roughly the length of the game. But no. The promising Genki Kawamura, winner of the best director prize at the San Sebastián festival for his debut ‘Cien flores’ (2022), manages to keep the viewer’s attention throughout the film with minimal elements: a subway corridor and a person looking for the exit.
With these building blocks, Kawamura crafts an ingenious and tense narrative that makes repetition its main storytelling device. Each new pass through the same corridor forces us to scrutinize the image for anomalies, to distrust what we see, and to share the protagonist’s growing paranoia. But the most interesting thing is that the director doesn’t merely transplant the game’s mechanics to the screen, but endows them with a dramatic and moral dimension that goes far beyond a simple puzzle. A lesson in how to make a lot of cinema with very, very little. 8.2
Available: Filmin, Movistar
A Desert (Joshua Erkman)
Known for his Ty Segall music videos, director Joshua Erkman made his feature debut two years ago with ‘A Desert’, a highly stimulating blend of thriller and horror whose soundtrack is, naturally, composed by Segall himself. Winner of Sitges’ Noves Visions section, ‘A Desert’ is pure indie cinema: few locations (barely a motel and several ruined buildings in the Mojave Desert), a handful of characters (including one played by David Yow, frontman of The Jesus Lizard) and a lot of invention and narrative power.
Erkman plays with the imagery of rural America, the “detour to hell” through a degraded Old West inhabited by rednecks in overalls stained with blotches, bending it to his will. While echoes of many films linger (from ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ to ‘Twentynine Palms’, to name two very disparate examples), ‘A Desert’ has its own personality. It works both as a terrifying city-boy nightmare and as a particularly bleak portrait of a United States turned into an immense landscape of abandonment, decay, and violence. 8
Available: Filmin, Shadowz
The Plague (Charlie Polinger)
Another brilliant debut. The highly acclaimed ‘The Plague’ has opened doors for Charlie Polinger at A24, with which he is preparing ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous tale featuring an enviable cast: Mikey Madison, Léa Seydoux, and Franz Rogowski.
‘The Plague’ is a very inspired cross between the drama of school harassment and the body horror tale. The director turns a summer water polo camp into a stage of adolescent cruelty, where group dynamics and the struggle for acceptance take on terrifying dimensions. The fear of rejection and humiliation ends up manifesting in the bodies themselves: rashes, pimples, eczema and wounds that turn the skin into a reflection of psychological upheavals. Polinger also demonstrates an extraordinary expressive capacity. His sophisticated staging, with echoes of Kubrick, a particularly disturbing sound design and the unsettling score by musician and singer Johan Lenox create an atmosphere of unease and constant threat. 8.1
Available: Filmin, Movistar, Prime Video
Hope (Na Hong-jin)
Promised to be one of the decade’s great monster movies. Na Hong-jin’s return (The Strangeness, The Yellow Sea) after ten years without directing a feature landed directly in Cannes’ official competition, which is quite unusual for a genre film. Watching the first act of ‘Hope’ it’s clear why it was selected to compete alongside auteurs like Cristian Mungiu, Pawel Pawlikowski, or Valeska Grisebach: Na Hong-jin’s directing is impressive. The long opening, following a police officer through a town ravaged by a creature we won’t see until much later, is among the best work seen this year.
Then things change: the monster becomes explicit and so do the film’s shortcomings. The threat, so terrifying when off-screen, loses much of its bite once materialized as a digital creature that isn’t very convincing. And what up to then had been a triumph of staging begins to become a sequence of chases, gunfights, and action scenes (the film runs two and a half hours) that grow increasingly flashy and repetitive. Still, the first hour is so strong that it deserved a place in this selection. 7
Available: in cinemas
Exhuma (Jang Jae-hyun)
Korean genre filmmakers seem inexhaustible, and one of the latest arrivals is Jang Jae-hyun, who had already drawn attention with his previous ‘Svaha: The Sixth Finger’ (2019), internationally released on Netflix. With ‘Exhuma’ he has crowned himself: it was South Korea’s top-grossing film in 2024 and became one of the biggest commercial successes in Korean horror cinema’s history.
Curiously, with ‘Exhuma’ something similar happens to what happens with ‘Hope’. The first hour is magnificent, as if David Fincher had directed a folk horror thriller in which, instead of a pair of police officers, we have a shaman and a geomancer. The fascinating rituals, the ominous atmosphere and discoveries as perturbing as a snake with a human face or a coffin buried upright compose an intrigue of formidable visual impact. The problem is that when the specters become visible they don’t live up to the atmosphere that precedes them, and the accumulation of explanations and twists ends up diminishing the force of a proposition that worked much better through suggestion. A notable horror film, in any case, that finds its best moments in that unsettling territory where the modern world discovers it has never fully managed to rid itself of its old ghosts. 7.5
Available: Prime Video
Send Help (Sam Raimi)
Sam Raimi’s return to the genre on the big screen, seventeen years after ‘Drag Me to Hell’ (2009), recovers the most recognizable hallmarks of his cinema: a mix of horror, comedy and gore that works wonderfully. A blend as entertaining as it is gross, to which this time a few drops of adventure romance, bedroom battles and class struggle have been added. Drops that give sharpness to the whole, of course—no syrup.
The result is a bloody, perverse and very twisted entertainment that turns a survival story into a ruthless power struggle. Raimi plays with our sympathies and expectations (watch the final twist), constantly subverts the relationships between victims and executioners, and embraces excess with a zeal and narrative cadence we hadn’t seen since the aforementioned infernal revenge film. 7.7
Available: Disney
The Virgin of the Quarry (Laura Casabé)
There’s an image in ‘The Virgin of the Quarry’ that condenses Mariana Enríquez’s literary universe (also adapted in the recent ‘My Sad Dead’): a supermarket cart abandoned in the middle of the street. The same object that allows for multiple readings: dramatic (belonging to a homeless person assaulted by neighbors), metaphorical (symbol of the economic crisis) and sinister (its contents seem to drag a curse). Laura Casabé has captured this superposition very well by choosing the story ‘El carrito’ to weave it together with ‘The Virgin of the Quarry’, both included in ‘The Dangers of Smoking in Bed’. The former provides the social context, Argentina’s 2001 crisis; the latter, a story of sexual awakening, obsessive jealousy and female rivalries that acquire supernatural dimensions.
There is something of Carrie in that adolescent who, unable to cope with rejection and frustration, seems to project her anger onto the world around her through forces beyond her control. Casabé interweaves adolescent drama, the generational portrait, and folklore-rooted terror with great naturalness. Internet cafe chats, songs by Las Pelotas, and the small cruelties among friends coexist with witchcraft rituals, curses and manifestations of the supernatural. All this in a landscape of precariousness, insecurity and social disintegration, under the suffocating heat of a summer that seems about to explode. 8
Available: Movistar
Jenny Pen’s Law (James Ashcroft)
Stephen King went crazy for it. He placed it in his top 10 films of the 21st century, no less. I suppose, at 79, the fear of something like what happens to the protagonist of Jenny Pen’s Law must influence its appraisal. Because that is what James Ashcroft’s film is about, the director of the equally superb ‘Caught in the Darkness’ (2021): the fear of aging, the physical and mental deterioration, the dependence on others, the fear of not being taken seriously because “you’re old and senile.”
Jenny Pen’s Law is something like ‘Misery’ in a nursing home. A psychological, claustrophobic horror tale in which a judge, admitted to a care home after a stroke, becomes the victim of a psychopathic inmate who makes his life a living hell. The film rests on two great strengths: the formidable acting duel between Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow (both awarded at Sitges) and the originality of its setting, which turns a place designed to care for the most vulnerable into a space of defenselessness and terror. 7.5
Available: Filmin, Movistar
Smile 2 (Parker Finn)
Of all the recent horror franchise sequels that have hit theaters lately — ‘Wedding Night 2’, ‘Black Phone 2’, ‘M3GAN 2.0’ — the second part of ‘Smile’ seems to me the best of all. How has Parker Finn (currently filming with Margaret Qualley the remake of Zulawski’s Possession) managed to repeat the premise without the film feeling repetitive? Through stylization.
Finn proves to be an extraordinarily gifted director of staging. The charm of this sequel isn’t in the script, which can’t surprise as much as the first installment, but in the expressive force the director is able to draw from the terrifying situations the protagonist, a pop star played with great boldness by Naomi Scott, endures. The elaborated framings and camera movements, the editing, and the use of sound turn each hallucination into a horror spectacle. There are sequences of staggering virtuosity, such as the dancers invading the protagonist’s apartment, which turns a pop choreography into a nightmare of twisted bodies and monstrous smiles. The film is a bit long — more than two hours for a very B-movie-ish proposition — but it doesn’t lack ideas. 7.3
Available: Prime Video
V/H/S/Halloween
From the V/H/S saga, active since 2012, many of the great names of contemporary fantasy have passed through. Some were already known – Adam Wingard, Ti West, Scott Derrickson – and others made their mark there, like David Bruckner (‘The Night House’, ‘Hellraiser’), Chloe Okuno (‘The Strange One’), or the duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (‘Wedding Night’, ‘Scream’). ‘V/H/S/Halloween’, the penultimate installment of the series (‘V/H/S/Mixtape’ has just premiered in the US), continues the same approach: established names (Paco Plaza, Alex Ross Perry) and others emerging, such as Casper Kelly, who is already making waves with his first feature film for cinema, ‘Buddy’.
It doesn’t seem accidental that the episode directed by Kelly, ‘Fun Size’, is the best in this installment. A treat — no better word — for fans of gore comedy, with a very solid narrative and a design of settings and characters (idiot youths and a creepy villain) well achieved. Of the rest of the segments (the collection is uneven but estimable, none feel out of place) the standout is Paco Plaza’s, ‘Ut Supra Sic Infra’, shot in Spain and in Spanish, a tale of possessions and hidden forces that alternates the police reconstruction of a massacre with footage shot by the victims themselves. A supernatural horror exercise that reclaims the pulse of the ‘REC’ director for found footage and culminates in a spectacular display of physical horror. 7
Available: Planet Horror
