Friday night with friends is about energy. You want something that earns its place in the conversation - a film that people are still talking about on the way home.
In retrospect, the 2010s were a decade of quiet excellence - films doing serious work without demanding credit for it.
Horror works best when it earns the dread before deploying it. The best films in the genre build something you care about, then threaten it.
Kyung-chul is a dangerous psychopath who kills for pleasure. Soo-hyeon, a top-secret agent, decides to track down the murderer himself. He promises himself that he will do everything in his power to take vengeance against the killer, even if it means that he must become a monster himself.
When a zombie virus pushes Korea into a state of emergency, those trapped on an express train to Busan must fight for their own survival.
A committed dancer struggles to maintain her sanity after winning the lead role in a production of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake."
A decade after a tragic mistake, family man Chas Chandler and occult detective John Constantine set out to cure his daughter Trish from a mysterious supernatural coma.
Real zombies arrive and terrorize the crew of a zombie film being shot in an abandoned warehouse, said to be the site of military experiments on humans.
What separates great horror from cheap horror is craft. These films use silence, anticipation, and image with the precision of a surgeon.
Chris and his girlfriend Rose go upstate to visit her parents for the weekend. At first, Chris reads the family's overly accommodating behavior as nervous attempts to deal with their daughter's interracial relationship, but as the weekend progresses, a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries lead him to a truth that he never could have imagined.
Vampire housemates try to cope with the complexities of modern life and show a newly turned hipster some of the perks of being undead.
Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren work to help a family terrorized by a dark presence in their farmhouse. Forced to confront a powerful entity, the Warrens find themselves caught in the most terrifying case of their lives.
A brilliant plastic surgeon creates a synthetic skin that withstands any kind of damage. His guinea pig: a mysterious and volatile woman who holds the key to his obsession.
Two hillbillies are suspected of being killers by a group of paranoid college kids camping near the duo's West Virginian cabin. As the body count climbs, so does the fear and confusion as the college kids try to seek revenge against the pair.
The films that give you a good cry do so because they've earned it. Not through sadness alone - through care. These films care.
These films work not in spite of their darkness but because of what they do with it. Fear, in the right hands, is one of cinema's most honest tools.