For a Friday with friends, you need a film that doesn't require perfect silence to work. Something engaging enough that it holds attention even in a room with people in it.
In retrospect, the 2010s were a decade of quiet excellence - films doing serious work without demanding credit for it.
Great horror films are never really about the monster. They're about what the monster represents â fear, grief, guilt, the unknown.
In a small town in Maine, seven children known as The Losers Club come face to face with life problems, bullies and a monster that takes the shape of a clown called Pennywise.
Guts, an immensely strong sword-for-hire, has little direction in his life, simply fighting one battle after the next. However, this all changes suddenly when he meets and is bested by Griffith, a beautiful and charismatic young man who leads the Band of the Hawk mercenary army. After Guts joins the Band and the relationship between the two men begins to blossom, Casca, the tough, lone swordswoman in the Band of the Hawk, struggles to accept Guts and the influence he has on the world around her. While the two men begin to fight together, Griffith continues to rise to power, all seemingly in order to reach his mysterious, prophesied goals. What lengths will Guts and Griffith go to in order to reach these goals, and where will fate take the two men?
When a massive, gilled monster emerges from the deep and tears through the city, the government scrambles to save its citizens. A rag-tag team of volunteers cuts through a web of red tape to uncover the monster's weakness and its mysterious ties to a foreign superpower. But time is not on their side - the greatest catastrophe to ever befall the world is about to evolve right before their very eyes.
Several friends travel to Sweden to study as anthropologists a summer festival that is held every ninety years in the remote hometown of one of them. What begins as a dream vacation in a place where the sun never sets, gradually turns into a dark nightmare as the mysterious inhabitants invite them to participate in their disturbing festive activities.
Still scarred by the trauma he endured as a child at the Overlook Hotel, Dan Torrance faces the ghosts of the past when he meets Abra, a courageous teen who desperately needs his help -- and who possesses a powerful extrasensory ability called the "shine".
What separates great horror from cheap horror is craft. These films use silence, anticipation, and image with the precision of a surgeon.
Failed architect, engineer and vicious murderer Jack narrates the details of some of his most elaborately orchestrated crimes, each of them a towering piece of art that defines his life's work as a serial killer for twelve years.
High school student Shun Takahata is bored. Bored with the day-to-day monotony of school and life, he prays for change, for something exciting. Suddenly, he and his classmates are forced to play deadly children's games and facing terrifying creatures from a talking Daruma doll to a sharp-clawed lucky cat.
César, an unhappy concierge, maintains a peculiar relationship with the very diverse inhabitants of the upper-class apartment building where he works in Barcelona.
A young bride's wedding night turns into her worst nightmare when her ridiculously rich in-laws force her to play a gruesome game of hide-and-seek.
Plagued by a series of apocalyptic visions, a young husband and father questions whether to shelter his family from a coming storm, or from himself.
Great films that make you cry do so because they've made you care. By the time the emotion lands, you're not surprised - you're just not ready for it.
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.