Horror films can be a bloody minefield (or is that war films…). It’s not that jump scares don’t work, they do, but when every film uses the same trick it becomes tedious. A face suddenly filling the screen. A cat leaping out of nowhere. A musical sting timed to put your drink in your lap. We get it.
The horror films worth losing sleep over are the ones that make you sit with something truly twisted and leave an image in your head that won’t shift. The best of recent years have understood that dread is like a bottle of cheap plonk. It needs time to breathe before it does any real damage.
The filmmakers who get this right tend not to come from Hollywood’s horror sausage factory. A24 and Neon are two names worth remembering. And if subtitles don’t scare you, there’s a stack of international productions that chill your bones without a single frame of CGI blood.
If The Substance isn’t on your watchlist, fix that now. Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 body horror is still as wrong as it was when it first came out. It doesn’t jump. It escalates, slowly and deliberately, until you’re watching through your fingers because you genuinely cannot believe what you’re seeing.
For 2026 releases, Undertone from Ian Tuason is the proof. Picked up by A24 and shot for $500,000 in Tuason’s own childhood home, the entire film is built around sound. Nina Kiri plays a paranormal podcast host who starts receiving audio recordings that pull her somewhere she can’t explain. No score cues, no false alarms. Tuason lost both parents to cancer during the pandemic, and the film was shot in the house where they died. That grief is in every frame. It made $21 million on half a million dollars, which tells you what audiences will pay for when someone gives them something real.
From South Korea, Salmokji: Whispering Water follows in the footsteps of folk horror classics like Midsommar and The Wailing but finds its own rhythm. Set around a reservoir in South Chungcheong Province, its psychological approach earned 21 consecutive days at number one in Korea and over two million admissions, the first Korean horror to hit that mark in eight years. The violence, when it comes, hits harder precisely because the film gives you almost nothing for its first hour.
Hollywood has mostly given up on slow-building dread, which is why Heretic from 2024 felt so welcome. Hugh Grant trapping two Mormon missionaries in his house and dismantling their faith was scarier than most franchise entries with ten times the budget. The lesson was simple: committed performances and a genuinely unsettling idea will always beat spectacle.
For streaming, Shudder remains the most reliable place for this kind of film, and at around £5 a month it won’t break the bank. The curation is considerably better than trawling through the horror section on a major platform and landing on Paranormal Activity 9. If you want something more international, Mubi is worth checking out. Subtitled horror from Japan, Romania, and Argentina turns up there regularly, and it tends to assume you can handle ambiguity without someone holding your hand through it.
And if you want to save yourself nearly two hours of torture (not the scary kind, the misery of sitting through a truly awful film), give Backrooms a wide berth. You’d find more horror in the back room of the TNT office. But that’s a story for another day.
