Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like The Yeti:
Wolf Man
Wolf Man is another uneven entry in Universal Pictures’ long-running struggle to make their classic monster IP feel vital again. Leigh Whannell may be one of the more exciting genre filmmakers working today, but this misaligned project is more whimper than howl.
Sting
Sting has its moments, but the genre has offered much better this year, and a premise like “growing killer spider gets loose” doesn’t do enough to tie the movie together and keep you engaged. It is worth the price of admission once, but it’s not much to write home about after the fact.
Hell Hole
There might be a fun creature feature somewhere in Hell Hole, but the newest Shudder release doesn’t strike a good balance in tone and narrative. I don’t want to keep trashing on a streaming service that offers many independent filmmakers an outlet to produce their projects, but Shudder is starting to deviate away from a must-have service for fans of the genre.
Hell of a Summer
On the surface, Hell of a Summer doesn’t have many glaring flaws. It’s an obvious love letter to classic slasher films like Friday the 13th, Scream, and Sleepaway Camp. Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard make their directorial debut here, and while their enthusiasm for the genre is clear, the film struggles to carve out its own identity. Instead of reinventing familiar tropes, it largely retraces well-worn ground, and that familiarity ultimately works against it.
The Watchers
It’s not all bad, but I wished The Watchers tied together better. A monster movie with diluted monster energy, the movie wanders along, yanked forward by solid captives and a couple noteworthy scares. Ishana Night Shyamalan should keep attempting to make movies like this because I’d imagine most will achieve greater success.
Barbarian
Zach Cregger‘s Barbarian is still refreshing and thrilling, and it’s easily one of my favorite theater experiences of 2022. Films try over and over again to use the schlocky marketing bit of audiences screaming in theaters only to be disappointing in actual terror when places in front of you – but Barbarian is genuinely jaw-dropping.
Backrooms
Kane Parsons’ deliriously scary YouTube creepypasta series The Backrooms has been adapted to the big screen, and he is not the first to graduate from YouTube filmmaking and short-form horror to feature auteur in the last few years. Zach Cregger and Curry Barker have similar trajectories off the success of Barbarian/Weapons and Obsession, respectively. But Parsons makes a direct adaptation of his own highly successful and notorious Backrooms project here, becoming A24’s youngest feature director in the process.
Cuckoo
Sometimes, a good ole freak-out film that doesn’t make much sense is exactly what you need. Fortunately, Tilman Singer is responsible for two of them now. 2020’s Luz was an underappreciated shock to the horror system that signaled Singer as an auteur to look out for moving forward, and 2024’s Cuckoo only further cements him as one of the genre’s bravest image makers, even as he’s working out the kinks in his storytelling repertoire.
Frankenstein
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein hews closely to Mary Shelley, for better and for worse. It is a long running passion project, and it makes sense that he resists drastic changes to a story that already matches his gothic sensibility. After the more adventurous reworkings of Nightmare Alley, Pinocchio, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon lineage in The Shape of Water, this feels cautious. The craft is elegant, the discoveries are limited.
Night Swim
With a PG-13 rating, and a concept so thinly developed beyond “scary swimming pool,” Night Swim relies heavily on cheap scares and creepy underwater sight gags – where few of which actually earn their keep. Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon star in a sometimes silly, often underdeveloped horror movie.
READ MORE: Movies Like Wolf Man, Movies Like Backrooms
