Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Colony:
The Last House
There’s a potentially compelling contained thriller buried somewhere inside this premise. A family trapped in their home while an unknowable force surrounds them, forcing them to confront dwindling resources, paranoia, and their own assumptions about what’s happening outside could have made for a genuinely tense movie. Instead, The Last House keeps stopping to explain itself until whatever mystery or suspense it might have generated has largely evaporated.
They Will Kill You
There’s a version of They Will Kill You that I would’ve liked quite a bit more than the one we ultimately got. For about the first forty-five minutes, director Kirill Sokolov wears his influences so openly that it becomes part of the fun. The film is drenched in Tarantino worship, from the geysers of blood and elaborate swordplay to moments that feel lifted straight from the filmmaker’s particular brand of exploitation excess (there may or may not be a shot of a demon licking the toes of a certain heroine). If you like Kill Bill, it’s hard not to have at least a little fun watching Sokolov channel that same chaotic energy, even if he never quite makes it his own.
The Elixir
Netflix’s Indonesian zombie thriller The Elixir is built on a sturdy if familiar setup: an estranged family is forced back together as a zombie outbreak rips through their town after a trial run of Jamu, a traditional herbal medicine, warps into a wrinkle-erasing miracle with monstrous side effects. Director Kimo Stamboel leans into pulp and gets plenty of mileage from the hook. The early chaos is tight and sticky, the gore is squeamish in a way that recalls peak The Walking Dead, and the effects often look pleasingly practical. As a piece of international genre fare, The Elixir has enough snap to sit alongside Netflix’s better imports.
28 Years Later
Few film franchises feel as reflective of their eras as the 28 Days Later franchise. The 2002 original remains one of the most influential horror films of the century, with Danny Boyle’s grainy, handheld style perfectly matching its atmosphere of isolation and dread. Its 2007 sequel, 28 Weeks Later, wasn’t directed by Boyle or written by Alex Garland, and while it had moments, it left fans with a sense that more could be done with the premise. Now, both Boyle and Garland return for 28 Years Later (2025), a film that feels both like a homecoming and a cautious step toward something bigger.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
Ready or Not never really felt like a movie that needed a sequel. The original told a complete story, ended on one hell of a punchline, and sent Samara Weaving off covered in blood with a cigarette in hand as one of the great modern horror protagonists. There wasn’t much left to say. So credit where it’s due to Radio Silence, because Ready or Not 2: Here I Come does a surprisingly good job justifying its own existence.
Buddy
I think the right crowd is going to have an absolute blast with Buddy, particularly if they find themselves in one of those raucous midnight screenings where the audience is just as willing to laugh at the gore as they are to recoil from it. The 90s kids-show angle didn’t work quite as well for me as the movie’s more straightforward horror, and I don’t think there’s enough underneath the concept to make this something I’ll be thinking about for very long. But Casper Kelly clearly knows the exact kind of deranged audience he’s making this for, and Buddy delivers enough blood, absurdity, and mascot mayhem to satisfy them.
Ice Cream Man
There are few directors working today whose names immediately tell you exactly what kind of movie you’re about to watch quite like Eli Roth. Whether that’s a compliment or a warning depends entirely on your tolerance for gallons of fake blood, unapologetically mean-spirited humor, and horror movies that constantly wink at the audience while doing something completely unhinged on screen. At this point, “Directed by Eli Roth” is practically its own subgenre, and Ice Cream Man leans into that identity about as enthusiastically as possible. It’s loud, gleefully disgusting, and has absolutely no interest in pretending to be anything other than a midnight movie for horror sickos.
V/H/S/Halloween
V/H/S/Halloween feels like the most obvious swing this long-running Shudder anthology could take, and the holiday framing mostly works. After a few detours to specific years and even outer space, this film plants every vignette on October 31, stitching them together with a proper wraparound about The Octagon Corporation’s cursed “Diet Phantasma” soda that kills its taste testers in escalatingly nasty ways. Bryan M. Ferguson leans into splattery punch lines here, and the carnage sets the tone for a lineup that ricochets between gross-out mayhem and quieter, queasier terror.
Weapons
Weapons opens with one of the most chilling hooks you’ll hear in any movie this year: at exactly 2:17 a.m., every child from Mrs. Gandy’s class woke up, walked downstairs, opened the front door, stepped into the dark… and never came back. It’s the kind of premise that immediately grabs you, the kind of logline that sells itself in a trailer and sticks in your head for days. Writer-director Zach Cregger, who burst onto the horror scene with 2022’s Barbarian, proves once again that he knows how to start a story with an irresistible, terrifying question.
Passenger
There’s enough in Passenger to recommend to horror fans. The central premise is clever, the performances are strong, and André Øvredal demonstrates a real understanding of how to stage individual scares. But it arrives at a moment where other filmmakers are swinging bigger.
READ MORE: Movies Like Buddy, Movies Like The Last House
