Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for horror movies like V/H/S/Mixtape:
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.
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.
Ash
As a filmmaker, Flying Lotus continues to show potential, particularly in his ability to craft unsettling, otherworldly imagery and pair it with haunting sound design. But Ash feels like a proof of concept more than a fully realized vision—a solid step up in production value, but not in storytelling or emotional impact. Eiza González and Aaron Paul star as two stranded astronauts on a distant planet.
V/H/S/Beyond
V/H/S/Beyond is the seventh installment of the cult classic horror anthology franchise V/H/S. After six, you’d think a series would begin to lose steam or run out of ideas, but this one has done the opposite. Since Shudder rebooted the franchise in 2021 with V/H/S/94, the popularity for it has grown more and more. Now, they feel like tentpole releases on the horror streamer’s October slate.
Ick
Joseph Kahn’s Ick is a caffeinated, genre-scrambling splatter comedy that lives on needle drops and velocity. It is shameless about both, and that is part of the fun. Kahn edits like a music-video veteran, hurling you through an opening twenty-minute life-ruiner montage scored to mid-2000s emo and alt rock. “Swing, Swing” tees up the fall of golden-boy quarterback Hank Wallace, while tracks like “Teenage Dirtbag” slide in later as the movie keeps sprinting from bit to bit. The approach is knowingly exploitative of nostalgia and pop culture, yet the film is so nakedly in on its own joke that the excess becomes a feature rather than a bug.
Final Destination Bloodlines
Final Destination Bloodlines is the rare horror legacy sequel that understands exactly what it is—and more importantly, what its fans want. Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, this blood-soaked revival of the Final Destination franchise doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it absolutely fine-tunes it, delivering gory set pieces, a slickly paced plot, and just enough lore expansion to make it feel like more than a rehash. It’s self-aware without being snarky, brutal without being mean-spirited, and surprisingly clever in how it weaves its mythology into something new.
Bring Her Back
Bring Her Back may satisfy diehard fans of A24-style horror or those looking for a few jarring images, but for most viewers, it will likely feel like an echo of better films. This is the kind of horror that thinks it’s elevated but forgets to be compelling. For the Philippous, it’s a clear step back—stylistic confidence without a story worth telling.
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.
The ‘Burbs
Joe Dante’s The ’Burbs is the kind of suburban paranoia comedy that still plays like gangbusters. In this 1989 dark farce, Tom Hanks stars as Ray Peterson, a worn out everyman who has finally taken a week off and plans to do absolutely nothing. His staycation curdles the minute his motor-mouth neighbor Art, played with gleeful needling by Rick Ducommun, fixates on the new family next door, the reclusive Klopeks, who seem to appear only at night, haul suspiciously heavy trash to the curb, and dig holes in their yard during thunderstorms.
READ MORE: Movies Like Buddy, Movies Like Ice Cream Man
