Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for horror movies like Beware Boiúna:
Dangerous Animals
Dangerous Animals is an effective piece of genre filmmaking that doesn’t overreach and knows exactly what it wants to be. It’s scary, sharply made, and full of small, clever choices that elevate it above its straightforward premise. It’s the kind of late-night horror flick that benefits from a pitch-black room and a strong stomach, and one that knows how to get under your skin without overstaying its welcome.
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.
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.
The Host
Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is a genre-bending monster movie that blends sci-fi horror, political satire, and family drama into one of the most distinctive creature features of the 21st century. Deeply influenced by the Godzilla franchise, Bong crafts a cautionary tale about environmental recklessness and government incompetence, opening with an American scientist dumping bottles of formaldehyde into Seoul’s Han River. Years later, this reckless act results in the emergence of a massive, mutated amphibian that terrorizes the city.
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.
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.
Send Help
Sam Raimi is back to his old ways. Having spent nearly the entire 21st century being put through the franchise ringer, from a Spider-Man trilogy to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to a very strange Oz reimagining, there have been only a couple of original film highlights spilled in between. Drag Me to Hell developed a cult following, and his latest film Send Help seems destined to do the same.
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.
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.
READ MORE: Movies Like Ice Cream Man, Movies Like Send Help
