Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for horror movies like Hallowarrior:
It Ends
There are some pacing issues here, particularly considering how quickly 89 minutes can feel exhausting, but I’m inclined to see that as more of a feature than a bug. It Ends is a movie about people becoming exhausted by an experience that has no end, and the film manages to make that exhaustion feel palpable without completely sacrificing its sense of mystery. It’s an admirable out-of-nowhere debut genre picture, a smartly abstract descent into madness that knows when to stop explaining itself. Like a Gen Z M. Night Shyamalan being found in real time. Credit to Alexander Ullom.
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.
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.
We Bury the Dead
Daisy Ridley has quietly turned her post Star Wars years into one of the more interesting genre pivot runs in recent memory. Even when the movies are uneven, like The Marsh King’s Daughter, the choices are rarely boring, and when they click, like Sometimes I Think About Dying, you can see her stretching in real time. That streak continues with Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead, a January release that arrives with all the baggage of the calendar’s reputation and still manages to offer more craft and atmosphere than you typically get in that slot.
Keeper
Keeper finds Oz Perkins splitting the difference between the chilly occult dread of Longlegs and the goofy pulp of his Stephen King riff The Monkey. The result is a winking slow burn that slips, scene by scene, into gawky madness. It is more confident than The Monkey, less severe than Longlegs, and most alive when it trusts atmosphere over exposition.
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.
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.
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.
Knock at the Cabin
The concept behind Knock at the Cabin is fairly simple, as many of M. Night Shyamalan’s movies are. A couple and their daughter are at a remote cabin when a set of strangers sets upon their location. It’s made known to them that they must choose a sacrifice from their own family to prevent the apocalypse. Despite the well-mannered and caring demeanors of the intruders, they insist that this sacrifice must be made in order to save the world.
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.
READ MORE: Horror Movies Like Carrie, Horror Movies Like Colony
