Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like New Group:
Midsommar
If the slow spread of groupthink in New Group is what got under your skin, Midsommar is the natural next stop. Ari Aster sends Florence Pugh’s grieving Dani to a midsummer festival in rural Sweden, where a smiling commune absorbs outsiders one ritual at a time. It’s broad-daylight horror built on the terror of belonging, and on the way a crowd can make the unthinkable feel like tradition.
Talk to Me
Danny and Michael Philippou’s debut is about teenagers who turn something dangerous into a party trick, passing around an embalmed hand that lets spirits in for 90 seconds at a time. Like New Group, it understands how quickly peer pressure becomes its own kind of possession, and Sophie Wilde anchors it as a lonely girl desperate to feel connected to anyone. It remains one of the best A24 horror movies of the decade.
Ju-on: The Grudge
Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on: The Grudge is one of the purest distillations of J-horror, a fractured, out-of-order chain of hauntings that spreads from a single cursed house in Tokyo to everyone who steps inside it. Its scares come from stillness: a pale figure at the top of the stairs, a croaking sound in the dark, a shape that shouldn’t be under the covers. Anyone who enjoyed the contagious dread of New Group should start here.
Cloud
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud charts a different kind of collective madness. Masaki Suda plays a quietly ruthless online reseller whose anonymous customers and rivals slowly coalesce into a mob that wants him dead. Kurosawa lets the tension build in mundane spaces before the film snaps into violence, and the result is a sly portrait of resentment spreading through a crowd that never quite shows its face.
Serpent’s Path
Kurosawa’s French-language remake of his own 1998 thriller stars Kō Shibasaki as a Japanese doctor in Paris who helps a grieving father (Damien Bonnard) abduct the men he believes are responsible for his daughter’s death. It’s colder and more procedural than New Group, but the same unnerving Japanese genre sensibility is there: long takes, flat affect, and violence that arrives almost casually.
Heathers
Long before New Group turned a high school into a nightmare, Heathers skewered the social order of a Midwestern high school with a pitch-black sense of humor. Winona Ryder’s Veronica falls in with Christian Slater’s dangerous new kid, and the bodies start piling up as the student body turns every tragedy into a trend. It’s the definitive teen satire about how quickly a school can lose its mind together.
I Saw the TV Glow
Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a surreal suburban fever dream about two lonely teenagers (Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine) who bond over a late-night TV show and begin to suspect it is more real than their own lives. It shares New Group’s interest in alienated adolescence and in identity slowly dissolving into something larger, and its haunted, neon-washed imagery lingers long after it ends.
Bodies Bodies Bodies
Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies is a sharper, funnier spin on group dynamics gone wrong. A hurricane party at a remote mansion turns deadly when a murder-in-the-dark game becomes real, and Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, and Rachel Sennott tear each other apart with accusations and Gen Z jargon. It’s a reminder that the scariest thing in a group of friends is often the group itself.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter
Oz Perkins’ debut strands two students at a remote Catholic boarding school over winter break while a third young woman (Emma Roberts) makes her way toward the campus. Kiernan Shipka is chilling as the girl who begins to change. Like New Group, it’s a school-set horror film that trusts silence, stillness, and unease over cheap jolts.
Cuckoo
Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo drops Hunter Schafer into a remote resort in the German Alps where something is very wrong with the guests, the staff, and the strangely cheerful owner played by Dan Stevens. It runs on the same off-kilter logic as New Group: the adults seem complicit in the strangeness, and a teenage girl has to figure out the rules on her own.
READ MORE: Movies Like Midsommar, Horror Movies Like Talk to Me
