Le Manoir du Diable, the first horror movie on record, was made only one year after Arrival of a Train, the first film ever. That’s about 125 years of film, which means there’s 125 years worth of horror for fans to choose from. The sheer quantity of horror movies produced in that amount of time is almost incalculable, which for a cinephile is hell because it’s impossible to see them all. There are hundreds of thousands of movies and if you don’t know where to look, you’re bound to miss some good ones. Because of the numerous subgenres within subgenres, the VHS boom of the ’80s, and the constant stream of new shit being released every week, combing through the entire history of horror is a daunting task. This list was made to shine a light on a select few you might not have seen that I think are worth your time.
Welcome back to 100 Overlooked Horror Movies You Need to See.
20. Mermaid Legend (1984)
It feels as though the success of a movie comes down to timing more than quality. There are so many great gems that remain undiscovered by the masses, simply because they were released at the wrong time. Mermaid Legend fell through the cracks when it was released in 1984 but if it came out now, it would be a critical darling. It’s definitely a cult classic but it remains underappreciated outside of niche audiences. Everyone who’s seen it knows it’s far too good to be kept alive simply through word of mouth. This is a Criterion Collection level thriller and you’ve never even heard of it.
The film tells the story of Migiwa (Mari Shirato), a young woman whose fisherman husband is murdered by a corrupt businessman seeking to develop the coastline where they live. After witnessing her husband’s brutal death, she embarks on a quest for vengeance, culminating in a violent and surreal confrontation. As the film progresses, the narrative takes on a dreamlike quality, with the “mermaid” theme woven into the symbolic fabric of the story. Mermaid Legend is a tale of revenge, which is a well-worn theme in Japanese cinema, however, this film elevates it to a near-mythological level.
Migiwa’s journey for retribution is not only a personal quest but also a battle against the corrupt forces of industrialization and greed that threaten her world. Her husband’s death serves as a catalyst for a broader confrontation with the powers that be. The film questions the morality of revenge and its cost on the avenger, as Migiwa becomes increasingly consumed by the violence she inflicts. While not exactly horror, its moody pacing, dreamlike atmosphere and surreal tone make it a must watch for fans of art-house cinema.
19. The Golden Glove (2019)
Based on the real-life German serial killer of the same name, Fritz “Fiete” Honka is a deeply troubled, alcoholic man who lives a miserable, filthy existence. He frequents a run-down bar called Zum Goldenen Handschuh (The Golden Glove), where he meets and preys on older, vulnerable women. Honka is a grotesque figure, both physically and psychologically, representing the decay and desperation of his environment. He is alienated, grotesque, and trapped in a life of violence and addiction. Through heavy makeup and prosthetics, the young actor becomes almost unrecognizable, physically embodying the real-life killer’s deformed appearance.
Dassler captures Honka’s mannerisms—the twitchy awkwardness, explosive temper, and pitiful desperation that make the character unsettling yet disturbingly human. Honka’s facial disfigurement, the result of a car accident in real life, is an important element in the portrayal. It not only makes him stand out visually but also symbolizes the deeper ugliness within. His hunched posture, shambling movements, and unkempt appearance further add to the grotesque nature of his character. It’s a truly transformative performance that unfortunately flew under the radar and is still waiting to be discovered.
18. The City of the Dead (1960)
Time for a controversial hot take: I think this is better than Black Sunday. Made at the exact same time, both films have similar plots (a witch curses a town and hundreds of years later, the curse starts claiming victims) and have similar atmosphere (the black and white cinematography is amazing in each film) but I think this one has a better pace. I think Bava is one of the all time greats but that movie is slower than a dying sloth and drags more ass than a dog with worms. This on the other hand, moves like a rocket.
The plot is constantly unfolding, with new things introduced to keep you engaged. It starts as a Silent Hill-esque spooky town horror movie, then evolves into a Scooby Doo level mystery and then eventually becomes a full blown action movie with a lazer shooting crucifix and everything. This has given me a much greater appreciation for the director John Llewellyn Moxey, who’s films I’ve always liked but never connected the dots on who made them. He’s behind some of the best made for TV movies ever, such as: Home for the Holidays, Nightmare in Badham County and The Night Stalker. He’s an underrated voice in horror and he and this film need more respect.
17. Grim Prairie Tales (1990)
Part of the appeal of horror anthologies, besides the quality and variety of the segments, is the wrap-around story. Not all successful anthologies need a connective tissue to introduce each story, but the ones that have a “host” or a plot device that explains why it’s a segmented narrative are the most fun. Asylum is the gold standard when it comes to the wrap around but there are a ton that go the extra mile in trying to thematically tie everything together. Dead of Night and Ghost Stories have mini-narratives in between segments, whereas Body Bags and Tales From The Crypt have memorable hosts that introduce each tale. One that always gets overlooked when talking about the quality of the wrap-around story is Grim Prairie Tales.
While not original (it’s a collection of eerie stories around a campfire), its setting certainly is and you couldn’t ask for better hosts. Set against the backdrop of the American West, the film’s framing narrative centers on two travelers—Arthur (Brad Dourif), a mild-mannered city man, and Morrison (James Earl Jones), a grizzled, tough bounty hunter—who meet by chance on the plains. As night falls, the two men begin telling each other tales, leading to four distinct short horror stories, each tinged with Western aesthetics and moral undertones.
The stories deal with more than just supernatural scares; they are a meditation on frontier morality. The Old West, as depicted here, is a place of moral ambiguity, where justice is often brutal, and survival sometimes means compromising one’s principles. The framing conversation between Arthur and Morrison serves as a moral debate that spans the entire film. Arthur sees the world in black and white, while Morrison’s worldview is more pragmatic and cynical, shaped by the harshness of his environment. While no individual story will knock your socks off, together, they create an interesting debate between two actors at the top of their game.
16. Séance (2000)
Only Kiyoshi Kurosawa could remake Séance on a Wet Afternoon for television and somehow make it scarier. The film follows the same basic plot as the original but changes up certain story elements: the film follows Junco Sato (Jun Fubuki), a professional psychic who lives with her husband Koji (Koji Yakusho), a sound engineer. Junco’s abilities have always been treated with quiet skepticism, even by her husband, but things take a sinister turn when a young girl is kidnapped near their neighborhood. Around the same time, Koji accidentally discovers the unconscious girl hidden in a trunk that was delivered to his studio by mistake. Panicked and afraid of being accused of the crime, Koji and Junko decide to hide the girl in their home until they can safely return her without drawing suspicion.
That’s bad idea number 1, but things snowball from there when Junco decides to use her psychic abilities to help solve the case she’s now a part of. The plan spirals out of control when the girl unexpectedly dies in their care, transforming the situation from an ethical lapse in judgment into a straight-up nightmare. Junco becomes convinced that the child’s spirit has returned, haunting them both for their deception and moral weakness. Sense on a Wet Afternoon is more of a drama, where you’re watching an insane person make increasingly awful choices until there are no more choices to make. Kurosawa’s version focuses more on the aftermath of their terrible plan and plays more like a Poe story where guilt is more powerful than any ghost.
15. The Midnight Hour (1985)
Made-for-TV horror movies never get the respect they deserve. They’re treated like the red-headed stepchild of horror. They’re relegated to a separate category that’s often dismissed or outright forgotten. Which is why no one ever talks about The Midnight Hour, a movie that should be a Halloween staple but isn’t due simply to the fact that it was made for television. Set in the sleepy town of Pitchford Cove, The Midnight Hour centers around a group of high school teenagers who unwittingly awaken the dead after performing an ancient ritual. The main protagonist, Phil (Lee Montgomery), and his friends decide to dress up as historical figures for a Halloween party, raiding a museum exhibit for authentic costumes and an old scroll that belonged to a 300-year-old witch, Lucinda Cavender (Jonelle Allen).
During the party, they recite an incantation from the scroll as a joke, not realizing they’ve triggered an ancient curse that causes the dead to rise from their graves, including vampires, zombies, and Lucinda herself. As the night unfolds, Phil meets Sandy (Jonna Lee), a mysterious girl who helps him try to undo the curse. The film follows the teens as they try to stop the supernatural chaos while evading zombies, ghouls, and other creatures that terrorize the town. The Midnight Hour combines elements of classic supernatural horror with the campy, irreverent spirit of 1980s teen movies while maintaining a playful tone. It never becomes too dark or gruesome, which makes it more of a family-friendly Halloween movie. It could’ve easily have been a Disney movie back in the day if it wasn’t for the ending. Unlike most movies that eliminate the supernatural curse with magic, the world doesn’t go back to normal. Everyone that dies in this movie, doesn’t come back for a happy ending. It’s a ballsy conclusion to a movie you could easily show a child.
14. Hiruko the Goblin (1981)
Hiruko the Goblin is a bizarre creature feature that plays like a haunted playground designed by someone who thinks nightmares are just fun romps you have with your monster friends. Before Shinya Tsukamoto crowned himself the high priest of body horror with Tetsuo: The Iron Man, he made a horror-adventure film so tonally bizarre it feels like Sid and Marty Krofft creatures dropped acid and got lost inside the house from Hausu. A disgraced archaeologist gets a call from his son’s school, only to discover that it’s sitting on top of a literal gateway to hell. Goblins, spider-legged heads, and cursed tombs start piling up, and before long, it’s less Raiders of the Lost Ark and more Hellraiser meets Goosebumps.
It has the manic energy and weird monsters of a gateway horror aimed at youngsters but it’s far too weird and disturbing for their precious eyes to witness. The tonal whiplash would give them panic attacks alone. There’s tragedy, absurd humor, and genuine terror wrestling for control of the same movie, and somehow Tsukamoto lets them all win. It’s not his scariest, not his smartest, but definitely his most fun. Hiruko the Goblin is gonzo horror with a grin—a splatterpunk ghost story that reminds you that monsters don’t just crawl out of the ground; sometimes, they crawl out of the minds of wonderfully deranged filmmakers.
13. Saloum (2021)
Sinners is getting rave reviews for being a more sophisticated take on From Dusk Till Dawn—and while that movie absolutely rocks and deserves all its flowers, calling it “the next From Dusk Till Dawn” is the laziest comparison imaginable. They’re similar (both are single-location siege films involving vampires) but Saloum is far closer in terms of plot structure. From Dusk Till Dawn isn’t just “people trapped in a bar fighting off the undead until sunrise.” What makes it special is how it starts as one movie—a gritty crime thriller—and then abruptly transforms into a full-blown vampire bloodbath without missing a beat. That midpoint switch is the special ingredient that ties it all together and that’s what Saloum pulls off better than any movie since. It starts as a spaghetti western, flirts with an action thriller, and ends up as full-blown horror before you even realize it’s shifted gears.
The story follows the Hyenas of Bangui, a trio of legendary mercenaries who crash-land in the Saloum Delta after a job goes sideways. They take refuge in a small, isolated village, but the longer they stay, the clearer it becomes that something ancient and angry is lurking just beyond the horizon. What sets Saloum apart from most genre mashups is what it means. It’s not just mercenaries vs. monsters—it’s a reckoning with colonial trauma, revenge, and the ghosts left behind by cycles of violence. Even as bullets fly and blood spills, there’s genuine pathos underneath it all. Saloum doesn’t just cross genres—it devours them. It’s a revenge western, a supernatural fable, and a pulsing African horror film all at once.
12. Alison’s Birthday (1981)
When people think of Australian horror, they usually picture brutal slashers like Wolf Creek and The Loved Ones, moody arthouse nightmares like Lake Mungo, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Wake in Fright, or nature’s revenge classics like Razorback, Dark Age, and Long Weekend. Almost no one associates Australia with folk horror, even though that subgenre quietly produced some of the country’s best horror films of the era. Both The Devil’s Playground and Bedevil are woefully underseen but when it comes to the best hidden gems of Australia folk horror, Alison’s Birthday is the crown jewel. A teenage girl named Alison (Joanne Samuel) gets a cryptic message from beyond the grave warning her not to come home for her 19th birthday. Naturally, she ignores it. If you’ve seen even one horror movie, you already know that was a colossal mistake—and exactly how this is going to end.
Like The Wicker Man, Alison’s Birthday weaponizes community. The evil isn’t hiding in the shadows—it’s sitting at the dinner table, asking if you want another slice of cake. The horror takes so long to kick in, you eventually forget about the warning from the beginning and just settle into the gentle malaise of overly friendly old people. But eventually an empty smile or a stare that lasts too long raises an alarm in your mind and eventually, you’ll start screaming “girl, I don’t know what’s going on but run.” Alison’s Birthday proves that dread doesn’t need spectacle—it just needs inevitability. It’s quiet, eerie, and mean-spirited in the way only early ‘80s horror could be. You’ll never look at a birthday celebration the same way again.
11. Love Massacre (1981)
Love Massacre is what happens when the Hong Kong New Wave accidentally wanders into a slasher movie and never finds its way out. It begins as a melancholy drama, the kind of story that could’ve easily aired on late-night television—a woman caught in a quiet emotional tug-of-war between two men. One is kind and patient, the sort of man she could build a safe, quiet life with. The other is handsome but haunted, spiraling into grief over his sister’s suicide, a wound that festers beneath the film’s soft, romantic exterior. For over an hour, the movie seems content to stay in that register—a hazy, color-soaked love story about people quietly unraveling.
And then the bottom drops out.
Without warning, the film mutates. The tender melancholy of the first half fractures into a nightmare of obsession and violence, as if someone spliced a romantic melodrama with The Toolbox Murders. The shift is so abrupt and jarring it feels like the director just went through a painful break up during the making of it and had some shit he needed to work through. The final act—when the title’s promise of “massacre” finally arrives—is pure, unrelenting carnage. The violence comes in waves, brutal and chaotic, more akin to Ted Bundy’s real-life sorority rampage than to the stylized set pieces of typical Hong Kong thrillers. Once the killing starts, it doesn’t let up until every trace of tenderness has been painted over in red.
Director Patrick Tam—who would go on to mentor Wong Kar-Wai—shoots Love Massacre like he’s directing a perfume commercial. His camera drifts through rooms like a ghost, lingering on faces too long, letting silence thicken until it becomes unbearable. His use of color is especially striking: every shade of red feels like a scream trapped in glass. You can see the seeds of Wong Kar-Wai’s visual poetry here—the obsession with texture, the longing embedded in every frame—but where Wong finds romance in loneliness, Tam finds despair. Love Massacre is a film that seduces you with beauty only to leave you bleeding by the end. What begins as a story of love and grief curdles into a portrait of madness so sudden and violent it feels like an emotional ambush.
10. The Holy Virgin Versus the Evil Dead (1991)
The Seventh Curse earned its cult status by being an action-horror-comedy hybrid supercharged by the incomparable Chow Yun-fat. The only way to top that kind of lightning in a bottle would be to double down on the action, the horror, and the insanity—while finding someone even cooler to lead the charge. Enter The Holy Virgin Versus the Evil Dead. Not only does it crank every dial past its breaking point and toss in gratuitous nudity for good measure, it somehow ropes in Donnie Yen—an actor so effortlessly badass, no movie villain, mortal or demonic, could ever pose a real threat.
The story kicks off with a group of students slaughtered during a botched occult ritual, leaving a stoic art teacher (Yen) as humanity’s last line of defense against the supernatural onslaught. From there, the film descends into pure chaos: shrieking victims, black magic, exploding corpses, and Donnie Yen beating the hell out of demons.
The pacing is pure adrenaline. One moment it’s a splatter-filled horror film, the next it’s a martial arts brawl, and before you can catch your breath, it’s suddenly a supernatural cop thriller. It shouldn’t work—but it absolutely does. The film’s manic energy and gleeful trashiness fuse into something hypnotic. Yen, dead serious amid the madness, becomes the movie’s anchor and its greatest joke. Watching him deliver bone-crunching kicks to creatures from hell feels like watching Bruce Lee crash-land into The Beyond with nunchucks blazing. The Holy Virgin Versus the Evil Dead is cinematic delirium distilled—a sleazy, high-octane, genre-melting mini masterpiece that plays like every movie ever made all at once.
9. Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (1968)
The Yokai Monster trilogy is as underseen as it is unique. The trilogy stars ghosts that look like low-budget, human-sized Godzilla knockoffs who act like mischievous trickster spirits who revel in punishing the wicked. The films bookending Spook Warfare feature greedy businessmen and cold-blooded killers getting their comeuppance—fun in their own right, but nothing compared to the chaos unleashed in the middle installment. This is easily the weirdest, wildest, and most kick-ass of the trilogy. That one film alone makes the entire Blu-ray set worth owning. The plot is basically a mythological turf war: an ancient Babylonian vampire-demon called Daimon rises from his tomb and sets up shop in feudal Japan, possessing samurai and spreading evil like a foreign infection.
The local yokai—Japan’s mischievous, shape-shifting folklore creatures—aren’t having it. So they do what any self-respecting spirits would do: they form an army and go to war. This is a kaiju movie where a giant vampire God fights a ragtag group of goofy ass ghosts. Make no mistake, these guys are absolutely terrifying, if you’re an average joe but to a Dracula the size of Galactus? They’re about as threatening as the gang from H.R. Pufnstuf. But that unevenness actually raises the stakes.
These monsters—ranging from a one-eyed umbrella ghost to a long-necked woman—aren’t anywhere near the same power level, and some are bound to die. But that uncertainty only makes the climatic battle more thrilling. If you’re interested in Kaiju monster movies because you want so see dudes in rubber suits fight over a fake city, destroying model buildings and causing a ton of obviously fake looking destruction but find the Godzilla movies boring because “nothing happens in them?” Well, you’re in luck because this is a Godzilla movie where everything happens and the monsters are way cooler to look at and actually have personalities.
8. Night Life (1989)
The fact that Night Life is as obscure as it is, is crazy considering it’s a horror movie from everyone’s favorite decade that also involves zombies, everyone’s favorite monster. The story revolves around Archie Melville (Scott Grimes), a high school student who works part-time in his uncle’s (John Astin) funeral home. Archie is a relatable underdog, dealing with typical teenage struggles: he’s bullied at school by a group of rich kids, has an unrequited crush on his classmate, and works an unglamorous job with no clear future in sight. Things take a wild turn when the bullies die in a freak car accident and their bodies end up at the funeral home where Archie works.
Due to a series of bizarre circumstances, the dead teens come back to life as zombies, setting off a series of gruesome and comedic events as Archie and his friends fight for survival. The zombies, however, retain their vengeful personalities, which means Archie’s torment continues even beyond the grave. Seriously, these are the most aggressive bullies in the history of cinema. They give the bullies from IT and Tammy and the T-Rex a run for their money. They want to kill Archie not because they want to eat his brains (because zombies) but because they’re assholes. But that’s part of the fun of the movie. They’re exaggerated caricatures of high school antagonists that symbolize the persistent nature of high school trauma. It’s a horror comedy with zombies that subtly tackles themes of high school anxiety with great performances by Grimes and Astin. It’s a cult film waiting for its cult.
7. Footprints on the Moon (1975)
Footprints on the Moon is a giallo for people who hate giallo, which is why it’s one of the only ones I like. It skips the usual bloodbath and goes straight for the brain. It’s not about masked killers and black gloves. It’s about a woman trying to figure out if she’s losing her mind, and Luigi Bazzoni makes you feel every second of that confusion. He was the first director to realize that the dream logic that’s prevalent throughout the genre works better if the plot lends itself to dream logic and isn’t just thrown in to help contribute to the eerie atmosphere. Florinda Bolkan plays Alice, a translator who wakes up to find three days missing from her life. She has no idea where she was, what she did, or why her dreams are haunted by a bizarre image of astronauts abandoning a man on the moon. If that sounds strange, good—that’s the point. From the start, nothing feels stable.
Clocks don’t match, people remember her differently, and reality keeps sliding out of reach. This is a slow burn, and Bazzoni leans into the atmosphere hard. Every location looks perfect but feels off and every conversation raises more questions than it answers. The pacing is deliberate, but the mood keeps you hooked. You want answers as much as Alice does, and Bazzoni keeps dangling them just out of reach. The payoff isn’t about shocking twists or gore. It’s about that creeping sense of inevitability—the feeling that something has been wrong since the first frame, and now you finally know what it is. By the end, you’re not sure if you’ve watched a mystery, a dream, or a nightmare. Footprints on the Moon is elegant, creepy, and one of the most unique psychological gialli of the 1970s.
6. The Forbidden Files (1989)
The Forbidden Files isn’t the first found footage movie, but it feels like it predicted the analog horror boom decades before it existed. It plays like a cursed artifact disguised as a TV documentary—something that blurs the line between truth and fiction so seamlessly you start questioning what’s real and what’s staged. Imagine Unsolved Mysteries or In Search Of, if they were broadcast straight from a haunted VCR.
The film unfolds through supposedly “real” footage shot by people who claim to have encountered the paranormal. The first segment follows a man stranded at sea after a shipwreck, slowly losing his mind as his rations mysteriously never deplete. He refuses to fire his flare gun at passing ships but eventually shoots it into the sky at something only he can see. Days later, he calmly wades into the ocean and vanishes. Another segment centers on a man’s eerie footage of the moon following an alleged alien abduction. In another, an entire town becomes ensnared in hysteria over a local witch.
None of it is outright terrifying, but every piece leaves a residue of unease—a sense that something is just off. Watching it feels like uncovering the prototype for Internet horror, a fossil from the future. Each clip leaves you with more questions than answers. Did any of this air on television? Was it real? Or is that uncertainty the point—the film’s own built-in curse, feeding its legend every time someone presses play? By the end, you can’t help but wonder if you’ve joined the growing list of those who’ve simply seen too much.
5. Benny’s Video (1992)
Despite producing three stellar horror films (and one good enough but ultimately pointless remake), no one considers Michael Haneke a horror director. I truly believe a major contributing factor to this is the fact that most only know his worst contribution to the genre. Some have seen the original Funny Games, less have seen Caché and hardly anyone has even heard of Benny’s Video. And it might be the best of the bunch. The film follows Benny, a 14-year-old boy from a wealthy, emotionally detached family. Benny spends much of his time alone, watching violent videos and recording his own.
His disconnection from reality becomes clearer when he films and later commits a senseless act of violence, showing no remorse or understanding of its impact. Benny’s character illustrates how media consumption, particularly violent content, can numb individuals to the consequences of their actions. Haneke uses Benny to critique society’s passive consumption of violence through screens. The movie is part of Haneke’s broader critique of media and violence, themes he revisits in his later works. Benny’s cold, almost clinical approach to violence sets the tone for the director’s unsettling style, where the audience is forced to confront the moral implications of passive viewership.
4. Abruptio (2023)
Evan Marlowe spent eight years trying to get this movie finished. From the time the script was written, the voice recording was done, and the post-production was complete, nearly a decade had passed. It took so long that technically it is Sid Haig’s last film (it came out in 2022, three years after he died) despite the fact that he recorded his lines back when he was making Bone Tomahawk. That’s a long time to work on a passion project, so regardless of its quality, Marlowe deserves respect for fighting that hard to see his vision come to fruition. He deserves even more respect for fighting for this. It would be one thing if the rock he was trying to push up the hill was important to him and he was the only one who could tell it. But no, this rock is a big ol’ boulder of batshit Insanity.
Every few years, a movie slithers out of nowhere that feels like it was smuggled in from another dimension—something too weird, too handmade, too wrong to have come from the same planet as Marvel movies or Netflix originals. Abruptio is one of those films. It’s a waking nightmare made entirely with life-sized puppets, and it’s so grotesque, inventive, and deeply unsettling that it feels like Jan Švankmajer directed a snuff version of Anomalisa. Les Hackel (James Marsters) wakes up to find a mysterious implant in the back of his neck and a cryptic message instructing him to commit unspeakable acts—or die.
It’s the kind of plot that could’ve worked in live-action, but the choice to tell it with full-body latex puppets transforms it into something infinitely more disturbing. Every face looks wrong. Every movement is jerky, mechanical, and alien. Even when nothing horrifying is happening, you feel like you’re watching something you shouldn’t. The choice to make every character a human-sized puppet gives it a unique edge, but it is more than just a stylistic choice; it literally ties into the theme, which is: everyone is a puppet controlled by unseen masters. There’s a good chance you’ll hate Abruptio. It’s ugly by design, slow in places, and suffocatingly bleak. But if you’re drawn to the outer edges of horror—the weird, the tactile, the uncompromising—it’s a minor miracle. Abruptio is what happens when someone opens the door between horror and art and finds something unspeakable staring back.
3. The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974)
Italian films are my kryptonite. They move at a crawl, their plots twist themselves into knots, and they have far too many characters to keep track of. The only saving grace, most of the time, is the gorgeous cinematography and the occasional grisly kill—but even that’s rarely enough to make the slog worth it. And yet, every so often, the chaos coalesces. The dream logic, the languid pacing, the violent eruptions, and the hypnotic colors align just right, and the result is alchemy. The Perfume of the Lady in Black is one of those rare miracles—an overlooked masterpiece that deserves to be whispered about with the same reverence as Repulsion or Don’t Look Now. Silvia (Mimsy Farmer), a chemist, begins to unravel after a series of coincidences start to feel like patterns. People stare too long. Memories don’t line up. Faces shift, intentions blur, and the world starts to feel staged.
The more she tries to anchor herself in reality, the more it seems to warp around her, as if her mind is being rewritten in real time. Is she paranoid—trapped in a feedback loop of her own anxieties—or is there truly a conspiracy chipping away at her sanity, one subtle manipulation at a time? Barilli keeps both possibilities alive, turning the film into a psychological hall of mirrors. What starts as a standard mystery slowly curdles into a surreal study of trauma, repression, and decay. The Perfume of the Lady in Black is a giallo reimagined as a psychological thriller—where the question isn’t who did it, but whether anything ever happened at all.
2. Possessed II (1984)
A follow-up in name only to Possessed (1983), this one ditches continuity for chaos. It opens with a haunting, ends with a exorcism, and in between, it feels like reality keeps tripping over itself. The film follows a detective investigating a string of bizarre deaths that seem to circle back to a single cursed woman, but good luck trying to track the logic—this isn’t a mystery so much as a mind fuck given cinematic form. This movie throws so much at the viewer, even Raimi would tell it to calm the fuck down. Like so many Category III-adjacent horror films of the era, it’s a mix of the sacred and profane—priests versus demons, sex versus damnation, the living versus the guilt they can’t bury. But what makes Possessed II hit harder than its contemporaries is the amount of crazy it throws at you.
While others at the time focused on the extreme, this only cares about the non-stop gags it has planned. There are so many demons, so many unrelated murders committed by said demons, so many weird hauntings, you will forget half of what you just watched because it’s impossible to remember it all. There was definitely something in the air in Hong Kong horror from the early ’80s—a kind of manic, electric weirdness that feels like the filmmakers were all chasing a nightmare they half-remembered. Possessed II is the purest form of that energy: part exorcism film, part supernatural noir, and part cosmic fever dream about guilt, ghosts, and the cruel weight of karma. It isn’t polished. It isn’t coherent. But it doesn’t need to be. If The Exorcist is religion gone wrong, Possessed II is what happens when even God stops picking up the phone.
1. Il demonio (1963)
Horror fans hate the term “elevated horror” because they know critics only use it to describe a two-decade-old window. Elevated horror implies it is a movie head and shoulders better than most in terms of its quality and subject matter. Basically, it’s not a mindless slasher or gratuitous torture porn, two genres born from the early ’80s and that died out well before the ’10s. It’s a ridiculous dismissal of every other decade of horror that produced high-quality horror on the regular. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to shine a light on a refreshing slow burn horror that focuses more on vibes, atmosphere and tone over jump scares, splatter effects and non-stop nudity but it’s disingenuous to suggest it’s an anomaly. Horror has always been elevated.
Case in point: Il Demonio (aka The Demon), a blistering commentary on patriarchy and misogyny that feels like an A24 film made fifty years before the studio existed. Set in a remote village in Southern Italy, The Demon follows Purificata (Daliah Lavi), a young woman who is ostracized by her community and accused of being possessed by the devil after her love for a local man is rejected. At its core, The Demon is a film about the destructive power of superstition and the persecution of those who do not conform to societal norms.
Purificata’s suffering can be seen as a symbol of the broader plight of women who are marginalized and demonized for their desires and independence. The film explores the thin line between religious devotion and fanaticism, as the villagers’ fervent belief in the supernatural leads them to commit acts of cruelty in the name of righteousness. If you’re like me and you run every time you hear the words “Italian horror” because you know that means slow and nonsensical, give this one a shot. It’s what Italian horror should’ve been, instead of beautiful but boring giallos and interminable supernatural films.
40-21
What are some of your favorite overlooked horror movies? Share them with us down below, and maybe they’ll end up on a future list!
