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.
40. Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack (2012)
Based on the manga by Junji Ito, Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack is a horror anime that follows the bizarre and terrifying events in Japan when sea creatures start emerging from the ocean with mechanical legs, wreaking havoc on the land. The story centers around Kaori, who, while visiting Okinawa, gets caught up in this surreal invasion and must survive as the world is overtaken by these grotesque creatures. As an adaptation, Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack takes some liberties with Junji Ito’s original manga. The film condenses and alters certain plot elements, leading to a narrative that is more streamlined but also different in tone. Some fans of the manga may find the changes disappointing, as the film doesn’t fully capture the slow-building dread and existential horror present in the source material.
However, as every adaptation of his work has proven, you can’t do a 1:1 adaptation because his unique brand of horror only works on the page. You have to make some changes for it to work and I think the filmmakers did an admirable job of turning the ridiculous idea of sharks with legs into an absolute nightmare scenario. Gyo Tokyo Fish Attack is a visually striking and conceptually bold horror film that captures the bizarre and unsettling essence of Ito’s work, albeit with some narrative and tonal inconsistencies. It’s a film that will likely appeal to fans of body horror and surreal, apocalyptic scenarios, but may not satisfy those looking for a more traditional horror narrative or a faithful adaptation of the manga. Despite its minor flaws, it remains a unique entry in the horror anime genre, offering a disturbing and unforgettable viewing experience.
39. My Super Psycho Sweet 16 (2009)
MTV, in its twilight years of cultural relevance, greenlit a slasher movie based on a reality show about spoiled teenagers. That sentence alone should’ve guaranteed disaster. And the film’s premise “a killer stalks a birthday party at a roller rink,” isn’t doing it any favors. But somehow, against all odds, My Super Psycho Sweet 16 works. This is the rare made-for-TV horror movie that feels like it wants to be a real slasher, not just cosplay as one. The premise is pure 80s camp: Madison, a rich mean girl, throws an over-the-top Sweet 16 party at an abandoned roller rink that was shut down years ago after a massacre. Naturally, the killer returns. Cue the blood, the screaming, the guilt, the gossip, and a surprising amount of pathos. At its best, My Super Psycho Sweet 16 feels like the ghost of Prom Night filtered through the digital fuzz of early-2000s MTV.
Which means outdated slang, awful fashion and a terrible soundtrack aimed at an audience who no longer exists. But the kills are brutal enough to make you forget this aired on cable, and the characters are surprisingly well-drawn for a movie designed to cash in on copious amounts of teenage corpses. What makes it fascinating is that it exists in a weird cultural limbo — too slick to be grindhouse, too earnest to be satire. It’s the bastard child of MTV and VHS horror, a movie that should’ve been a throwaway novelty but instead became a cult oddity that spawned two sequels and a small but loyal following. It’s not great cinema. But it’s a great reminder that sometimes, even in the most commercial, cynical corners of pop culture, a real horror movie can slip through — blood, heart, and all.
38. Seven Footprints to Satan (1929)
You would think that after making one of the greatest horror films of the silent age that Benjamin Christensen would, at the very least, be a director known within the horror community. Everyone knows Haxan but the director and his films seem to have slipped into obscurity. To be fair, a good chunk of his films have been lost to time but the ones that remain are worthy of rediscovery. I cannot for the life of me figure out why Seven Footprints to Satan hasn’t had a huge critical resurgence. It’s well-liked among the people who have seen it but that number is shockingly low. This should be routinely ranked among the best silent films ever, let alone horror. The plot is simple: a young rich socialite is planning a trip to Africa but before he goes, his fiancée asks him to go with her to a party. Everything seems hunky dory until a fight breaks out and everyone scatters.
They leave in a hurry but realize they’ve actually gotten into the wrong car and are now being kidnapped by a cult of satanists. The rest of the film involves them running around a mansion filled with a sorts of insane individuals intent on getting them. There’s a little person who lives in the walls, a cripple named “The Spider”, an Asian woman with a penchant for yelling, a Fu-Manchu-looking guy and a gorilla. It’s a madcap horror comedy that feels like a live-action Betty Boop or Felix the Cat cartoon where they’re stuck in a haunted house and get spooked for eight minutes. It has that same kind of energy and it also has a twist as good as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It’s a classic just waiting for the right critic to shine a light on it.
37. The Abomination (1986)
There’s low budget movies, no budget movies, and then there’s The Abomination — a movie with a budget so small, a twenty minute porno has higher production values. Shot on grimy 16mm in rural Texas, this is the kind of horror movie that doesn’t just look diseased — it feels diseased. Every frame sweats. Every sound buzzes. Every scene looks like a VHS tape that caught leprosy. After being “healed” by a televangelist, a woman coughs up a bloody tumor, and keeps it in a jar like it’s the Virgin Mary. Then it grows teeth. Then it multiplies. Then it crawls into her son’s mouth and turns him into a meat pinata that cant stop puking up meat monsters. So many that it feels like he’s hosting a Cronenberg-themed party and the only guests are his intestines and they’re getting violently kicked out. While this is happening to him, the house starts to become a fleshy temple to some mutant deity.
Which means the film is filled to the gills with red goop, fake blood, pulsating organs made from latex and what I’m assuming is cheap hamburger meat mixed with oatmeal. You can smell this movie. If this film came with an Odorama scratch-n-sniff card and John Waters chose the scents like he did for Polyester, if you scratched it and sniffed it, you’d die. It is a gross, gross movie but that grossness is what earned it a cult following. Fans of SOV oddities love this movie because of Bret McCormick’s earnestness. He had no money, no talent and no luck but he didn’t let any of that stop him from making exactly the movie he wanted to make. He could’ve rewritten it to work within his budget but his momma didn’t raise no bitch. Raimi made The Evil Dead with nothing, damn it. That movie proved the only thing stopping you from making a movie is the will to act. McCormick wanted to make a gross out body horror comedy and nothing stopped him.
36. Ravenous (2017)
Not to be confused with the 1999 cannibal movie of the same name, Ravenous is a French Canadian cannibal movie of a different kind. The two are similar in that one is about cannibals and the other is about undead cannibals because it’s about zombies. The movie is about zombies that may not even be dead at all, which kinda ruins the joke. In rural Quebec, the world has already ended. A mysterious infection has wiped out most of the population, transforming the dead into pale, feral husks who gather in the fields, staring up at the sky or building eerie towers out of junk and furniture — monuments to some unknowable instinct.A small band of survivors wanders through this desolate landscape.
They move from house to house, scavenging supplies and dodging the infected. Sometimes they find shelter. Sometimes they find bodies. The further they go, the less it feels like they’re escaping anything — the apocalypse isn’t chasing them, it’s just everywhere. Everywhere and inexplicable. The dead act like lost souls wandering a now dead Earth who are forced to kill to survive but who aren’t just immobile when food on legs walls by. They’re always occupied with busy work. Always building skyscrapers out of random shit for some unknown reason. It’s as odd as it is creepy. Zombie movies don’t often change up the formula, so every time one does, it should be noted.
35. Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015)
Be My Cat: A Film for Anne is so successful at its meta approach to the found footage formula, you (along with some of the actors within the film) start to question where the line ends and real life madness begins. Adrian Tofei, the film’s writer, director, editor, and star, plays “Adrian Tofei,” a Romanian filmmaker obsessed with Anne Hathaway. Not the real one, but the version of her that exists only in his warped imagination—a muse, a fantasy, a hostage to his art. He makes a movie as an audition tape for her, using three local actresses to demonstrate what he’s capable of. Spoiler: what he’s capable of is horrifying.
Found footage horror is a dime a dozen, and by 2015 the genre had eaten itself into redundancy. But Tofei reinvigorates it through sheer, unnerving authenticity. Every moment feels unscripted, every twitch and stammer feels real, and the line between acting and psychosis becomes so thin it might as well not exist. His performance is too convincing. The shaky digital footage, the cramped Romanian streets, the raw awkwardness of the women—all of it feeds into the illusion that we’re watching something we shouldn’t. Something that wasn’t meant for us. Be My Cat: A Film for Anne is what happens when Ben from Man Bites Dog decides to film his crimes instead of hiring a documentary crew to do it for him.
34. Violence Voyager (2018)
Nothing gets me more excited than discovering a film I know will give me something unique. That’s why I tend to drag my feet on prestigious or critically acclaimed films I know I’ll like, I almost always know what they are and what I’ll get out of them before I press play. Outside of amazing cinematography that stays with you forever, there’s nothing better than a great cast attacking a great script and while I love all of that, chasing the new is more exciting to me. I’d rather roll the dice on something that looks weird and interesting than something that everyone said was great, almost every time. And that’s because I’m looking for experiences that often times only the strange can provide. Violence Voyager is one of those experiences.
It’s the kind of film who’s plot synopsis will betray you. IMDB will tell you it’s an animated film about two kids who discover an odd theme park deep within the mountains that soon turns sinister and while that’s all correct, the picture it paints is far less interesting than the actual film. For one thing, the animation is almost non existent. It’s paper cutouts that barely move, which immediately puts your mind on edge. There’s something about unnatural movements that taps into that uncanny valley effect that makes us feel uneasy. Whether intentional or not, the film accomplishes the same thing. In addition to the unsettling animation, the film’s plot goes in so many wild directions, it’s impossible to guess where it’s going to end up. As much as I love watching a great film, these WTF experiences are what I live for.
33. Der Fan (1982)
The only reason this wasn’t remade years ago, is the fact that no American studio knows it exists. The only thing you’d need to do to modernize it is to update the technology. Other than that, this haunting psychological thriller that tackles the darker side of obsession and celebrity worship plays far better today, than it did in 1982. The film follows Simone, a teenage girl who is obsessed with a pop star known only as “R” (played by the real-life musician Bodo Staiger).
Simone’s infatuation with R consumes her entire existence; she writes him letters, dreams of meeting him, and isolates herself from her family and friends. When R comes to her town for a performance, Simone finally gets the chance to meet him, leading to a disturbing series of events that reveal the depth of her obsession. Der Fan takes a shocking and unexpected turn in its final act, shifting from a seemingly straightforward tale of teenage infatuation into something far more disturbing and psychologically complex.
The film’s climax is infamous for its graphic and unsettling depiction of the consequences of Simone’s obsession. Desirée Nosbusch, who was just seventeen at the time of filming, delivers a powerful performance as Simone. She captures the character’s innocent yet disturbingly single-minded devotion with a subtlety that makes her eventual breakdown all the more horrifying. Nosbusch’s portrayal of Simone’s descent into madness is both believable and deeply unsettling, making her one of the most memorable aspects of the film.
32. Butterfly Kisses (2018)
A found footage horror film that adds an interesting twist to the genre by blending it with a mockumentary format, Butterfly Kisses plays with themes of obsession, urban legends, and the blurred lines between reality and fiction while offering a brand new monster with its own unique mythology. A filmmaker discovers a box of videotapes in an abandoned basement. The tapes were recorded by a pair of film students who were working on a documentary about a local urban legend known as “Peeping Tom.” According to the legend, Peeping Tom is a supernatural entity that can be summoned by staring down a particular stretch of the Ilchester Tunnel for an hour without blinking. Once summoned, the entity relentlessly follows its victim, getting closer with each blink until it finally kills them.
Butterfly Kisses uses a unique narrative structure that alternates between the found footage of the student filmmakers and the mockumentary-style footage of the filmmaker’s investigation. This dual approach allows the film to explore the concept of unreliable narrators and the manipulation of media. The student film footage is definitely the A plot and stronger of the two storylines. Watching the two characters grow increasingly more desperate in their quest to break the curse they brought upon themselves is tense and frightening. Seeing Peeping Tom get closer and closer to them in the footage they’re shooting will have you scanning every frame like a terrifying game of Where’s Waldo? That is until he’s so close, there’s no need to look for him because he’s no longer hiding, he’s right there.
31. Angel Dust (1994)
Angel Dust feels like the greatest film Kiyoshi Kurosawa never made. It shares the same tone, visual language, and creeping sense of dread as Cure—that mix of beauty and rot, hopelessness and quiet menace—but it actually beat Kurosawa to the punch by three years. No one ever cites Gakuryū Ishii (formerly Sogo Ishii) as an influence on their work due to the fact that he’s such a singular filmmaker (Burst City and Crazy Thunder Road are one of a kind slices of punk rock insanity) but he clearly helped define the new look of Japanese thrillers that still persists today.
The film follows Setsuko Suma (Kaho Minami), a criminal psychologist investigating a series of seemingly random murders committed on crowded subway cars. Each killing is methodical, emotionless, and happens like clockwork — a nightmare synced to the rhythm of public transportation. But as Setsuko digs deeper, the investigation becomes less about catching a killer and more about dissecting her own fractured psyche, especially when an old lover, now a cult deprogrammer, re-enters her orbit. Angel Dust is a psychological horror film disguised as a police procedural, but it operates on dream logic — like if The Silence of the Lambs were directed by Satoshi Kon.
30. Door (1988)
A lonely housewife (Keiko Takahashi) spends her days in quiet isolation while her husband’s at work and her child’s at school. Her only company comes from the endless procession of door-to-door salesmen who keep invading her space—until one of them decides he’s not leaving. What starts as a critique of domestic monotony slowly mutates into something far more brutal than you could possibly imagine. Takahashi’s film opens like a kitchen-sink drama, then swerves into psychological horror, and finally crashes headfirst into pure home-invasion terror. It’s the closest we’ll ever get to seeing Chantal Ackerman directing Repulsion. The clash of tones is so unique, you’ll either click with it and love it or bounce off of it and get bored.
But it rewards the impatient with a killer third act and a memorable villain. The obsessed salesman turned stalker (Daijirō Tsutsumi) is one of the most unsettling psychos Japan ever gave us. He starts as an unrelenting stalker with infinite amounts of time and patience and turns into a blood crazed lunatic. He attacks with the brutality of a savage in that third act but as hard as he comes at her, the harder she fights back. She’s not a final girl, she’s the only girl. She beats the shit out of him. The most memorable moment involves her stabbing him in the face with a certain kitchen utensil. Door is the Japanese answer to Straw Dogs if it were remade by someone who thought being home alone is the scariest thing in the world.
29. Broadcast Signal Intrusion (2021)
There are corners of the Internet that feel genuinely dangerous when you stumble into them. Sometimes it’s as simple as landing on a sketchy website that feels wrong somehow, or watching a video that gives you the ick because you can’t quite tell if what you’re seeing is real. That’s when the alarm bells start ringing. Google protects you from the darkest parts of humanity but what if it no longer existed? Or rather, what was it like finding these inexplicable images and videos before the Internet existed? Movies like 8MM showed how hard it was searching for extreme snuff films—you literally had to dig through hell to find shit to satisfy your demons but Broadcast Signal Intrusion covers the other side of unexplained VHS tapes. The weird side.
The film follows James (Harry Shum Jr.), a lonely video archivist who stumbles onto a series of hijacked TV transmissions (real, unnerving pirate broadcasts featuring distorted humanoid figures and cryptic audio) and slowly becomes convinced they’re linked to a string of missing women. Whether he’s right or just unspooling into madness is beside the point. The deeper he digs, the more the movie becomes about obsession itself: how curiosity can turn into compulsion and how important it is to know when a mystery should remain a mystery. Not all questions need answers, especially ones holding a knife. Broadcast Signal Intrusion doesn’t just recreate ‘90s paranoia — it broadcasts it straight into your brain. A haunted signal trapped between frequencies, playing forever for anyone foolish enough to tune in.
28. Late Night Trains (1975)
Late Night Trains is Last House on the Left but on a train. They’re so similar in tone, one of its alternate titles is literally New House on the Left. Two teenage girls on their way home for the holidays board a train where they run into a pair of low-rent predators and a sadistic upper-class woman who joins in on their cruelty for sport. What follows is an endurance test wrapped in a European art film—where violence is disturbingly casual. It’s the kind of horror that doesn’t give you the satisfaction of release. There’s no catharsis. No revenge. It just leaves you hollow, like something inside you rotted while you were watching. This movie belongs solely in the dare category.
The type of horror movie you only watch to challenge yourself because there is no entertainment or enjoyment to be had here. It’s nihilistic to the nth degree. It is a boot to the face of decency, a film so grim it makes its American cousin look almost kind by comparison. But under all that brutality lies actual beauty. It swaps out the dirty grindhouse aesthetic for something slicker, something colder. Lado directs with unnerving restraint, framing the brutality like he’s making The Passenger instead of an exploitation flick. There was actual care put into the aesthetics and framing of scenes. Which makes everything else that much more disturbing.
27. Night of Death! (1980)
The main reason horror fans hail the ’80s as the genre’s golden age is simple: it just never stops giving. Even the most die-hard devotees who think they’ve seen it all keep unearthing hidden gems buried in those blood-soaked hills. If I told you there was an ’80s horror film you’ve never seen where the neighbors from Rosemary’s Baby turned out to be more like the Sawyers from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre than a bunch of devil worshippers, would you believe me? Night of Death! (aka La Nuit de la Mort!) Is one of those late-’70s/early-’80s Euro horrors that looks like it should be trash but turns out to be weirdly artful, hypnotic, and deeply unpleasant.
The setup sounds almost quaint: a young nurse takes a job at a remote countryside mansion turned old folks’ home, where the residents act strange and the staff keeps disappearing. But the longer she stays, the clearer it becomes—these geriatrics aren’t just weird. They’re hungry. The premise is almost identical to Next of Kin, but while that film relied on surreal imagery to unnerve its audience, Night of Death! takes a more understated, quietly disturbing approach. Since the film is about old people, it makes sense that their creepiness would reveal itself slowly, to better match their turtle-like speed. The second act starts to suffer from its deliberate pace but the last fifteen minutes really rewards the patient. For fans of creepy slow burns filled with creepy geriatrics secretly doing grotesque things.
26. Battle Heater (1989)
Battle Heater feels like director Jôji Iida aggressively trying hard to pull off Nobuhiko Obayashi’s style and he gets pretty get damn close. So many subplots are thrown at the viewer—some completely insane—that it sometimes feels like you’re barely holding on to the story, but that’s part of its shotgun-blast approach to chaos, which is exactly what makes it so charming. The film is about a possessed kotatsu (a low, wooden table frame covered by or heavy blanket, upon which a table top sits. Underneath is a heat source, usually an electric brazier) that terrorizes an apartment complex filled with weirdos, losers, and outcasts. There are tenants that are planning a double suicide. There is a couple trying to dispose of a corpse. There are punks acting like punks and love birds caught in a one sided triangle.
So much is going on that sometimes it forgets it’s supposed to be about a killer heater but again, that’s part of the charm. It has a kind of gonzo energy that makes you feel like you’re trapped inside a malfunctioning VHS tape. Every frame bursts with the kind of manic creativity you only find in late ‘80s Japanese genre cinema. The tone swings from broad comedy to splatter horror to deadpan social commentary, often within the same scene. It’s messy, overstuffed, and refuses to make sense, but that’s what makes it great. Like a live-action anime filtered through the sensibilities of a surrealist prankster, Battle Heater is a reminder that Japanese filmmakers of the era weren’t afraid to swing for the fences, even if they were aiming at a completely different ballpark.
25. Afraid of the Dark (1991)
Afraid of the Dark might be the best film ever made about how terrifying a child’s mind can be—especially when it’s starting to unravel. It is a coming of age nightmare with an ingenious midpoint twist. A young boy named Lucas (James Fox) is convinced a serial killer is stalking blind women around his neighborhood. His mother and all her friends are blind, so he spends his days guiding them everywhere they go—always by their side, even in the moments when they die. He personally witnesses two of them get brutally murdered, like he has front row seats to the newest Fulci movie. Or did he? At the halfway point, it is revealed that nothing we had just witnessed happened.
There is no killer, the people in his life aren’t blind and all the men on the outskirts of the frame aren’t all creeps. The movie is actually about a young man’s fear of going blind and how that is affecting his mental state. He is slowly losing his grip on reality, and starts committing heinous acts because his mind is warped. When he takes off his glasses, reality is distorted and he behaves accordingly. It makes sense within his broken view of things but for everyone else, he’s a ticking time bomb waiting to become Dahmer. The first half is a bloody paranoid fairy tale and the second is a quiet tragedy about blindness—literal and metaphorical that takes a hard left into the horrors of mental degradation.
24. The Sentinel (1977)
If Rosemary’s Baby is the classy, paranoid older sister of satanic horror, then The Sentinel is the sleazy little brother everyone forgets exists. It’s what happens when the prestige occultism of the late ’60s gets filtered through grindhouse sensibilities. Director Michael Winner (yes, the Death Wish guy) approaches horror with the subtlety of a crowbar to the face. If the neighbors of Rosemary’s Baby were low-key creepy, the ones in The Sentinel are throwing birthday parties for cats. Rosemary’s Baby hid the horror, The Sentinel shows the ghouls. A young fashion model (Cristina Raines), desperate for a place to stay, finds a beautiful old brownstone with a suspiciously low rent, which should be red flag number one. Red flag number two? The blind priest who just sits at the top floor window all day, staring out over the city like a gargoyle waiting for something.
From there, things get… weird. Alison’s neighbors are a parade of grotesques—an assortment of eccentrics who feel like they escaped from a freakshow. Eventually, she learns they’re not tenants at all. They’re the damned, residents of Hell itself, and the building is literally the gateway between Heaven and the pit. What makes The Sentinel fascinating—beyond its absurd cast (Burgess Meredith, Ava Gardner, Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Berenger, and even Beverly D’Angelo in a scene that will burn itself into your memory whether you like it or not)—is its commitment to being ugly. Not just visually, but spiritually. It wants to leave a stain on your soul. It’s not as elegant as The Exorcist or as psychologically precise as Don’t Look Now, but it’s got something neither of them do—a vicious mean streak and enough bleak nihilism to choke on.
23. Don’t Deliver Us from Evil (1971)
If Heavenly Creatures is the arthouse version of teenage blasphemy, Don’t Deliver Us from Evil is the grindhouse one. A gleefully perverse, beautifully blasphemous provocation that plays like a satanic coming-of-age film directed by someone who actively hates the Church. Loosely inspired by the same real-life case that fascinated Peter Jackson decades later but taken in a completely different direction. Jackson’s was a painfully tragic love story between two crazies that felt like murder was their only solution. Joël Séria’s version has no interest in painting anyone as sympathetic.
Two teenage Catholic schoolgirls, Anne and Lore, swear allegiance not to God but to Satan, and spend their summer break testing how far they can push sin before Hell itself takes notice. They lie, they seduce, they torment, they kill. But this isn’t a horror film in the traditional sense — there are no demons, no jump scares, no supernatural comeuppance. The horror here is moral rot, human cruelty, and the casual glee of innocence curdling into evil. And the devil has no power here, he’s not standing in the shadows silently approving their misdeeds. He’s just an excuse for two young girls to do whatever they want and what they want to do is shocking. Don’t Deliver Us from Evil is what happens when religious repression and sexual curiosity collide head-on and explode into perversion.
22. We’re Going to Eat You (1980)
Before Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain, before Peking Opera Blues, before he changed the face of Hong Kong cinema with A Better Tomorrow and the entire heroic bloodshed movement it inspired. Before all of that, Tsui Hark made We’re Going to Eat You — a movie that’s part kung fu movie and part cannibal comedy that wobbles between Looney Tunes slapstick and Cannibal Holocaust sleaze. A complete outlier within his work in every way, Hark never made anything as zany, as action packed or brutal ever again. This has a Jackie Chan action comedy tone but with the brutal violence of an Eli Roth horror. The tonal shifts are whiplash inducing but that’s why it works. A secret agent (named Agent 999, because why not) tracks a wanted criminal to a remote island. The island’s residents?
A cannibal cult that lures travelers for dinner. And not as guests. What follows is a Lucio Fulci movie with the manic energy of a Shaw Brothers action flick. The film never really settles on what it wants to be. One minute you’ve got bone-crunching martial arts choreography and the next, you’re watching broad farce with Benny Hill–style chase music. It’s an exploitation film made by a genius who hadn’t quite learned to control his powers yet. A schizophrenic satire on corruption and the absurdity of authority but mostly, it’s a kung fu cannibal comedy that’s as strange as it sounds.
21. Red Spell Spells Red (1983)
Red Spell Spells Red radiates pure bad energy. Buried for decades, it remains one of the most disturbing and unrelenting Category III horror films ever to come out of Hong Kong. It looks like someone filmed a National Geographic special on black magic, then decided it needed more snakes, blood, and necrophilia. It’s equal parts documentary and nightmare, blending scenes of real animal slaughter with the kind of supernatural grotesquery that only Hong Kong in the 1980s could produce. Red Spell Spells Red follows a film crew traveling to Borneo to shoot a documentary on native witchcraft.
Naturally, they ignore every warning about curses, offend the local spirits, and unleash a red spell that dooms them one by one. Think Cannibal Holocaust crossed with Evil Dead directed by Eli Roth. Not all horror is designed to scare you, some just want to throw as much red at you as fast as humanly possible and that is most definitely this film. It’s also a fascinating cultural artifact—a time capsule of a film industry testing the limits of taste and censorship, weaponizing shock as both transgression and tourism. Whether you view it as an exploitation gem or an utter waste of time, is irrelevant. Red Spell Spells Red doesn’t care, it’s going to curse you anyway.
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What are some of your favorite overlooked horror movies? Maybe they will show up in the Top 20!
