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.
60. My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (2020)
If you skipped My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To because the title gives you images of pretentious indie music from the mid ’00s, I don’t blame you. It definitely sounds like the name of an album from that time. But I promise you, this movie is anything but hipster. It’s an atmospheric and emotionally charged indie horror film that explores the dynamics of a dysfunctional family caught in a nightmarish situation. Two brothers – Dwight (Patrick Fugit) and Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram), are tasked with caring for their younger brother, Thomas (Owen Campbell). Thomas suffers from a mysterious condition that requires him to drink human blood to survive, making him a sort of modern-day vampire.
To keep him alive, Dwight and Jessie are forced to go to extreme and morally compromising lengths, including killing innocent people. The story unfolds as the siblings struggle with the emotional and psychological toll of their situation, with Dwight particularly burdened by the weight of their actions. The film is suffused with a bleak, oppressive tone that reflects the characters’ despair and isolation. The muted color palette, sparse settings, and minimalist score contribute to a sense of claustrophobia and inevitability. This is not a traditional horror film with jump scares or overtly supernatural elements; instead, it relies on mood and tension to unsettle the viewer. This belongs in the “being a vampire is a drag” subgenre, a subgenre in desperate need of more titles.
59. Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell (1995)
I believe the only way to properly homage Raimi, is to do it with zero money. The Evil Dead is beloved because of the passion and ingenuity that went into making it. Everyone who saw it recognized that this was made by friends in the woods with more talent than money. Even the sequel, which had a much bigger budget, was still made for pennies compared to everything else at that time. That’s the exact reason people respond to Dead Alive or Demon Wind, no money but endless invention. That’s exactly why Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell works as well.
It’s a loving homage made by a passionate fan with no means. Just like the Raimi film its drawing inspiration from, The film’s plot is as straightforward as they come: a bodybuilder named Shinji, accompanied by his ex-girlfriend and a psychic, enters a haunted house where they are confronted by vengeful spirits. As the spirits begin to possess and attack them, Shinji uses his strength and determination to fight back in increasingly absurd and bloody ways. It’s not original, it runs just over an hour and it’s shot on video but it’s so fun, those are all perks, not bugs.
58. Neighbour No. 13 (2005)
Confucius once famously said “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves” and while he was clearly referring to the inevitable negative consequences and self-destruction that come with vengeance, it could also be applied to the main character in Neighbour No. 13 and the viewer. There are two kinds of revenge movies: the ones that feed off your bloodlust, and the ones that make you sick for ever wanting it. This is the latter. A festering wound of a film that starts as a slasher and curdles into a portrait of what happens when you never escape the person who hurt you. When the past doesn’t haunt you but lives inside you, wearing your face. By the end, it’s unclear who’s more monstrous: the bully who broke him, or the man who let that brokenness define his entire existence. Jûzô (Shun Oguri) is the kind of man who disappears in a crowd, and that’s the problem — he’s been disappearing his whole life.
As a child, he was tormented by a sadistic bully named Akai (Hirofumi Arai), whose brand of cruelty left a permanent scar, both literal and psychological. Years later, fate places them in the same construction company, and what’s been buried deep under Jûzô’s skin finally claws its way out. Enter Number 13 (Shidō Nakamura), a snarling, scarred alter ego who manifests like a comic book demon. Nothing but teeth, rage, and unfiltered vengeance. He’s the id made flesh, a walking reminder that revenge born from trauma doesn’t heal; it metastasizes. When the violence finally erupts, it’s not stylized or cool, it’s nauseating. You’re not cheering. You’re flinching. If revenge is a dish best served cold, Neighbour No. 13 is that dish left out too long — rancid, poisonous, and unforgettable.
57. Don’t Go to Sleep (1982)
With a few exceptions, made-for-TV horror movies have been ignored by most horror fans—especially ones of a certain era. Anything made for a streamer is virtually indistinguishable from things on a streamer, so they usually get eyeballs regardless. But the ones made in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s? Unless it has Stephen King or Steven Spielberg’s name on it, most go unseen. One of the greatest made-for-TV horror hidden gems that deserves more love is Don’t Go to Sleep, a movie oozing with dread and creepiness. The film starts innocently enough: a family moves into a new home, hoping for a fresh start after the tragic death of their daughter, Jennifer. But “fresh starts” are a lie in horror, and soon the surviving daughter, Mary (Robin Ignico), starts hearing her dead sister’s voice.
Jennifer whispers in her ear, taunts her, manipulates her but the question is, is she really back? Or is Mary’s mind the haunted house? Unlike most ghost stories of its era, Don’t Go to Sleep doesn’t rely on cheap tricks or gore. It thrives on tension, the unspoken kind that sits at the dinner table, behind fake smiles and uncomfortable silences. Valerie Harper plays the mother as a woman so consumed by guilt she can’t see the storm brewing under her roof. Dennis Weaver’s father is distant, fragile, one bad day away from cracking. Some movies don’t need monsters. They just need grief — raw, festering, unacknowledged grief to do the haunting for them. Don’t Go to Sleep is one of those movies. Oh, and you’ll never look at a pizza cutter the same way again.
56. 1974: The Possession of Altair (2016)
Found footage horror is the cinematic equivalent of fast food —cheap, easy, and usually bad for you. But every now and then, someone figures out the recipe. 1974: The Possession of Altair is one of the best found footage films in years because it feels like a cursed artifact, a film that shouldn’t exist. A memory you were never meant to see. Set (and shot) like a 1970s home movie, the film follows Altair and Manuel (Diana Bovio and Rolando Breme), a newly married couple whose lives are captured through a grainy 8mm camera. The footage starts out sweet — newlyweds playing with their dog, smiling for the lens, basking in that warm, sepia glow of domestic bliss.
But as the weeks go by, Altair starts to unravel. Her smiles fade. Her eyes hollow out. She talks to something in the night. And suddenly, that happy home movie becomes a snuff reel of supernatural despair. What makes 1974 work isn’t just the aesthetic — though it’s perfect. The faux-8mm texture is flawless, the sound is muffled and decayed, and the editing feels genuinely handmade, like someone spliced this thing together in a panic. But beyond the style, there’s a creeping, sickly authenticity.
You don’t feel like you’re watching actors; you feel like you’re watching evidence. Like Paranormal Activity, the film weaponizes stillness. The camera lingers too long. The cuts feel wrong. There’s no musical score, just the soft hum of an old projector and the kind of silence that makes you hold your breath. When the horror finally comes, it’s not loud or flashy — it’s invasive. The kind of subtle terror that makes you sweat because you could’ve sworn you shut your closet door when you went to work. The kind that makes you wonder “where did that one kitchen knife go?” It’s that slow building of tension that makes you realize you’re no longer safe in your own home anymore.
55. My Little Eye (2002)
Albert Brooks predicted our obsession with reality TV all the way back in 1979 with his film Real Life. It’s one of the most prescient comedies ever made because it was flawlessly lampooning a thing that didn’t really exist yet. My Little Eye, released in 2002, is similar in the sense that it looked at the rise of reality TV and asked, “What if reality TV was the monster?” Released a year before Big Brother became a global plague and a decade before Black Mirror made paranoia fashionable again, this movie saw where we were headed — and it wasn’t pretty. Stop me if this premise sounds familiar: five strangers agree to live together in a remote mansion for six months, their every move broadcast online to an unseen audience. The catch? If anyone leaves, everyone loses the prize money. Easy enough, right? But as the days drag on, the cameras feel more and more like cold, unblinking eyes. Watching. Always watching.
Director Marc Evans shoots the entire thing through surveillance cameras, webcams, and night vision, making every frame feel claustrophobic and impersonal. The movie looks like it’s spying on you, not the other way around. At first, it plays like a cynical reality-show satire. Then it mutates. The food runs low. The contestants start breaking. Someone’s watching who shouldn’t be. And by the time the film reveals what’s really happening, you realize the game isn’t being played for prize money — it’s being played for blood. What sets My Little Eye apart from the countless “people trapped in a house” thrillers that came after it is its tone. It’s not gory or loud; it’s quietly nihilistic. There’s no hero, no catharsis. Just a group of kids realizing too late that they’ve become content for someone else’s entertainment. Every scream, every breakdown, every death is just another clip for the feed. My Little Eye was way ahead of the curve and the worst part? It feels almost quaint compared to where we are now.
54. The Mansion of Madness (1973)
Some films are nightmares. Others are what nightmares dream about when they sleep. The Mansion of Madness doesn’t just flirt with insanity — it dives headfirst into it and embraces it like a long lost lover. It’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest rewritten by Alejandro Jodorowsky and illustrated by Salvador Dalí after a particularly strong dose of peyote. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” Moctezuma’s debut feature feels like a movie made on another planet — a cosmic asylum where logic is the first patient to escape. A young journalist arrives at a mental institution hidden deep in the Mexican countryside, hoping to write about its “progressive” methods.
What he finds instead is a carnival of madness, where the inmates have taken over, the doctors are chained up, and every corridor drips with surrealist delirium. Moctezuma, a collaborator of Jodorowsky’s on Fando y Lis and El Topo, clearly inherited his mentor’s taste for the grotesque and the divine. But where Jodorowsky used mysticism to find transcendence, Moctezuma uses it to descend — deeper, darker, into the mind’s rotting basement. The film isn’t about enlightenment; it’s about the thrill of losing your grip on reality. The Mansion of Madness is a hallucinogenic descent into art-horror lunacy. Part surrealist parable, part political allegory, all beautiful madness.
53. The Peacock King (1988)
Based on Makoto Ogino’s manga, the film follows two monks: Peacock (Yuen Biao), a cool-headed exorcist from Hong Kong, and Lucky Fruit (Hiroshi Mikami), a perpetually nervous spiritualist. Together, they’re tasked with stopping the resurrection of the demon lord Hell King, who’s set to be reborn through a possessed young girl. And standing in their way are an army of monsters, cultists, and the kind of rubber-suited abominations that would make H.P. Lovecraft blush. Director Lam Ngai Kai (the mad genius behind Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky and The Seventh Curse) treats coherence as a suggestion while laughing maniacally in the face of narrative logic.
He’s more interested in spectacle: glowing portals, skeletal demons, stop-motion dragons, and a finale that looks like a cross between a Power Rangers episode and an acid trip through the Book of Revelation. The effects are equal parts awe-inspiring and ridiculous, but there’s so much sincerity in the chaos that you can’t help but love it. If Ghostbusters was possessed by a Hong Kong demon and dipped in the neon sludge of 1980s anime, you’d get The Peacock King — a delirious, genre-bending slice of supernatural chaos that feels like it was made by someone trying to film five movies at once and refusing to cut a single frame. It’s fantasy, horror, comedy, martial arts, and a monster movie all mashed into one, and somehow, it works because it never stops moving.
52. The Brotherhood of Satan (1971)
The evil devil worshippers at the center of The Brotherhood of Satan aren’t recruiting teens or wayward hippies—they’re bored retirees looking for a second life, literally. Their old bodies are breaking down, so they’ve struck a deal with the Devil to transfer their souls into the young. It’s Cocoon by way of The Twilight Zone if The Twilight Zone loved Black Sabbath. Not only is the premise interesting enough to make it worth a watch, it also belongs to two very underrepresented horror subgenres: the creepy town subgenre and daylight horror. Set in a dusty desert town where time feels frozen, this low-budget oddity begins like a weird western but slowly morphs into a fever dream of paranoia, ritual, and demonic bureaucracy.
Director Bernard McEveety shoots the small-town setting with a claustrophobic, dreamlike dread that feels closer to Polanski than Gunsmoke. That tone is what makes it an odd duck within his filmography. He worked almost exclusively in the realm of Western television, which explains the setting but not the atmosphere. This was his sole horror movie and it’s a shame he went right back to television afterwards. He clearly had a knack for crafting slow building creepy stories. It’s not perfect but it is uniquely unsettling. A weird little satanic snapshot of Americana gone rotten, where even the sunshine feels sinister and the church bells ring for the damned.
51. The Carrier (1988)
The Carrier proves that the B movies that reach an infamous status aren’t infamous due to their plots but the incompetence of their directors. The only reason this isn’t mentioned on the same league as a Troll 2 or a Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is because it’s only outrageous on a storytelling level, not a filmmaking one. In terms of quality, this is closer to Maximum Overdrive than Birdemic but it’s no less insane. The film is about a man who inexplicably becomes the carrier of a deadly virus that infects inanimate objects and dissolves anyone who touches said object. The first thing that kills someone in this is Dr. Seuss book and it only gets crazier from there. Soon, the entire town is running around in trash bags (you gotta create a barrier between you and the object) hunting anyone they think is the carrier down. Religious hysteria and lynch mob mentality seem to be the film’s targets but the mob aren’t technically wrong.
There is a carrier and he needs to be killed, they just go about it in the dumbest way possible. They rub baby chicks and cats over every surface of the town (yes, many animals get dissolved in this) and target anyone they deem ungodly. At a certain point, it actually turns into a war between the black garbage bag wearers and the clear cling wrap wearers over cats. I kinda fucking love how bonkers this is. Going back to Maximum Overdrive, it feels like a Stephen King story (a small town dealing with a Stand like plague filled with religious nutballs like The Mist that isn’t afraid to kill children) directed by a coked up Stephen King. So exactly like Maximum Overdrive.
50. Lesson of the Evil (2012)
A popular high school teacher concocts an extreme plan to deal with the rise of bullying and bad behavior among the student body. There’s a scene in the film Battle Royale where Beat Takeshi—tired of his unruly goddamn students—throws a shuriken at one of them, killing them instantly. He broke the rules of the game (a teacher can’t kill a student), just because he couldn’t stand their shit for one more second. Now, take that scene, replace Takeshi’s character with Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, and turn it into a film directed by Michael Haneke, and that’s Lesson of the Evil. The first half is all set up.
It’s extremely slow not unlike Van Sant’s Elephant but where I feel that film was nothing but 90 minutes of kids walking down hallways, Lesson of the Evil is using that same foundation to build to something. It’s creating a framework of monotony to lure you into a false sense of security. The main character is annoyingly concerned with the school’s safety and based on what we’ve seen in previous films, it seems like he’s the hero who tried to warn everyone before it was too late. But that’s not this movie. This is a Miike high school movie and it might be the most violent thing he’s ever made. Well, second. Nothing beats Ichii the Killer.
49. Orozco the Embalmer (2001)
Orozco the Embalmer is not a horror movie. It’s not even a narrative feature. It’s a documentary that follows Froilan Orozco, a mortician living in the slums of Bogotá, Colombia, where the air smells like decay and the streets are paved with corpses. The world Kiyotaka Tsurisaki documents is ugly—where death isn’t just a visitor, it’s a roommate. Everyone Bogotá has accepted death as a way of life. But for Orozco, it’s business. He wades through blood, rot, and hopelessness with the detachment of a war correspondent and the stomach of a butcher. He handles corpses (even the young ones and yes, there are many young corpses depicted in the movie) like a mechanic fixing a transmission. But instead of trying to put them together to put into an engine, he’s getting them ready for the grave. The film has no narration. No score to soften the blows. No moral guidance to tell you how to feel.
Tsurisaki simply turns his camera on and lets it capture the reality of a man who embalms dozens of bodies a day, sometimes more, in a country at war with itself. It’s part documentary, part endurance test, part descent into hell. Every frame is filled with death—hands stitching open chests, faces drained of color, the sound of sloshing fluids faintly in the background like a soundscape lulling the audience to sleep. But beneath the gore is something unexpectedly human. Orozco isn’t a monster; he’s a man doing what he has to do to survive. He talks to the corpses like old friends, cracks jokes, and approaches the whole thing with the same weary indifference as someone who shrugs off their job with a half-hearted, “eh, it’s a living.” By the end, you realize the film isn’t about death at all—it’s about what it does to the living.
48. Kotoko (2011)
If Tetsuo the iron Man is the only movie you’ve seen from Shinya Tsukamoto, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a madman who only made experimental art films designed to drive you insane. He’s actually Japan’s resident poet of pain who excels at tapping into a character’s emotion and making you feel what they feel. Tetsuo wasn’t effective simply because the concept was bananas, it’s effective because it trapped you in the mind of a metal fetishist. It made you feel the madness. And as grueling an experience as that was, it almost pales in comparison to what Kotoko (Cocco) goes through in this movie. Kotoko is a single mother whose grip on reality is becoming incredibly fragile. She sees the world with double vision. Not metaphorically—literally. Every person she meets splits in two before her eyes: one real, one imagined, one kind, one cruel. It’s the visual manifestation of her paranoia, a world where every smile is simultaneously warm and insidious.
The horror doesn’t come from the world she no longer can trust but herself. Between hallucinations and self-harm, between moments of violence and quiet delirium, there’s a love so raw it hurts to look at. Kotoko loves her baby with the intensity of a dying star. She sings to him through tears, through blood, through the crushing weight of her unraveling mind. It’s one of the most honest depictions of postpartum psychosis ever put to film—terrifying not because of monsters, but because it’s real. She’s fighting for sanity for the sake of her child and every day, she loses one battle after another. Kotoko is a raw nerve of a film. Like watching someone’s soul caught between heaven and hell, and realizing both are the same place.
47. Candy Land (2022)
Candy Land takes viewers into the grim and gritty world of truck stop sex workers, colloquially known as “lot lizards.” The plot centers around a young woman named Remy who, after being cast out from a religious cult, finds herself thrust into this harsh and unforgiving environment. As the story unfolds, the truck stop becomes a battleground for control, morality, and humanity. Candy Land is marked by its gritty realism, intense atmosphere, and strong performances, particularly by its lead actress. It’s a horror film that harkens back to a specific time in cinema, where art met exploitation. When genre films were Trojan horses filled with social messages but never felt like soapboxes. If you go in expecting a maniac chasing around hookers at a truck stop, you’ll be sorely disappointed. This is less of that and more of a dark exploration of human resilience and the complexities of life on the fringes of society. Its stark portrayal of its characters’ lives offers a sobering perspective on issues often left in the shadows, making it a significant addition to the genre.
46. Baby Blood (1990)
There’s been plenty of ‘demonic baby’ movies and even a couple of ‘evil fetuses that turn their mother’s evil to get some blood’ movies but non are as wild as Baby Blood. For one thing, the evil fetus that’s corrupting the main character from inside her womb? She got that not from pregnancy, but from a tiger. The evil little creature shot out from a tiger and buried itself deep inside her vagina. It only gets crazier from there. Imagine if Jean Rollin made Ms. 45 but made it more feminist and instead of killing predatory men with a gun, she went at them like a wild animal, collecting their blood to satiate the hunger of a monster living inside her and you wouldn’t be too far off. It’s not your typical horror film, nor is it your typical revenge film. It’s a unique blend of both that, while not perfect (the pacing is all over the place), offers an experience unlike anything else. Fun fact: Gary Oldman voices the baby in an uncredited role.
45. The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972)
Emilio Miraglia’s follow-up to The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave takes everything deliciously excessive about giallo—murder, madness, models, and melodrama—and dials it up to 11. Even Its premise feels heightened: two sisters, a cursed castle, and a family legend about a vengeful “Red Queen” who rises every hundred years to kill seven people. It’s the Brothers Grimm by way of Mario Bava. Barbara Bouchet plays Kitty Wildenbrück, a museum photographer who may or may not be losing her mind. She’s the perfect giallo protagonist: gorgeous, guilty, and perpetually framed like she’s about to be murdered.
And then there’s the Red Queen herself: a literal nightmare in a flowing scarlet cape, slicing through victims like an avenging specter from an aristocratic fever dream. She’s less a character than a manifestation of everything that makes giallo immortal. Mystery, madness, and menace wrapped in couture. Once the murders start (by knife, by car, by pure gothic theatrics) it’s anyone’s guess whether the Queen is a vengeful spirit, a deranged sibling, or just the curse cashing its checks. Red Queen Kills Seven Times is a fashion show drenched in blood. It’s Giallo at its most gorgeous and deranged. When the Red Queen strikes, death has never looked this good.
44. The Chalk Line (2022)
The Chalk Line opens with a couple (Paula and Simón) finding a lost little girl wandering a deserted road at night, silent and terrified. They take her in, because that’s what good people do in horror movies before realizing “good” and “safe” are never the same thing. The girl won’t cross a line—literally. She’s trapped inside an invisible box of fear, only moving within chalk boundaries she draws herself. It’s a striking image that hooks you with a nightmare logic puzzle: what’s keeping her inside, and what happens if she steps out? As Paula (Elena Anaya) tries to help the child heal, her maternal instincts start warping into obsession.
It’s horror by way of empathy—no monsters, no gore, just the lingering ache of what people do to each other and the scars that trap us long after the doors are unlocked. It couldn’t be more trauma porn if it tried but unlike other movies with that classification, things actually happen in it. In between the moments of dread, there’s compelling character drama. You’re so invested in the story, you don’t even realize the story has been tightening a noose—slow, deliberate, patient. The Chalk Line isn’t flashy, but it’s sharp. It’s the kind of film that hides its cruelty, drip feeding it to you till it decides to unscrew the cap and drown you in it. But it’s not here to shock you; it’s here to haunt you with the idea that love, fear, and control might all be drawn with the same piece of chalk.
43. Evil Cat (1987)
Coming off the horror high of The Imp, Dennis Yu delivers another slice of Hong Kong insanity that only the ‘80s could cook up: a supernatural kung fu monster movie about an ancient evil spirit sealed inside a cat. That’s not a metaphor. It’s literally an evil cat. Centuries ago, a Taoist priest traps a demonic feline spirit after it’s spent generations corrupting and killing humans. Cut to modern day, where the spirit’s seal is broken, and suddenly people start dropping dead with claw marks and catlike convulsions. The only thing standing between humanity and hairball Armageddon? A weary descendant of the original priest, who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else than fighting a meowing demon from hell.
What follows is pure Hong Kong horror insanity: part ghost story, part creature feature, part supernatural martial arts showdown. The tone ping-pongs between slapstick comedy and gruesome body horror, often within the same scene. You’ll laugh at a possessed house cat one minute and wince at a skin-ripping transformation the next. It’s the cinematic equivalent of petting something cute and realizing it’s actually a hell spawn. A supernatural furball of martial mayhem, Evil Cat proves once and for all: curiosity didn’t kill the cat—black magic did.
42. The World of Kanako (2014)
The beauty of Letterboxd is the way it allows clever people to perfectly describe a movie with the fewest words possible. It’s a great platform for long form reviews, stream of consciousness reviews and jokes disguised as reviews but my favorite are the ones that boil a film’s essence down to its brass tacks in a brief paragraph. When it comes to describing The World of Kanako, not even the best critics like Pauline Kael, known for their verbose vocabulary and novel length reviews could do better than this: “Imagine Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me but with Harvey Keitel’s character from Bad Lieutenant as both Leland Palmer and Agent Cooper and the whole thing takes place in the clawhammer fight hallway from OldBoy.” If you haven’t seen those movies, you don’t need to know anything more about the film to know whether or not you’re in and if you’ve seen this movie, you know how accurate that review is.
If you haven’t seen those films, imagine the most relentless, unpleasant journey through a sweaty, hell led by an abusive, alcoholic demon. There are no heroes here, only various shades of awful people. A dark, twisted, and visually striking thriller that dives into the underbelly of human depravity, The World of Kanako follows Akikazu Fujishima (Kōji Yakusho, a million miles away from his character in Cure), a former detective with a violent and self-destructive streak, as he searches for his missing teenage daughter, Kanako (Nana Komatsu). As he delves deeper into her life, he uncovers shocking truths about her secretive and dangerous world. The film is structured as a non-linear narrative, jumping between past and present, as Akikazu’s investigation reveals the dark corners of his daughter’s life and the people surrounding her. The more that’s revealed, the more you’ll want to take a shower. If 8mm made you uncomfortable, stay far away from this because it makes that look like Sesame Street by comparison.
41. Rigor Mortis (2013)
The vampire genre consists of so many films, that there’s an entire subgenre consisting of a specific type of vampire you’ve probably never heard of. Originating in Hong Kong, jiangshi movies involve undead corpses that hop with their arms outstretched. The most famous example is the 1985 film Mr. Vampire, which spawned a long-running series and a million imitators. The films are always comedies because the sight of a hopping vampire is the furthest thing from horror. Director Juno Mak loved the genre and decided to make Rigor Mortis as its elegy. The film is a blood-soaked love letter to a long dead genre reimagined through a lens of grief, nostalgia, and melancholy.
The film follows a washed-up actor (played by Chin Siu-ho, star of Mr. Vampire—a meta stroke of genius) who moves into a crumbling apartment building that holds as many memories as it does monsters. There’s ghosts, vampire hunters and of course the Jiangshi. Unlike Mr. Vampire or its knock offs, this isn’t a comedy. There’s humor, sure but it takes the supernatural threat deadly serious. Rigor Mortis isn’t content to simply spook, It aches. The jiangshi here aren’t campy kung fu monsters, they’re tragic relics of a culture that’s forgotten how to believe in its own ghosts. A requiem for the undead, a ghost story about ghost stories—the film is a perfect metaphor for Hong Kong horror itself: decayed, romantic, trying to resurrect what can’t be saved.
80-61 | 40-21
What are some of your favorite overlooked horror movies? Maybe they will show up later in the list!
