Film-Forward

Horror

The Substance

The well-worn Sunset Boulevard yarn of a Hollywood’s star’s fading relevancy gets a garish, unsubtle, and searing revamp.

Cuckoo

A riff on a familiar horror setting: the creepy house/facility in the middle of nowhere.

Oddity

A gothic tale of ghosts, curses, and the otherworld.

Longlegs

Nicolas Cage has never before created a monster this unforgettable.

MaXXXine

A throwback to the long-revered era of exaggerated 1980s horror.

The Devil’s Bath

The raw and distressing film depicts how the desire to die found in religion becomes a brutal and sinister way of getting relief.

The Vourdalak

An odd, offbeat little gem wrapped up in an 18th-century vampire tale.

Tiger Stripes

This allegory takes some of the worst experiences of puberty to become, at times, a genuinely bewildering horror movie.

Handling the Undead

A zombie movie that could be described as Bergmanesque for exploring ideas about death and grief.