Martin Sheen in The Dead Zone
The dead-eyed political aspirant Greg Stillson in David Cronenberg’s Stephen King adaptation encapsulates Trump-level terror.
Dr. Renault’s Secret
An American doctor arrives in a French village. He’s come to wed the niece of renowned local scientist Dr. Renault, but a storm forces him to delay the final leg of his journey and spend the night at an inn.
Bubba Ho-Tep
The premise alone is cinematic gold. It’s the early 21st century and Elvis (a heavily made-up Bruce Campbell) is alive, unwell, and confined to a dilapidated rural nursing home in Mud Creek, Texas, where the residents slurp, gag, and fart during mealtimes and loved ones only come to visit when you’re dead so they can toss your precious keepsakes in the trash.
Trouble Every Day
Trouble Every Day (2001) opens with Tindersticks’ swooning, doomy song of the same name enveloping the image of two figures—neither of whom are seen again—making out in the back seat of a car, their hands and mouths drifting toward what we imagine to be an inaugural sexual encounter.
The Devil’s Bath
Set in the mist-shrouded woods of Upper Austria in the 18th century, the latest film from writer/director duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala opens with a prelude depicting a crime and its subsequent, swift punishment: a woman tosses a baby down a deep, jagged waterfall before calmly turning herself in to the authorities, who fatally dismember the woman and later display her remains in a sort of forest shrine.
Altered States
Adapted by Network scenarist Paddy Chayefsky from his only novel, Altered States (1980) is an unusual work of mainstream psychedelic science fiction, one that posits the unfettered mind as an engine of radical corporeal transformation.
Blackout
The premise, like the ambient air of fatalism, owes as much to film noir as it does horror. A man wakes in a place he can’t remember arriving at, his body bearing the ravages of some misadventure, his memories a dense fog yielding no clues save a lingering sense of grave culpability.
Late Night with the Devil
Drawing inspiration from the special bleary-eyed ambiance of vintage witching-hour television, this found-footage curio from Australia’s fraternal writing/directing duo Cameron and Colin Cairnes (who also edit here) considers the Faustian bargain implicit in the ruthless pursuit of household-name celebrity status.
Monolith
A public case of professional disgrace has driven a journalist (Lily Sullivan) to hide out at her parents’ vacant, sprawling country home. But the young woman, credited simply as “the interviewer”—we learn her subjects’ names but never her own—refuses to be defeated.
She Is Conann
Sweeping across centuries and continents to track the Orlando-like incarnations of its titular barbarian, French writer/director Bertrand Mandico extravagantly extrapolates on the themes and situation of his 2023 short film Rainer, a Vicious Dog in a Skull Valley with this hallucinatory existential epic about survival in a world of relentless brutality and failed attempts at civilization.