Editorials
10 Great Modern Slasher Films You Might Have Missed
For the stalwart slasher fan, we’re still waiting on the modern revival. After rising to overwhelming prominence in the early ‘80s- an era dubbed the Golden Age of Slashers- the slasher slipped into dormancy in the ‘90s. It wasn’t until the massive success of Wes Craven’s Scream that it saw a resurgence, which died down quickly again at the turn of the century. The baton passed to the emerging extreme horror dubbed “torture porn” in the early aughts.
While the slasher has yet to receive a modern equivalent to Halloween or Scream to inspire the next wave of slashers, all hoping to cash in on that same innovative success, that doesn’t mean it’s been a wasteland for the subgenre. Far from it. The 21st century, so far, delivered numerous franchises like Hatchet and Wrong Turn, sequels to popular series Scream and Halloween, endless remakes, and a slew of original slashers like Happy Death Day and You’re Next. That doesn’t remotely cover the international or independent releases, many of which have fallen through the cracks.
For the diehard slasher fans, these ten underseen slashers bring the fun.
Dream Home
Most slashers frame their narratives through the protagonist, which is most often the final girl. 2010’s Dream Home takes the rarer route by showing the perspective of the killer as she’s driven to kill. Cheng Li-sheung works two jobs to save up enough to purchase her dream flat. Her efforts are thwarted at every turn, from the ailing health of her parents to consistent obstacles at the bank. Cheng Li-sheung breaks and unleashes ultimate carnage. Told in a non-linear format, nothing about Dream Home is conventional. It’s a refreshing take on the slasher, and it’s extreme. If you like your slashers extra gory, this is it.
Dude Bro Party Massacre III
Despite the title, this is a standalone horror-comedy with no previous installments. Created by the comedy troupe 5-Second Films, and based on a five-second short, Dude Bro presents as a lost film that’d been banned in the ‘80s. Thus intentional lo-fi, VHS quality grit. As for the plot, a masked killer named Motherface targets and slaughters fraternity bros. Loner Brent Chirino infiltrates a popular frat to catch the killer. It’s a comedy that plays up the laughs and stupidity but never dumbs down the gorier elements. Dude Bro makes for such a goofy slasher parody that it’s near impossible not to boost your mood while watching.
Lake Bodom
Anytime “based on a true story” pops up in a horror movie, it’s understandably met with eye-rolls and skepticism. In Lake Bodom, co-writer/director Taneli Mustonen uses the unsolved 1960s Lake Bodom murders that rocked Finland as a launchpad to create a slick, dynamic slasher. Set in the present day, a new foursome of friends decides to camp at the site of the 1960 murders, hoping to solve the case by reconstructing that ill-fated night by the minute. Naturally, things go awry after nightfall, and the killings begin. There’s plenty of originality in the story, but don’t expect a significant break from slasher tradition. Do, however, expect gorgeous cinematography and to have that need for a well-executed slasher well met.
Scare Campaign
One of the most tried and true tropes in the subgenre is the prank gone wrong. An ill-executed prank often makes for a handy catalyst to murder. Writer/directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes take it to the next level. Scare Campaign is a hidden camera prank show, where the cast and crew set up elaborate schemes to scare its targets silly on camera. The hijinks are becoming so involved, however, that it’s getting dangerous. When a rival web series threatens to usurp their ratings, and they’re encouraged to up the ante, things get deadly quick. The Cairnes first lean into expectations in terms of plot, then subvert it. More importantly, it’s a lot of fun, and the kills are delightfully bloody.
Psycho Beach Party
A strange comedic blend of ‘60s beach party movies, psychodrama, and ‘80s slasher, this parody based on an off-Broadway play brings the camp. Lauren Ambrose leads as the Gidget-like Florence, a young woman determined to become the first female surfer at Malibu Beach. Complicating matters is a string of murders, in which Florence becomes the prime suspect because of her dissociative identity disorder. In terms of kills, Psycho Beach Party is pretty tame. This is more of a genre-adjacent spoof than an outright slasher movie, so this pick is more for fans seeking something outside of the box.
Among the Living
By now, thanks to Shudder, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s third feature has grown a little less obscure. The setup sees three boys skip school to hang out and explore an abandoned film studio. There they witness a masked man dragging a woman across the lot. The kids manage to flee, unaware that the masked man saw them and is determined to silence them forever. Part Amblin coming of age tale, part slasher, Among the Living doesn’t reach the same intense heights as their debut, Inside. Still, with central protagonists that have barely hit puberty, Bustillo and Maury aren’t afraid to put their characters through the wringer.
Severance
The director of Triangle and Black Death, Christopher Smith, shows off his funny bone in this comedic slasher. The sales division of a military arms corporation embarks on a team-building retreat in the mountains but find themselves under siege by a masked killer instead. Aside from the wry office humor involved, that this sales team works for an arms company means you can expect a wide array of weaponry at the characters’ disposal. You can also expect things to get very violent. It’s kill or be killed in sales, after all.
Party Hard Die Young
This European slasher harkens back to the post-Scream slasher craze, but with a modern polish. Meaning if you’re feeling nostalgic for the teen slashers of yesterday, this is a worthwhile watch. For Julia, her friends, and hundreds of recent high school graduates, a getaway to a Croatian island resort is supposed to offer the best time of their lives. Instead, it turns into a fight for survival. Julia’s friend is found dead under mysterious circumstances, and the body count quickly rises from there. It’s a straightforward, no frills slasher under bright neon haze and a contemporary setting. That’s not a bad thing here. While the killer’s ultimate motivation is familiar, the identity is far less predictable.
Lesson of the Evil
Described as Dexter meets Battle Royale, leave it to Takashi Miike to bring the disturbing horror. The plot sees a popular high school teacher concoct a plan to address rising bullying and bad behavior among the student body. If you guessed death and mayhem, then you’d be correct. Lesson of the Evil is essentially a slow-burn slasher that crescendos into a shocking, violent climax. There’s a whole lot of taboo-breaking and bloodletting in this gruesome feature revolving around a sociopath, but with Miike’s distinct sense of humor. Its subject matter means this one isn’t so easy to find.
Cold Prey
Both Cold Prey and Cold Prey 2 should be required viewing for the slasher fan. While snowboarding in the mountains, an accident leaves Jannicke and her friends in search of shelter. They stumble upon a nearby abandoned motel and quickly realize they’ve become trapped inside with a deranged killer. While it doesn’t reinvent the wheel by any stretch, Cold Prey thrills anyway with fantastic set pieces, creepy atmosphere, and nail-biting tension. Jannicke makes for a tremendous final girl that doesn’t get near as much recognition as she should. Cold Prey 2 borrows heavily from Halloween 2, offering a clean continuation of Jannicke’s battle against the menacing Mountain Man.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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