Horror movie season started early this year with the one-two jump scare of Obsession and Backrooms. In that spooky spirit, film critic Monica Castillo wants to know: Which horror movie caught you by surprise?
As always, we invite you to contribute your own responses in the comments—and send in some prompts of your own! If you have a pop culture question you’d like us and fellow readers to answer, please email it to [email protected].
Infested (2023)
The French horror movie Infested was a luck-of-draw review I received a few years ago, and it’s yet to stop haunting me. Set in a large housing complex, Infested follows a resident bug enthusiast named Kaleb (Théo Christine) after he unwittingly buys a deadly new type of spider. Of course, as these critters are wont to do in horror films, it escapes, quickly reproduces throughout the complex, and gets larger and larger as the colony expands. But Sébastien Vanicek’s film does more than just creep the daylights out of its audience afraid of spiders. It also explores the ways poor communities are policed, isolating them in such a way that makes them easier targets for the big killer spiders. But as a creature feature, it was delightfully scary, with many jump scares and foreboding sequences that left viewers anticipating the spider’s next bite. [Monica Castillo]
Black Sabbath (1963)
Anthology horrors are always a mixed bag, but each entry in Mario Bava’s 1963 triptych (which inspired Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler to change their band’s name from “Earth”) is surprisingly solid. But the movie’s consistent quality isn’t its most shocking feature. You get the giallo-lite tension of “The Telephone,” the folklore-drenched romantic horror of “The Wurdulak,” and then—wham—”The Drop Of Water” hits you like a right hook in a haunted house. After being lulled by the comforting campfire chills of the first two shorts, the final segment of the film, at least in the original Italian cut anyways, suddenly ramps the terror way up. Bava weaponizes an unforgettable corpse’s grotesque rictus grin and goggling eyes, while the purple-red light, unsettling sound design, and dusty apartment interiors must’ve been a “eureka” moment for Bava’s contemporary, Dario Argento. The resulting imagery injects the “The Tell-Tale Heart” riff with jump scares that the Blumhouse squad would still kill to replicate, stealthily sequestered in the endcap of a sparse ’60s flop. [Jacob Oller]
Hallow Road (2025)
I know there’s a trailer above, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that Hallow Road is best devoured without knowing much about it. The film rests almost entirely on the extremely capable shoulders of Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys, who play husband-wife duo Maddie and Frank. One night, they’re woken up by a phone call from their 18-year-old daughter, who says she’s hit someone while driving in the woods. As they head off to help her, Hallow Road stays with them on the harrowing journey throughout. For a movie that takes place almost entirely in the claustrophobic confines of a car, with the camera capturing fear, shock, and paranoia on Pike and Rhys’ faces, Hallow Road gets increasingly unnerving and unpredictable. It’s a taut thriller that leaves the ending up to interpretation, which is another reason why Anvari’s film surprised me and didn’t leave my mind for days after I watched it. [Saloni Gajjar]
The Vanishing (1988)
Plenty of horror movies are driven by the fear of the unknown, only to stall out when they finally show who/whatever is terrorizing their characters. The Vanishing is the rare film where the answers are scarier than the questions, and those questions—involving a woman’s sudden, mid-road-trip disappearance and her boyfriend’s obsessive quest to find her—are pretty unnerving to begin with. Going into The Vanishing, I knew nothing about it beyond the premise, and I’d recommend the same to anyone else. So committed am I to preserving its dreadful secrets that I couldn’t bring myself to embed the trailer (which gives much too much away) above. Instead, please enjoy this clip of director George Sluizer taking great, deserved pride in Stanley Kubrick’s response to this masterpiece of psychological horror:“It’s the most terrifying film I’ve ever seen in my life.” [Erik Adams]
The Cabin In The Woods (2011)
Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s horror send-up The Cabin In The Woods is really just a nesting doll of well-crafted surprises, as it shifts audience sympathies, genres, and tones with all the swiftness of a hatchet sinking into some poor trapped horror sap’s back. Its best surprise might be its meanest, though: That’s the bit where Chris Hemsworth’s Curt—reduced to a stereotypical meathead action hero by the puppetmasters orchestrating the film’s stock slasher scenario—tries to ramp his way to a heroic victory on his dirtbike. Even if audiences remember why Curt’s escape attempt won’t work, they’re still likely to be shocked by the matter-of-fact way the film dispatches him, an incredibly dark action gag that can still elicit a very grim laugh even if you see it coming from a mile away. [William Hughes]
Frailty (2001)
It’s not the twist in Brett Hanley’s script for the late Bill Paxton’s directorial debut that surprised me or that’s stayed with me since I first watched Frailty (which I caught on cable, the way all competently made horror movies should be watched). The 11th-hour veer, which is really more of a “steering into the skid” move, involving an investigator played by Powers Boothe and Matthew McConaughey’s sullen character isn’t exactly shocking. That development lends itself to a pro-serial killer reading of the film, which puts up a goofy “demons are real” defense by the end. But after watching Frailty again (this time on satellite), the ending became even bleaker than it originally seemed: Bloodthirsty killers are both made and born, as we see in the way the two young male leads’ lives unfold. Which is why the best you can hope for is to aim them at other murderous types, à la Dexter (or Frailty). [Danette Chavez]
Suspiria (2018)
I guess you could say both Suspirias caught me by surprise. I watched Dario Argento’s original, as many I’m sure did, as a college student. I considered it to be more of a campy artifact than something that really spooked me (which is in no way a bad thing—I love campy artifacts). That original film is so singular that I was among the skeptics when it was announced that Luca Guadagnino would remake the film. My question was: Why? But what surprised me was how much I love Guadagnino’s take on the story—depending on the day, it’s my favorite of his filmography. There’s plenty of camp to be found here, even in Dakota Johnson’s wig alone. But I also find the remake to be much more frightening, both with the dread of the Iron Curtain-era aesthetics but the sometimes orgiastic body horror. The scene where Olga (Elena Fokina) is mangled in a macabre dance is one unlikely to leave my psyche for a long time. [Drew Gillis]
Insidious (2010)
Fresh out of college and working as a Genius Bar-tender, I landed my first movie-reviewing gig from Craigslist, writing for a now-defunct Bangor-based blog called Week In Rewind. For $150 a month, barely covering the price of the tickets, I would spend every Friday cramming in two or three new releases, hammering out reviews in between screenings. My editor would often take the big release, leaving me with the scraps, one of which was the new horror movie from the Saw guys, called Insidious. As a Saw hater at the time (who has since come around), a haunted house movie featuring Darth Maul from director James Wan and co-writer Leigh Whannell didn’t thrill me, and I went in with my arms crossed. But it didn’t take long to prove me wrong. Anchored by two great performances from Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson, the film’s every masterful jumpscare in Insidious worked spectacularly. Insidious was more of an endurance test, and I considered quitting multiple times because I was simply getting too scared. Perhaps the biggest jumpscare of all was that Wan and Whannel had created a classic that would become a yearly rewatch for me. Even better, it’s still pretty friggin’ scary. [Matt Schimkowitz]
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