While not the official start of autumn, August has always been the falling action of the summer. When I was a kid, the end of August was when the leaves started turning pretty colors, the temperature started getting colder, and the holidays started feeling just around the corner. So even though the fall season isn’t fully here yet, it’s still a great time of year to start watching some scary movies to herald the upcoming spooky season.
Ick (2025)
Back in the ’90s, in the wake of the post-Scream Kevin Williamson boom, a non-slasher teen horror comedy was released called The Faculty. It’s a movie I’ve always found to be criminally underrated and underseen by the general filmgoing populace. It seems to be fate that when the newest generation gets their own comparable version of The Faculty, it too would go underseen and largely paved over in the collective discourse. Don’t let that happen to you! Director Joseph Kahn delivers a truly funny, breezy, and heartfelt movie that would be satisfying to both genre fans and horror newbies. It centers around Hank (Brandon Routh), who was an up-and-coming football star in the aughts, but due to an injury, that prospective megastar future never came to pass. He has since stuck around in his small town, living a lowly job as a high school science teacher, and begins to realize that the often-ignored and strange growth that’s all around town may be far more dangerous than anyone realizes. The whole thing is emotionally rooted in that early 2000s nostalgia, both in the aesthetic, the casting of Brandon Routh as the lead, and the banging soundtrack throughout. You’ve got Creed, Blink-182, Paramore, The All-American Rejects, The Plain White Ts, Good Charlotte, and many, many more. It’s like candy to any fan of this musical genre and era, and it gives the film a unique identity, even amongst films with similar tonal and thematic ideas. Once the horror kicks into gear in the second act, it also has a surprising amount of tense and creative sequences that balance out the cheesier elements with some genuine stakes. It’s a great beginner’s horror film, but it won’t leave you behind on the enjoyment either.
Watch it on Prime Video, Tubi, the Roku Channel, Fawesome
The Hitcher (1986)
The art of highway horror has never been executed so brilliantly. This is one of my favorite finds over the entire course of writing May’s Monthly Horror Recs. What begins as an eerie and unsettling horror film escalates at the pace of an action movie, widens in its scope, explodes in its action, then ends on a harrowing psychological note only the best of the horror genre can offer. The film primarily follows Jim, who is played to final-boy perfection by C. Thomas Howell. It opens on a stormy night drive on the cross-country highway, an easy time to fall asleep behind the wheel. Figuring he needs to find some way to stay awake, he takes in a hitchhiker he happens upon quickly after almost nodding off. As the worst kind of luck would have it, though, this is no ordinary person he just lets into his car. He says his name is John Ryder, and he is basically Rutger Hauer’s Highway Michael Myers. I can’t overstate how terrifying he is. While he is not technically omnipresent in terms of screen time, the pressure he puts on the characters and the tension of his maybe showing up is pervasive. There is seemingly nowhere he can’t go; if it seems illogical that he’d know something, be somewhere, or do something, that’s exactly what he’ll do. He’s never shown to do anything supernatural, or physically come off that way, but his presence in the story is reminiscent of an unavoidable and godlike malevolence. The film takes off as a cat-and-mouse game between the likable everyman, Jim, and the relentless Ryder. It takes on an almost Terminator-style vibe, as desperation runs higher and bodies pile up. I’m sure there was a fantastic thematic layer to this film – I felt a backbone of emotion throughout – but I was just so enamored and inspired by the experience alone on the first watch that I’ll probably have to save that type of analysis for my next of hopefully many, many rewatches. Do yourself a favor and don’t overlook this one…it took me way too long to finally see it.
Watch it on Cinemax
Session 9 (2001)
When you think of creepy horror movie locations, a lot can come to mind, including the Overlook Hotel (The Shining), the torture bathroom (Saw), or the inside of the Nostromo (Alien). Even some broader archetypal horror situations, like being stalked by a killer in a suburban neighborhood, being harassed by spirits in a haunted house, or being trapped in an enclosed building, are all very familiar. It’s weird, then, that while some exist, abandoned asylum horror isn’t more prolific. Perhaps there is just a future version of this that will feel like the setting’s definitive interpretation, but even if that does happen, it is imperative not to lose sight of the best version I’ve seen thus far, Session 9. It follows an asbestos cleaning crew as they take on a nearly impossible job to completely clear out an abandoned mental hospital. As the job rolls on, crew members seem to be disappearing, cracks in relationships grow wider, and dark seeds of the past begin to show themselves. This is full-on psychological horror. It takes a lot of inspiration from The Shining in that way. As the events progress, things start getting more fantastical, and the stakes are raised as the characters descend further into madness. Are the supernatural suggestions real, or an extension of our characters’ insanities? Are their pasts finally disastrously coming to a head, or are the tragedies committed in this facility’s history driving them further into their worst parts? This ambiguous approach gives the movie its most powerful sense of identity, along with its oppressive atmosphere of decay and mistrust.
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2007)
Last month, I had the distinct pleasure of recommending the recent horror mockumentary Strange Harvest. It struck a chord with me, and it inspired me to knock off one of my biggest movies on my horror list of shame, which also happens to be a mockumentary. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is correctly labeled as a more humorous and meta take on the slasher genre, but it doesn’t quite conform to what a modern audience would expect of those labels. It assumes prior knowledge of the tropes and history of the slasher genre, and the more you know, the more details, jokes, and entire sequences will make an impact on you. The style hits on a supreme level, and it will be very rewarding upon rewatch. The film follows a documentary crew as they follow an up-and-coming slasher, Leslie Vernon, as he plans for his big night of murder and mayhem. It gives the crew (and, by extension, the audience) a play-by-play of a slasher film from the killer’s perspective. The exercise regimen (a whole lotta cardio), inspirations (Jason, Freddy, and Michael), victim picking, location prepping, and a whole lot more. The group dynamic is a blast. In this weird universe, being a slasher killer is treated as just another career path, so Leslie isn’t portrayed as an insane and antisocial psychopath. He’s often funny, eager to share, has friends, and grows a relationship with the crew as it goes along. Some of the film’s best moments are when it’s allowed to just show these characters sitting and bonding over the crazy situation they’re all in. By the end, when the night comes and we’re in the thick of the final act, it pulls a rug right out from under you. It’s not only a genius subversion of the tropes it has been playing off the whole time, but it also ends up really supporting the characters’ arcs in impactful ways. It would’ve been a fun time without that ending, but it became genuinely special with it.
Oxygen (2021)
I admit to this one being a slight stretch of what could be considered “horror.” However, it is an immensely tense bottle thriller directed by one of the most prolific horror directors of the 21st century, and that gives it a pretty defensible position. Oxygen follows a woman who wakes up in a futuristic pod with no memory of who she is or how she got there. The film acts as both a mystery and a survival thriller as she deciphers what brought her here and how to hopefully find a way of escape before her very limited oxygen supply depletes. A bottle thriller like this only ever works as well as its lead, and Melanie Laurent, who many may know from Inglourious Basterds, fills those massive shoes perfectly. She’s captivating in every moment, portraying problem-solving intelligence, final girl-style grit, and real vulnerability in many harrowing scenes. It’s quite a clever script, and Alexandre Aja makes the most of it. One of the cleverest ideas is the A.I. companion built into her pod, which gives her and the audience an additional voice. M.I.L.O. is voiced by phenomenal actor Mathieu Amalric, who gives it just enough coldness to feel isolating, but also just enough slight nuance to make him an entertaining part of the story. Laurent manages to solve problems and find answers quicker than I ever expected her to, but that always leads to bigger problems, more confusing questions, and an even more desperate situation. By the end, it adds way more layers of plot than I ever expected it to. I’d be surprised if anyone could truly guess where this ends up going from the opening minutes.
Watch it on Netflix
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