The Summer’s Best Indie and Art-House Horror Movies Are All Out This Month

So far, the year’s horror offerings have been a mixed bag, but that’s fine—that’s what summer is for. This July, however, we’re being treated to a bounty of excellent, and very scary, things to see. We’ve already had Maxxxine, a love letter to slick 1980s horror from Ti West, and the prequel A Quiet Place: Day One, which has been raking it in at the box office. Those movies are perfectly good Hollywood entertainments, but a new run of indie art-house horror (three movies are playing in theaters now and in the week to come) represents something special. Pick any one of the movies below—or try all three!—and indulge in that ritualistic pleasure of midsummer: taking refuge in a cool, dark room and scaring yourself silly.

Longlegs

Longlegs opened last Friday and is already a box-office phenomenon. Inspired by gothic ’90s thrillers like Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, Osgood Perkins’s unsettling and periodically shocking mood piece is an intelligent example of occult-horror escapism. Maika Monroe, in a carefully modulated performance, steps it up as the film’s protagonist, an FBI agent investigating a series of mysterious killings in the gloomy, forest-cloaked Pacific Northwest. And you may have already heard about Nicolas Cage in the title role. He is, quite simply, one of the weirdest, scariest movie monsters I’ve encountered in some time—glam-rock grotesque, reedy voiced, and satan obsessed. The whole thing is dark and relentless with plot turns that make this about familial secrets and the bonds of parents and children. For horror fans, a must-see.

Oddity

This is an excruciatingly scary film set in Ireland with a setup that might seem expected (an isolated house, an insane asylum nearby), but Oddity loads such intense jump scares and go-for-it storytelling into its short run time that the movie feels singular and new. Oddity opens in theaters today and is the second feature from Damian McCarthy, an Irish writer-director with a fixation on dark hallways and building tension beat by beat. One should avoid spoilers when it comes to the movie’s plot, but suffice it to say that Oddity begins with the wife of a doctor from the nearby institution who is spending the night alone in their house. She’s visited by one of his patients, who desperately asks to be let inside. The choice she makes, of whether to open the door, sets off a slightly lunatic tale that involves her blind, psychic sister, haunted artifacts, and a central supernatural mystery that has a ruthless conclusion.

Starve Acre

Leave it to the Brits to do folk horror right (The Wicker Man from 1973 being the almighty model). Starve Acre, a beautifully shot, eerie mood piece set among bleak 1970s Yorkshire moors, gives you all the elements: a desolate farm; creepy locals wearing ultra-nubby sweaters; a young couple, played by Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark, caught up in a demonic curse, descending into madness. It probably wouldn’t work as well as it does if not for the committed and nuanced performances of Smith and Clark, who look transported right out of a ’70s time machine. They lose their young son early in the film, and their grief drives them into obsessive behavior even as the wildlife on their land begins acting strangely. Creepy and a bit unhinged, this is one to watch late at night, when the film’s bleakness will fully cast its spell.