No film here is good or bad. It is only like something.

2023 · Mystery

A retired Poirot living quietly in post-war Venice is talked into sitting in on a seance at a crumbling palazzo, and the night ends with a body. Mostly one dark house, with the storm outside doing a lot of work.

Sits near the middle on every axis.

2017 · Animation

A boy from a Mexican family that has banned music wants to play, and on the Day of the Dead he ends up in the land where his ancestors live. Bright, quick, and built around songs.

• FantasticStrongly fantastic

2019 · Horror

The boy from the Overlook Hotel is now a drinker in his forties working at a hospice, when a girl with the same gift starts writing to him about the people who hunt children like her. Long, and slow to get going.

• FantasticClearly fantastic

2020 · Horror

A couple who have fled South Sudan are given a rundown house on an English estate and told not to leave it while their asylum claim is decided. A haunted house film that spends as much time on the paperwork and the neighbours.

• HeavyStrongly heavy
• IntimateClearly intimate

2023 · Horror

A struggling late-night host books a Halloween special in 1977 with a parapsychologist and the girl she says came out of a satanic cult. Presented as the tape of that broadcast, near enough in real time.

• IntimateStrongly intimate

2012 · Animation

A boy who can see and talk to dead people turns out to be the only one who can stop a three-hundred-year-old curse waking up his New England town. Stop-motion, funny, and scarier than most films aimed at kids.

• FantasticStrongly fantastic

2022 · Horror

A therapist watches a patient do something terrible in front of her, and afterwards starts seeing strangers smile at her the same way. Loud, full of jump scares, and it does not let up.

• HeavyClearly heavy
• FantasticClearly fantastic

2022 · Horror

Teenagers in Adelaide pass around an embalmed hand that lets a spirit into whoever holds it, ninety seconds at a time, and film each other doing it. Loud and fast, and it gets nasty.

• HeavyStrongly heavy

2016 · Horror

A father and son who run a small-town morgue take in an unidentified body late at night and start the autopsy, and the basement gets stranger with every step. Two men, one building, most of one night.

• IntimateStrongly intimate
• HeavyClearly heavy

2013 · Horror

A family move into an old Rhode Island farmhouse in 1971, things start happening at night, and they call in a married pair of investigators. A straight haunted-house film of quiet shots and loud noises.

• SimpleClearly simple

2020 · Horror

A schoolteacher is left alone in the lake house her husband built for her after his sudden death, and starts finding things in it she cannot explain. A quiet film about grief with a lot of standing in the dark, listening.

• IntimateStrongly intimate
• HeavyStrongly heavy
• Character-drivenClearly character-driven

2007 · Horror

A woman moves back into the seaside orphanage she grew up in to reopen it as a home for children, and her young son starts talking about friends nobody else can see. An old-fashioned ghost story built on quiet, not jump scares.

• HeavyClearly heavy
• IntimateClearly intimate

2001 · Horror

A mother waits in a dark house on Jersey for her husband to come back from the war, keeping her two children out of daylight because it makes them ill. Old-fashioned, quiet, built on creaking doors.

• IntimateStrongly intimate

2006 · Comedy

A working-class woman in Madrid juggles her daughter, her sister and the village she grew up in, where the women talk about the dead as if they had never left. Bright colours, warm, and led entirely by women.

• Character-drivenClearly character-driven
• IntimateClearly intimate

2025 · Horror

At 2:17 one morning, seventeen children from the same class get out of bed and run off into the dark, and the town starts looking for someone to blame. Told in chapters, each following a different person.

• HeavyClearly heavy

2018 · Horror

After her difficult mother dies, a miniature artist and her family begin coming apart, and something in the house does not feel finished. Long, quiet and building; the frights are mostly not the jumping kind.

• HeavyStrongly heavy