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

2025 · Horror

Four years on, Gwen is dreaming about murders at a winter camp she has never been to, so she takes her brother and a friend there. A blizzard shuts them in, and the dead phone starts ringing again.

Sits near the middle on every axis.

2025 · Horror

A killer who hunts couples every Valentine's Day mistakes two coworkers at a work dinner for a date. Half romantic comedy, half slasher, and it keeps swapping between the two.

Sits near the middle on every axis.

2025 · Horror

In 1988 an outcast at Shadyside High signs up to run for prom queen against the popular clique, and a masked killer starts working through the candidates. A straight-ahead slasher, most of it on prom night.

• IntimateClearly intimate
• Plot-drivenClearly plot-driven

2025 · Horror

Bodies start turning up in the canals of Amsterdam, killed by someone who works underwater, and the detective who handled the same kind of case decades ago is called back in. A slasher with boat chases.

• Plot-drivenClearly plot-driven

2025 · Horror

Maya wakes in a small-town hospital after being stabbed by three masked strangers, and they have come to finish it. A straight chase through a town whose sheriff would rather this went away.

• Plot-drivenClearly plot-driven
• SimpleClearly simple

2025 · Horror

Here Peter Pan is a killer who steals children away to Neverland, and when he takes her younger brother Wendy Darling goes looking for him. A straight slasher: chases, hiding places and a lot of blood.

• SimpleStrongly simple
• Plot-drivenClearly plot-driven

2026 · Horror

Sidney Prescott has a husband, a coffeehouse and children in small-town Indiana until Ghostface calls again, this time going after her teenage daughter. Phone calls, chases and knife fights, as before.

• FastClearly fast
• Plot-drivenClearly plot-driven

2026 · Comedy

The masked killer from the first Scary Movie turns up again, and Cindy Campbell, now a paranoid shut-in, is dragged out by the friends and family around her. Gag after gag, aimed squarely at the first two films.

• SimpleClearly simple
• LightClearly light

2026 · Horror

A Kansas highway patrol officer sees her husband murdered by the serial killer the papers call the Satanic Slasher, and follows his trail across the Midwest. The chase is straightforward and the killings are not spared.

• HeavyClearly heavy

2026 · Crime

A widowed crime writer's eight-year-old son is taken, and he turns to his estranged father, a retired detective, for help. The case starts to line up with one from decades ago, a convicted serial killer called the Whisper Man.

• RealisticStrongly realistic

2026 · Horror

A content moderator at a video app keeps flagging execution clips that look far too real, and nobody at work will take her seriously. She posts them on Reddit instead, and they take off.

• HeavyClearly heavy
• RealisticClearly realistic

2024 · Horror

A new FBI agent with a knack for hunches is put on a decades-old case of families killed in their own homes, all tied together by coded letters signed with one name. Slow and quiet, with the scary parts kept just out of frame.

• HeavyStrongly heavy

2003 · Mystery

In 1986 a rural Korean province gets its first serial killings, and two local detectives who work by instinct and beatings are joined by a careful man from Seoul. It is often funny, and the case runs for years.

• RealisticStrongly realistic
• HeavyStrongly heavy

2022 · Action

In his second year out at night, Batman follows a killer who leaves riddles addressed to him at every scene, and the trail runs into the city's oldest families. Long, rainy, and closer to a detective film than a superhero one.

Sits near the middle on every axis.

2007 · Mystery

A cartoonist at a San Francisco paper gets pulled into the Zodiac killings and keeps working the case for years after everyone else has stopped. Long, talky, and full of names, dates and paperwork.

• RealisticStrongly realistic
• ComplicatedStrongly complicated

1997 · Mystery

A Tokyo detective works a run of identical murders committed by unconnected people who cannot say why they did it. Very slow, very quiet, and it gets right under you.

• HeavyStrongly heavy
• ComplicatedClearly complicated

1978 · Horror

A man who killed his sister as a child comes back to the same Illinois town fifteen years later and follows a babysitter around. Long, patient stretches where nothing happens.

• SimpleClearly simple
• IntimateClearly intimate

2010 · Thriller

An intelligence agent finds the man who killed his fiancee and, rather than turn him in, lets him go and catches him again. Extremely violent, and it goes well past where you expect.

• HeavyStrongly heavy

1960 · Horror

A secretary drives out of Phoenix with forty thousand dollars of her employer's money and stops for the night at a motel off the highway. It changes course completely partway.

• RealisticClearly realistic
• IntimateClearly intimate
• HeavyClearly heavy

2003 · Horror

Two men wake chained at opposite ends of a filthy bathroom with a body between them and a tape recorder each. Almost all of it is that room.

• HeavyStrongly heavy
• IntimateStrongly intimate

1996 · Horror

A killer in a mask starts working through a California high school, and the victims all know the rules of horror films. Funny and frightening in the same scene.

Sits near the middle on every axis.

1995 · Thriller

Two detectives in a city where it never stops raining work a series of murders organised around the seven deadly sins. Dark, wet and steadily worse.

• HeavyStrongly heavy
• RealisticStrongly realistic

2008 · Thriller

A former detective now running escorts realises the man who took two of his women picks them up himself, and goes after him through Seoul at night. Frantic, and the police are useless.

• HeavyStrongly heavy
• RealisticStrongly realistic

2009 · Drama

A fourteen-year-old is killed in 1973 and watches from somewhere in between as her family come apart looking for her. The afterlife is enormous and colourful.

• HeavyStrongly heavy

1991 · Thriller

A trainee FBI agent is sent to interview an imprisoned psychiatrist for help catching a killer who is still working. The interviews are the film.

• HeavyStrongly heavy
• RealisticStrongly realistic