Chances are, you’ve heard of Weapons.
The buzzy new scare flick from Barbarian director Zach Cregger has everyone talking — and could be the next in a long line of late summer horror hits dating back to The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis in 1999.
I’d definitely recommend Weapons, but if you walk out of it craving more movies that will make your skin crawl, you should check out the list of films I’ve compiled below. One is a criminally underrated film with David Caruso, another is a black-and-white classic that’s still creepy AF and the third is perhaps the greatest TV miniseries ever made.
‘Session 9’ (2001)
Gordon Fleming (Peter Mullan) is under a lot of pressure. He’s tasked with leading a crew of blue-collar workers to remove asbestos from a long-abandoned mental institution in Massachusetts. But when one of his workers begins playing old recordings of a patient who murdered her family, strange things begin to happen. When one of them disappears, it’s clear that Gordon and his men are in danger from something haunting the hospital’s walls. But who — or what — is stalking them?
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Like Carnival of Souls before it, Session 9 derives much of its horror from its location, Danvers State Hospital, which actually existed before it was torn down in 2007. The large Gothic building is fully milked for all of its creepiness by director Brad Anderson, who uses its dilapidated structure and crumbling walls to general some well-earned scares. While not a lot happens throughout most of Session 9, the last 20 minutes or so are some of the most tense and terrifying moments ever captured in a horror film.
The movie also ends on a perfect, haunting note, with a voice from long ago admitting, “I live in the weak and wounded, Doc.” I’ll leave it to you to find out what that means.
Session 9 is available to rent on Prime Video.
‘Village of the Damned’ (1960)
How can a movie 65 years old possibly be as scary as one made in 2025? Watch Village of the Damned to find out. This unsettling classic stars Oscar-winner George Sanders as Professor Gordon Zellaby, who is travelling back to his quaint English village when he discovers everyone — mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, even the cows — have fallen asleep.
When they awaken, most of the women discover they are pregnant and soon give birth to children that all look alike — white hair, a monotone voice and strange eyes that seem to control people. It’s clear to George that these children aren’t quite human. But what exactly are they, what do they want and how can he stop them?
Village of the Damned doesn’t have jump scares or massive amounts of blood being spilled. Instead, it repeats the unsettling image of cherubic-faced children with glowing eyes forcing people to do terrible things to themselves, like sticking their hand in a boiling pot of water. It’s a seemingly benign movie that really possesses a nasty spirit, and like Weapons, it uses visuals of innocent-looking children as effective symbols of terror and madness.
Village of the Damned is available to rent on Prime Video.
‘It’ (1990)
A lot of people have seen Stephen King’s It thanks to the popular, big-budget remake in 2017, with Chapter Two released in 2019. The 2017 film is great, but let’s be honest — it’s not quite as effective as the 1990 four-hour miniseries. Even though it was constrained by a small budget and network censorship standards that prevented it from being as violent and gory as the novel, the telefilm caused nightmares for millions of children — myself included — by simply conveying all of its horror through its antagonist, Pennywise the Clown (Tim Curry).
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He terrorizes a group of children in the 1960s in Derry, Maine, and nearly kills them in the grimy sewers beneath the town before Pennywise seemingly dies. 30 years later, the creature is back, and lures the now-adult survivors back to the small, deadbeat town they all ran away from to stop the evil once and for all.
Why is It so scary? Much of the credit should go to Curry, who fully embodies Pennywise, complete with white pancake makeup, an always-present red balloon and a disarmingly cheerful disposition. He looks and acts like a regular clown — until he doesn’t, and whatever It is emerges to scare the daylights out of you. Unlike most movie monsters, Pennywise isn’t scary because of what you see him doing, but rather what he suggests — an ancient, unknowable evil, who knows your worst fears and uses them against you. Is there anything scarier than that?
