10 Underrated Scary Movies That Deserve Your Attention Today

One of several phenomenal horror movies produced by Val Lewton at RKO Studios in the 1940s, Isle of the Dead centers on a group of people quarantined from the plague on a beautiful but spooky Greek island in the early 20th century.

That’s enough to scare you, but the film adds a potential supernatural threat, as one of the people quarantined believes an evil creature exists among them. It’s a great atmospheric horror movie that stars Boris Karloff and features one of the scariest sequences of someone being buried alive ever set to film.

Not to be confused with the Japanese horror film Dark Water, that film’s remake, or the American legal drama Dark Waters released in 2019, 1993’s Dark Waters is a singular Lovefraftian via Catholicism horror film.

The movie follows a young woman who returns to the convent island where she was born after her father’s death. When she arrives, she learns the old friend who was supposed to greet her has gone missing, and as she investigates, she uncovers only more mysteries. It’s a gorgeous and unsettling movie that’s a must-watch for fans of sea-side cosmic horror.

Hellbent is something special; it’s a slasher movie that’s entirely populated by gay characters. The film takes place on Halloween night in West Hollywood and follows a group of gay friends as they hop around from club to club, meeting hot guys and trying to hook up while avoiding a mysterious and creepy masked man.

They don’t find out until much later, but the audience learns in the opening that the masked man is a quintessential slasher villain, killing off characters in and around the central friend group throughout the film.

Gaia is a South African eco-horror film that’s essential viewing for any fans of the subgenre. The film follows a forestry worker who journeys into a forest after losing a drone. She discovers a father and son living on the land deep in the wilderness.

But they aren’t the only ones on the land. Gaia offers amazing creature designs and scenes of squirm-inducing plant-based body horror, making it one of the best horror movies of the last decade.

Bones stars the one and only Snoop Dogg as Jimmy Bones, a career criminal who kept a black neighborhood thriving through his good works and community outreach.

But the film doesn’t tell that story; it tells the story of Jimmy Bones’s supernatural return from an unmarked grave and his revenge on the people who betrayed him. It’s a modern blaxploitation film that does justice to the historic genre and brings it into the 21st century.

Vincent Price had been horror royalty for over a decade when he starred in The Abominable Dr. Phibes. But his performance as the titular doctor is one of his best. The movie tells the story of Phibes and his Ten Plagues of Egypt-inspired quest for revenge against the doctors he blames for his wife’s death.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a gorgeous movie with brightly lit, colorful sets and costumes. But it still manages to disturb viewers with the creative ways Phibes has of murdering his victims.

The original Prom Night is a great slasher, but its sequel is something more unique. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II isn’t narratively related to the first film; instead, it tells the story of the titular Mary Lou, a young woman who died at her prom in 1957.

But the movie isn’t a period piece; it follows Mary Lou’s spirit after she’s awoken and takes possession of a high schooler in 1987. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is a wild ride combining elements of Peggy Sue Got Married, Carrie, and several slashers to create something delightful.

The Devil’s Candy is the only movie I can remember that made me scared to walk home afterward. The film centers on a family of a mom, a painter dad, and a tween daughter who move into a new house.

It doesn’t take long for dad to start hearing voices and for those voices to influence his paintings. But it’s not just possible demons in the house that are cause for concern; one of the former residents also hears the voices and can’t help but listen to them when they ask for blood, children’s blood, and he sets his sights on the daughter of the new family.

The British Hammer Film Productions studio is best known for its brilliantly sumptuous gothic adaptations of pre-existing monster movies. Still, this small-scale, black-and-white movie based on an original story is one of the best they have ever produced.

Taste of Fear follows Penny (Susan Strasberg), a young woman who returns to her father’s home after her best friend takes her own life. But when she arrives, only her stepmother and a doctor are at the house.

Penny is suspicious of her stepmother and only grows more so when she sees her father’s corpse, or does she? The movie turns into an exciting, potentially supernatural mystery film that keeps you guessing and scared until the end.

This thread inspired this post.

Writing and directing team Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury are best known for their New French Extremity classic Inside (a movie I consider one of my favorites of all time). But their later work deserves attention, too.

Their 2020 film Kandisha feels like a mix of La Haine and Candyman as it centers on a multiracial group of friends living in the project-housing suburbs of Paris and their attempts to stop a supernatural evil they called forth. Kandisha offers the gore that the duo is famous for and explores race, class, and the history of French colonialism in exciting and nuanced ways.