I’ll give you three. The first one scared me the most.
Last Shift (2014).
A rookie cop is tasked to watch over an abandoned police station. The police station became haunted after a Manson-wannabe family hang themselves in it.
(Don’t worry; these aren’t spoilers.)
I consider this a quaint little horror. The whole film takes place in one setting with one main character, yet does so much with it.
The major seller for me is the lead character- she’s not the dumb lead that horror movies are so fond of having. She’s a cop with her head screwed on right. When strange things start happening, she chalks it down to being alone in an old building and overthinking things.
When things get stranger, she tries to leave. She doesn’t fall into madness quickly; it’s a slow descent, you don’t realise its happening until it happened.
There are some legit scares. The children in a circle singing, the body floating in the hallway.
The Platform (2019):
It’s more thriller than horror.
A man volunteers to be part of some shady exercise. He is put in a room with another person. What are they supposed to do?
Nothing. Just eat.
Eat what? Just food. Eating itself is not the tricky part. The tricky part is being lucky enough to have anything to eat. You see, they’re placed on a floor in a building. Each room on each floor, two people in each room. The objective is to be lucky enough to be placed on a top floor where you can get the best food.
There’s a platform that is full of food, and once every day the platform moves from the topmost floor to the bottom, stopping at each floor for a couple of minutes so the roommates can eat.
There are hundreds of floors, so you get the idea. People who are placed at the topmost floors are lucky, at the lowest floors people die of starvation.
Naturally, in such situations people will get nasty, and the film doesn’t hold back. Murders, r*pes, cannibalism; it’s gory.
His House (2020):
A couple whose whole family was slaughtered in a civil war flees to the UK to start a new life. Only, their past doesn’t want to leave them yet, and follows them across the ocean.
I think it’s really about the guilt people feel when they leave their family behind in danger to find better lives for themselves; it’s also about having difficulty to adjust to a new environment, trying to fit into a new culture and way of life that wasn’t your own.
I think what makes this film interesting is similar to what makes The Babadook (another great horror film) interesting: the ghost/evil entity. It’s not your average demon; it’s something else entirely, something new, something strange.
The brilliance of the evil in The House is that from the beginning till the end of the film, it’s not and never fully clear whether it’s malevolent or benevolent. It is to the wife a friend, to the husband an enemy. Always thought that was a bit unique.