Every horror movie worth its salt needs a good premise. It’s easy to just copy a premise that’s worked in the past — like a masked killer picking off teenagers or a band of survivors fending off the zombie apocalypse — but nothing grabs the moviegoing public’s attention like an entirely unique and original premise.
Jordan Peele is one of the most idiosyncratic voices in horror cinema right now. His most recent movie, Us, is a psychological thrill-ride in which everyone in America is forced to face their worst enemy — themselves — when doppelgangers in red jumpsuits start killing off all the originals.
Us (2019)
Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke star in Jordan Peele’s sophomore feature Us as a couple who bring their kids to the beach on vacation and get attacked by their own doppelgangers in the middle of the night.
While the trailers suggested that the story would be mostly confined to the family’s vacation home, the second half of Us becomes a full-on zombie movie in its post-apocalyptic fight for survival.
It Follows (2014)
In a pointed visual metaphor for STDs (and any number of other interpretations fans have come up with), It Follows sees a demonic spirit being sexually transmitted from host to host.
Whoever is possessed by this spirit is relentlessly followed by monsters until they give up and allow the monsters to catch them and get it over with. Inconsistent lore aside, it’s a pretty haunting movie.
A Quiet Place (2018)
John Krasinski successfully shed his Jim Halpert image when he directed, co-wrote, and starred in A Quiet Place. Sound is as crucial to cinema as imagery, and A Quiet Place used sound brilliantly.
The alien invaders populating its post-apocalyptic wasteland can’t see and instead sense movement with their acute hearing. So, the survivors have to stay completely quiet, because the slightest noise could get them decapitated in seconds. It’s not a completely silent film, but Krasinski does use silence to create a palpable feeling of terror.
Tusk (2014)
Kevin Smith based his comedy-horror gem Tusk on a Gumtree ad he mentioned in a SModcast episode. A homeowner was offering a free living situation in exchange for any potential tenant who’d be willing to dress up as a walrus all day. The real ad turned out to be a prank.
Justin Long stars in Tusk as a podcaster who answers such an ad and meets a maniac played brilliantly by Michael Parks, who’s intent on actually turning him into a walrus.
Don’t Breathe (2016)
Although home invasion movies are ten a penny, Fede Álvarez put a fresh spin on the well-worn subgenre in Don’t Breathe. Whereas most home invasion movies are told from the perspective of the homeowners and the burglars are the villains, in Don’t Breathe, the burglars are the protagonists.
They expect that robbing a blind man will be easy, but that blind man turns out to be a gun-toting maniac whose basement holds a dark secret.
Hereditary (2018)
Ari Aster’s feature directorial debut Hereditary is more of a harrowing family tragedy than a horror movie. Aside from some ominous foreshadowing, it’s a straightforward drama about grief for its first half-hour before a disturbing twist veers the movie directly into horror territory.
In Hereditary, the terror is inescapable. Something terrible is going to happen to the Graham family and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.
The Shining (1980)
The premise of Stephen King’s bestselling novel The Shining is what drew Stanley Kubrick to it. He didn’t appreciate King’s telling of it, which is why he deviated wildly from the source material in his adaptation, but the hook remained the same.
Jack Torrance is a struggling writer who takes a job as a winter caretaker at a haunted hotel called the Overlook. Snowbound in isolation with his wife and son, Jack gradually goes insane. In King’s version, Jack is a good man who is corrupted by the Overlook’s spirits. In Kubrick’s version, he’s a hot-tempered maniac from the very beginning — the hotel might not even really be haunted.
Audition (1999)
For the first half of Audition, it doesn’t really feel like a horror movie at all. It’s more of a melodrama about a widower moving on and re-entering the dating pool at the behest of his son. He collaborates with his producer friend to hold “auditions” for potential new wives.
When he falls for one of them, he gets a lot more than he bargained for as she becomes dangerously attached to him and doesn’t want to share his affection with anybody — not even his son.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper’s grindhouse masterpiece The Texas Chain Saw Massacre isn’t just a run-of-the-mill slasher — it’s the ultimate pro-vegetarian film. Sally Hardesty’s family has been profiting from the meat industry for decades.
One day, Sally and her friends run afoul of Leatherface, a chainsaw-wielding maniac with a taste for human flesh. The subtext gives an ironic bite to Hooper’s tale of a cannibal slaughtering human beings for food.
Get Out (2017)
Before he let America’s doppelgangers run amok in Us, Jordan Peele established himself as one of the most exciting new voices in horror cinema with his debut feature, Get Out.
Another social thriller with Twilight Zone vibes, Get Out is essentially Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner meets The Stepford Wives. A Black photographer travels with his white girlfriend to an all-white gated community to meet her parents, where something sinister is afoot.
