Film Notes: A Selection of Recent(ish) Obscure(ish) Horror Films

Horror has a (well-earned) reputation as a wastebin genre. Here are a few horror-adjacent films, largely without jumpscares, musical stings, and cheap tricks. They're on the fringe of the genre, where it starts to become something else.

The Vast of Night (2019)

This is probably the finest film I've seen this decade. Not necessarily the best, or the worthiest, but a film I'd like to show to other filmmakers as an example of how to do it properly. I regret not seeing it in a theatre.

It's... OK to do a period film with modern dialogue. Shakespeare did it; you can too. But there's something impressive about a film that manages, on a relatively low budget, to seamlessly recreate a time and a place. There's never a sense you're looking at a set, that lighting guys and boom mikes are just out of view. You're there. These aren't costumes, they're clothes. These aren't actors. They're people. The dialogue is what it should be.

The long shots. The soundtrack. The framing, the lighting, the haircuts. The sound shoes make. Someone loved every part of this film. 

The Vast of Night is the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind wishes it could be. It's, in my view, the greatest UFO film of all time. Better than Contact, better than Fire in the Sky, better, even, than Incident at Raven's Gate. It's Andrew Patterson's directorial debut, and it is very impressive. I'll follow their career with interest. Do online gambling sites let speculate in director futures? 

A Whale (2024)

This film deserves a wider audience I'm not sure if it'll ever get an English release, or even a wide theatrical release, but it really should.

It's unsettling without being frightening. It is well paced, well shot, and, as far as I can tell, well planned. It is a streamlined film. It respects the viewer's time and intelligence, which feels rare these days. It integrates CGI without spectacle and without bravado. I've seen the wretched Underwater (2020) recommended as a cosmic horror film; there's simply no comparison. Perhaps one day, budgets will be distributed according to talent.  

Ashkal, the Tunisian Investigation (2022)

This is only superficially an investigative horror film. It's deeper, and has a lot more to say, but if you only take the superficial aspects, it's a superb contribution to the genre.

I'm a little leery of using of real-world tragic events as supernatural framing devices. Is it necessary to create a secret history where the hand of the devil (or local equivalent) is visible, when human causes and human desires are all that is required? Adding a secret purpose to a death camp implies the real purpose is insufficiently horrifying.

But, viewed from a sufficient distance, this is possibly the perfect Delta Green movie. Up there with the first season of True Detective.

Yellow Veil Pictures

Not one film, but a film distribution company with a well curated selection.  

 Side Note: Oh God, Not Another Casting Call

A surprising number of intriguing sci-fi / horror films turn out to be Inside Holllywood pictures. You know the type; films made by people trapped inside the reality-warping California ecosystem, written by people unable to see beyond the walls of their cage. Examples include but are not limited to Somnium (2025), Touch Me (2025), The Endless (2017), Something in the Dirt (2024).

Something in the Dirt was particularly disappointing, as it had some real potential before devolving into self-congratulatory / self-deprecating Hollywood inside baseball slop. These films aren't cosmic horror films. They're films about trying to make it in Hollywood, or life in California, with a vague framing device to sell tickets. They're inherently shallow. 

Maybe David Lawson Jr. et. al. need to take a sabbatical and work somewhere. Get out in the real world. Put a boom mic on their shoulder and walk east, until someone says "that's a weird looking golf club". 

 But outside of the Hollywood bubble, the films Yellow Veil Pictures picks up are generally pretty good. Without Name (2016) has elements of Algernon Blackwood's The Trees. The Spine of Night (2021) is an OSR darling. I can't imagine being nostalgic for TV commercials, but Buffet Infinity (2025) is a film consisting largely of small-town TV commercials. I think shorter films, like the Local 58 series, have already thoroughly explored the analog horror genre, but it was still enjoyable. 

Backrooms (2026) & I Saw The TV Glow (2024).

Both films are good; Backrooms surprisingly so, given the perils of adapting a vague vibe into a film. They could be entries in a new, loosely defined subgenre: the horror of repetition and of a wasted life. This isn't the main theme of either film, but it is present. 

We all have our loops. Our habits. Behaviors that keep us walking in circles. Reaching for the same solutions over and over again. Thinking each time will take you somewhere new, but they don't. And still, it's the neural pathway of least resistance. A path you made. - Backrooms, 2026.

Time wasn't right. It was moving too fast. And then I was 19. And then I was 20. I felt like one of those dolls asleep in the supermarket. Stuffed. And then I was 21. Like chapters skipped over on a DVD. I told myself, "This isn't normal. This isn't normal. This isn't how life is supposed to feel. - I Saw the TV Glow (2024).

This isn't the active invariant time loop horror of Timecrimes (2007), Triangle (2009), or Primer (2004), or even the disjointed self-examination of The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973).

This is a passive, unconscious looping. Patterns repeating themselves. Proustian, perhaps. Not the horror of change, but the horror of a lack of change, at the lack of one's ability to change. The sense of time slipping forward while repeating itself. Something closer to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, or possibly Asako Yuzuki's Hooked. It's not a new fear or a new idea, but it seems to be resonating with today's audiences (whatever that means).

There are probably other films that fit this category. A friend suggested M. Night Shyamalan's [The Beach That Makes You] Old (2021). That friend was sentenced to watch Death Bed: the Bed that Eats (1977) sober.

There's a pop psychology link between an era's horror movie fears and its real-world preoccupations (well, at least for mainstream America). Zombies and the local other, alien abductions and the cold war, etc. Is the perception of time and the futility of human endeavour the new frontier of horror?