The Most Underrated Horror Films Of The 2010s

"Come on," we can almost hear you saying, "a slasher comedy? And one that's rated PG-13, no less?" But trust us when we say that there's more to The Final Girls than meets the eye. Sure, there's jokes and goofy slayings and plenty of self-aware humor, but there's also a surprising amount of heart in this story about a young woman (Taissa Farmiga, American Horror Story) trying to reconnect with her deceased mother (Malin Akerman) by watching the low-rent slasher flick she starred in years ago. Naturally, the young woman finds herself getting more than she bargained for when she and her friends are pulled into the movie itself in this story of grief and family ties that also manages to be a genuinely funny and visually striking slasher comedy - all without a lot of piled-on grue. Who would have thought?

Jeremy Saulnier's story of a punk-rock band trapped by white supremacists unfortunately feels more topical with each passing day. It's also notable for its claustrophobic setting, intense action, and powerful performances. After all, it's not every day that you get to see Captain Picard himself, Sir Patrick Stewart, play a skinhead. When the film's band, the Ain't Rights, find themselves playing a gig at an out-of-the-way venue in Pacific Northwest, they quickly realize they're in trouble when they notice the place is full of skinheads. That doesn't stop them from playing a cover of "Nazi Punks F*ck Off" by the Dead Kennedys, though. It isn't until the show is over that things take a turn for the fatal. The band is in the green room when they witness a slaying - and the leader of the skinheads decides to take them all out to keep them from talking. The result is a severe, nail-biting flick that is also one of late lead actor Anton Yelchin's last film roles.

Found-footage horror movies and ghost movies have both been extremely popular over the course of the last decade - but they also both get kind of a bad rap among horror connoisseurs as being samey films made to appeal to the least-common denominator. At a glance, Grave Encounters looks like it'll be exactly that - a found-footage dark ride about the crew of a ghost hunting reality show who explore an abandoned mental hospital with a dark history, where they'll encounter plenty of kohl-eyed figures. And, certainly, it has plenty of that to offer. But Grave Encounters also does things that most of its siblings don't dare, such as messing with time and space in ways that are genuinely disconcerting and reminiscent of more typically thoughtful fare like Picnic at Hanging Rock or the book House of Leaves.

Sister act directing duo Jen and Sylvia Soska, who have recently remade David Cronenberg's Rabid, first jumped onto the genre scene with their 2012 black comedy horror film American Mary. Though it immediately earned them a name in extreme horror circles, American Mary still remains under-seen by the wider horror world. In it, Katharine Isabelle (of the Ginger Snaps series) plays a medical student who, in desperate need of funds, finds herself drawn into the world of extreme body modification. Unfortunately, she is also the subject of a terrible assault from the doctors and mentors who are in charge of her residency, which leads her to a grisly revenge and into a cat-and-mouse game with the police. With a 60% at Rotten Tomatoes, the Critics Consensus says American Mary "utilizes pitch-black humor and striking visuals to deliver gory, freaky thrills for body-horror enthusiasts."

Director Mike Flanagan has made quite a career for himself by directing Netflix's mini-series version of The Haunting of Hill House, not to mention Stephen King adaptations Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep. But one of his earliest horror film entries still remains under-seen, in spite of being part of what started his career in the industry. The film follows Tricia and her sister, Callie. Tricia's husband has been missing for seven years, and she and her sister gradually begin to suspect his disappearance, along with those of many other people in the area, has something to do with a tunnel in front of her house. Just as Tricia is having her husband declared passed in absentia, he abruptly shows back up, bloody and barefoot, and surprised that anyone else can see him. Of course, things only get freakier from there, as Flanagan showcases some of the skills that have made him a major name in the horror field in the years since.

Not exactly a small-time production, The Awakening was made by the BBC and StudioCanal and stars actors like Iron Man 3's Rebecca Hall, The Wire's Dominic West, and Imelda Staunton from the Harry Potter franchise. Yet many people seem to have slept on this quiet but eerie haunted house chiller from 2011. Hall plays Florence Cathcart, an author and professional skeptic who works with the police to debunk fake spiritualists in the wake of WWI. When she is invited to a private boy's school where the ghost of a child may have caused the demise of another boy, her skepticism is tested by what she discovers. The movie may be at its best during the early debunking scenes, but all the actors give good performances, and there's plenty of chilly ambiance to be found all the way to the film's twisty ending.

In most horror movies, occult magic is shockingly easy to find and perform. So much so that it's a wonder people aren't calling up spirits and placing hexes left and right - which, if the number of supernatural horror movies out there are any indication, maybe they are. Not so in Liam Gavin's A Dark Song, a film that concerns two people - a woman grieving the passing of her seven-year-old son and an ill-tempered occultist - who are performing a grueling, months-long ritual. Neither of them can leave the house for the duration of the rite, and it gradually takes a terrible (and possibly fatal) toll on the both of them. If this is the price of ritual magic, it makes much more sense that people aren't tossing it around willy-nilly.

Ben Wheatley's films can be a bit of an acquired taste, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that a great many of them remain underappreciated and under-seen by those who might find them fascinating. Of all his earlier films, one of the best - and most beloved by those who have had the good-fortune to see it - is Kill List, Wheatley's 2011 mash-up of horror and crime cinema. Following two former soldiers who are working as hitmen after getting back into the world, Kill List is a slow burn that takes its time getting to its bizarre folk horror elements. But when they do arrive, boy, do they ever.

Writing/directing duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have been generating growing buzz in indie horror circles with the release of films like The Endless, but one of their best (and most under-seen) efforts remains their 2012 debut Resolution. The film concerns two friends, one of them (Michael) a successful graphic designer with a pregnant wife, the other (Chris) a user who has moved into a remote shack and seems to have become increasingly delusional. Michael decides to stage an intervention, but things begin to turn strange when the two men start finding seemingly impossible photographs and film footage of them. A mind-bending trip into the truly weird that is also a tale of the bonds of friendship, Resolution is a testament to what you can do with a fairly meager budget and some big ideas.

Sure, the whole slasher deconstruction fad has become old hat in the decades since Scream, but that doesn't mean it can't still get a fresh spin now and again. In Ruin Me, a young woman named Alex reluctantly tags along on her boyfriend's Slasher Sleepout trip - an event that's part camping trip and part escape room, in which the participants are dropped off in the woods in the midst of a simulated slasher movie. Of course, things aren't all that they appear, and events quickly take a turn for the intense as Alex's companions start turning up deceased. Think Cabin in the Woods if it hadn't been played for laughs, or David Fincher's The Game, but for slasher aficionados. That'll give you some idea of what you're in for with Ruin Me, which is currently streaming on Shudder.

Sometimes it isn't the story that's being told that makes a film stand out, it's the telling. On its surface, The Canal's story of a husband (Rupert Evans) whose wife goes missing and is presumed drowned in the canal near his home is a familiar one. Is he cracking up, or is the house actually haunted by a grisly misdeed that occurred there a century ago? What sets The Canal apart from the rest of the ghostly crowd are its visuals, borrowed partly from the archival film footage that is the protagonist's day job. As the haunting ramps up - or his sanity begins to unravel - and the walls start cracking apart to reveal the horrors hiding beneath, they uncover sights that would have been right at home in a Clive Barker adaptation.

One thing that doesn't get talked about enough is the importance of sound in making horror films work. Not so with Berberian Sound Studio, the second feature from British director Peter Strickland (In Fabric). Here, Toby Jones plays a sound engineer who goes to work on an Italian giallo horror film, only to find himself out of his depth and quickly losing his grip on reality. "I wanted to make a film where everything that is usually hidden in cinema, the mechanics of film itself, is made visible," Strickland told Basia Lewandowska Cummings of The Quietus. "Here, the film is out of view, and you only see the mechanics behind it." If you ever wanted to see - and be entirely creeped out by - Foley artists making sound effects for grisly scenes that you can't see, this is your movie! Never has watching men tear apart produce been so menacing.