SO MUCH OF THE FEAR THAT horror films enkindle within us comes from what horror nerds like me call ‘The Beyond.’ It’s what we don’t see and what we can’t comprehend (much less control) that makes us afraid. It unsettles us to resign to the fact that there are things in this world that go beyond our understanding and forces that don’t adhere to the same laws that apply to us.

Supernatural horror encapsulates this dreadful feeling so well, be it the sinister spirits traumatizing a suburban family in Poltergeist or a demonic entity preying on a woman’s implosion on the back of her grief in Hereditary. Maybe it’s a sentient .exe file that amplifies people’s sorrow and yearning to disappear, like in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse.

There are plenty of good supernatural horror films I’m sure a lot of us have watched, so I put together a list of some titles that I feel have yet to receive their much-deserved flowers — hence, this week’s underrated supernatural horror edition of ¡Qué(ue) Horror!.

👹 Onibaba
1964, dir. Kaneto Shindō | Japan 🇯🇵

Menacing post-war horror that beautifully unfurls in a violent clash of rage, envy, and possession. Shindō’s Onibaba is a masterclass in accentuating terror in a world that’s already riddled with so much fear and infighting. The film picks up after a man wedges a rift between two women who raid soldiers for survival.

😈 The Devils
1971, dir. Ken Russell | United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Many of my peers have yet to acquaint themselves with Ken Russell’s masterpiece, The Devils, and it’s a mistake I’m devoted to correcting. Set in the 17th Century, the film tells a modern story about corrupt institutions desperately trying to burn progressive ideals to ash — sadly, all still relevant themes some fifty years later.

🔥 The Fury
1978, dir. Brian De Palma | United States 🇺🇸

Obscured by his other thriller about a telekinetic teenager, Brian De Palma’s The Fury outsizes his 1976 classic, Carrie, in every way. The film is a widely cynical, noir-ish, superhero origin story with tinges of supernatural horror. So often, it lapses over on the sillier side, but the thrills and the red-eyed cynicism never let up. John Williams’ gorgeous score is a major plus.

🩸 Possession
1981, dir. Andrzej Żuławski | France 🇫🇷

One of my Four Favorites (as of writing this). Żuławski’s Possession is categorically a psychological thriller about marital distress (among other things), but like any great film, it’s more than that. Here, events unravel in ways that make them inscrutably un/real and super/natural. It’s an expressive horror film that sheds light on the anxieties and offers curt commentaries about the zeitgeist.

👻 Whispering Corridors
1998, dir. Park Ki-hyung | South Korea 🇰🇷

The wave of eerie, petrifying ghost stories towered to gargantuan heights with the success of Japanese films like Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge. This 1998 South Korean chiller from Park Ki-hyung is a welcome entry to that stable, even sprawling into a multi-film franchise that tells standalone stories with each film.

🕯️ Séance
2000, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa | Japan 🇯🇵

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is (rightly) revered as one of the genre’s greatest. In between his two better-known works — Cure and Pulse — he made Séance, a straight-to-TV feature that exhibits the same restraint and possesses the same tenebrous knack for supernatural schemes. It’s loosely based on Mark McShane’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon, which tells the story of an anxious clairvoyant who goes to strange lengths to aid with police crime-solving.

📸 Lake Mungo
2008, dir. Joel Anderson | Australia 🇦🇺

Lake Mungo is eerily committed to the mockumentary facade and never lets the mask come off once. So, when we learn about the menacing thing that happens in the film, it’s hard to fully telegraph in our minds that the mocku’s subjects are mere characters and aren’t real people. There are plenty of scary moments in this film, but that one time-frozen photo still haunts me to this day.

🛌 The Awakening
2011, dir. Nick Murphy | United Kingdom 🇬🇧

I’ve vacillated on whether or not I should add this well-crafted if sometimes rote slice of Gothic horror. I could have gone with other noteworthy entries, from Del Toro’s Crimson Peak to Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others, but ultimately thought its lamentations on grief and sorrow to be so intriguing. Plus, Rebecca Hall’s performance as a moonlighting ghost hunter in post-WWI England is incredible.

🏠 His House
2020, dir. Remi Weekes | United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Remi Weekes’ His House follows two Sudanese refugees struggling to rebuild their lives in a strange English town. It paints a nightmarish vision where migrant horrors, diasporic guilt, and social alienation all come into one. It’s one of the best horror films to emerge at the turn of the decade, and I think more people should see it.

🖍️ We're All Going to the World’s Fair
2021, dir. Jane Schoenbrun | United States 🇺🇸

Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is an unnerving look at the horrors of living inside a void where nothing feels real (a.k.a. the Internet). It follows a distraught teenager participating in a horror video challenge that drives her deep into madness. The ending is one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve seen; it pushes us to confront our own distorted online identities. Are you still you?

¡Qué(ue) Horror! is a monthly email column where I share horror movie recommendations specific to a theme, genre, filmmaker, etc. This series is exclusive only to Deep Cuts subscribers (free and paid).

¡Qué(ue) Horror! is a new bi-weekly email series where I share horror movie recommendations specific to a theme, genre, filmmaker, etc. This series is exclusive only to Deep Cuts subscribers (free and paid).

Good evening.

After kicking off my descent into the world’s nastiest films and videos (#DisturbingDescent), my mind sailed adrift in the unnerving world of thalassophobic horror.

As someone with this very rational fear (whoever considers thalassophobia an ‘irrational’ fear is coked out of their mind), I am terrified by the monsters and secrets lurking beneath uncharted sea depths. And these six films confront those secrets in vivid, interesting ways.

🦑 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
1961, dir. Irwin Allen | United States

More than 60 years into its initial release, Voyage’s early ruminations about climate change ring truer than ever before. Epic in scale and pretty in aesthetic, this technical beauty of a film sometimes obscures the very real horrors of nature on the brink of collapse.

🦈 Jaws
1975, dir. Steven Spielberg | United States

Steven Spielberg’s seminal film provided a blueprint not only for seaside thrillers of its ilk but also for other adjacent genres, including the slasher. Jaws is as perverse as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. The film forces upon us the p.o.v. of a blood-thirsty predator, patiently dawdling in the trenches until the perfect time to strike its prey.

🦠 Virus
1980, dir. Kinji Fukasaku | Japan, United States

Added largely for its topicality, Virus puts up a mirror to our slow march towards self-annihilation. In the film, a global pandemic has wiped out most of the human race, and it’s left to a quarreling group of survivors holed up in miles and miles of Antarctic expanses to decide what to do next.

🌊 The Abyss
1989, dir. James Cameron | United States

James Cameron’s The Abyss is often described by fans as Ridley Scott’s Alien, but underwater. I don’t oppose this comparison; I find the film similarly arresting and unnerving. That’s not due to the aquatic aliens but to the post-Cold War anxieties that bubble up so often that it becomes a greater threat than a lost nuclear sub.

🐡 Leviathan
2012, dir. Verena Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor | France, United Kingdom

Between the two sea-bound Leviathan films that exist (this and the aqua-mutant B-movie from the ‘80s), I chose this visceral documentary about marine exportation. Apocalyptic and grotesque in atmosphere, the film argues that the horrors of the deep don’t need to swim up to the surface. We’re already doing it ourselves.

💦 Underwater
2020, dir. William Eubank | United States

Underwater is such a trigger for one’s thalassophobia. It film follows a deepwater researcher (Kristen Stewart) who has to fend off Eldritch terrors at the foot of the Mariana Trench. Where it pales in storytelling, it makes up for visuals. It’s one of the best-looking underwater horror thrillers I’ve seen yet.