The Best Indie and Art-House Horror Movies of the Summer Are All Out This Month

So far, the year’s horror offerings have been a mixed bag, but that’s fine—that’s what summer is for. This July, however, we’re being treated to a bounty of excellent, and very scary, things to see. We’ve already had Maxxxine, a love letter to slick 1980s horror from Ty West, and the prequel A Quiet Place: Day One, which has been raking it in at the box office. Those movies are perfectly good Hollywood entertainments, but a new run of indie art-house horror (three movies are playing in theaters now and in the week to come) represents something special. Pick any one of the movies below—or try all three!—and indulge in that ritualistic pleasure of mid-summer: taking refuge in a cool, dark room and scaring yourself silly.

Longlegs

Longlegs opened last Friday and is already a box-office phenomenon. Inspired by gothic ’90s thrillers like Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, Osgood Perkins’s unsettling and periodically shocking mood piece is an intelligent example of occult-horror escapism. Maika Monroe in a carefully modulated performance steps it up as the film’s protagonist, an FBI agent investigating a series of mysterious killings in a gloomy, forest-cloaked Pacific Northwest. And you may have already heard about Nicolas Cage in the title role. He is, quite simply, one of the weirdest, scariest movie monsters I’ve encountered in some time—glam-rock grotesque, reedy-voiced, and satan-obsessed. The whole thing is dark and relentless with plot turns that make this about familial secrets and the bonds of parents and children. For horror fans, a must-see.

Oddity