The month’s picks include a contagion film, an ’80s throwback, an unnerving tale of siblings, a faux documentary and a slow-burn thriller.
Halloween is around the corner and already I’m up to my eye sockets in horror, whether it’s the marquee monster “Halloween Kills” or the daredevil Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, which runs through Oct.21. So to maximize your movie-watching hours this witching season, three of this month’s picks clock in at no longer than 90 minutes. You’re welcome, boo. Rent or buy on Amazon. This taut Canadian horror-thriller, about hotel guests attacked by a deadly virus, never mentions Covid. But — and maybe this is the fate of contagion films now — it’s hard to read a movie about viral spread that turns people into gasping ghouls as being about anything else. The film opens on Naomi (Yumiko Shaku), a pregnant woman on the run from her husband in Japan, sitting in a hotel hallway with other people gulping for air. She crosses paths with Val (Carolina Bartczak), a mom whose plan to take her daughter and escape her abusive husband gets a little easier when he turns into a weak, wheezing monster. Turns out it’s no conspiracy theory: The outbreak has sinister origins. I don’t want to say more, because in just 79 minutes the director Francesco Giannini, in his solo feature debut, fronts his film with strong central female characters and packs it with ferocious twists. It’s too early to tell to what extent coronavirus horror movies will influence horror. “Hall” and the demonic Zoom-call picture “Host ” — the scariest movie ever, according to a new study — makes me think it will. The jury’s out on “Corona Zombies.” Stream it on Hulu. You don’t need to remember the 1980s to appreciate Prano Bailey-Bond’s creeping-dread drama, her feature debut about the Video Nasties scare in Britain. The honest-to-God moral panic swept the country, leading to the banning of 72 films. Enid (Niamh Algar) spends her days watching extreme movies, not for pleasure but for the British government.
