Death Creeps

A deceptively quiet aquatic thriller, Dangerous Animals (2025), directed by Sean Byrne, lures audiences in with understated tension and an undeniably charismatic protagonist. Within its restrained pacing are character studies of obsession, ritual, and survival anchored by compelling performances.

Coyotes (2025) sinks its teeth in with a ferocious blend of survival and eco-horror as scathing satire. Written by Tad Daggerhart and Nick Simon, director Colin Minihan delivers a stripped-down brutality with comedic undertones, stranding the rags-to-riches Stewart family in a hostile wilderness with a Santa Ana windstorm wreaking havoc, before pitting them against a pack of ravenous coyotes.

“We can’t talk about these things,” Doris (Jayne Atkinson) admits, her voice heavy with the unspoken truth that mothers are expected to bury their negatively perceived emotions. Where culture demands maternal bliss and perfection, horror dares to expose the cracks that make happy homes derelict haunted arenas. Baby Ruby (2023) and The Babadook (2014), disrupt the pastel veneer of maternal bliss to expose postpartum depression not as a private failing but as a cultural taboo.

Bess Wohl’s directorial debut feature Baby Ruby (2023) opens with the glossy façade of new motherhood—pink garland, champagne toasts, frosted perfection—but the illusion shatters almost immediately. Wohl drags us past the glow of pregnancy into the darker terrain revealing an abyss of anguish, paranoia, and dread. What begins as a joyful milestone becomes a cinematic exorcism of postpartum depression and psychosis.

Hunt Club (2023) creeps in on a whisper but quickly bares its teeth. Directed by Elizabeth Blake-Thomas, the film positions itself in the lineage of feminist revenge horror—a subgenre carved out by films like I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Revenge (2017), and Promising Young Woman (2020)—but does so with a grindhouse edge and a theatrical flourish.

It Follows (2014), written, produced, and directed by David Robert Mitchell, is a criticallyacclaimed supernatural horror film, and with good reason.