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When Apes Strike Back: A Brief, Bloody History of Killer Ape Cinema

08 Thursday Jan 2026

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There is something uniquely unsettling about the cinematic ape. Neither fully beast nor recognisably human, the ape exists in a liminal space where intelligence threatens instinct and instinct threatens civilisation. When apes turn violent on screen, it is rarely just spectacle—it is metaphor. Fear of regression. Fear of science. Fear of nature remembering its strength.

As Primate prepares to join this strange lineage, it’s worth tracing how killer ape cinema has evolved: from pulp exploitation and natural horror, through prestige allegory, to blockbuster spectacle and outright absurdity.

The Apex of Fear: Apes as Allegory

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Franklin J. Schaffner’s landmark film is not a “killer ape movie” in the crude sense, but it is foundational. The apes are not monsters; they are inheritors. Their violence is institutional, judicial, scientific. What terrifies is not their savagery but their civilisation—one that mirrors humanity’s worst impulses.

Every ape-on-human act here carries ideological weight. This is not about claws and teeth; it is about power structures. Nearly every killer ape film since has echoed this anxiety, whether consciously or not.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

The modern franchise reclaims that allegorical power. Caesar’s apes are tragic, political beings whose violence emerges from betrayal and fear. While not “killer apes” in the exploitation sense, the film’s emotional complexity elevates simian aggression into something operatic. Violence is framed as consequence, not novelty.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

This latest entry leans further into myth-making. Apes as kings, generals, tyrants. Here, the killer ape becomes historical force—a reminder that dominance is cyclical. Humanity is no longer prey, but footnote.

Verdict: Essential context. These films legitimise the ape as cinematic threat by grounding it in philosophy rather than pulp.

Nature Turns Hostile: Apes as Environmental Horror

In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro (1985)

Possibly the most literal killer ape film ever made. Tens of thousands of starving baboons descend upon humans during a drought. It’s messy, bleak, and strangely prescient. Environmental collapse creates violence, not evil. The apes are not villains—they are survivors.

Despite its rough edges, the film taps into a genuine eco-horror vein later seen in shark, insect, and reptile cinema.

Blood Monkey (2006)

A late-era attempt to graft Jurassic Park aesthetics onto primate horror, Blood Monkey is disposable but emblematic of the genre’s exploitation phase. Science meddles. Apes mutate. People die. The film has little to say beyond spectacle, but it shows how the killer ape had become a direct-to-video creature feature staple.

Verdict: Relevant as cautionary tales—nature retaliating against human arrogance.

Laboratory Nightmares: Apes and Scientific Hubris

Monkey Shines (1988)

George A. Romero’s most psychologically disturbing work may also be his quietest. Ella the monkey is not a rampaging beast but a resentful, possessive intelligence shaped by experimentation. The horror lies in emotional transference and loss of autonomy.

This is killer ape cinema at its most intimate and uncomfortable.

Link (1986)

An underrated British horror gem where a super-intelligent orangutan becomes lethally territorial. The film weaponises intelligence rather than mutation, suggesting that awareness itself may be the most dangerous upgrade of all.

Night of the Bloody Apes (1969)

Mexican exploitation at its most lurid. A heart transplant turns a man into a masked ape monster. It’s crude, sensationalist, and morally dubious—but deeply influential in cementing the ape-man as grindhouse staple.

Panic in the Tower (1990)

A lab-escape narrative filtered through teen horror clichés. The killer baboon is more slasher than animal, stalking corridors like a furry Michael Myers.

Verdict: These films form the psychological backbone of killer ape cinema—where the true horror is not the animal, but the experiment.

Giants, Gods, and Spectacle: When Apes Become Myth

King Kong (1933 / 2005)

Kong is not a killer ape—he is a tragic one. Violence is secondary to romance, spectacle, and colonial metaphor. Yet his influence on the genre is incalculable. Every giant ape that follows owes him a debt.

Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake amplifies Kong’s emotional register, transforming destruction into operatic tragedy.

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

This iteration strips Kong of romance and repositions him as apex guardian. His violence is righteous, directed outward at greater monsters. Here, the killer ape becomes protector—a shift that reflects modern genre sensibilities.

Rampage (2018)

Pure popcorn nonsense. Genetic tampering turns a gorilla into a skyscraper-smashing kaiju. Fun, loud, and completely unconcerned with metaphor, Rampage represents the genre’s absorption into blockbuster bombast.

Verdict: Spectacle-driven entries that dilute fear but expand scale.

Absurdity and Parody: When the Genre Eats Itself

Mulva 2: Kill Teen Ape! (2004)

A micro-budget splatter parody that knows exactly how ridiculous the concept has become. It doesn’t undermine the genre—it autopsies it.

Mad Monster Party? (1967)

Not killer ape cinema per se, but illustrative of how apes were absorbed into pop-horror iconography by the late ’60s.

Verdict: Not essential, but proof that killer apes are culturally flexible—even laughable.

Outliers and Near Misses

Congo (1995)

Technically a killer ape movie, spiritually a corporate jungle adventure. The grey gorillas are terrifying in concept but undercut by tonal confusion and animatronic stiffness. A fascinating failure.

Ad Astra (2019)

The infamous space-baboon sequence is memorable but tangential. A jump scare, not a genre entry.

Why Killer Apes Endure — And Why Primate Matters

Killer ape films persist because they strike at something deeply primal: the fear that intelligence does not guarantee moral superiority. That evolution is not ascent, but competition. When apes attack, cinema asks whether humanity deserves its place at the top.

From allegory (Planet of the Apes) to exploitation (Night of the Bloody Apes), from eco-horror (Kilimanjaro) to blockbuster spectacle (Rampage), the genre has splintered but never vanished.

If Primate is to matter, it must choose which lineage it belongs to. Will it embrace pulp, philosophy, or paranoia? The history of killer ape cinema suggests that when these films work best, they don’t just show apes killing humans—they remind us how thin the line between them has always been.

  • Saul Muerte

Top ‘Fresh Kill’ Horror Films of 2026

28 Sunday Dec 2025

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Anticipating the Next Wave of Fear

If 2025 marked a consolidation of horror as a serious critical form — a year of restraint, inheritance, and psychological rigor — then 2026 promises escalation of a different kind. Not louder, necessarily, but broader. The forthcoming slate suggests a genre increasingly preoccupied with systems: religion, legacy franchises, folklore, surveillance, bodily autonomy, and historical memory. Sequels coexist with reinventions; prestige auteurs collide with grindhouse traditions; and horror’s long-standing obsession with the past intensifies into something closer to cultural archaeology.

What follows is not a ranking of box-office potential, nor a speculative list of shocks, but a curated survey of the most critically promising horror films currently scheduled for 2026 — projects that suggest where the genre may be headed, formally and ideologically.

1. Untitled Jordan Peele Project

Jordan Peele’s continued absence of detail has become its own form of authorship. Since Get Out, Peele has positioned secrecy as a conceptual extension of his work — a refusal to allow audience expectation to pre-empt meaning. Whatever form his 2026 project takes, it is almost certain to engage with systems of power, visibility, and American myth-making, filtered through genre architecture.

Peele’s films operate less as allegory than as diagnosis, embedding social critique within meticulously constructed genre frameworks. Anticipation here is not rooted in premise but in method: the expectation that horror will once again be used to interrogate what America refuses to name.

2. Untitled The Exorcist Project

Director: Mike Flanagan

Mike Flanagan’s involvement with The Exorcist franchise suggests a decisive tonal shift away from bombast and toward interiority. Flanagan’s strength has always been his ability to locate horror within grief, faith, and unresolved trauma — concerns deeply aligned with The Exorcist’s theological underpinnings.

With Scarlett Johansson and Jacobi Jupe attached, the project signals a focus on relational dynamics rather than spectacle. If successful, this could mark a rare revival: not of a franchise’s iconography, but of its existential seriousness.

3. The Mummy

Director: Lee Cronin
Expected April 17, 2026

Lee Cronin’s reinvention of The Mummy appears poised to reject colonial adventure tropes in favour of familial horror and bodily unease. The disappearance-and-return narrative frames the monster not as ancient spectacle, but as an invasive presence within the domestic sphere.

Cronin’s work has consistently emphasised corruption through intimacy — the idea that horror enters through love rather than conquest. This approach could finally liberate The Mummy from pastiche, reimagining it as a story of loss, identity, and irreversible change.

4. Scream 7

Director: Kevin Williamson
Releases February 27, 2026

With Kevin Williamson returning to direct, Scream 7 represents a rare case of a franchise turning inward rather than outward. The focus on Sidney Prescott’s daughter reframes the series’ meta-commentary as generational inheritance — asking what it means to pass trauma, notoriety, and survival forward.

Rather than parodying contemporary horror, Scream 7 appears positioned to interrogate its own legacy, transforming self-awareness into something closer to reckoning.

5. Terrifier 4

Director: Damien Leone
Expected October 1, 2026

By its fourth entry, Terrifier has evolved from cult provocation into a sustained endurance experiment. Leone’s commitment to practical effects and confrontational violence resists prestige horror’s current trend toward refinement.

What makes Terrifier 4 compelling is not escalation, but persistence. It exists as a countercurrent — forcing a conversation about the limits of spectatorship and the uneasy pleasure of excess.

6. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Director: Nia DaCosta
Releases January 16, 2026

Nia DaCosta’s entry into the 28 universe signals a shift from outbreak panic to post-collapse power structures. The move toward organised gangs and world-altering discovery suggests a franchise finally confronting its long-term implications.

DaCosta’s sensitivity to social hierarchy and myth-making positions The Bone Temple as less survival horror than political horror — a study of what replaces civilisation after fear becomes normalised.

7. Clayface

Director: James Watkins
Expected September 11, 2026

Clayface’s shape-shifting mythology offers fertile ground for horror rooted in identity instability. James Watkins’ involvement hints at a psychological approach rather than comic-book spectacle, reframing the character as tragic figure rather than villain.

The horror here is not transformation, but indeterminacy — the terror of never knowing where the self ends.

8. Evil Dead Burn

Director: Sébastien Vanicek
Expected July 24, 2026

With its plot under wraps, Evil Dead Burn remains one of the year’s most intriguing unknowns. Vanicek’s involvement suggests a grittier, more confrontational sensibility — potentially pushing the franchise toward nihilism rather than slapstick.

The challenge will be maintaining Evil Dead’s anarchic spirit while adapting it to contemporary horror’s more controlled brutality.

9. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett
Releases March 27, 2026

The sequel expands the first film’s class satire into something closer to mythic competition. By multiplying families and stakes, Here I Come risks dilution — but also offers the opportunity to transform satire into operatic cruelty.

If successful, it could become a dark fairy tale about inheritance, entitlement, and survival economics.

10. Werwulf

Director: Robert Eggers
Expected December 25, 2026

Eggers’ medieval werewolf film promises a return to folklore as lived belief rather than cinematic trope. Set against fog, superstition, and communal paranoia, Werwulf appears positioned as a study of fear as social contagion.

Eggers’ commitment to linguistic and historical authenticity suggests a film less concerned with transformation than with the terror of collective conviction.

11. Thread: An Insidious Tale

Director: Jeremy Slater
Expected August 21, 2026

Time travel as grief mechanism reframes the Insidious universe around consequence rather than shock. The central conceit — rewriting tragedy — situates horror within parental desperation and moral compromise.

If handled with restraint, this could become the franchise’s most emotionally coherent entry.

12. Wolf Creek: Legacy

Director: Sean Lahiff
Expected 2026

By shifting focus to children surviving in Mick Taylor’s territory, Legacy reframes the franchise around endurance rather than nihilism. The Australian landscape once again becomes indifferent, vast, and complicit.

The film’s success will hinge on its ability to balance brutality with perspective — horror as survival, not spectacle.

13. The Bride

Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Releases March 6, 2026

Gyllenhaal’s reinterpretation of Bride of Frankenstein foregrounds politics, gender, and radical transformation. Set against 1930s social upheaval, the film positions monstrosity as emancipatory rather than aberrant.

This is Frankenstein as social revolution — a reclamation of agency rather than a cautionary tale.

14. Resident Evil

Director: Zach Cregger
Expected September 18, 2026

Cregger’s involvement suggests a deliberate move away from franchise excess toward claustrophobic immediacy. A courier trapped in a hospital outbreak recalls survival horror’s roots: isolation, confusion, and bodily threat.

If successful, this could be the franchise’s first genuinely frightening reinvention.

15. Psycho Killer

Director: Gavin Polone
Releases February 20, 2026

Positioned as procedural horror, Psycho Killer explores violence through aftermath rather than spectacle. By centring a police officer navigating personal loss, the film aligns horror with grief and investigation rather than shock.

Its promise lies in restraint.

16. Victorian Psycho

Director: Zachary Wigon
Expected 2026

This gothic narrative of a governess amid disappearing staff evokes The Turn of the Screw through a feminist lens. Horror emerges gradually, through atmosphere and implication rather than revelation.

The film’s strength will lie in ambiguity: whether monstrosity is external, internal, or socially constructed.

17. Iron Lung

Director: Mark Fischbach
Releases January 30, 2026

Adapted from minimalist survival horror, Iron Lung translates isolation into cosmic dread. Its confined submarine setting and apocalyptic mythology suggest horror as existential endurance.

The challenge will be sustaining tension without relief — an experiment in atmospheric extremity.

18. Ruby, Ruby

Director: Ursula Dabrowsky
Expected 2026

An Australian ghost story rooted in injustice and reclamation, Ruby, Ruby frames haunting as consequence rather than curse. The cemetery setting positions memory as a site of entrapment and resistance.

If handled with restraint, it could join the lineage of Australian horror that privileges melancholy over menace.

Closing Cut

The horror films of 2026 appear less concerned with novelty than with continuity — of trauma, myth, and unresolved systems. Whether through folklore, franchise, or speculative futures, these projects suggest a genre increasingly aware of its own history and responsibilities.

If 2025 taught us how horror cuts, 2026 may show us where it scars.

  • Saul Muerte

The Golden Scalpel Awards 2025

27 Saturday Dec 2025

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Horror as Discipline, Horror as Diagnosis

Horror cinema in 2025 proved itself less interested in spectacle than in excavation. Across continents and budgets, the year’s most vital films treated fear not as an external shock but as a condition embedded in history, technology, power, and the body itself. Monsters, when they appeared at all, were often secondary to systems: inheritance, authority, intimacy, and the quiet violence of belief.

The Golden Scalpel Awards were conceived not as a popularity contest, nor as an exercise in shock valorisation, but as a critical intervention — an attempt to assess horror cinema as a serious artistic and ideological practice. These awards privilege films that cut rather than bludgeon; works that understand dread as something cumulative, ethical, and often unresolved. Performance, direction, and form are judged not by extremity, but by precision.

In keeping with that ethos, categories that reduce complexity to provocation have been deliberately avoided. There is no “Most Disturbing” award here. Disturbance, after all, is not a metric — it is a by-product of rigor.

What follows is a bifurcated awards structure: International Excellence and Australian Horror Excellence, allowing global achievements to be recognised without subsuming the distinct traditions and preoccupations of Australian genre cinema. Together, they form a portrait of a year in which horror did not scream — it lingered.

🔪 International Golden Scalpel Awards

🏆 Best Picture

Sinners

Sinners stands as the year’s most formally and thematically complete horror film — a work that understands terror as something inherited rather than encountered. Its horror emerges through the slow accrual of history, guilt, and unspoken violence, binding personal narrative to collective memory. Refusing easy catharsis, the film positions fear as an ethical burden passed down through generations. It is a film that cuts deep precisely because it never raises its voice.

🎬 Best Director

Ryan Coogler — Sinners

Coogler’s direction is defined by restraint and moral clarity. He resists spectacle in favour of atmosphere, performance, and spatial tension, allowing horror to surface organically rather than erupt theatrically. His control of tone and rhythm transforms Sinners into a work of sustained unease, demonstrating how genre cinema can function as historical inquiry without sacrificing emotional immediacy.

✍️ Best Screenplay

Weapons

The screenplay for Weapons is constructed around absence, fracture, and refusal. It withholds clarity not as a gimmick, but as a structural principle, forcing the audience to inhabit uncertainty rather than resolve it. In doing so, it redefines narrative satisfaction as something corrosive and unresolved — a mirror held up to a world where explanation itself has become suspect.

🎭 Best Actor

Michael B. Jordan — Sinners

In a dual role that resists ostentatious differentiation, Michael B. Jordan delivers a performance of remarkable discipline. Rather than signalling contrast, he allows identity to diverge through posture, rhythm, and moral orientation. The horror lies in convergence rather than opposition, as the boundaries between selves erode. Jordan’s work becomes the film’s emotional architecture, embodying Sinners’ meditation on legacy, complicity, and denial.

🎭 Best Actress

Julia Garner — Weapons

Julia Garner’s performance is calibrated to instability. She refuses psychological legibility, offering instead a portrait of a character perpetually in flux. Emotion surfaces without warning and retreats just as quickly, aligning performance with the film’s fractured narrative logic. Garner does not guide the audience — she disorients them, transforming ambiguity into a lived condition. It is a performance that demands intellectual as well as emotional engagement.

🌫 Best Atmosphere

Nosferatu

Through light, texture, and negative space, Nosferatu constructs a gothic world of immersive dread. Atmosphere here is not decorative but structural, shaping perception and emotion at every level. The film demonstrates how horror can operate through mood alone, drawing viewers into a dreamlike state where time, desire, and decay blur together.

🩻 Best Body Horror

Bring Her Back

Bring Her Back deploys body horror not as provocation but as emotional language. Physical distortion is inseparable from grief, obsession, and psychological collapse, lending the film imagery that feels tragically inevitable rather than gratuitous. The horror lingers because it feels earned.

🤖 Best Tech Horror

Companion

Grounded and unsettling, Companion explores the erosion of intimacy in a technologised world. Its horror lies not in speculative futurism, but in recognition — the quiet dread of systems already embedded in daily life. The film’s restraint allows its ideas to fester long after the final frame.

🏅 The Golden Scalpel (Highest Honour)

Sinners

Awarded to the film that most rigorously exemplifies horror as a critical discipline. Sinners cuts through history, identity, and belief with surgical precision, leaving scars rather than answers.

🇦🇺 Australian Golden Scalpel Awards

Australian Horror Excellence

Australian horror in 2025 reaffirmed its defining traits: realism, endurance, and an acute sensitivity to environment and power. These films reject excess in favour of inevitability, positioning fear as something endured rather than escaped.

🏆 Best Australian Horror Film

Dangerous Animals

A survival horror stripped of sentimentality, Dangerous Animals privileges endurance over escalation. Violence is presented as an extension of environment and instinct, aligning the film with Australia’s strongest genre traditions. Its restraint is its greatest strength.

🎬 Best Australian Director

Sean Byrne — Dangerous Animals

Byrne’s direction is marked by spatial clarity and tonal control. Threat is sustained rather than amplified, allowing dread to accumulate through inevitability. His work demonstrates a profound understanding of how environment shapes fear.

🎭 Best Australian Actor

Geoffrey Rush — The Rule of Jenny Pen

Rush delivers a performance of chilling restraint. Authority, calm, and routine become instruments of menace, revealing how cruelty often operates behind civility. It is a precise and disciplined piece of psychological horror acting.

🏞 Best Use of Australian Landscape

Dangerous Animals

Here, landscape is not backdrop but mechanism. Open space becomes isolating, indifferent, and complicit — a reminder that environment itself can be an active participant in horror.

🏅 Australian Golden Scalpel

Dangerous Animals

Awarded to the Australian film that most rigorously embodies horror as endurance, realism, and environmental threat.

Closing Cut

The Golden Scalpel Awards are not intended to settle debate, but to sharpen it. Horror remains one of cinema’s most flexible and intellectually generous modes — capable of interrogating history, technology, and identity with a clarity few genres can match. The films recognised here do not offer comfort. They offer precision.

And sometimes, that is far more unsettling.

  • Saul Muerte

Top 5 Horror movies/shows of 2018

30 Sunday Dec 2018

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5. Birdbox

This may have been a late entry, but it made such an impact on the Surgeons team that two members of the Surgeons team instantly placed it in their Top three movies of the year. For this reason, the Sandra Bullock post-apocalyptic thriller by director Susanne Bier finds itself in the Top five list.

“Great example how the best horror is shown but not seen. (“See” what i did there?)” – Dr. Yee

“When the world starts going mad, a single look could get you killed. Bird Box is engaging from the start. Packed with tense moments and like most good post apocalyptic movies it deals with trust, loyalty and the lengths people will go to for survival and to protect the ones they love. It does often bear similarities to other films in the genre but there are a few fresh ideas here to enjoy.
Overall it was a great experience, loaded with tension and solid performances.” – Dr. Allford

4. Suspiria

Here’s another example of one of our top rated movies dividing the thoughts and opinions of our Surgeons, as you will see from the quotes below, but this re-imagining of the Argento classic from the mind of Luca Guadagnino, starring Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson does enough to shimmy its way into the top four spot in our countdown, proving that perhaps style can outweigh substance. (You biatch!! – Editor)

“It’s a slow-burn movie that grinds its way to a stumbled conclusion.
The drama is gritty and realistic with some stunning performances and dramatic dance sequences that hook you in, but rather than set you ablaze in a fury of emotion, it peeters out to a mere whimper.” – Dr. Muerte

“Out the gate the new Suspiria makes it clear it reveres the original but will not retread it’s steps, absolving a lot of fears I had going in, the focus on the witches coven politics and each slow and gorgeous turn of the screw that the main characters suffer is hypnotic.” – Dr. Jack

3. The Haunting of Hill House

Marking the only entry for a TV series this year, The Haunting of Hill House by the brilliant mind of Mike Flanagan deserves its place in the Top three for shaking up the medium on the small screen by providing in-depth characters on a journey that challenges the mind and captures the very essence of your classic ghost story. We were already fans of Flanagan’s work and he has once again proved to be a modern storyteller with his finger firmly on the horror pulse. Doctor Sleep can’t come soon enough.

“This is a fantastically complex gothic horror story for the Netflix generation.” – Dr. Davies

“Very hard to sustain quality horror over even a handful of eps. The fact HoHH did it over 10 is a testimony to its writing.” – Dr. Yee

2. Mandy

It may not be everyones taste, but this crazed, psychedelic, mind-fuck that takes Nicolas Cage to the height of rage and fury, hell-bent on seeking revenge certainly left a mark this year. Mandy is a life-form of its own and its originality coupled with a savage journey thrust this centre stage of our top horror list. Two of our surgeons are still in recovery from the sheer orgasmic attack on their senses from watching this cult-film in the making.

“Beware of your strive for beauty and perfection. Slice it open and you get a reign of anarchy and destruction.” – Dr. Muerte

“This heavy metal horror was quite simply a work of visual and audio genius.” – Dr. Davies

1. A Quiet Place

Hands down, no other film on this list had such a huge impact after watching. Despite its early release in the year, two of the Surgeons laid down the gauntlet of prediction and labelled this as the Movie of the Year. A bold statement, and A Quiet Place had its fair share of challengers, but the strength of the premise along with the simple, heart-breaking narrative kept it firmly in the no.1 spot.

“Tension ratcheted to 10 at the start and wound to 11 soon after and never. Lets. Go. Great writing,  great performances and great directing. The fact it was done by Jim from the office is even more remarkable.” – Dr. Yee

Top 13 Horror movies/shows of 2018

30 Sunday Dec 2018

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It’s been a mammoth year for fans of horror as the once scoffed upon genre rose to the forefront of the box office and begun what some have heralded as a new age in films that scare and delight.

Amongst the jaw-dropping awesome-ness that has been on display, there has also been some absolute bombs and disappointments, which is to be expected when something becomes popular, carbon copies of the movies that stood out start to crop up, but only pale in comparison.

So it’s a tough task, but the Surgeons team gathered our collective heads to form what we considered to be the movies that provided the most impact on our souls and ripped apart our senses. Not all of us agreed with each other, but that’s part of the beauty of film. Each movie will cut to the core of the psyche and effect people in different ways.

So, once we tallied together the results, there were 13 films and shows that we believe deserve significant praise, and here they are:

13. Luz

We’re so thankful to have caught this little gem at the Sydney Underground Film Festival this year. It may have a short running time, but it manages to pack in a bold, experimental, and minimal approach to the occult genre, which places this movie at the start of our countdown.

“Singer manages to balance the highs and lows in a harmony of beautifully constructed cinematography and movement.” – Dr. Muerte

12. Pyewacket

Another movie that we caught on the festival circuit, and another movie that centres on the occult, (you’ll notice a certain theme occurring to the movies that resonated this year).

“Pyewacket tackles what could easily be remised for teenage angst, but offers powerful performances from the two leads, Laurie Holden (The Walking Dead, The Americans) and Nicole Muñoz. in a slow-burn drama that s believable and tension-packed to its conclusion.” – Dr. Muerte

11. Apostle

Leading the charge this year when it came to streaming content will probably come as no surprise in Netflix. There was a plethora of movies and shows that had significant impact, but none more so than this charged up, bloody film that rampaged its way to the small screen starring Dan Stevens (Legend) and directed by Gareth Evans.

“Evans is a master in creating heart-wrenching angst and turmoil into his narrative and with Dan Stevens has the perfect muse, as a lost and troubled man on a quest that takes him into a dark and twisted labyrinth of angst and suffering to reach a place of peace and tranquility.” – Dr. Muerte

10. Revenge

Our Top 10 begins with this French rape revenge horror that marks itself from similar movies for its intelligence, stunning cinematography, and striking performances.

“Director Coralie Fargeat manages to harness all these elements together whilst providing a stunning movie that elevates itself above the quagmire of sensationalism by using smart and intense drama at its core.” – Dr. Muerte

9. The Ritual

Continuing the occult theme on Netflix comes this movie about the rocky relationship between friends, which continues to be tested and strained as they backpack across a remote woodland terrain.

“The Ritual proves that when done well, there’s nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned, straight-up scary story.” – Dr Williams

“On Paper it seems like a trail well travelled; bunch of friends get lost in the woods and strange and/or horror things happen, but this Netflix original is full of atmosphere, great performances and some truly unsettling imagery that has burned into my brain.” – Dr. Jack

8. Unsane

Those who missed this movie should definitely check it out. From a director who is always willing to test himself technically and narratively in Steven Soderbergh, and hotter than hot British actress actress Claire Foy, who once again pushes the boundaries of her acting prowess in her most exposed role to date.

“Psychological horror shot on an iPhone by Steven Soderbergh…I’m in! Fun little thriller that shows you don’t need million dollar equipment to make a quality movie, you just need a solid story – which this has.” – Dr. Davies

7. Halloween

It promised so much for a beloved franchise, one that had seen the bitter end of the barrel with people fearing that Myers would no longer be able to stalk the streets of Haddonfield again.
Thankfully David Gordon Green and his writing collaborator Danny McBride played the perfect balance of nostalgia and fear, coupled with some contemporary themes that placed Halloween back into respectability again.

“Congratulations to the Blumhouse team. You’ve produced the best Halloween film in 40 years.” – Dr. Muerte

6. Hereditary

This film came out of the blocks boasting that it was the scariest film of our generation, and critics likening it to The Exorcist  in the way it shook the horror genre. It’s arguable that it manages to meet this proclamation, and divided The Surgeons opinions on this matter, but does enough to hit the half-way point of out Top Horrors list for 2018, so must have had something going for it. Plus it tapped into the whole occult thing that seems so prominent this year in horror movies.

“Those who like to have the brain stimulated by smart and disturbing terror can expect a movie to resonate and tingle the senses.” – Dr. Muerte

“Though I had plenty of issues with the movie as a whole, when the midway “twist” came to a head, it shocked the most audible reaction out of me that I’ve had in a long, long time.” – Dr Jack

Top 5 Horror movies and shows of 2018