The spooky season is upon us—always welcome news for those of us who enjoy getting scared within the safe confines of the movie theater. To date, the horror offerings of 2026—Obsession, Backrooms, Hokum, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Resident Evil—have made for a helluva time at the multiplex, but don’t overlook little-known gems currently languishing on streaming platforms.
Here are two worth seeking out.
Censor (2021)
Does movie violence spur the real-life kind? Great Britain in the 1980s certainly thought so, when outcry over low-budget exploitation films prompted the administration of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to swoop in and censor so-called “video nasties.” It’s a world revisited in the somber, delightfully disturbing Censor.
Enid Baines (Niamh Algar) is a flinty loner with ashen skin and a demeanor to match. A censor for the British Board of Film Classification, she approaches her work with the utmost severity. “It’s not entertainment,” she admonishes her parents when she thinks they are making light of her job. “I do it to protect people.” But there is another burden that weighs heavily on her: Enid carries the guilt of a childhood incident in which her younger sister, Nina, disappeared while both girls were walking in the woods. The ever-present trauma of that experience hits hard when Enid screens Don’t Go in the Church, a cheapo “video nasty” by horror director Frederick North. The film, which North specifically requested that Enid review, bears an alarming similarity to the circumstances under which Nina vanished.
While Enid’s parents have finally allowed themselves to accept that Nina is likely long dead, Enid isn’t so sure. Algar is riveting as a woman haunted by the past. Enid digs into North’s oeuvre, only to notice that one of his regular actresses resembles what Nina might now look like as an adult.
Writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond and co-writer Anthony Fletcher create a stifling, insulated environment for Enid. Censor is almost oppressively claustrophobic; it takes place in only a handful of locations, usually indoors and at night, in what appears to be a sparsely populated London. Cinematographer Annika Summerson accentuates the sense of dread with a nearly washed-out visual design. The result is moody AF. (Streaming on Amazon Prime and Kanopy)
The Lure (2015)
I’ll go out on a limb and proclaim that The Lure is unequivocally the best-ever Polish-language mermaid-centric fairy tale dressed up as a horror musical. In her directorial debut, Agnieszka Smoczyńska didn’t hold back.
This resolutely bonkers picture concerns mermaid sisters Golden (Michalina Olszańska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), who wind up latching on to the house band of a Warsaw nightclub. Being mermaids—their huge tails sprout whenever they are splashed with water—they attract the interest of the seamy nightclub owner (Zygmunt Malanowicz), who immediately directs them to disrobe. “Smooth as Barbies,” says an onlooker, noting that the mermaids have no sex organs when in human form. Despite that fact and the sisters’ childlike behavior, they are soon put to work, albeit exploitatively, as a sexualized cabaret act. There are musical numbers outside the nightclub, too. Like I said, the movie is also a musical.
Silver falls for Mietek (Jakub Gierszał), the club’s floppy-haired bass player, despite the protests of her more circumspect sister. Golden has good reason to be wary. After all, the lore of The Lure dictates that if a mermaid falls in love with a human who ends up marrying another, she must eat the person who spurned her—lest she turn into sea foam the morning after the marriage.
Bet you can guess what might happen. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, The Lure ladles on more gore and sexiness than Disney’s Ariel ever could have imagined. Silver sacrifices everything for Mietek, who seems not to register the depth of her devotion. “To me, you’ll always be a fish, an animal,” he tells Silver before they swap spit.
Beneath the grotesqueries is a heartbreaking parable about the bodily autonomy of women and their subjugation to men. The weirdness is the film’s lure, if you will, but Smoczyńska and writer Robert Bolesto clearly have more on their minds. As we all know, fish is good brain food. (Streaming on HBO Max, Criterion Channel and Plex)
This article appears in Thunder Season Preview.