Happy Halloween to all who celebrate, especially those frantically combing the streaming apps in search of one last fright flick before October is through. There are an awful lot of options, from all-time classics and franchise fare, to B-movie schlock and awards season also-rans. That last category has been sucking up an awful lot of oxygen lately, and 2025 has at least four stateside releases that seem primed for end-of-year plaudits: Sinners, 28 Years Later, Bring Her Back, and Weapons. The tonier stuff is good and fine (see: among the best flicks of the year), but there’s something to be said for getting down and dirty, forgoing statement making and thematic rigor for something grimy and unvarnished. It’s a search that almost inevitably leads back to the mid-2000’s and early 2010’s, though for true filmic thrill seekers, the oil fields of Saw and Paranormal Activity have already been drilled. So this month, we’re taking our cues from Hollywood itself, and looking overseas at International Horror Hits of the New Millennium.

Pillaging the overseas celluloid cabinet really was the coin of the realm at the turn of the century, with any number of American remakes raking it in at the box office, but intellectual property theft was, in truth, more of a two-way street. 2004’s Sarah Michelle Gellar-vehicle The Grudge may owe its very existence to its Japanese counterpart, Ju-On: The Grudge, but the 2002 original is clearly built from imported parts. A ghost story set in contemporaneous Tokyo, writer/director Takashi Shimizu’s film has no hang-ups regarding plagiarism, borrowing liberally from The Exorcist, Poltergeist, and The Amityville Horror on both narrative and cosmetic terms. The Tokunaga family’s home is fitted with the same creaking floorboards and dimly-lit hallways to which U.S. audiences had become accustomed, and neither the ambiently menacing score nor cavalcade of jump scares show any desire to fix what isn’t broken. If you’re looking for something novel, the structure here will have to make do.

Parceled out in chapters that take their name from each section’s incoming protagonist, married couple Rika and Izumi (Megumi Okina and Kanji Tsuda, respectively) may have the deed to the house, but Ju-On prefers to sublet. It’s understandable given the grisly fate of everyone who enters the domicile, but the draw of the movie’s unusual blueprint quickly sours upon repetition. Lining up like lambs to slaughter, each new character faces roughly the same moribund destiny, straining the flick’s ability to surprise, and placing the onus squarely on the terrors themselves to save the day. The gambit only works in fits and starts, with Shimizu’s staging often too plodding to land on any true payoffs. Even the actors seem unphased, struggling to convey true panic before believably settling into their post-possession character arcs. There’s ghoulish fun to be had, but it waxes and wanes, and never threatens to show us westerners anything we haven’t seen before in droves.

It’s hardly alone in that regard, and while 2007’s [•REC] made enough waves to conjure its own English language remake just one year later (Quarantine), directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza were drafting in The Blair Witch Project’s wake. Paying tribute and taking cues is nothing new in the genre, and the Spanish import at least has the temerity to affix a juicy premise to its found footage scaffolding. Following reporter Ángela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) on her late night ride-along with the Barcelona fire department, the film’s faux-vérité opening is cracked right down the middle when a distress call from a local apartment complex puts everyone in immediate danger. Having heard the impetuous ‘just leave the house’ cries of film lovers across the globe when it comes to haunted environments, screenwriters Balagueró, Plaza, and Luiso Berdejo dreamed up a dastardly anti-solution; what if the door was locked?

Despite spreading like wildfire through darkened, claustrophobic corridors, the virus on hand, which turns regular folk into a cross between zombies and vampires within moments of contraction, is hardly the worst of Ángela’s problems. That would be the armed horde that awaits just outside the walls, commanding the building’s inhabitants to remain calm as they steadily board the windows. Protecting the broader public only sounds like a good idea from the outside in, and for as many jolts as [•REC] provides with its gory, side-swiping mayhem, it’s the painstakingly erected barriers that stay with you. This isn’t an either/or; Balagueró and Plaza are experts in the field of tension and release, drumming up anxiety before sending a bystander tumbling down a staircase, or bringing a fangs-bared assault entirely too close for comfort, making a meal out of their set-up’s more generic possibilities. Chaos is frightening in the moment, but the organized malevolence will keep you up at night.

Perhaps inspired by this vision of a well-intentioned government crackdown, Train to Busan does [•REC] one better by positioning corporate carelessness as the yin to elected officials’ cruel yang. In callously divesting from a local agriculture venture, fund manager Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) only has himself to blame when an analogous outbreak starts spreading across South Korea, more than ruining the birthday of his soft-spoken daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an). Trapped on the titular automotive, the pair form a rag-tag team with roguish Yoon Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok), his expectant wife Seong-kyeong (Jung Yu-mi), and a pair star-crossed teenaged lovers named Min Yong-guk and Kim Jin-hee (Choi Woo-shik and Ahn So-hee, respectively). It’s the getting-the-gang-together formula, distilled down to its most elemental form, though it’s hardly the tip of the iceberg where capitulation to the tried-and-ture is concerned.

Busan’s rabid and fleet-footed undead may look like a mirror image of [•REC]’s hungry masses, but both director Yeon Sang-ho and the aforementioned filmmakers are pilfering from 28 Days Later. Danny Boyle’s 2002 instant classic is widely credited for popularizing the fast zombies that are still infiltrating screens more than two decades later, a phenomenon that reached its financial peak with 2013’s World War Z. That movie’s piles of berserkers are an optical touch stone here, joined by the locomotive shenanigans of Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer, turning Busan into a sampler platter of the previous decade-and-a-half of global genre day players. Director Yeon Sang-ho isn’t about to let innovation stand in the way of true blue efficacy, making up for the film’s lack of originality with some truly inspired set pieces, all stemming from an elevator pitch that’s beyond reproach. Worrying about copyright infringement is pretty difficult when you can’t unclench your fists.

The Devil’s Backbone exists in a similarly crowded echo chamber, but the voices it’s responding to come from a much more distant past. Guillermo del Toro has built a cottage industry out of refashioning Gothic Romance for modern audiences, and the director’s 2001 sophomore effort laid plenty of breadcrumbs for his continued approach. Set in a cash-strapped orphanage during the Spanish Civil war of the 1930’s, Backbone stars Fernando Tielve as Carlos, a perceptive youth who’s heartbreakingly abandoned at the aforementioned establishment in the flick’s opening passage. Losing your family and being mercilessly bullied in your decrepit new home would be enough to tarnish any childhood, but Carlos’ torments extend to the transcendental, coming face to face with the ghostly visage of a previous resident whose disappearance remains unresolved.

As the oldest movie among the four featured here, it makes sense that Backbone’s hews itself to a different, more classical paradigm. The other three share a kinship in sudden affronts and jolting sounds designs, but del Toro’s work goes through its motions in a more deliberate, dream-like fashion, unfolding as a twisted fairy tale. Pulse rates aren’t meant to ebb and flow as they are throughout the next several years, instead maintaining a dependable thump that’s punctuated by indelible images. Despite exploring the fallout of war and fascistic regimes, both mainstays in the del Toro catalogue, Backbone’s plot doesn’t have the same staying power as its most beatific frames, highlighted by a defective bomb wedged leeringly into the earth at the center of the orphanage’s courtyard. The metaphor, which reminds both the characters and the viewer of violence’s eternal imminence, may be on the nose, but it’s paradoxically ravishing, and stands out in a crop of flicks that are otherwise reluctant to overtly state their thematic agenda.

Modesty in motifs is almost wholly absent in horror’s more recent celebrated entries, shunned in favor of flicks that use their chosen analogy as a springboard into madness, and not the other way around. Largely credited to Jordan Peele and Ari Aster, who, tellingly, both released their debut features after everything listed here, this new-fangled, high falutin approach has cleaved the genre in half, with one side seeking awards season validation while the other plays straight to the gore-enthused cheap seats. It needn’t be so stratified, and if there’s one takeaway from revisiting Ju-On, [•REC], and Busan, it’s that things can effectively go bump in the night without standing in for a greater societal ill. Backbone’s implied call for pacifism breaks the trend, but is still less intent on underlining its thesis statement with a thick, black marker than its modern counterparts, locating dramatic heft in the interpersonal more often than the sociological. Turns out you don’t need a startling stand-in when there’s enough administration-induced trauma to go around.

While all four movies feature fantastical enemies, only Ju-On comes by its true antagonism from beyond the parameters of the known world. Busan’s minacious mob provides the film with its most immediate dangers, but it’s bred out of corporate greed and governmental non-chalance, two things unlikely to go away when the outbreak is eventually contained. There’s no real faulting the authorities that have barricaded the doors in [•REC], but logic and nuance don’t provide much solace when you’re on the wrong side of their even-keeled conclusions. Backbone’s ghost story hardly even matters to its central plot, the flick’s pale-faced specter proving nowhere near as troubling as Eduardo Noriega’s Jacinto, a tempestuous insurgent using political upheaval as a pretense for his get-rich-quick scheme. Balagueró, Plaza, Sang-ho, and del Toro are all more interested in recognizable bad actors than the ostensible haunts that get ticket buyers to leave their home, a truth that crystalizes down each film’s home stretch.

Cleaning up a mess is never as fun as making it, and one of the unspoken benefits of horror’s recent obsession with metaphor is that it puts less onus on the eventual explanation. Lead-footed exposition isn’t a requirement of stories that trojan horse their treatises on grief, exploitation, or neuroses, but less heady ventures tend to view it as a must. The inciting pollution in Busan doesn’t force eyes to roll, but the origin story of Backbone’s lost boy is wildly convenient, and the parameters of Ju-On’s central curse are frustratingly nebulous despite chunky mounds of explication. Standing out from the ham-fisted crowd is [•REC], sweatily attaching an ancient hex to a plot that would have been just fine sticking with contamination and outbreak. There’s power in mystery, but none of the filmmakers involved here are interested in testing those waters, opting to dull their dangers in the name of caution, afraid to lose viewers who would have been better served by a touch of enigma. 

Drawing straight lines around and through various plot threads is a kindness to those in search of narrative clarity, but the inner workings of the childhood mind remain a riddle. Busan breaks with its counterparts yet again here, exclusively casting Su-an in the most angelic of glows, corralling audience sympathy by situating such an adorable babe amidst its truly maniacal woods. At least she’s still on our team; Balagueró, Plaza, Shimizu, and del Toro all frame the next generation as an unknowable threat, as stumped by pint-sized cognisance as parents the world over. Backbone ends up ushering its youthful tormentor to the light, but not before leveraging our unspoken distrust against higher, more empathetic thinking, a move copied by [•REC] without all the softening redemption. The little girl is question is good for a particularly juicy jump scare, but Ju-On isn’t satisfied with a single, deplorable pivot, utilizing its most juvenile cast member as a harbinger of doom, as well as a mascot across nearly all advertising material. There’s something unnerving about a silent little boy in face paint, and none of these movies are above leaning into instinctive, reflexive fears. If anything, weaponizing our basest phobias provides some connective tissue across all four entries.

Customs, attitudes, and rituals might differ by culture and region, but the most obvious takeaway from diving into foreign horror, as with any filmic subset, is that the human experience remains recognizable across continents. It’s taken for granted when it comes to the death of a family member, falling head-over-heels in love, or the deleterious effects of war, but it’s no different where the creepy crawlies are concerned. Flickering lights down long hallways prompt goosebumps, an open wound causes seat squirm, and no one is ready for the petrifying face of that phantom lurking just behind the corner. You could call it basic, and you’d be right; there’s no reinventing the wheel here, just a global community of weirdos trading traditions and passing along new tricks of the trade across languages and time zones. Join the coterie if you dare; we’re all mad here.