Ten Horror Movies To Try If You Liked ‘The Nun’

As the U.S. inches ever closer to fall, the tone and tenor of movies drifts from big-budget tentpoles to creepy and moody.

And we are there for that.

With the release of The Nun, the latest installment in the universe of The Conjuring and the first major Hollywood horror movie of the season, audiences are getting ready for the fright nights at U.S. cinemas and on streaming/video-on-demand services in the weeks to come.

In the old days, you used to be able to head into a video store and wander around, checking out the horror section and coming away with a handful of VHS tapes or DVDs you’d never heard of. Those days are gone for much of the country, and algorithms from Netflix and Amazon are notoriously not very good at actually predicting what people might like.

…So that’s where we come in.

If you’re sitting alone at home and want a good scare, we have put together a list of low- or no-budget horror movies you may or may not have heard of, that could appeal to fans who made The Nun last weekend’s highest-grossing movie.

We won’t be naming anything that has been out in theaters in the last few months, as the chances are good that if you watched The Nun, you’ve seen a bunch of those. Instead, let’s take you on a tour through the metaphorical VHS stacks of days gone by…!

The Exorcism of Emily Rose

With The Exorcism of Emily Rose, director Scott Derrickson put himself on the map and started to build a career that would eventually lead to being tapped for Doctor Strange.

It was not Derrickson’s first feature (five years before, he directed Hellraiser: Inferno), but it was the first that really felt like it was a new thing coming from a fresh voice, and more than the sequels and remakes he took on early in his directing career, it feels like direct line can be drawn from The Exorcism of Emily Rose to Sinister, which made him a horror star.

It would not be his last movie about exorcism (he also did Deliver Us From Evil in 2014), but it is the one that feels the most deliberately inspired by religious iconography and a grasp for “realism” in its horror.

Frailty

Starring Matthew McConaughey with Bill Paxton and Powers Booth, Frailty centers on a family torn apart by a demented father who believes he has is getting messages from God.

Those messages? That he needs to kill demons disguised as people, putting his sons in the unenviable position of knowing that their father is murdering these “demons.”

The directorial debut of Bill Paxton, the movie has a divisive twist that can be the best or worst part of the flick depending on who you ask, but the character work, cinematography, and high concept are enough to make it worth checking out.

Red State

Chances are good that if you’re reading ComicBook.com, you’ve heard of filmmaker Kevin Smith.

After years of doing comedies, Smith tried his hand at horror with Red State in 2011 — an experiment that went well enough that he has infused horror elements into almost everything he has done since.

The film centers on a trio of teens who are essentially catfished into a trap by religious extremists, who hope to put them to death as penalty for their sins.

The Wicker Man

…Umm, the original, obviously, not the remake with Nicolas Cage.

Although that one can be fun, too, if you’re into just watching Cage at his Cagiest.

In any event, The Wicker Man centers around a police officer called off to a remote, isolated area that seems to live by its own rules in order to investigate the disappearance of a young girl during a local cult holiday celebration. As he begins to suspect that the cult has something to do with her disappearance, he becomes more and more deeply enmeshed in the community.

This one is very slow and deliberate relative to the others, but it is another movie with religious/cult underpinnings and it is a superb piece of filmmaking, with a great performance by lead Edward Woodward.

Session 9

A 2001 film starring David Caruso (CSI: Miami) and Paul Guilfoyle (CSI), Session 9 centers around an asbestos crew that is called in to clear out an old, abandoned hospital.

Once inside, one of the crew members begins to suspect it is haunted, leading to a great bit of psychological horror set against a clinical backdrop that is creepier because you know it was once intended to be comforting.

The movie was directed by Brad Anderson, who also did the Christian Bale movie The Machinist and directed a number of episodes of Fringe.

House

As far as popular ’80s horror franchises, House is kind of the one that got away.

In the first film, a Vietnam veteran-turned-horror novelist returns to his boyhood home to find that it is haunted.

William Katt (The Greatest American Hero, Crisis on Earth-X) stars in the main role, and is great in the part. While the movie falls prey to some typical ’80s cheesiness, it manages to be genuinely entertaining and occasionally scary despite the zaniness of some of its ideas.

You can save yourself the trouble and skip the sequels, though.

Waxwork

We’re going with this one largely because, to some extent, the visual of an evil nun is inherently absurd — so even if you are watching these movies for some serious scares or the creepy religious imagery, we’re going to guess you wouldn’t mind a movie where Abraham Lincoln and the Marquis De Sade try to kill some high school kids.

That’s right, you know we’re right.

The Waxwork franchise is one of those direct-to-VHS horror series from the ’80s that had been kind of hard to find intermittently, but recently there was a reissue of several of those Vestron Video horror movies to Blu-ray, and the Waxwork/Waxwork II 2-pack is 100% worth a look.

Trick ‘r’ Treat

A clever anthology movie that has a consistent tone but a variety of characters, Trick ‘r’ Treat feels like a movie that was a few years ahead of its time and could easily have slotted into the “shared universe” horror movies of The Conjuring, The Purge, and others where movie after movie follow a different group of characters facing a similar threat. 

There’s also a comic book tie-in from Manhunter and Supergirl scribe Marc Andreyko — and if Andreyko is involved, you know it’s going to be good.

As Above, So Below

Since this is recent, it has probably the most visual similarity to The Nun in the sense that horror movies tend to go in waves as to what is considered scary at any given moment.

In the film, Perdita Weeks plays an archeologist searching for an artifact can grant eternal life and turn any metal into gold. When she learns that the stone is hidden underground in the Catacombs of Paris, she assembles a crew to guide and document her mission — but as they get closer, the team members all find themselves in a version of their own personal hell.

Thirteen Ghosts

This one is a kind of melding of various styles, with monsters, body horror, jump scares, psychological horror, and the premise of a family trapped in a haunted house all kind of blended into one film.

Along with some solid performances and effects that (mostly) still hold up, this makes Thirteen Ghosts worthy of inclusion on this list, even though it mostly breaks the rule about being a low-budget or mostly-forgotten movie.

Whenever we see something out of the Conjuring universe, the imagery reminds us of this era, when Resident Evil and Thirteen Ghosts were redefining horror movie monsters in a way we have still not entirely gotten away from.