The ’80s had the slasher boom and the ’90s was the decade of mainstream meta horror courtesy of Scream, but the aughts are a much harder span of time to narrow down into one category, at least as far as horror cinema goes. If anything, it was the decade when movies pretended to be based on true stories, a trend that had been around since the ’70s. However, the massive success of The Blair Witch Project really did inspire quite a few similar “found footage” movies. However, the 2000s added significantly to film history, and some of the decade’s notable contributions to the genre appear to have fallen out of public consciousness.
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What follows are three very different movies that, despite their financial performance at the time, are not remembered on a macro scale. Even if they have their fans, most of the general audience in 2025 probably doesn’t know they exist, even though they really didn’t come out all that long ago.
3) Frailty
While the twist of Frailty is a gut-punch, it is far from the only effective element of the film’s narrative. We follow the Meiks family, which consists of Adam, Fenton, and their widower father, who is simply called Dad (Bill Paxton). Dad is a troubled man, one who believes he is commanded by God to kill demons…who just so happen to look exactly like regular human beings. Now an adult, Fenton (Matthew McConaughey) relays to an FBI agent about how his father committed his murders, and while as a child he was horrified by it, Adam was not and has since gone on to continue in their father’s footsteps.
Throughout the whole movie, we basically believe that Dad is mentally unwell and all of the people he touches, which gives him psychic visions of their past crimes, were just people. When Adam claims to have the visions, too, we think he’s either placating his father or just has the imagination of a child. But, no, as it turns out, what both Adam and Dad saw was real. And, as Dad prophesied and told Adam, Fenton did grow up to become a serial killer (though not one who targets demons, one who targets innocent people).
Furthermore, the man sitting across from the FBI agent isn’t Fenton; it’s Adam. Adam recently killed Fenton for becoming the prophesied serial killer, and now he’s here to take care of the FBI agent who is, in fact, the one who took away the family’s matriarch to begin with. It’s all a fairly labyrinthine plot, but it plays in a pretty straightforward manner, and it made for a shockingly excellent directorial debut for the late Paxton, and he sadly only directed one other (very different) film before his passing.
Stream Frailty on fuboTV.
2) Wolf Creek
Wolf Creek is so gritty and disturbing it remains one of the few movies to earn an “F” CinemaScore. This Australian realism-bound scare fest follows a trio of backpackers as they traverse the outback. Up next is a trip from Broome to Cairns, which is far too long a trek to hike, so they purchase a car that is very clearly on its last legs. Unfortunately for them, the looks of the car are far from deceiving, and it breaks down when they stop off at Wolf Creek National Park. Things seem to be looking up when they meet Mick Taylor, who tells them he can fix the car, but the more he talks the more he seems like he’s making stuff up. Worse yet, his veiled threats passed off as jokes are more concerning than funny.
Mick is a truly intimidating cinema monster because there’s nothing about him that is removed from reality. He’s a flesh-and-blood human who kills because he enjoys it. This is not a movie where everything is wrapped up with a nice, bright bow at the end. It’s a movie where violence is shown in gruesome detail to characters who feel deeper than archetypes. We rarely feel as though we’re watching a movie, which is an impact intensified by the fact that this is one of those movies that claims to be based on true events.
It’s not entirely fictional, considering it was inspired by two separate backpacker murder cases, but the “based on true events” hook is really more of a technique to unsettle the viewers than it is a statement of fact, and it’s quite effective. No cinematic violence is more jarring than something that feels like a part of our reality, just see the similarly underrated and forgotten British film Eden Lake for further proof.
Stream Wolf Creek on Prime Video.
1) Quarantine
A really solid found footage horror movie no one talks about, Quarantine (a remake of the arguably superior [Rec]), is an intense, claustrophobic take on the zombie film. We follow Dexter‘s Jennifer Carpenter as Angela Vidal, a reporter who, along with her cameraman, is filming a report on the L.A. Fire Department. They go with the firefighters to their next call, an apartment building packed to the gills with residents. It’s a bad night to go on a ride-along, though, because this apartment building’s occupants are about to come down with a really bad case of rabies.
Coming out a year after Paranormal Activity became something of an event film, Quarantine comparatively came and went. It’s ironic because, overall, Quarantine is better than Paranormal Activity. It doesn’t quite have that “Is this actually happening?” vibe, which boosted that film’s scare factor, but it is better acted and comes equipped with a similar grim bummer of an ending.
Rent Quarantine on Amazon Video.
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