Every October, the same handful of famous horror titles get recommended on loop. Bailey Richards, PEOPLE’s resident horror buff, spent the year doing something different: logging 170 horror films and hunting for the ones most viewers have never heard of. Her resulting list of ten is a hidden gem hunter’s map — spanning 1963 to the present, from a French festival premiere to a 1971 Mia Farrow thriller that time forgot.
The New Discoveries
The freshest finds lead the way. I Love Paris, a French vampire mockumentary, arrived fresh off its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, carried by Aminata Thiboult as Paris, a rising musician who leaves a trail of blood while chasing a music festival slot. Richards calls it an oddball instant charmer and one of the best depictions of a Gen Z protagonist put to screen. The Cycle also premiered at the festival on the East Coast: a moody concoction marrying a crime procedural in the vein of Memories of Murder with an ooey-gooey creature feature in the vein of An American Werewolf in London. Its heart is two television stars — True Blood‘s Deborah Ann Woll as a lauded forensic pathologist and Burn Notice‘s Jeffrey Donovan as a small-town cop — investigating murders that keep getting weirder and more grisly.
(Greg2600 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))Mārama, the 2025 directorial debut of Taratoa Stappard, may be the list’s heaviest entry. Set in the 19th century and grounded in the colonised history of Aotearoa New Zealand, it follows Mary, a Māori woman adopted and raised in New Zealand, as she unspools the elaborate web of lies an Englishman spun about her family. It is a revenge film at its core, one that refuses to shy away from the realities of colonial violence, and Richards warns that Ariāna Osborne’s performance — from the smallest mouth twitch to a larger-than-life display of grief and rage — will shatter you.
The Classics You Missed
Half the list is archaeology. See No Evil (1971) gives Mia Farrow a second all-time performance after Rosemary’s Baby: blinded in a horse-riding accident, her Sarah recovers at a countryside estate while a sadistic killer — visible only by his cowboy boots — closes in. Messiah of Evil (1973) drops a young woman into a coastal town in search of her father and dissolves into pure liminal space dread; it has circulated under titles including Revenge of the Screaming Dead and Dead People. And Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body (1963) lures viewers in with blood and violence before revealing itself as an atmosphere-drenched melodrama about a love triangle between two brothers, with horror icon Christopher Lee at its center as a nobleman with a sadistic streak.
(Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))The nineties get two slots. The Faculty (1998) is the list’s popcorn pick: Robert Rodriguez directing a Kevin Williamson script, with Clea DuVall, Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Usher, Salma Hayek and Jon Stewart facing an alien takeover of their high school. Richards calls it Clueless meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Men in Black. Thesis (1996), from Spain, follows a morbidly curious film student in Madrid studying filmed violence for her thesis, who begins to suspect someone at her university is making the real thing — a celluloid rabbit hole Richards calls essential viewing.
The Modern Cult Favorites
Two recent films complete the ten. Oddity (2024), Damian McCarthy’s Irish supernatural horror film, is a story about the love between twin sisters Dani and Darcy — one of whom dies a brutal death in the opening moments — and a revenge delivered by a life-size wooden figure wearing a permanent scream. Richards found it after watching McCarthy’s Hokum in April and says it knocked her socks off. Creep 2 (2017) is, for her, in a league above the already-excellent first Creep: Desiree Akhavan’s Sara, an aspiring web-series host hunting oddball subjects, meets Mark Duplass’s killer where he is instead of running away. Duplass himself told Richards the connection between Aaron and Sara was “really special” — his favorite of his killer’s victims.
(Greg2600 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))There is a method behind the eclecticism. Richards logged the 170 horror films across the whole year — more than 350 movies in total — after a reader joked last October that she should “get out more.” The comment became a dare: she took herself to the theater even more, caught festival premieres on both coasts of the Atlantic, and rewatched contenders like Creep 2 the night before interviewing its star to make sure it still belonged. That is why the list can hold a 1963 Italian gothic, a 2025 New Zealand debut and a 1998 studio teen movie at once — each title survived comparison against everything else she saw, including the hits she chose to leave out. The exclusions are part of the curation: Obsession, Backrooms and Resident Evil are all recommended in her introduction, then set aside so the spotlight lands where it is needed.
How to Watch the List
Richards deliberately excluded this year’s blockbusters — Obsession, Backrooms and Resident Evil — to make room for discoveries, and her list rewards exactly the kind of viewing that produced it: 170 horror films in a year, more than 350 movies overall. Program a double feature from two eras, or work through all ten before Halloween. Either way, the message of the list is the same: the best scary movie of your season is probably one you have never heard of.