Welcome to Favorite Frights, where actors, directors, writers and journalists share their favorite film titles available on Shudder.
Duncan Birmingham, writer and director of Who Invited Them and author of The Cult In My Garage, shares his 8 favorite titles now streaming on Shudder.
Red Rooms - My favorite film of 2024. Like the frustratingly mysterious main character (a hypnotic Juliette Gariepy), Red Rooms is hard to pin down, shape-shifting scene to scene from courtroom drama to character study to serial killer thriller all the while ratcheting up the tension to a fever pitch. Like the French Canadian lovechild of Fincher and Haneke.
The House of the Devil - Ti West set the high bar for anachronistic '80s horror with this one. A classic set-up that delivers both in snowballing tension and in a terrifying payoff. As a babysitter in need of quick cash, Joceline Donahue is excellent as are Greta Gerwig as her sassy BFF with a Farrah Fawcett hairstyle and an unfailingly polite Tom Noonan as her new client with a lot of rules.
Kill List - Unrelentingly bleak with terrifying imagery that still gives me the willies, Kill List is completely unpredictable, seesawing between gritty British kitchen sink realism, hit man crime genre elements, shocking blood-soaked bursts of violence and freaky folk horror.
Watcher - All hail Maika Monroe who's so compelling here as a failed actress adrift in Bucharest where her increasingly thoughtless boyfriend has relocated for work. A seemingly simple Hitchcockian set-up with shades of Polanski, Chloe Okuno's paranoid thriller is a slowburn in the best possible way and was one of my favorite films of 2022. The ultimate in the subgenre of gaslight horror with a main character who not only can't get anyone to believe her, she can barely get anyone to understand her as she doesn't speak the language.
Black Christmas - The ultimate holiday horror that's replaced It's a Wonderful Life as my favorite Yuletide season rewatch. A great cast, wonderfully thematic lighting and cinematography, some charmingly hokey humor and the scariest obscene phone calls in all of horror. I never get tired of this classic.
Carnival of Souls - Along with Leonard Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers, Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls is one of cinema's most interesting "one hit wonders" by a director who never made another film. Super influential, the DIY film wears its low-budget on its threadbare sleeve. Atmospheric and eerie, it's short on scares but heavy on its own original cocktail of oddball menace and dread.
Sissy - This movie combines comedy, social media satire and slasher tropes into a bright and colorful confection filled with unconventional character twists and really fun inventive kills that don't skimp on the gore. It’s really fun.
Audition - Takashi Miike’s classic about a widower holding fake auditions to find a new romantic partner gets under your skin and stays there. Miike draws out the inevitable comeuppance of his middle-age main character to nerve-shredding effect. It feels like a condemnation of the casual misogyny ingrained in the upscale business class. More relevant than ever. Asami is one of the all time great horror baddies.
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Duncan Birmingham is a writer and filmmaker. The feature film he wrote and directed, Letterboxd, Bluesky and Instagram.
