New subtle horror

The year is 1905. Thomas Richardson travels to a remote island to rescue his sister after she's kidnapped by a mysterious religious cult demanding a ransom for her safe return. It soon becomes clear that the cult will regret the day it baited this man, as he digs deeper and deeper into the secrets and lies upon which the commune is built.

Three brothers and a sister have just lost their mother. After her death they fear to be separated, so to protect themselves and prevent this from happening they decide to flee to an abandoned farm, a place that is not what it seems, because it hides a dark secret between its walls.

Christmas is supposed to be a time for peace and joyful family reunions. But when Matt and his wife Karen show up unannounced at the home of his estranged brother Steve to celebrate the holidays, they are instead greeted with a horrifying surprise: trapped in the basement is a man. But not just any man. Steve believes that his hostage is none other than the devil himself.

In a lonesome house in the countryside between woods and cornfields live nine-year-old twin brothers who are waiting for their mother in the heat of summer. When she comes home, bandaged after cosmetic surgery, nothing is like before. The children start to doubt that this woman is actually their mother. An existential struggle for identity and fundamental trust emerges.

Will and Eden were once a loving couple. After a tragedy took their son, Eden disappeared. Two years later, out of the blue, she returns with a new husband... and as a different person, eerily changed and eager to reunite with her ex and those she left behind. Over the course of a dinner party in the house that was once his, the haunted Will is gripped by mounting evidence that Eden and her new friends have a mysterious and terrifying agenda. But can we trust Will's hold on reality? Or will he be the unwitting catalyst of the doom he senses?

When a harmless game between a married couple in a remote retreat suddenly becomes a harrowing fight for survival, wife Jessie must confront long-buried demons within her own mind - and possibly lurking in the shadows of her seemingly empty house.

Two Catholic schoolgirls Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton) get left behind at their boarding school over winter break as the other girls leave, where it's rumored that the nuns are satanists. Meanwhile, a disturbed mental patient Joan (Emma Roberts), an escapee, is picked up by a middleage couple (James Remar and Lauren Holly) who drive her on a determined trip to the same school, where the girls must face the supernatural and demonic possession.

There, but for the grace of God, goes Maud, a reclusive young nurse whose impressionable demeanor causes her to pursue a pious path of Christian devotion after an obscure trauma. Now charged with the hospice care of Amanda, a retired dancer ravaged by cancer, Maud's fervent faith quickly inspires an obsessive conviction that she must save her ward's soul from eternal damnation - whatever the cost. Making her feature-film debut, writer/director Rose Glass cannily lures the audience into this disturbed psyche, steadily setting up her veritable diary of a country nurse for an unnerving and ultimately shocking trajectory. Morfydd Clark (also at the Festival in The Personal History of David Copperfield) portrays the sanctimonious Maud with an intense stoicism that belies a disquieting vulnerability, as Maud desperately vies for absolution and solidarity from her embittered patient (an enthralling Jennifer Ehle, also at the Festival in Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies). Glass tenderly captures this relationship with an empathetic gaze that first assumes an ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere - but it isn't long before Maud's dogmatic candor incites an irreconcilable friction that spirals her mind into a suffocating confluence of creeping doubt and paranoia. As Glass tightens the screws on her misguided martyr, well-placed nods are made to religious horror forerunners like William Friedkin's The Exorcist, further contributing to the film's increasingly dread-filled malaise. And when this insidious fever climatically breaks, the consequences are devastating and terrifying in equal measure.

In order to get away from their busy lives, the Wilson family takes a vacation to Santa Cruz, California with the plan of spending time with their friends, the Tyler family. On a day at the beach, their young son Jason almost wanders off, causing his mother Adelaide to become protective of her family. That night, four mysterious people break into Adelaide's childhood home where they're staying. The family is shocked to find out that the intruders look like them, only with grotesque appearances.

A frustrated, angst-ridden teenage girl awakens something in the woods when she naively performs an occult ritual to evoke a witch to kill her mother.

BRAID is the female driven psychological thriller and horror story of Petula Thames and Tilda Darlings, two self proclaimed artists turned dealers and schemers on the run. The Girls moved to NYC to follow their dreams, but ended up getting involved in illegal activities instead. One unfortunate night, they mishandle eighty thousand dollars worth of narcotics and are given 48 hours to pay their vengeful drug lord back. The girls leave town and arrive at a desolate, gothic mansion in the countryside with the plan of robbing their wealthy childhood friend, Daphne Peters. Daphne inherited a fortune when she was little and has since been living secluded in the manor her whole life, growing into a dangerous schizophrenic agoraphobe, prisoner of the fantasy world the three created as children. To take her money the girls have to take part in Daphne's twisted and violent game of make believe. The three of them quickly descend into a deadly maze of hallucinations, role play, torture and murder. A female version of A Clockwork Orange, Mulholland Drive meets Heavenly Creatures meets Funny Games, with The Others twist at the end.

Outwardly, Reed leads a typical yuppie life living in a stylish apartment with his wife Mona and their newborn daughter, it afforded by a white collar professional career. But Reed has a need not only to kill, but kill in a specific way, with an ice pick. Rather than his initial target, he instead chooses as his victim an English speaking prostitute. On the pretense of an out of town conference, he leaves home, and instead checks into an upscale hotel, goes through the motions of the murder to ensure that that part of it goes off without a hitch, and hires his target prostitute through a service, the intended victim named Jackie. What Reed does not anticipate is that Jackie has her own agenda for their time together, which he at times believes is on her knowledge and acceptance of her fate at his hands. Regardless, what ensues is a psychological cat and mouse game between the two, it never clear who is the mouse and who is the cat.

Stained by the brutal death of a young woman, the tranquil and vacant New England mansion of the prolific horror authoress, Iris Blum, has become her silent prison. To take care of the ageing writer who suffers from chronic dementia, the property's manager hires the gentle and soft-spoken live-in hospice nurse, Lily Saylor; however, this is far from an ordinary job. Little by little, Lily's imagination will run wild, as shadowy sightings of eerie female spectres blur the frail boundaries between reality and fantasy, fable and truth. Iris has talked about man's coexistence with the spectral realm in her novels that chill the bone to the marrow. Could her secluded white house at the end of the road be an aerial limbo caught in the middle of life and death?

Following her aunt's death, Colleen and her daughters inherit her house. However, during their first night in their new home, murderers enter the home, putting Colleen in a situation where she must fight to save her daughters' lives. When the girls suffer a terrible trauma during the night, their disparate personalities diverge even further. The younger daughter, Beth, is said to become a famous horror author with a perfect family and life in Los Angeles, while her sister, Vera, can't cope, and loses her mind faced to an unshakable sense of paranoia. Sixteen years later the daughters and mother reunite at the house where Colleen and Vera continue to reside, it is then that strange events begin to take place.

Sawyer Valentini is a troubled woman who moves away from home to escape a stalker. Sawyer finds she is still triggered by interactions with men as a result of her experiences. She makes an appointment with a counselor at Highland Creek Behavioral Center. At her appointment, she unknowingly signs a release voluntarily committing herself to a 24-hour stay. She calls the police but they do nothing when they see the signed release. After physical altercations with a patient and a staff member, Dr. Hawthorne says she is being kept for seven more days. Another patient, Nate Hoffman, gives Sawyer an introduction to the place. Highland Creek is running a scheme to milk health insurance claims for profit. They trick people into voluntarily committing themselves as long as the patients' insurance companies continue to pay; when insurance claims run out, the patient is "cured". One day, Sawyer sees David Strine, her stalker, working as an orderly under the assumed name George Shaw. She has an outburst and is restrained. Her outbursts result in the repeated use of restraints and sedation..

When elderly mother Edna inexplicably vanishes, her daughter Kay and granddaughter Sam rush to their family's decaying country home, finding clues of her increasing dementia scattered around the house in her absence. After Edna returns just as mysteriously as she disappeared, Kay's concern that her mother seems unwilling or unable to say where she's been clashes with Sam's unabashed enthusiasm to have her grandma back. As Edna's behavior turns increasingly volatile, both begin to sense that an insidious presence in the house might be taking control of her. With RELIC, first-time writer/director Natalie Erika James crafts an unforgettable new spin on the haunted-house movie.

A soon-to-be-stepmom is snowed in with her fiance's two children at a remote holiday village. Just as relations finally begin to thaw between the trio, strange and frightening events threaten to summon psychological demons from her strict religious childhood.

Disturbing and mysterious things begin to happen to a bartender in New Orleans after he picks up a phone left behind at his bar.