Five Horror Movies to Stream Now

Already missing Halloween? Stay at home for this year’s virtual New York City Horror Film Festival (Dec. 2-9) or for this month’s streaming picks, which include mutants in love and mushrooms out for blood.
Who would have thought my pulse would race watching a guy work on his home computer during the pandemic? That’s what happened during this taut conspiracy thriller written and directed by Christian Nilsson. (Don’t confuse it with the other new horror film called “Dashcam.”)

It’s Halloween night, and Jake (an intense Eric Tabach) is a video editor working out of his New York City apartment on a local TV news story about a fatal traffic stop that involved a police officer and a former state attorney general. When Jake gets an email from the state’s press office marked “Confidential,” he opens it to find dashcam evidence suggesting that what happened on the road that night might have been an assassination.

The spooked-out Jake, who dreams of being a reporter, leaves his apartment to look for a clue he thinks is hidden in Washington Square Park. But what’s with the car idling outside his apartment?

Nilsson has cited Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” as an inspiration, and it shows. “Dashcam” is at its creepiest when just audio and video clips, and Jake’s surgical adjustments to them, steer the paranoia-driven story. Over 82 unnerving minutes, Nilsson squeezes big suspense out of seemingly throwaway moments, as when Jake just sits and listens to audio tracks. The muted underscoring that sounds like it’s coming from the next apartment adds a sinister sonic edge.

The 2019 documentary “Horror Noire” was a past-due, eye-opening look at Black Americans and their place in, and relationships to, horror movies. Using the same title, this anthology highlights Black actors, filmmakers and six macabre tales that include blood suckers, a possessed house and, as one character puts it, “Satan his damn self.”

There are two standouts. “Get Out” meets “Midsommar” in Kimani Ray Smith’s very funny horror comedy “Sundown.” Erica Ash and Tone Bell star as a couple whose political canvassing in rural West Virginia gets interrupted one night by local racist vampires.

The other is Julien Christian Lutz’s “Brand of Evil.” It’s a Faustian story about Nekani, a young gay artist (Brandon Mychal Smith) who starts getting well-paying commissions from a mystery patron. When Nekani learns his client’s designs are hate symbols, he struggles to reconcile the sinister assignments with the big money they come with. No matter: His fate has been sealed, with soul-sucking consequences.

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Five Horror Movies to Stream Now

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