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The spring release window does something unkind to horror. Everything not named after a legacy franchise or produced by a studio big enough to buy a Super Bowl ad gets sorted into a pile, handed a three-city theatrical run, dropped onto a streaming platform at 3am on a Friday, and left there to either be discovered or not. Most of the time, not.
Six months into 2026, the watching list is already past forty entries between festivals, streaming drops, and limited releases. The ones generating headlines right now are largely the ones that were always going to generate headlines. That is fine. I hope everyone is enjoying those. But there is another list, and it is longer than people realize, full of films that showed up quietly and are waiting for the people who would love them most to finally find them.
Here is where to start.
Heritage (2026)
I do not know how many horror films have come out of Corsica before this one. Based on what writer-director Baptist Agostini-Croce has said about his debut, the answer is roughly zero. So when the found footage community started passing around a trailer for a Corsican folk horror shot on an early-2000s camcorder, made in five days on a budget of under five thousand euros, there was a reasonable amount of skepticism floating around. That skepticism did not survive contact with the actual film.
Heritage follows Marie and Daniel, returning to Corsica to visit their grandfather fifteen years after leaving the island, video camera in hand, expecting a family reunion. The footage they end up capturing is not what any of them expected. Reviews from its run at Unnamed Footage Festival in San Francisco have compared it favorably to early Lake Mungo, which is a high bar, and based on the evidence circulating in the found footage community, not an unfair one. No distribution deal yet, it is still making the festival rounds. If you have ever felt strongly about folk horror you did not know existed, this is the year to start paying attention.
Rabbit Trap (2025/2026)
The Welsh folk horror from debut director Bryn Chainey is currently streaming free on Pluto TV for one month only, which is not a sentence that usually precedes a serious recommendation, but here we are. Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen play a couple who leave London for an isolated Welsh cottage hoping to find creative quiet and some acoustic inspiration. They find something else.
SpectreVision produced this one, the same company behind Mandy and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which tells you something about the film’s intentions before you even press play. The 48% Rotten Tomatoes score tells you something too, which is that critics and horror fans are looking at this film completely differently. Genre audiences coming out of it tend to use words like “dreamlike” and “unsettling.” Critics tend to want more plot. One of these groups is probably right about what kind of film this is. I will let you guess which.
Free on Pluto TV until May 31 and then who knows.
Exit 8 (2026)
The Japanese liminal horror adapted from Kotake Create’s indie video game was always going to find an audience in horror circles. What nobody quite predicted was how well director Genki Kawamura would translate the premise into a full-length film. Kazunari Ninomiya plays a Tokyo commuter who gets a devastating phone call mid-commute and immediately afterward gets trapped in a subway corridor with no exit. The rules are simple. Walk the loop, spot the anomalies, do not miss one or you start over.
What Kawamura does with that setup across a feature-length runtime is considerably less simple. Exit 8 landed in North American theaters on April 10 via NEON after its 2025 Cannes Midnight premiere, which ended with an eight-minute standing ovation, and walked away with a 93% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. Horror fans who grew up on the early-2000s J-horror wave from Hideo Nakata and Kiyoshi Kurosawa have been particularly vocal about this one. It is currently available to rent on Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home. The line between the film’s horror and its mundane, relentless commuter dread is thinner than you would expect. That friction is real. It produces heat.
Faces of Death (2026)
Daniel Goldhaber directed How to Blow Up a Pipeline, so you already know he is not interested in safe choices. For Faces of Death he reunites with Isa Mazzei, the writer he made Cam with back in 2018, and together they have built a reimagining of the 1978 cult film that is not a remake in any conventional sense. It is a horror film about content moderation and the specific violence of going viral, built around Barbie Ferreira as a website content moderator who discovers a serial killer recreating scenes from the original and uploading them to a popular platform to watch the view counts climb.
Goldhaber and Mazzei are asking what it means to keep watching something terrible, which is a question the 1978 original asked in a far more confrontational way. Dacre Montgomery and a supporting cast that includes Charli XCX in an actual acting performance round out a film that is now on Shudder and available to rent on VOD. The reviews came in mixed, but in the best possible way. People either got it immediately or walked away with questions, and both camps left with something.
Affection (2026)
Jessica Rothe has spent most of her career in horror-adjacent material, from the Happy Death Day films to a handful of things that never quite used her correctly. Affection, the debut feature from BT Meza, uses her correctly. She plays Ellie, a woman who wakes after a car accident to find herself in a house she does not recognize, with a husband she cannot place and a daughter she is certain should be a son. The man standing in front of her explains that she has a rare brain condition causing false memories. She tries to believe him. She almost succeeds.
What Meza builds from that premise is not quite a thriller and not quite body horror and not quite a domestic dread film, which is probably why it opened May 8 in limited theaters via Brainstorm Media and has been largely invisible since. The festival circuit received it well, including strong notices from CUFF and the 2026 Overlook Film Festival, and Rothe’s performance is already getting the “long overdue” framing from the people who have been paying attention. Currently available to rent on Fandango at Home.
Saccharine (2026)
Natalie Erika James directed Relic, and if you have seen Relic then you already know what she does to a domestic space. She fills it with something that should not fit. Saccharine is her Sundance 2026 Midnight premiere and her second feature, and it is about a young medical student named Hana who begins consuming human ashes as part of a weight-loss craze, is almost immediately haunted by the dead person she swallowed, and keeps going anyway.
That last part is doing a lot of work in the film. Midori Francis plays Hana and gives a performance that is doing several things at once, including being funny in a way that feels genuinely uncomfortable, which is a difficult line to walk and one she walks for the entire runtime. Co-stars Danielle Macdonald and Madeleine Madden are working hard alongside her. Saccharine is in select theaters now and comes to Shudder in July.
Leviticus (2026)
The queer Australian horror from debut writer-director Adrian Chiarella also came out of Sundance’s Midnight section and was picked up by NEON for a June 19 theatrical release. The 96% Rotten Tomatoes score has been doing its promotional work. What that number does not fully communicate is what Chiarella is doing with his premise. A violent supernatural entity in a small, isolated, religiously fanatic Australian town that takes the physical form of whoever the person it encounters desires most.
Joe Bird and Mia Wasikowska lead the cast. Critics who have seen it describe a film that functions simultaneously as romantic horror, survival film, and social commentary without being clumsy about any of those registers at once. Theaters June 19.
