But Alli isn’t done growing, and even worse isn’t finished morphing, becoming a gruesome figure who looks an awful lot like Tinja herself. Tinja keeps the winged goblin hidden in her bedroom, away from her overprotective blogger-mother (Sophia Heikkila) and the rest of her family. In this Finnish horror fantasy, a gifted 12-year-old gymnast named Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) finds, nurtures and hatches an egg that becomes a giant ugly bird that becomes a demonic ugly bird-creature. Which is another way of saying: Stay away if your horror tastes stick to the traditional lane.

Schoenbrun pairs their stark, intensely personal story with a visual language that includes creepypasta videos, ASMR and found footage, and the results are otherworldly. That’s a powerful voyage to make, but not surprising considering how deeply their unsettling film engages with questions of self-identity. In an interview earlier this year, the writer-director-editor Jane Schoenbrun told me they discovered they were transgender during the making of the film, their first feature. Rogers), she loses her grip on reality and terror creeps its way into her room - or does it? As Casey develops an online relationship with an anonymous older man (Michael J. Drawn to the macabre, she takes the World’s Fair Challenge, an online role-playing game that, if players’ videos are to be believed, triggers physical and mental distress. Thumbs up to HBO Max for giving experimental horror a home outside the art house.Ĭasey (the assured newcomer Anna Cobb) is a troubled teenager who cocoons in her attic bedroom.

As Vogt told me in an interview in May: “I don’t think I’ve been as scared as an adult as I was as a kid.”Īnother of my favorite films this year is this strange adventure in slow-burn form-busting. It’s a testament to Vogt’s empathy as a director that this scene, nothing more than a shot of a boy and his feelings, was the film’s scariest. It’s not often that a horror film brings tears to my eyes, but that’s what happened during a scene in which Ben wrestles with a horrific act he commits because of something within himself that he doesn’t understand. There the girls meet kids with paranormal skills, including Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), who can hear people’s thoughts, and Ben (Sam Ashraf), a bullied preteen whose ability takes a deadly form that sets up the film’s devastating final act. The movie begins as Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum) and her autistic sister, Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), move with their parents into a Norwegian housing complex. It’s one of my favorite horror films of the year. This supernatural thriller from the writer-director Eskil Vogt, about children with powers they don’t know how to handle, is intensely creepy and atmospheric, but also humane and heartbreaking.

The Fairy Tale Trap by Emily Casey