10 Most Underrated High School Horror Movies

2. Excision (2012)

From the get-go, Excision serves to surprise, leading with outcast female character Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) and getting stranger by the second.

Pauline wants nothing more than to be a surgeon, and is unwilling to let her unstable mental state or propensity for lucid delusions hold her back. Fascinated with blood, dreaming of deadly sex, and practising her craft on her neighbours, she goes to extreme lengths to further her fantasies, and protect her younger sister Grace (Ariel Winter), whose potentially terminal cystic fibrosis provides the basis for the film's most harrowing scene.

Although Excision premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival to a positive reception, nobody saw it thereafter, as it enjoyed no cinematic release and came during the time before the Neon, A24 and Blumhouse boom, when smaller scale and indie horrors began to take precedence on cinephiles' watchlists.

Reappraisal – or, you know, just appraisal – show it to be playfully sharp, purposefully gory and more worthwhile in its slender 81 minute runtime than many comparable films are at double its length. Plus, its got a major dose of weird-cred, provided by Malcolm McDowell and John Waters in supporting roles.