The BEST Horror Movie Recommendation You'll Get This Year
Not to toot our own horns or anything.
If there's one thing I love more than anything else in the movie discourse-sphere, it's a good recommendation. Dishing them out, taking them on board - whatever. The sweet, sweet serotonin hit that comes with adding another film to my Letterboxd watchlist or crossing it off cannot be topped, especially when it's something you just know is going to hit different.
Seeing as it's January once again and we're all in the mood for resolutions and opportunities (and maybe something to chase away those post-Holiday blues), now also seems like the perfect excuse to share one of those recommendations that hit especially hard for me, and why there's a good chance it could also be your best horror movie discovery of 2026.
The 1980s gifted the horror genre with a whole bunch of great monster movies, ranging from werewolves on the Yorkshire moors to alien killer clowns and even, on occasion, the odd Pumpkinhead in between. But if any creature were to lay claim to owning that particular decade best, then it would have to be our good old-fashioned blood-sucking friends themselves, the vampire.
The eighties gave us Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys, Tony Scott's The Hunger, Fright Night, and even vampires of the alien persuasion with Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce. It was a banger decade for the creatures of the night, but if any one film from that era stands out best today as a landmark genre entry - despite perhaps lacking the cultural cache of its contemporaries - then it would have to be Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark.
Released in 1987 with a cast headed up by Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein, Bigelow's sophomore directorial effort remains a sumptuous and subversive one - a vampire road flick that picks apart coming-of-age thematics with a neo-western flavour, courtesy of an inventive Eric Red script which carries over many of the same themes he spotlighted in his previous film, the Robert Harmon-directed 1986 masterpiece, The Hitcher.
The Hitcher totally recalibrated my brain when I caught it last year, and Near Dark did the same for similar reasons: namely, the clever subversion of the coming-of-age story and its supernatural road movie dynamic.
But one thing about The Hitcher is that it's widely available - you can get a gorgeous new 4K or Blu-ray from SecondSight and it's also not difficult to find on the litany of streaming services at our disposal. Near Dark, on the other hand, has not had a home video release in the UK or the US since 2009, with the last release being a German Blu-ray in 2020. You can stream it on Apple TV and Shudder in the States or on Prime in the UK at the time of writing, but it occupies a fairly anonymous spot in the eighties Vampire canon, and isn't talked about nearly enough as it should be. Or maybe it is and I'm just hanging around in the wrong circles. Who knows?
But all of this also makes it kind of the perfect recommendation, because it feels so relatively underseen and isn't as readily available as its peers. For Horror fans who have mined the genre for all its worth, Near Dark could potentially be a great first watch of the year.
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