EXCLUSIVE: Film At Lincoln Center will launch its horror film series Scary Movies next month, and titles set for the 13th edition include Alexander Ullom’s buzzy SXSW feature It Ends and a 4K restoration of Harry Kümel’s seminal Daughters of Darkness. Check out the official trailer for the season below.
Officially titled Scary Movies XIII, the season will run at Lincoln Center from August 15 through August 21 and feature 16 titles. The season opens with Ullom’s It Ends. The film screened at SXSW and follows a group of friends who, on a late-night food run, become trapped on an infinite highway with otherworldly terrors lurking beyond. Confined in their Jeep Cherokee, they must decide whether to accept their fate or attempt escape. Also screening on opening night is Alexandre O. Philippe’s Chain Reactions, a documentary about the profound impact of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, explored through discussions with Stephen King, Karyn Kusama, Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
Closing night will feature two films specially selected to celebrate the 10th anniversary of horror streaming service Shudder: Bryan Bertino’s The Dark and the Wicked (2020) and a 4K restoration of Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness (1971).
This year’s lineup also features five North American premieres: Abel Ferry’s Squealers, Diego Figueroa’s A Yard of Jackals, Matthew Losasso’s Row, Lina Lužytė and Nerijus Milerius’s Jōhatsu, and Andreas Prochaska’s Welcome Home Baby.
Additional highlights include Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap starring Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, and A Grand Mockery from Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon.
Film At Lincoln Center first launched the Scary Movies series in 2002. This year’s event was organized by Madeline Whittle.
“Scary times call for scary movies,” Whittle said in a statement. “Given the innumerable existential crises that define our current cultural and political moment, it’s no surprise that recent years have seen a resurgence of enthusiasm for art that shows us how to wrestle with fear, violence, and evil not as lofty philosophical abstractions, but via embodiment, emotion, and ambiance. Few art forms can rival film’s capacity not only to unsettle, frighten, and horrify, but also to reflect those feelings back to us, inviting us to better understand our own fear by participating in somebody else’s.”
She added: “The filmmakers featured in this year’s lineup have created work that brilliantly explodes the darkness, wrangling light, sound, and motion to terrifying, transcendent effect.”
See the full series lineup below.
All films screen in the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th St.)
Opening Night
It Ends
Alexander Ullom, 2025, U.S., 86m
New York Premiere
Tampa-born writer-director Alexander Ullom, named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2024, coined the term “hangout horror” to describe his perversely entertaining and sneakily profound feature debut, which opens on four friends in their early twenties (Mitchell Cole, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, and Phinehas Yoon), newly graduated and piled together in someone’s Jeep Cherokee, zooming down a lushly wooded parkway on a low-key snack run. When the awaited turn-off never materializes, the young adults find themselves trapped on a metaphysically perplexing, seemingly endless road—one from which they can’t escape, as they soon discover that stopping the car invariably attracts the attention of what lurks in the forest…. Ullom elicits uniformly winning performances from the four leads, and his own immense talent for writing dialogue is on full display, establishing an easy intimacy with his characters through their approachable, lived-in banter, and inviting the viewer into their idiosyncratic friend-group dynamic—all while embracing the full allegorical potential of the ingeniously existential thought experiment that drives the story to its promised, if inconceivable, conclusion.
Friday, August 15 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Alexander Ullom and producers Carrie Carusone and Evan Barber
Baxter
Jérôme Boivin, 1989, France, 83m
French with English subtitles
Baxter is a bull terrier who, upon being adopted from the kennel where he was born, finds himself condemned to a rootless existence, shuttled between the homes of a series of human owners: first, an elderly woman whose timidity and neediness are repulsive to Baxter, driving him to seek a way out by any means necessary; next, a young couple whose amorous enthusiasm elicits his undying loyalty and delirious affection, until the addition of a new family member disturbs the trio’s happy equilibrium; and finally, a young boy whose all-consuming obsession with the lives and deaths of Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun betrays a nascent affinity for fascism, to Baxter’s surprise and delight. The canine protagonist, with his inexpressive facial features and impassive gaze, makes for a surprisingly introspective antihero: his interiority is made gloriously legible thanks to Maxime Leroux’s droll, dispassionate, yet unmistakably bestial voice-over, recalling the narration of a Camus novel, or of film noir at its most nihilistic. The first of two collaborations between director Jérôme Boivin and co-writer Jacques Audiard, adapted from Ken Greenhall’s 1977 novel Hell Hound, Baxter is at once a satirical work of pitch-black, bone-dry humor and a chillingly sober fable illustrating the interpersonal—and interspecies—mechanics of amorality and violence. DCP by Studiocanal at VDM, France.
Tuesday, August 19 at 8:45pm
Chain Reactions
Alexandre O. Philippe, 2024, U.S., 101m
English and Japanese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Pioneering genre visionary Tobe Hooper was just 31 years old when he unleashed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on the world in 1974, and the mythic stature of the 16mm-shot, low-budget tour de force has only grown in the intervening decades. Hooper’s masterwork takes center stage in the expansive, deeply admiring documentary from director Alexandre O. Philippe that premiered at last summer’s Venice Biennale, timed to anticipate the original film’s semicentennial in October 2024. Philippe weaves together clips from the original film and its myriad influences and heirs from throughout film history, interspersed with a treasure trove of never-before-seen outtake footage and extended interviews with midnight movie aficionados and luminaries of the horror genre: directors Takashi Miike and Karyn Kusama, writers Stephen King and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and comedian Patton Oswalt. Each expert-enthusiast helms one of the film’s five “chapters,” waxing rhapsodic with incisive critical insights, colorful historical anecdotes, and heartfelt personal accounts of drawing creative inspiration from Hooper’s genius—all of which amounts to a rich, multifaceted tribute to a towering masterpiece of American horror cinema. A Dark Sky Films release.
Friday, August 15 at 9:00pm
The Dark and the Wicked
Bryan Bertino, 2020, U.S., 95m
When they’re informed of the family patriarch’s imminent demise, grown siblings Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) warily venture back to the childhood home from which they both fled years before, rallying to support their grieving mother and help care for their father in his final days. Upon their arrival at the fading farmstead nestled deep in the Texas hills, the pair are confronted with an altogether more chilling reality: their mother seems to be under the influence of some sort of evil supernatural presence—a shape-shifting, mind-warping entity that wants Louise and Michael gone. Writer-director Bryan Bertino wields an impressively precise command of mood and atmosphere, time and place, mapping out the dim interiors of the family farmstead in compositions of dense, painterly chiaroscuro, and alternating these shots with ominous, shiver-inducing tableaux of forlorn figures framed in stark silhouette against the sun-blanched farmland.
Since it arrived on the scene in 2015, Shudder has established itself as the premier streaming destination for avid devotees of the horror genre. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the company’s founding, Scary Movies is pleased to present this special theatrical presentation of Bertino’s indelible fourth feature, which returns to the big screen five years after a largely virtual festival run in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Featuring an introduction by Sam Zimmerman, Shudder’s Senior Vice President of Programming and Acquisitions. A Shudder release.
Thursday, August 21 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Michael Abbott Jr., moderated by Sam Zimmerman
4K Restoration
Daughters of Darkness
Harry Kümel, 1971, Belgium/France/West Germany, 87m
English, French, Dutch, and German with English subtitles
The great Delphine Seyrig commands the screen with potent erotic flair in her iconic turn as Elizabeth Báthory, a bewitchingly imperious Hungarian countess whose fateful encounter with a young couple on their honeymoon catalyzes a blood-soaked maelstrom of desirous depravity. More than 50 years after Daughters of Darkness first seduced and beguiled audiences, the film’s reputation as a defining achievement in the lesbian vampire subgenre has only grown, and it remains the most celebrated title in the small but provocative corpus of Belgian director Harry Kümel. Critic Geoffrey O’Brien, in a monumental 1993 treatise articulating the contours of modern horror cinema, characterized Kümel’s film as “a deeply unpleasant evocation of a war of nerves… Jaded age preys cunningly on narcissistic youth, and seductiveness and cruelty become indistinguishable as Seyrig forces the innocents to become aware of their own capacity for monstrous behavior. If Fassbinder had made a vampire movie it might have looked something like this.”
Selected and featuring an exclusive pre-recorded introduction by The Boulet Brothers, hosts of The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula: Titans, in honor of Shudder’s 10th anniversary and the series’ season two premiere debuting this Fall. 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative by Blue Underground, with the supervision of director Harry Kümel.
Thursday, August 21 at 9:00pm – Video introduction by The Boulet Brothers
Good Boy
Ben Leonberg, 2025, U.S., 73m
New York Premiere
When it comes to filling the role of horror-film protagonist, dogs could be considered the platonic ideal. Equipped with heightened senses and a preternatural knack for perceiving (if not understanding) subtle environmental changes, they’re mute witnesses to all manner of lurking threats, more sensitive to things that go “bump” in the night than their human companions. For his first foray into feature filmmaking, Ben Leonberg cast his own pet Indy in the starring role as the charismatic canine hero (also named Indy) whose point of view mediates the action, applying a cleverly cinematic twist to a timeless tale of intergenerational haunting. On the periphery of the narrative, and largely out of frame or out of focus, there’s Indy’s owner Todd (Shane Jensen), whom we meet en route to the secluded house he’s inherited from his late grandfather (played by Larry Fessenden in a memorable camcorder cameo), where he plans to convalesce while half-heartedly seeking treatment for an unspecified but ominously lingering ailment. As Todd and Indy’s tranquil coexistence begins to unravel with the intrusion of sinister, possibly paranormal forces, Leonberg’s craftily maneuvered camera hews closely to his dog’s low-angle vantage point, alternating point-of-view shots with stunningly expressive close-ups on the wide-eyed visage of the film’s vibrant, astonishingly gifted star performer. An IFC/Shudder release. Tuesday, August 19 at 6:30pm
A Grand Mockery
Adam C. Briggs, Sam Dixon, 2024, Australia, 105m
Collaborating for the first time, underground Australian visionaries Sam Dixon and Adam C. Briggs have joined forces to concoct a singularly nerve-jangling cinematic head trip, evoking their addled protagonist’s dingy, dead-end environs with the tactile immediacy and lustrous visual textures of Super 8 film stock. Dixon stars as Josie, a bedraggled Queensland cinema worker who, to the chagrin of his long-suffering girlfriend Nelly (Kate “Babyshakes” Dillon, lead singer of the Brisbane rock outfit Full
Flower Moon), has a habit of drowning his ennui and alienation in endless mugs of red wine from a box. Slowly but surely, he begins to lose his grip on reality as he tries and fails to tolerate the repetitive, dehumanizing drudgery of his everyday life. Briggs and Dixon cannily deploy all of the DIY formal resources at their disposal, resulting in a magnificently lo-fi, phantasmagorical fever dream that renders Josie’s psychic disintegration palpable, even poetic: perception stutters and stalls, nightmare logic prevails, and feverish maybe-hallucinations give way to horrific bodily transformations, all brought to surreal life with a dazzling audiovisual lyricism that proudly bears the influence of Kafka, Lynch, and Buñuel. A Yellow Veil Pictures release.
Wednesday, August 20 at 9:00pm
The Home
Mattias J. Skoglund, 2025, Sweden/Iceland/Estonia, 90m
Swedish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
When Monika (Anki Lidén) suffers a stroke in her small-town home, her not-so-subtly second-favorite son, Joel (Philip Oros), returns from Stockholm to care for his widowed mother, hoping to help ease the transition to her new life at a local memory-care facility. Soon after settling in, Monika’s confused, unsettled behavior turns abruptly and unpredictably violent, and Joel can’t shake the horrifying suspicion that his abusive late father might have returned from the beyond to torment mother and son anew, not content to leave his beleaguered next of kin in peace. What unfolds is an understated master class in treading the unstable boundary line between allegorical horror and family tragedy, an authentically terrifying yet resolutely compassionate depiction of dementia at its most painful and unsparing. Director Mattias J. Skoglund gives equal emotional weight to the ordeals of parent and child, savvily harnessing the affective power of the genre’s formal conventions to dramatize the terrifying isolation and disorientation that the disease can inflict on both its victims and, indirectly, their loved ones. A Dark Star Pictures release.
Saturday, August 16 at 4:00pm
Jōhatsu
Lina Lužytė, Nerijus Milerius, 2024, Lithuania, 83m
Lithuanian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Following a tragic explosion in a port town outside Vilnius that leaves one sailor dead and another missing, city morgue worker Lina (Zygimante Jakstaite) is unsettled by the comportment of the dead man’s estranged wife when she comes to identify the body; soon, Lina has launched an informal investigation, hoping to make sense of her own suspicions. Documentary filmmakers Lina Lužytė and Nerijus Milerius chart Lina’s progress with a philosopher’s interest in the enigmatic origins of human behavior, drawing inspiration from the Japanese phenomenon of jōhatsu (literally “evaporation”), a term for individuals who choose to vanish without a trace, deliberately and methodically orchestrating their own disappearance, leaving former lives and loved ones behind without warning. The events that follow coalesce into a virtuosically discomfiting parable, reminiscent of George Sluizer’s Spoorloos in its unflinching, destabilizing intensity: a deceptively subdued thriller that locates terror in the impossibility of really knowing our fellow humans, the impenetrable obscurity of their motivations and actions—and, perhaps most frightening of all, the nagging awareness that our own most profound, private truths might be equally unknowable, even to ourselves.
Saturday, August 16 at 9:00pm – Q&A with Lina Lužtė and Nerijus Milerius
Noise
Kim Soo-jin, 2025, South Korea, 95m
Korean with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Inter-floor noise disputes in densely occupied residential buildings have emerged in recent years as a uniquely urgent social issue in the cities of South Korea, where news outlets report that the number of violent crimes attributed to these conflicts has risen dramatically over the last decade. With his deftly executed first feature, director Kim Soo-jin taps thrillingly into the abundant cinematic possibilities afforded by the phenomenon, earning the director a place among the most prodigious new voices in Korean horror. Sisters Ju-young (Lee Sun-bin) and Ju-hee (Han Soo-a) are excited to move into their first shared home as young adults, but shortly after their arrival, Ju-hee mysteriously disappears—and Ju-young, who wears a hearing aid, starts to perceive a barrage of weird, portentous frequencies that seem to emanate from the building itself. The sensory effects of Ju-young’s hearing impairment are rendered vivid and immersive via a layered, thrillingly suggestive soundscape that builds in intensity as the young woman [looks for her sister], while fending off the threats and ravings of a fellow tenant whose own unaccountable noise complaints inspire increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior towards the neighbors he holds responsible.
Monday, August 18 at 6:15pm
Rabbit Trap
Bryn Chainey, 2025, U.K., 88m
New York Premiere
Joining the likes of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie among the great troubled marriages of genre cinema, Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen disappear into the roles of Darcy and Daphne Davenport, a sound engineer and his experimental musician wife, freshly decamped from London and taking up residence in an isolated cottage deep in the Welsh countryside in search of creative renewal and acoustic inspiration. When the couple set about exploring their new environs, recording instruments in tow, Darcy stumbles upon a “fairy circle” that emits a strange, unidentifiable frequency; this odd discovery is followed closely by the appearance on their doorstep of an otherworldly child (Jade Croot) who claims to live nearby and is eager to befriend the Davenports. Soon the child has become a fixture in their household, alternately ingratiating himself and raising suspicions, and exposing unacknowledged rifts and unexamined secrets that threaten to wreak psychological and spiritual havoc in the lives of his makeshift adoptive parents. Bryn Chainey has crafted a sensorially vivid, darkly beguiling debut feature that’s steeped in regional folklore, harnessing the uncanny undercurrents of occult tradition and mythology to illuminate obscure, irreducible mysteries of the human condition that stubbornly resist the flattening certainties of modernity.
Saturday, August 16 at 6:15pm – Q&A with Bryn Chainey
Row
Matthew Losasso, 2025, U.K., 118m
North American Premiere
When a battered and blood-spattered rowing vessel washes ashore on a rocky, windswept Scottish isle, the boat’s lone surviving passenger, terrified and disoriented Megan (Bella Dayne), struggles to piece together her fragmented memories of events at sea—and the fate that befell the three crewmates with whom she departed from Newfoundland weeks earlier, embarking on an ambitious attempt to complete a North Atlantic crossing in record time. The ensuing interrogation sets the stage for an intricate series of scattered flashbacks, revealing perilous interpersonal fault lines that threaten to fracture the fragile cohesion of the crew, which includes driven, uncompromising captain Dan (Akshay Khanna), Megan’s old friend Lexie (Sophie Skelton), and taciturn last-minute newcomer Mike (Nick Skaugen), who may or may not be on the run from authorities after murdering his girlfriend. British Australian director Matthew Losasso’s first feature, co-written by Losasso and Skaugen, is an ingeniously constructed new entry in the grand tradition of maritime huis clos ensemble thrillers, a worthy successor to the likes of Lifeboat and Dead Calm.
Sunday, August 17 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Nick Skaugen
Squealers
Abel Ferry, 2025, France, 103m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Fresh off a demanding round of exams, veterinary student Emma (Kim Higelin) looks forward to a restorative summer retreat in sunny French farm country, crashing with her older brother at the communal farm where he lives and works alongside a welcoming collective of activists. Anxious to earn her keep, she enthusiastically volunteers to assist her new friends on a risky mission, infiltrating a nearby slaughterhouse to retrieve hidden cameras that contain damning evidence of brutally inhumane practices in the facility. Unluckily for Emma and her intrepid comrades, the abattoir also happens to be owned by a ruthlessly ambitious politician running for local office (Olivier Gourmet) who, along with his unscrupulous entourage of thuggish cronies, will stop at nothing to prevent the incriminating footage from getting out. Abel Ferry’s sophomore theatrical outing is a grisly, high-octane, relentlessly suspenseful cat-and-mouse thriller that pits its idealistic young heroes against a violently vindictive ruling class determined to save its own hide, with the inciting struggle for justice morphing inevitably into a vicious, no-holds-barred fight for survival.
Sunday, August 17 at 3:00pm
The Wailing
Pedro Martín-Calero, 2024, Spain/Argentina/France, 107m
Spanish and French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In present-day Madrid, the life of well-adjusted university student Andrea (Ester Expósito) gradually descends into chaos when, after indirectly witnessing a shocking act of violence, she begins to suspect that she’s being targeted by an apparently malevolent supernatural entity, which manifests as a shadowy figure that lurks in dark corners and can only be seen through a camera’s lens. Meanwhile, she’s plagued by the sound of a woman’s agonized shrieks and sobbing pleas, assaulting her senses like a rogue radio transmission whenever she’s in the vicinity of a certain apartment building that looms menacingly over her daily routine. Inspired by the genre fiction of Argentinian novelist Mariana Enríquez, first-time feature director Pedro Martín-Calero and his co-writer Isabel Peña expertly navigate a nonlinear chronology that amplifies the emotional force and symbolic heft of their central themes, shifting gears in the second act to follow an introverted film student in Argentina 20 years prior (Malena Villa) who, along with her unwitting muse (Mathilde Olliver), might have been stalked by, and fallen prey to, the same unspeakable evil. A Film Movement release.
Monday, August 18 at 9:00pm
Welcome Home Baby
Andreas Prochaska, 2025, Germany/Austria, 105m
German with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Judith (Julia Franz Richter, brilliantly channeling Rosemary’s Baby–era Mia Farrow) enjoys a contented existence as a happily coupled, professionally fulfilled ER physician in Berlin when she receives word of her estranged father’s death, and learns that she’s inherited the house he inhabited in the remote Austrian village where she was born. Returning for the first time since childhood, with her partner Ryan in tow, Judith hopes to sell the property quickly, still bearing emotional scars left by the birth family that sent her away with no explanation decades earlier—but she’s startled to find her extended family all too welcoming, entreating the young couple to stay and put down roots in Judith’s ancestral home. It’s not long before she begins to experience strange memory lapses, troubled dreams, and troubling visions—and disturbing signs of a possible pregnancy, unplanned and unexplained. Building and sustaining tension with the sure hand of a veteran storyteller, director Andreas Prochaska masterfully updates the well-worn tropes of prenatal anxiety horror to wrestle with a uniquely millennial ambivalence around family legacies, prospective parenthood, and ties that bind so tightly that they just might draw blood.
Wednesday, August 20 at 6:15pm
A Yard of Jackals
Diego Figueroa, 2024, Chile, 108m
Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
What does authoritarianism sound like, and what do you do when those sounds start to leak through the walls of your living room? With his pulse-raising directorial debut, Chilean film editor Diego Figueroa applies those questions to the early years of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship, craftily adapting the narrative conventions of the political thriller genre to a more intimate and unsettling psychological register, foregrounding the thick layer of paranoia that mediates every interaction under junta rule. Raúl Peralta (Néstor Cantillana), a mild-mannered architectural model maker who works as a military contractor, finds his tenuously peaceful cohabitation with his bedridden mother disrupted by the arrival of mysterious new tenants in the adjoining row house, whose unseen nighttime activities keep the neighbors awake at all hours with a noisy racket that sounds suspiciously like violent intimidation. When the authorities reject his pleas for intervention, an increasingly disturbed Raúl must take it upon himself to gather evidence and seek answers, all while evading the attention of an oppressive police state. Cantillana—a frequent collaborator of fellow countrymen Sebastián Lelio and Pablo
Larraín—delivers a performance of slow-burn intensity in the vein of Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul in The Conversation, perfectly suited to Figueroa’s claustrophobic, densely evocative rendering of 1970s Santiago.
Sunday, August 17 at 9:00pm
