Allowing a stranger into your home carries its own inherent anxiety. Discovering that the stranger is not who they claim to be makes it unbearable. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Caitlin Morales, a suburban mother who hires Polly Murphy — played by Maika Monroe — as the family nanny. It does not take long before Caitlin begins to sense that something is fundamentally wrong with Polly’s identity. Director Michelle Garza Cervera crafted this modern reimagining of the 1992 original around the themes of motherhood, identity, and power, reframing the original story’s tension through a distinctly contemporary lens. The result is the kind of psychological suspense that makes the familiar setting of a family home feel genuinely threatening.

Silence does much of the screaming in Osgood Perkins’ 2024 procedural. An FBI agent follows a trail of occult evidence while pursuing a serial killer whose murders continue unabated, each crime scene leaving behind cryptic ritualistic clues. Maika Monroe stars as the agent, with Nicolas Cage delivering an unforgettable performance on the other side of the investigation. The film rewards patient viewers who prefer the gradual accumulation of dread over an easy jump scare — a creeping, uncanny procedural that lodges itself in the mind long after the credits roll.

Financial desperation can push a person into decisions they would never otherwise consider. Charles Blakey is on the verge of losing his ancestral Sag Harbor home when a peculiar businessman named Anniston arrives with an unusual proposition: rent him the basement for the summer. Corey Hawkins and Willem Dafoe anchor this slow, unsettling psychological chamber piece, in which a simple financial arrangement gradually reveals far darker dimensions involving inheritance, power, and moral complicity. The film operates at a quiet, deliberate pace that makes its revelations land with considerable weight.

The wind-up drum toy is not a gift. Twin brothers Hal and Bill discover a sinister monkey figurine, and every time it winds itself up, someone dies in increasingly outrageous and gruesome fashion. The discovery tears their family apart, and the brothers go their separate ways. Twenty-five years later, the killing begins again, forcing the estranged pair back together to confront what they have spent decades running from. Osgood Perkins adapts Stephen King’s short story into an R-rated horror-comedy that leans hard into absurdist gore and is calibrated precisely to produce shocked, horrified laughter.