Since he started his very own horror trilogy with X, Ti West has been making expert pastiches, each of which centers on characters played by Mia Goth. MaXXXine is the third installment in that trilogy, and follows Maxine, the aspiring actress from the first film, as she makes her way to Hollywood and tries to prove that she is a star.
As she finds herself being hunted by a serial killer, though, Maxine’s past threatens to come spilling out toward her present. If you saw MaXXXine and were into the ’80s horror pastiche that film is going for, then you might be looking for other horror movies that feel like they’re in a similar vein. We’ve gathered three such horror movies that will make for the perfect follow up to West’s latest effort.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
One of the great horror movies of the 1980s, A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the scariest movies ever made. The film tells the story of a group of teenagers who are being hunted in their dreams by Freddy Krueger, a man who kills them in their dreams and, as a result, in reality as well.
Although it has a conventional protagonist, one of the most unsettling things about Nightmare is that it doesn’t resolve the way you might expect, and seems to suspect that we’re all living in Freddy’s world now, just waiting for him to emerge and start hunting us down.
A Nightmare on Elm Street can be rented or purchased on Amazon Prime Video.
Evil Dead II (1987)
One of the silliest horror movies ever made, but also one of the most delightful, Evil Dead II tells the story of a group of kids who find themselves together in a secluded cabin. When one of them inadvertently summons a deadly spirit, they’re all forced to fight for their lives.
While this kind of Cabin in the Woods story is incredibly familiar, director Sam Raimi turns the violence and the hijinks up to a new level, transforming a movie that starts out terrifying into something that has you thinking about the Looney Tunes cartoons by the time the credits roll.
Evil Dead II is streaming for free on Plex.
In a Violent Nature (2024)
A brilliant twist on the confines of the slasher movie, In a Violent Nature adopts the perspective of its central killer instead of the teens who accidentally resurrected him and inevitably get slaughtered at his hand.
While the kills themselves are particularly gruesome here, what really makes In a Violent Nature so fascinating is the way the whole thing starts to seem much more mundane when you’re disconnected from the perspective of the victims who are being slaughtered. It’s a brilliant reminder that a movie like Halloween is only separated by a few degrees from something like John Wick.
In a Violent Nature can be rented or purchased on Amazon Prime Video.