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Brogan Gilbert gives an extraordinary performance as the troubled nurse caring for a terminally ill dancer in a compelling adaptation of the 2019 horror film

With its extreme closeups and eerily distorted faces, Rose Glass’s 2019 horror film Saint Maud has no shortage of scenes to make you flinch. But in Glass’s screenplay, words also jab like the desperately devout nurse Maud’s injections, starting with the blunt expletive used to describe terminally ill Amanda by her departing employee. After Maud takes over, a series of caustic voiceovers reveal her own surprisingly sharp tongue.

This compelling adaptation by novelist Jessica Andrews (Saltwater) and Jack McNamara, who also directs, keeps the wounding exchanges between characters but adds a sensory warmth that deepens their relationships. Andrews and McNamara don’t just capitalise on what a tale of body horror can obviously gain in live performance – including the moments of religious ecstasy that Glass dubbed “ godgasms ”, here movement-directed by Roberta Jean. They also repeatedly linger on their characters’ descriptions of taste, touch and smell, all reinforcing the physicality. “You’ve got soft hands,” Amanda (Dani Arlington) tells Maud (Brogan Gilbert) in their first meeting. She later smells Maud’s scalp as if she is a newborn baby and even licks her hair.

The Oscar winner is a sturdy presence in an intriguing post-apocalyptic puzzle that can’t quite find all of the pieces

There’s something nasty down in the woods again , just months after a deranged killer , some deranged fairies and a deranged attempt to resurrect IP all re-reminded us to steer well clear. In Alexandre Aja’s diverting yet overly derivative new horror Never Let Go, Halle Berry is a mother trying to keep her twin sons safe in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, hidden from whatever is left of the wider world. There are exhaustive rules told in an exhausting fashion, the most important of which is to never leave their remote shack without a rope attached, maintaining a connection with the holiness of home at all times. If they find themselves untethered then they’re at the mercy of a malevolent and inventive evil that will consume them.

But it’s an evil that only she can see, telling the boys that they will only see it when they get older, a caveat that starts to grow a seed of suspicion in the mind of Nolan (Percy Daggs IV, an excellent newcomer), the less unquestionably loyal of the pair, who faces opposition from brother Samuel (Anthony B Jenkins). As food starts to dwindle (a dinner of fried bark bits is an undeniable low point) and tensions starts to rise, the fraught family dynamic is put to the test.

Provocatively disarranging its chronology, this gruesome shocker sports with misogyny but its technical brilliance is undeniable

Writer-director JT Mollner shuffles the narrative deck with this macabre, ingenious serial-killer horror whose chapters are shown out of linear order. Each storytelling card is dealt with insolent provocation, a swaggeringly unhelpful contribution to the issues of sexual politics that we see male and female arresting officers debate at the very end. It recalls the look of movies made four or five decades ago; shot on 35mm film by actor turned cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi, it is a grisly shocker sporting with misogyny and the final-girl trope. There’s something of Tobe Hooper her, with an eerie “split diopter” camera shot in the manner of Brian De Palma (showing a looming face in closeup and an equally focused figure way behind) and a terrified woman at the wheel of a 1978 Ford Pinto (the car featured in the 1983 Stephen King chiller Cujo).

We begin with some faux-historical background titles about a serial killer who went on a murderous spree across heartland America some years earlier; the killer’s nickname is cheekily withheld. Then we see a grim-faced guy (played by Kyle Gallner) armed with a shotgun, ruthlessly chasing down a terrified victim (Willa Fitzgerald); the hysterical woman seeks shelter at the woodland home of two old hippies played by Ed Begley Jr and Barbara Hershey.

Tobe Hooper’s gonzo massacre movie set the template for so many horror films that were to follow – but retains a uniquely disturbing power all of its own

In 1974, Tobe Hooper released this intimately upsetting and disturbing horror: a gonzo-macabre masterpiece inspired by the true story of serial killer Ed Gein , who was arrested in 1957 for grisly atrocities in remote Wisconsin. (Texas sounds better in the title.)

Hooper’s minimalist shocker appeared just 14 years after Hitchcock’s sleek Psycho, which was also indirectly inspired by Gein (via the novel by Robert Bloch). Psycho is a far more refined variation on the Gein theme, more like Edgar Allan Poe. In contrast, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre feels utterly different: gritty, gloomy, social-realist; a no-budget account of how the Gein horror might have felt to those who actually encountered it. It feels closer, in its down-home style, to something like Barbara Loden’s Wanda , from 1970. Compared with the screeching slashers and their jump scares which it inspired, this is almost … well, not restrained exactly but more controlled, less generically self-aware, readier to defer its shocks. It is pre-formulaic. The first bizarre murder happens with no stabbing musical score on the soundtrack, with the camera positioned unresponsively at the other end of the room.

With Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness hitting UK cinemas next week, we ask where it features in the pantheon of anthology masterpieces

The Meaning of Life is probably closer to the world of TV sketch comedy, rather than ensemble movie, but the Pythons’ gang-show film was a box office smash and won the Grand Prix in Cannes in 1983 (while Víctor Erice’s The South and Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy got zip). With crazy grandiloquence, it took us through all the big questions of existence, and the tragicomic limits of physical pleasure were finally exposed by the restaurant scene in which Mr Creosote explodes. Like John Landis’s portmanteau comedy The Kentucky Fried Movie from 1977, this was full of very chancy, confrontationally bad-taste material that wouldn’t get on television then or now.

The message is clear but subtle in Christopher Murray’s anti-colonial fantasy which features an emanantly watchful performance from Valentina Véliz Caileo

Just as the 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent reversed the terms of the Aguirre-style colonialist expedition picture, this Chilean-Mexican-German collaboration (produced by Pablo Larraín) is a kind of inverted horror film that similarly draws on South American history. Where in western horror, Indigenous or pagan elements usually become demonised return-of-the-repressed fodder, in Chilean director Christopher Murray’s unsettling fantasy they are a source of identity, power and even reverence.

Sorcery is a 19th-century radicalisation story. On the rain-lashed island of Chiloé, Indigenous teenager Rosa (Valentina Véliz Caileo) works as a servant for German farmers; speaking their language and practising their Christian religion, she is cut off from her Huilliche roots. When all the homesteaders’ sheep die simultaneously, with twine braids found on their corpses, her father refuses to give up any culprits and paterfamilias Stefan (Sebastian Hülk) unleashes his hounds on him with lethal results. Sent to live with Mateo (Daniel Antivilo), an elder involved with Indigenous secret society La Recta Provincia, the orphaned Rosa senses the potency of their rituals and realises they could bring her justice.

‘I had no interest in teen vampire films and turned it down five times. But Joel Schumacher promised I wouldn’t have to wear the makeup and teeth, or have to fly around. Of course, he lied’

Joel Schumacher, the director, wanted me in the movie right from the first time we met. But the script I read was nothing like the magical movie it would become after rewrites and production, and I had no interest in teenage vampire films. So I turned it down about five times – but Joel was determined. He spent weeks explaining his vision, a mix of horror and comedy, and eventually wore me down. We made a deal: he promised I wouldn’t have to wear the makeup, the teeth or have to fly around. Of course, he lied.