The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)

Directed by John Sayles

AFTER HER MOTHER’S DEATH, ten-year-old Fiona comes to live with her grandparents in a small Irish fishing village. Fiona learns about the “strange day” when her baby brother, Jamie, washed out to sea in his cradle. She becomes entranced by the myth of the selkie, a seal who can turn into a human. When Fiona spies a naked little boy near the family’s former homestead on the abandoned Isle of Roan Inish, she wonders if long-lost Jamie is alive, being raised by the seals. Fiona’s grandmother calls the myth of the selkie “nonsense and superstition” and warns Fiona to stay away from that island of grief and sad memories. But her grandpa teaches her to love “the black rocks and the white waves and the hard sky above.” Set in the late 1940s, Sayles’s children’s movie (though accessible to all ages) is tender and beautifully shot. We’re treated to plenty of soulful, dark seal eyes, fiddle music, and Irish folklore in this story about the shifting space between land and sea, a place of magic and wonder. Ultimately, as Fiona’s pipe-smoking grandpa puts it, the “secret” of Roan Inish is this: “The sea gives and the sea takes away.”

—Neal Thompson

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Directed by Jack Arnold

IT’S A FISH. . . . IT’S A MAN. . .. It’s a gill-man? No, it’s the creature from the Black Lagoon, a prehistoric, amphibious humanoid that lurks in the depths of the Amazonian waters awaiting the arrival of a naive crew of scientists, marine biologists, and fame-seekers. An onslaught of killings ensue as the scientists debate staying to capture the creature or leaving while they still can. The creature, while menacing in nature and quite unsettling to look at, becomes fond of the only woman aboard the crew, Kay Lawrence, suggesting it might not be all evil, just possibly lonely. Playing off the universal fear of the unknown and vastness of the planet’s unexplored waters, the film, though not necessarily scary, is unnerving. Who knows, there might just be something mysterious waiting at the bottom of the oceans, where no one can see it coming—will it be friend or foe?

—Rachel Servidio

The Descent (2005)

Directed by Neil Marshall

NEIL MARSHALL’S 2005 horror triumph begins with six women chasing adventure in the Appalachian wilderness. Their thrill-seeking turns nightmarish when a cave collapse traps them underground. Long before anything monstrous appears, the film suffocates its audience with claustrophobic tension unfolding through narrow crawl spaces, collapsing rock, and the oppressive weight of silence. By the time the pale, eyeless crawlers emerge, dread has already taken hold, and escape feels almost impossible.

Yet the film’s real brilliance lies deeper. At its core, The Descent is about grief, betrayal, and the fragile bonds between friends when survival strips humanity bare. Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), still reeling from personal tragedy, undergoes her own descent, transforming from broken widow to feral survivor.

Relentless, brutal, and strangely poetic, The Descent lingers because its horror is twofold: the creatures in the cave and the darkness we discover inside ourselves.

—Darshi Shah

Jeepers Creepers (2001)

Directed by Victor Salva

YOU’VE LIKELY HEARD this warning before: Be careful when you go into the countryside. The people out there are dangerous. But what if the people are not predators but prey? In the world of Jeepers Creepers, there are other warnings: Don’t drive by the old church. Don’t call the cops. And never stop on your way home. If you do, you just might join countless other missing persons and meet the Creeper, an ancient humanoid being with gray, ridged skin, large batlike wings, the ability to regenerate by eating human body parts, and a cicada-like dormancy cycle leading it to awaken for only twenty-three days every twenty-three years. If you’re lucky, you’ll never meet it. If you’re unlucky, well, at least part of you will live forever in the Creeper’s ever expanding human skin–art installation. Who said ancient creatures can’t be artists in their spare time?

—Kim Schmidt

A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

Directed by Ava Duvernay

THOUGH CENTERED ON A FAMILY of groundbreaking physicists—who talk of fluid dynamics and quantum mechanics with ease Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time explores what exists beyond the scientifically observable. Dr. Alex Murry disappears while working on a project involving “tesseracts,” or wrinkles in time. His absence triggers an adventure for his eldest daughter, Meg, who is soon visited by an eccentric creature named Mrs. Whatsit. In the 2018 movie, Mrs. Whatsit transforms into a massive flying, leaflike creature. “What we wanted to do,” explained director Ava Duvernay, “was create something that hadn’t been seen before on-screen.” And it is true: save Reese Witherspoon’s shapely blue eyes, nothing like it has been seen on-screen; the creature’s form does, however, echo that of the humble lettuce sea slug, a gastropod that sounds repulsive but in reality mesmerizes as it glides through Caribbean waters.

“I hoped it was a dream,” Meg says, after Mrs. Whatsit’s first visit. Her mother replies, “No, Meg. Don’t hope it was a dream. I don’t understand it any more than you do, but one thing I’ve learned is that you don’t have to understand things for them to be.”

—Natalie Middleton