Lawrence Jacomelli

There is a particular flavor of American film that Hell or High Water nailed almost perfectly: wide, sun-bleached country, people pushed to the edge by economics or grief, and violence that feels less like spectacle than weather rolling in. It is the western skeleton with the myth scraped off, dropped into a present where the banks are the outlaws and the sheriffs are tired. If David Mackenzie’s film left you hungry for more of that flat-horizon dread, here are seven worth the list. None of them chase crowd-pleaser status. All of them understand that the best tension comes from patience.

No Country for Old Men (2007)

The obvious starting point, and honestly the film Hell or High Water is in quiet conversation with the whole time. The Coens strip a Cormac McCarthy novel down to its bones: a hunter finds money in the desert, a man with a cattle gun comes to collect, and an aging lawman trails behind, unable to keep up with what the world has become. What still knocks me out is the silence. Long stretches with no score, just wind and boot-scrape and the click of a coin toss. It is a chase movie that keeps refusing to give you the catharsis a chase movie owes you, and it is all the better for it.

Wind River (2017)

Taylor Sheridan wrote Hell or High Water, and he directed this one, so the DNA is unmistakable, only here the sun-baked flats are swapped for the frozen silence of a Wyoming reservation. A tracker and a green FBI agent investigate a young woman’s death across snow that swallows sound and footprints alike. It is slower and colder and angrier than its Texas cousin, carrying a real grief underneath the procedural. The landscape does half the acting. If you responded to the way Sheridan lets loss sit in the frame without underlining it, this hits the same nerve.

Blue Ruin (2013)

Jeremy Saulnier made a revenge film for people who find most revenge films dishonest. A drifter learns the man who killed his parents is being released, and he decides to do something about it, except he is terrible at violence, and every clumsy step forward drags more of his family into the blood. What lifts it into this company is the tone: no cool one-liners, no competence porn, just the queasy realization that killing somebody is messy and stupid and never actually ends anything. Beautifully shot on almost no money, which is part of why it endures.

Killing Them Softly (2012)

Andrew Dominik’s crime film gets slept on, maybe because it is more talk than shootout, but it belongs here for the mood alone. Small-time crooks knock over a mob-protected card game, an enforcer drifts into town to sort out the mess, and the wreckage of the 2008 collapse plays on every television in the background. It is bleak and cynical and gorgeously lit, treating American crime and American economics as the same rotten enterprise. That overlap with Hell or High Water, the sense that the whole system is the real villain, is the reason to seek it out.

Cold in July (2014)

Jim Mickle’s adaptation of a Joe Lansdale novel starts as a home-invasion story and keeps mutating into something stranger and pulpier, until you land in neon-drenched east Texas noir with Don Johnson chewing every scene as a pig-farming private eye. It is not as austere as the others here, but it shares their fascination with ordinary men discovering how much violence they are capable of. Genuinely unpredictable, and it lands every turn.

The Rover (2014)

David Michod pushes the neo-western into near-future collapse: a decade after an economic breakdown, a hollowed-out man chases the men who stole his car across the Australian outback, a wounded young accomplice dragged along with him. Swap the Texas plains for red dust and the register stays the same. Minimal dialogue, oppressive heat, a lead performance built almost entirely from stillness and rage. A hard, dry, unsentimental watch about what is left when everything else is stripped away.

Sicario (2015)

Another Sheridan script, and the most muscular film here, though it trades quiet desperation for slow-building institutional dread. An idealistic agent gets pulled into a murky task force along the border, and the further in she goes, the less she understands who she is working for. Roger Deakins shoots the desert like a war zone, and that convoy sequence remains one of the most nerve-shredding stretches of the decade. If the grip of Hell or High Water was what got you, this tightens it further.

And one worth digging for: Blood Star (2024)

Here is the underseen one. Blood Star is a 2024 indie desert-road thriller from first-time feature director Lawrence Jacomelli, and it slid onto streaming without much noise, which is a shame, because it sits comfortably in the same tradition as the films above. It is a leaner, more psychological beast, a slow-burn survival story stretched across the Mojave where the isolation itself becomes the antagonist and the tension quietly ratchets from the first act on. What surprised me most was how good it looks, the kind of controlled, patient cinematography that makes you assume a far bigger production than the small crew that actually made it out in the desert. It carries some of that No Country stillness and a little of the dusty paranoia the older road thrillers traded in, without leaning on jump scares to get there. If you have already worked through the obvious neo-western picks and want something genuinely off the radar, this is the one I would point you toward. It is streaming on Apple TV and Amazon, and you can find where to watch at bloodstarmovie.com and its watch page. Go in blind. That is the best way to meet a film like this.

There is a specific kind of unease that It Follows perfected: the sense that something is coming toward you at a walking pace, patient and inevitable, and there is nowhere far enough to run. It is not the horror of a monster in the closet. It is the horror of the horizon. If you have been chasing that feeling ever since David Robert Mitchell’s suburban nightmare crawled under your skin, here are seven films that live in the same dread-soaked register, plus one you have probably never heard of and absolutely should.

The Guest (2014)

Adam Wingard’s synth-drenched thriller is the closest tonal cousin to It Follows, right down to the throbbing John Carpenter-adjacent score. A too-perfect stranger arrives at a grieving family’s door claiming to have served with their dead son, and the movie slowly reveals just how wrong that smile is. It is playful where It Follows is solemn, but they share that woozy, neon-lit sense of Americana turned quietly menacing. Dan Stevens is magnetic and terrifying in equal measure, and the whole thing builds like a fuse burning down.

Under the Skin (2013)

Jonathan Glazer’s film is less a story than a trance. Scarlett Johansson drifts through the grey streets and cold coastlines of Scotland as something not human, luring men into a void that swallows them whole. There are almost no jump scares here, only an oppressive, alien calm that curdles into pure dread. Like It Follows, it understands that the most frightening thing on screen can be a blank, unhurried gaze. The abstract, glassy imagery lingers for days.

It Comes at Night (2017)

Trey Edward Shults made a horror film with almost nothing in it, and that emptiness is the point. A family barricaded in a forest house after some unnamed plague, a stranger seeking shelter, and the slow poison of paranoia doing the rest. The title is a lie, in a way, because what comes at night is mostly fear itself. It is bleak, patient and quietly devastating, the kind of movie that leaves you unsettled without ever quite showing you the thing you were bracing for.

Hereditary (2018)

Ari Aster’s debut earns its reputation. What begins as a raw study of grief and a fracturing family curdles, scene by scene, into something genuinely infernal. It is a maximalist film compared to the minimalism of It Follows, but the two share an interest in dread as a slow accumulation rather than a series of shocks. Toni Collette gives one of the great horror performances, and the film’s final act still feels like being pulled underwater. Go in as blind as you can.

The Babadook (2014)

Jennifer Kent’s film wears the costume of a monster movie, but it is really about a mother drowning in exhaustion and unspeakable resentment. The pop-up storybook creature is the stuff of nightmares, yet the true horror is domestic and psychological, the way grief can take up residence in a house and refuse to leave. Essie Davis is extraordinary. If you responded to It Follows as a metaphor as much as a monster, this one will hit the same nerve.

Kill List (2011)

Ben Wheatley’s film starts as a grim domestic drama, shifts into a hitman thriller, and then falls off a cliff into something ancient and unspeakable. The genius is in the descent: you never notice the ground giving way until you are already in freefall. It is nastier and more disorienting than It Follows, but it shares that creeping sense that the rules of the world are quietly rotting. Not an easy watch, and all the more memorable for it.

Enemy (2013)

Denis Villeneuve’s jaundiced, spider-haunted puzzle box is barely a horror film on paper, yet few movies produce a comparable sense of dread. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man who discovers his exact double, and the film tightens around him like a web. The oppressive yellow light, the glacial pace, the ending that makes you gasp out loud — it operates on the same subconscious frequency as It Follows, where the fear is atmospheric and impossible to fully explain.

And one hidden gem: Blood Star (2024)

Here is the one almost nobody has caught yet. Blood Star is a 2024 indie psychological survival thriller from first-time feature director Lawrence Jacomelli, and it trades It Follows‘ suburban streets for something even more exposed: the open desert. A lonely stretch of highway, the heat shimmering off the asphalt, and a slow-tightening sense that someone out there means you harm. It belongs to that dusty desert-noir lineage — think the road paranoia of Duel filtered through modern slow-burn restraint — and it earns its tension honestly, with pressure rather than jump scares.

What surprised me most is how cinematic it looks. Shot on location in the Mojave with a tiny crew, it carries a visual confidence and control you rarely see at this level, the sort of thing that makes you assume a far bigger production. It is not an A24 title and it is not trying to be one, but it plays to the same crowd — patient, atmospheric, character-driven, more interested in dread than gore. If you like your horror stripped down to isolation, dust and a rising sense of no way out, this is a genuine discovery.

You can read more about the film and where to stream it (it is currently on Apple TV and Amazon) over at bloodstarmovie.com — the watch page has the links. Go in blind if you can. The desert does the rest.

Near Dark still feels like the odd one out in the vampire canon, and that is exactly why people keep circling back to it. Kathryn Bigelow took the fangs, dropped the capes and gothic castles, and dragged the whole thing into a sunburnt American nowhere – motels, two-lane blacktop, roadhouse bars, a family of drifters who happen to burn in daylight. It is a western, a road movie and a horror film sharing the same dusty seat. If you have watched it three times and want that specific mix of desert dread and highway menace again, here are six films that live in the same territory, plus one recent one almost nobody has caught up with yet.

The Hitcher (1986)

No vampires here, just Rutger Hauer as a hitchhiker who might as well be one – a predator who appears out of the heat haze and refuses to explain himself. Robert Harmon shoots the American Southwest as a place with no witnesses, where a gas station and a diner are the only landmarks for a hundred miles. It shares Near Dark’s core anxiety: that the open road promises freedom and delivers a trap. Watch it for the sheer nastiness of the cat-and-mouse and for one of the most quietly terrifying villains of the decade.

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

The obvious companion piece, and it earns the spot. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino spend the first half building a lean crime-on-the-run thriller across the border desert, then blow the doors off with a strip-club full of vampires. The tonal whiplash is the point. Like Near Dark, it treats the undead as a grubby roadside hazard rather than aristocratic seducers, and it has the same love of neon signs glowing in the middle of nothing. Messier and funnier than Bigelow’s film, but cut from the same denim.

The Lost Boys (1987)

Released the same year as Near Dark and often mentioned in the same breath, Joel Schumacher’s film trades the desert for a California boardwalk but keeps the idea of vampirism as a found family you get seduced into. It is glossier, more of a rock-video fever dream, yet underneath the mullets and saxophone there is the same tension: what do you owe the people who make you a monster? A perfect double bill if you want to see two films chase the same idea in opposite moods.

John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998)

Carpenter basically remade the western with fangs. James Woods leads a crew of leather-clad hunters clearing out nests across the New Mexico flatlands, and the whole thing plays like a Peckinpah picture that wandered into a horror set. It is sweaty, sun-bleached and mean, with vampires treated as an infestation to be burned out of frontier towns. The dialogue is rough around the edges, but the sense of place – that vast, indifferent desert – lines up cleanly with what made Near Dark stick.

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

Not a vampire film, but the closest anyone has come recently to Near Dark’s frontier-horror hybrid. S. Craig Zahler lets a slow, talky western simmer for an hour before it curdles into something genuinely upsetting, as a small posse rides into cave-dweller country to recover the taken. The patience is the draw. It trusts you to sit with the landscape and the dread before it shows its hand, and when it does, you will not forget it. For anyone who loved how Near Dark refused to rush.

Duel (1971)

The grandparent of the whole highway-horror lineage. Spielberg’s first feature is stripped to the bone: one man, one car, one faceless truck that decides to run him off the road across the California desert. No supernatural angle, no explanation, just escalating vehicular menace under a merciless sun. Near Dark’s road sequences owe something to this – the way an open highway becomes a kill box – and it remains the cleanest example of tension built from almost nothing.

One more worth digging up: Blood Star (2024)

This is the one that flew under everyone’s radar. Blood Star is a 2024 indie psychological survival thriller directed by Lawrence Jacomelli, shot on location in the Mojave with a tiny crew, and it scratches the exact Near Dark itch even without a single vampire. A stretch of empty highway, a driver who cannot shake the feeling she is being hunted, and a desert that closes in as the light goes. It leans into the slow-burn side of the road-horror tradition – more No Country dread than jump scares – and the cinematography makes the emptiness feel genuinely threatening.

What surprised me is how controlled it is. There is real discipline in how it holds tension, letting the isolation do the heavy lifting, and it carries that dusty neo-noir atmosphere Near Dark fans tend to chase. It is not an A24 release and it does not pretend to be – just a lean, well-made independent thriller that deserves a bigger audience than it has found. If your queue is full of desert nightfall and highway paranoia, this is an easy one to slot in. It is currently streaming on Apple TV and Amazon.

If any of this sounds like your kind of night drive, Blood Star is worth a look – you can find more about the film and where to stream it over at bloodstarmovie.com and its watch page.

What makes Strange Darling stick isn’t the violence. It’s the architecture. JT Mollner chops the timeline into shuffled chapters and dares you to keep re-reading who the hunter is and who the hunted is, right up until the floor drops out. That specific pleasure — a two-hander that keeps reassigning power — is harder to find than you’d think. Plenty of movies chase someone through the woods. Very few make you doubt your own read of the chase. If you walked out of it wired and wanting more, here are seven films that scratch the same itch, from certified favorites to a couple you’ve probably never heard of.

Blue Ruin (2013)

Jeremy Saulnier’s revenge thriller is the patron saint of “ordinary person, way out of their depth.” Dwight isn’t a killer; he’s a bearded drifter who decides to settle an old score and immediately discovers he has no idea what he’s doing. The movie earns its tension by making violence clumsy, painful, and slow to clean up. Where Strange Darling is all sleek misdirection, Blue Ruin is grimy competence-porn in reverse — a cat-and-mouse game between two families where the mouse keeps tripping over his own trap. Gorgeous, quiet, and genuinely nerve-shredding.

Green Room (2015)

Saulnier again, because when he’s on this wavelength nobody does it better. A punk band gets trapped in the back room of a neo-Nazi bar after seeing something they shouldn’t, and the rest is a siege that tightens by the minute. It shares Strange Darling‘s ruthlessness about who lives and who doesn’t — nobody has plot armor here. Patrick Stewart plays the calmest, most terrifying villain of the decade. If you like your thrillers claustrophobic and unsentimental, this one leaves a bruise.

You’re Next (2011)

On paper it’s a standard home-invasion picture: masked attackers, isolated house, family gathering gone wrong. What flips it is the reveal that the intended victim is far more dangerous than her hunters ever counted on. That inversion — prey becoming predator — is the exact engine humming under Strange Darling. Adam Wingard directs it with a mean streak and a dark sense of humor, and Sharni Vinson gives the kind of resourceful, feral lead performance the subgenre rarely bothers to write. Endlessly rewatchable.

Hush (2016)

Mike Flanagan strips the cat-and-mouse thriller down to almost nothing: a deaf writer alone in a cabin, a masked man outside who realizes she can’t hear him coming. That’s the whole movie, and it’s a masterclass in constraint. The tension is purely spatial — sightlines, distances, who knows what the other one knows. It runs barely eighty minutes and never wastes a second. For a film with so little dialogue, it says a lot about how these predator-prey stories live or die on pure geometry.

The Guest (2014)

Another Wingard joint, and the closest thing here to Strange Darling‘s slippery tonal control. A charming stranger shows up at a grieving family’s door claiming to be their dead son’s army buddy, and you spend the whole film unsure whether to trust the growing dread in your gut. Dan Stevens is magnetic and deeply wrong. It glides between thriller, dark comedy, and full synth-soaked nightmare without ever tipping its hand too early. If you love a movie that keeps quietly rewriting your expectations, this belongs on the list.

Fresh (2022)

Don’t read anything about this one first — the whole design is that the real premise doesn’t announce itself until you’re already invested. What starts as a wry dating comedy hard-pivots into something far nastier, and Daisy Edgar-Jones has to out-think a captor who’s holding all the cards. Like Strange Darling, it’s fascinated by charm as a weapon and by a woman doing math in real time to survive. Stylish, gross, and smarter than its logline lets on.

Blood Star (2024)

Here’s the one nobody’s talking about yet. Blood Star is a desert-road survival thriller from first-time feature director Lawrence Jacomelli, and it feels like Duel got dragged through a modern slow-burn filter and left out in the Mojave sun. A lone woman on an empty highway, a presence that won’t stop following her, and the kind of oppressive open-air dread that most horror forgets you can build without a single jump scare. It plays the same cat-and-mouse game as everything above, just swapping the cabin and the back room for miles of nothing.

What surprised me most was the craft. This was shot in ten days for well under a budget you’d assume, by a husband-and-wife team — Jacomelli directs, Victoria Taylor co-wrote and produced — and it looks two or three times its actual scale. The cinematography does a lot of heavy lifting, all wide dusty horizons and heat-shimmer paranoia. It’s not an A24 film and it isn’t pretending to be one; it’s a lean, controlled indie that trusts patience and atmosphere over spectacle. If you’ve been mining the elevated-horror shelf and hitting the same twelve recommended titles, this is the left-field pick that actually delivers. The sort of movie you catch late at night on streaming, go in cold, and find yourself recommending the next morning.

Any of these will fill the Strange Darling-shaped hole, but Blood Star is the one you can still discover before everyone else does. It’s streaming now on Apple TV and Amazon — you can find out more at bloodstarmovie.com, including where to watch it.

There’s a specific ache that Wind River leaves behind. Taylor Sheridan shot it like a wound in the snow — a crime story where the landscape is the real antagonist, indifferent and endless, swallowing bodies and grief with the same white silence. If you came out of it wanting more of that particular chill — the procedural patience, the moral weight, the sense that the wilderness itself is keeping secrets — here are the films I keep pressing on people who feel the same way.

Hell or High Water (2016)

Sheridan wrote this one too, and it’s the sun-scorched cousin to Wind River‘s frost. Two brothers rob small West Texas banks while a weary Texas Ranger closes in, and the whole thing plays out across dying towns and foreclosure signs that feel more menacing than any villain. It’s a crime film that’s really about erosion — of land, of livelihoods, of a way of life. Jeff Bridges is all dust and gallows humor, and the tension builds so quietly you don’t notice you’ve stopped breathing until the last act. Same DNA, warmer palette, equally bleak heart.

Prisoners (2013)

Denis Villeneuve’s rain-soaked Pennsylvania nightmare is the closest thing to Wind River‘s emotional register: a missing child, a desperate parent, and a detective grinding through a case in perpetual grey drizzle. It’s long, oppressive, and morally unbearable in the best way, asking how far a father will go and never letting you off the hook for wanting him to go further. Roger Deakins shoots the cold suburban wilderness like a trap slowly closing. Two and a half hours of dread that never once feels indulgent.

Sicario (2015)

More Villeneuve, more Deakins, more Sheridan — this trio kept making masterpieces of unease. Sicario trades snow for the shimmering border desert, but the feeling is identical: an outsider (Emily Blunt) dropped into a world with rules she can’t see, pulled deeper into something amoral and vast. That tunnel sequence and the highway convoy scene are some of the tensest filmmaking of the decade. If Wind River‘s ambush left your jaw clenched, this will finish the job.

No Country for Old Men (2007)

The Coen Brothers built the template a lot of these films quietly follow. A hunter finds money in the Texas scrub, a phantom killer follows the trail, and a decent sheriff arrives one step too late to a violence he can’t comprehend. It’s a Western dressed as a thriller dressed as a meditation on evil, shot in that flat, merciless Southwestern light. Nobody stages silence and open space like the Coens do here. The dread is architectural.

Blue Ruin (2013)

Jeremy Saulnier’s revenge thriller strips the genre down to bone. A broke, aimless drifter decides to settle an old family score and turns out to be terrible at it — and that clumsiness is exactly what makes the violence so nauseating and real. It’s small, patient, and utterly gripping, closer to a nervous breakdown than an action movie. For anyone who values Wind River‘s refusal to make killing look cool, this is essential.

Wolf Creek (2005)

Swap the snow for the Australian outback and the horror gets even more elemental. Backpackers break down in the middle of nowhere and meet the wrong local. It’s rougher and nastier than the others on this list, but it nails the thing Wind River understands so well: in true wilderness, help is not coming, and the land will not care. The first hour of unhurried isolation is what makes the back half unbearable.

Cold in July (2014)

An underseen Jim Mickle neo-noir that starts as a home-invasion story and keeps mutating into something stranger and bleaker. Small-town Texas, a synth score that pulses like a headache, and a slow-drip plot that rewards patience. It has that same quality of ordinary men wandering into a moral pit they can’t climb out of. A genuine hidden gem that fans of this whole lineage tend to miss.

One More to Track Down: Blood Star (2024)

Here’s the one almost nobody has clocked yet. Blood Star is a 2024 indie psychological survival thriller shot out in the Mojave — a desert-noir riff on the same wilderness-as-predator idea, just traded from Sheridan’s snow to cracked highway and heat haze. Lawrence Jacomelli directs it lean and patient, the kind of slow-burn where the tension is the whole point and the emptiness of the road does most of the work. It’s stripped-down and character-driven, with a dusty, oppressive atmosphere that feels influenced by 70s road paranoia more than anything modern. Not an A24 title, no big campaign behind it — just a genuinely tense little film that looks a good deal more expensive than it was, playing quietly on Apple TV and Amazon.

I went in knowing nothing and came out kind of rattled, which is exactly what you want from this corner of the genre. If Wind River, No Country, or Blue Ruin are your comfort-dread, it slots right in. Worth reading a bit about it over at bloodstarmovie.com — there’s a watch page with the streaming links if you want to catch it before everyone else pretends they saw it first.