Movies Like It Follows: Dread-Soaked Slow-Burn Horror

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.