Small-Town vs. Big-City Horror: The Best Scares in Every Setting

Depression-era Chicago has a killer among its population. Harper Curtis discovers a house that urges him to kill the Shining Girls, and he obeys, using the house’s time travel powers to track them down. Jumping between years, he finds his victims as girls and then skips forward to kill them. That is until one of the victims doesn’t die like she’s supposed to. Now, she wants to track him down, where or whenever he is.

Needing money to take care of his father, musician Tommy Tester takes an odd job: deliver a book to a woman. Had he known the book would put him in the sights of two policemen and a series of events that lead to a bigger evil, he may not have taken it. Navigating the book makes him the target of two policemen with a plot to awaken a sleeping evil. Now Tommy has to deal with 1920s Harlem with all of its racism and police brutality and find his place in a capitalistic society.

When American tourist Frank solicits Kenji’s services to introduce him to the underground nightlife of Tokoyo, Kenji thinks all is par for the course. But when a young girl is found murdered, Kenji sees Frank’s odd behavior in a whole new light.

After the daughter of a cult film director is found dead in a warehouse in Manhattan, investigative journalist Scott McGrath can’t accept the suicide ruling by authorities. McGrath digs deeper, finding both more tragedy in the family and a strange hidden world built around the director’s films.

A decade after she left her small North Carolina town and never looked back, Mira receives a wedding invitation from an old friend. Curious at the chance to see childhood friends again, Mira accepts but soon finds out it’s going to be held at a plantation. Flashbacks to a traumatic night in her childhood and the history of the house swirl together into one big, tense scare.

After most of the Blackwood family die in a freak poisoning, the town turns on the remaining members: Constance, Merricat, and Julian. When a previously unknown cousin shows up at the house with clear intentions to marry Constance and get access to their estate, the thinly veiled tranquility they’ve made for themselves shatters, and the townspeople aren’t happy to keep their distance for long.

After the loss of her mother, Quinn and her father relocate to Kettle Springs, a small town where they expect a quiet life to grieve and recollect themselves. Soon, though, Quinn buts up against a town obsessed with making “Kettle Springs great again,” the clown-faced town mascot Frendo turned sinister one night at a high school party. Now, Quinn’s back into survival mode with the help of a few new friends.

In the market for a fresh start, Marigold’s family makes the move from sunny California to a small Midwest town after her mom takes an artist’s residency in an old house there. Despite the strange smell permeating the house and the off-limits basement and the emptiness of the street, Marigold is determined to make this change a good thing. But when her stepsister starts seeing an imaginary friend, and Mari sees shadows, she wonders if the change isn’t so good this time around.