Five horror movies to stream now

By ERIK PIEPENBURG

This month’s terrors come from stalkers, a witch, a slimy creature — and low blood sugar.

‘Mia’

Writer-director Luis Ferrer has guts. Not the red and viscous kind you usually see in horror, but the kind it takes to make a deeply unsettling psychological thriller that embraces being small and speaks in silence and whispers, not screams.

In the nearly wordless opening stretch of “Mia,” we watch as Aaron (Shah Motia), a middle-aged drifter, nervously tools around small-town streets before tailing Brenda (Julie Lucido) and her teenage daughter, Emma (Emiliana Jasper), to the motel where they’re staying. Aaron soon abducts Emma, an attack that takes place on the margins of the frame, as do many other scenes in this disorienting and confined-feeling film.

Aaron thinks the girl is Mia, the daughter he’s been desperately searching for since she was kidnapped 12 years earlier. Emma thinks he’s crazy — until she starts to wonder if perhaps he’s right. Whose memory is right? I won’t say more because the surprises of this humanely observed and tenderly acted two-hander are best experienced cold. (Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video.)

‘The North Witch’

Director Bruce Wemple blends horror genres — isolation, survival, occult, folk and even found footage — to deliver a macabre tale of witchcraft set in the wilderness.

The story begins as five young women drive to the far-north Canadian Barren Lands to look for a mysterious cabin that supposedly disappeared decades ago. A storm ends up separating them, landing Madison (Anna Shields, Wemple’s writing partner) in a cabin that she thinks may be the haunted one.

There, she’s reunited with Talia (Kaitlyn Lunardi), who seems mostly unfazed by their fate, the first clue that something’s amiss. The second? Those stick figures that were fashioned by a witchy hand and hung in a window.

Wemple cranks up the dread and the body horror as days turn to weeks and the spell that Madison and Talia seem to be under turns darker. (The headbanging scene is a knockout, the amateur tracheotomy, less so.) The action stays at a boil over 80 brisk minutes, right to the nutso ending. (Stream it on Tubi.)

‘Drop’

My weekly Target ad tells me it’s Summerween and therefore time to stock up on cheap plastic decorative skulls before the October rush. The whole concept is dumb but fun, and exactly the same can be said for Christopher Landon’s darkly comedic action thriller.

Meghann Fahy gives a dandy performance (as she did on the recent Netflix dramedy “Sirens”) as Violet, a widowed mom who goes on a date with a handsome photographer, Henry (Brandon Sklenar), at a fancy restaurant atop a Chicago skyscraper. Their dinner goes off the rails as Violet gets mysterious texts and photo drops on her phone from a stranger who says he will kill her young son at home unless she murders her date.

As in his slasher comedy “Happy Death Day,” Landon finds the right balance between scary and silly. Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach’s script gets progressively more preposterous as Violet repeatedly excuses herself from the table to obey the dire commands on her phone. (Jeffery Self is a delight as a nervous-Nellie server.) The finale is eye-rolling, but if you’re at home pigging out on your Summerween candy, you probably won’t care. (Stream it on Peacock.)

‘Pins and Needles’

My mom is diabetic, so I’m familiar with how scary a sugar crash (or spike) can be for her and for me. As awful as that experience is, I’m not mad that writer-director James Villeneuve uses the threat of an insulin deficit as the gimmicky defining terror in his wily new thriller. (Should my mom see it? Absolutely not.)

The film follows what happens when a young graduate student named Max (a no-nonsense Chelsea Clark) and two friends get a flat tire near a remote modernist estate and seek help there. No sooner do the friendly homeowners get back than a shocking act of violence occurs as Max watches. The couple (the cartoonishly directed Ryan McDonald and Kate Corbett) run a depraved human harvesting enterprise out of their basement. What’s worse, they have the car with Max’s insulin in it.

Most of the taut 95 minutes of this film focus on the resourceful Max, who munches on a snack bar as she tiptoes down dark hallways and in the corners of the Frankenstein-like laboratory. Cat-and-mouse stuff can get old fast, but the script’s nifty twists make this a diverting watch. (Stream it on Tubi.)

‘Monster Island’

This “Creature From the Black Lagoon”-inspired movie reminded me of the old-school creature features I grew up watching on Saturday afternoon TV. Only this one’s not for kiddos.

Set during World War II, the film follows two prisoners, a Japanese soldier (Dean Fujioka) and a British prisoner of war (Callum Woodhouse), who wash up on an island. They’re barefoot, shackled and separated by language.

Also, they’re not alone. Living and dead soldiers dot the beach, but beyond the sand stalks something truly sinister: a slimy green Orang Ikan, a mythological sea beast that looks like the “Alien” alien mixed with the angry, hungry thing from “Humongous.”

Writer-director Mike Wiluan tries to deliver a message about enemies forced to work together to overcome a mutual foe that is far more sinister than anything they’ve witnessed on the battlefield. But all that gets muddied in a convoluted script and overshadowed by my main reasons to watch: Fujioka and Woodhouse’s intense performances, a killer creature costume (created by Allan B. Holt and Movie Monsters Inc.) and a doozy of a final showdown between man and monster. (Stream it on Shudder.)