Five horror movies to stream now.

“Bone Lake”

By ERIK PIEPENBERG

This month’s picks include a disastrous vacation, a macabre homecoming and a witchy healing session.

‘Bone Lake’

Drugs, alcohol, sex toys, beefcake, physical seduction, emotional manipulation, taboo attractions and an arrow shot through a pair of testicles. Those are just some of the sinister pleasures in this nutty, darkly funny and very entertaining erotic thriller from director Mercedes Bryce Morgan and writer Joshua Friedlander.

Sage (Maddie Hasson) and her partner, Diego (Marco Pigossi), face a “Barbarian”-like conundrum: They’re booked at the same lakeside estate as Will (Alex Roe) and Cin (Andra Nechita), an equally attractive 30-something couple. They all agree to share the space, but I’m not giving anything away when I point out that one couple knows far more about their unexpected housemates than the other does — intel that fuels their descent into utter madness.

The film’s attempts at misdirection are see-through, but who cares when you have actors, especially the nimble Hasson, who make the obvious seem anything but. There’s a message here about surveillance and technology, and how elites are “trying to make us not trust each other,” as Sage puts it. That’s fine, but the real joy is in watching beautiful people sow and battle betrayal in nasty and gruesome ways. (Stream it on Netflix.)

‘Mother of Flies’

From their home in the Catskills, the Adams’ make singular horror movies about worlds and bodies gone mad, in a style that looks like an Iron Maiden album cover mixed with a psychopath’s Polaroids. Their latest supernatural drama, directed Toby Poser, her husband, John Adams, and their daughter Zelda, is perhaps their most opaque and personal film. Horror fans looking for a propulsive story might want to steer clear, but those interested in a tender but unsettling exploration of anguish should check this one out.

Poser plays Solveig, a reclusive witch who gets a visit from Jake and his college-age daughter, Mickey, in hopes that Solveig knows the right kind of witchcraft to cure Mickey’s terminal cancer. (Father and daughter are played by John and Zelda Adams.) But what’s with the talking corpse in the woods near Solveig’s home? And what does she mean when she mournfully tells Mickey, “Your curse is my gift?”

The story is sometimes frustratingly opaque, but overall the film is folk horror gold — a tragic tale of motherhood punctuated with stomach-churning viscera, ominous greenery and stillness. As they say about that other Addams Family, this family inhabits a world that’s mysterious and spooky and all together ooky. I’m all in. (Stream it on Shudder.)

‘Other’

David Moreau’s one-take apocalyptic nightmare, “Mads,” was one of my favorite horror movies of 2024. While his latest film doesn’t quite live up to that the nihilistic punch of “Mads,” it’s an engaging psychological thriller that won me over with a mix of creepy atmospherics, emotional heft and a terrific use of Veruca Salt’s 1994 song “Seether.”

The film opens as Alice (Olga Kurylenko) returns to her childhood home after the strange dark-of-night death of her estranged dark-spirited mother. What Alice doesn’t know is that she’s being watched on camera and tracked in the dark by a scurrying, growling something. Moreau intersperses surveillance footage with excerpts from VHS clips of Alice, a former teen beauty queen, being barked at by her domineering mother, a relationship that has Alice tightly in its grips.

The film loses steam when Moreau introduces a shrill YouTuber character. Still, this is a disturbing meditation on unrealistic beauty ideals and how past traumas, especially for young women with abusive mothers, can lay the foundation for punishing futures. (Stream it on Shudder.)

‘Death Name’

Like most Tubi originals, Réi’s supernatural drama is short (81 minutes) and the acting ranges from decent to cringy. But Réi and writer Regina Kim managed to elevate what could have been a Tubi clunker.

Filmed in elegant black-and-white, the disquieting opening scene finds a woman hiding in a closet as a mysterious figure in a hat inches her way. Typical horror stuff. But the setting is early 1950s Korea, and what happens next sets up the film’s frightening and heartbreaking exploration of modern Korean identity and the lasting legacies of the Korean War.

The story centers on Sophie Park (Amy Keum), a Korean American college student who has been told by her grandmother, who is struggling with early signs of dementia, never to speak her Korean name. When a friend speaks it, the sound seizes Sophie’s phone, a sign that her name carries sinister qualities. When Sophie brings home her new boyfriend, Jun (Kevin Woo), her grandmother becomes enraged, another sign that evil is afoot. Grandma’s anger, it turns out, is rooted in fear as much as love. (Stream it on Tubi.)

‘Psycho Therapy’

I’m a huge fan of Britt Lower, the Emmy Award-winning actress of the sci-fi drama “Severance.” She’s a master at understatement who can channel rage, fear, love and sympathy through a simple stare. Her nuanced approach to humor and pathos is the reason — the only reason, honestly — to see this comedic psychological thriller from writer-director Tolga Karacelik.

The film is about a man named Kollmick (Steve Buscemi), who introduces himself to Keane (John Magaro), a struggling novelist, by telling him he should write about a serial killer, a topic Kollmick knows well because he says he used to be one. (The film’s subtitle is “The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer.”) After Keane introduces Kollmick to his wife, Suzie (Lower), they begin having therapy sessions led by Kollmick, centered on the couple’s marriage and Keane’s career, both of which are disintegrating. Twists ensue.

Karacelik nails neither the dark nor the comedy. (A similar conceit didn’t work in “How to Be a Serial Killer.”) But Lower does, mesmerizingly. (Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.)

“Mother of Flies”