“Camping always seems like more fun than it is,” filmmakers Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett said in a Q&A following a preview screening of their 2016 reboot of Blair Witch.
I think it’s something that a lot of us can relate to. It isn’t just camping, either. Plenty of summer road trips, family vacations, and other excursions sound like a blast until we’re mired in the minutiae, discomforts, and inconveniences that come with them.
And that’s just for a regular summer trip. For the hapless individuals in these movies, their summer vacations take a deeply unpleasant, even nightmarish turn—and not all of them will survive.
Modern filmgoers have gravitated again and again to the horrifying summer trip gone wrong at the center of Ari Aster’s Midsommar, and for those who can’t get enough of watching terrible vacations, here are 10 other movies that will absolutely fit the bill.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
When it comes to sun-soaked summer horror, it doesn’t get much more foundational than Tobe Hooper’s 1974 magnum opus. As five teens take a van trip through the scorching Texas heat, they run afoul of a family of cannibals.
It sounds like simplistic and even puerile stuff, but The Texas Chain Saw Massacre upended the way horror movies were made for a reason: it’s effective, haunting, portentous, and thematically dense, its central metaphors read as everything from a critique of capitalism to a screed in favor of vegetarianism.
It’s also just one of the most unnerving movies to ever simmer in the summer heat.
Rituals (1977)
In this underseen Canadian classic, five doctors on a wilderness getaway are stalked by an unseen assailant. Is their enemy human? Is it supernatural? Is it someone in their group? Whatever the answers are, they won’t come until blood has been shed, and a terrible toll has been taken in suffering.
Setting up elements of early slasher and folk horror, Rituals is a sunbaked endurance test that is thrilling and grueling and painfully human. The film stars Hal Holbrook, known to fans of horror and thriller pictures for his roles in Magnum Force, Creepshow, John Carpenter’s The Fog, and many others.
A Perfect Getaway (2009)
How bad could a Hawaiian vacation be? Well, that depends on if you run afoul of a pair of Starkweather-esque serial killers.
As three different couples try to enjoy a Hawaiian getaway, they learn that another couple has been slain on the island—and the dastardly deed was believed to be the work of two killers.
Who among them is guilty? It’s a movie filled with social anxiety and twists and turns, directed by David Twohy (Pitch Black, The Arrival) and with a star-studded cast including Steve Zahn, Milla Jovovich, Timothy Olyphant, Kiele Sanchez, and none other than Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth, in a pre-MCU role.
The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
Based in part on the legend of Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean, Wes Craven’s sophomore feature quickly became a horror film mainstay, and helped to secure Craven’s place in the pantheon of great horror directors. As the Carter family is traveling through the Nevada desert on a family trip to Las Vegas, they become stranded in the middle of nowhere, and find themselves the targets of a desert-dwelling clan of cannibals.
Far from a simple exploitation grind, however, the two families in The Hills Have Eyes hold up a mirror to one another, and showcase the failure of the nuclear family as a microcosm of the state.
Us (2019)
Family trips have rarely gone more apocalyptically wrong than in Jordan Peele’s sophomore horror film Us, which sees the Wilson family returning to their summer house near Santa Cruz, where Adelaide Wilson had a terrifying encounter when she was a little girl.
As the past comes back to haunt her, the unknown underbelly of modern society comes back to haunt everyone as red jumpsuited doppelgangers known as “Tethered” begin pouring up from hidden tunnels beneath the country, hungry for revenge for generations of exploitation and neglect at the hands of the surface-dwellers—even when we didn’t know about it.
Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)
Legendary Spanish director Narciso Ibanez Serrador (The House That Screamed) asks the titular question in this grueling tale of a vacationing couple who stumble upon a Mediterranean island that is peopled only by homicidal children.
Tired of the toll taken on them by the wars and pettiness of adults, the children of the island have taken drastic measures—and the couple will have to take equally drastic ones if they hope to survive their stay. It’s an early and particularly eerie evocation of the oft-repeated “killer children” theme later surveyed in such flicks as Children of the Corn—and also a reminder of how bad a summer vacation can go.
Wake in Fright (1971)
Sure, Wake in Fright is technically a Christmas movie, but Christmas falls in the middle of summer in Australia.
John Grant is a schoolteacher who has been exiled to a tiny one-room school in the middle of the Australian outback. He’s headed back home to Sydney for the holiday when he becomes stranded in a mining town affectionately called The Yabba by the locals.
While there, the gruff, violent, drunken men of The Yabba treat him as one of their own, and he may just find that he is his own worst enemy as he is pulled down into a maelstrom of degradation and self-doubt—one from which he might never surface.
The Ruins (2008)
Based on the novel by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Scott B. Smith (who received the nomination for his adaptation of his 1993 novel A Simple Plan), The Ruins follows a pair of vacationing couples in Mexico who find themselves trapped in some Mayan ruins with some particularly dangerous vines.
The film was met with controversy for its depiction of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, but it also combines body horror, grueling survival horror, plant horror, and plenty of overheated vibes into a potent cocktail about an absolute vacation from Hell.
And Soon the Darkness (1970)
British director Robert Fuest is known for less restrained fare than this, having helmed such over-the-top horror flicks as The Abominable Dr. Phibes and The Devil’s Rain.
Before he made either of those, however, he directed this icy yet sun-drenched thriller about two nurses who are taking a cycling holiday through rural France when one disappears and the other learns that the area they are traveling through has been the site of a notorious sexual assault and murder.
Now terrified for the fate of her companion, she begins an unnerving odyssey to try to find her—before she joins her, instead.
Eden Lake (2008)
An idyllic weekend getaway at the titular lake turns terrifying when a young couple (played by Kelly Reilly and Michael Fassbender) are stalked and tormented by anti-social youths in this scare pic debut by James Watkins (The Woman in Black, Speak No Evil).
It’s part of a cycle of films that have been called “hoodie horror,” taking aim at Britain’s youth culture and what conservative UK politicians called “Broken Britain,” leading many reviewers to criticize it for “arguing that the middle classes could no longer live alongside the quasi-bestial lower orders,” as Owen Jones put it in his 2011 book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class.
Feature Image: MoMA - Film Still from Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
