Pop quiz: What do you get when you mix the helpless dread of “Rosemary’s Baby,” ’80s-era satanic panic, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” winning an Oscar for best editing, and the ever-growing economic disparity between the richest 1% and the working class? The answer is just about any recent horror movie you can think of — and the one playing in the next theater over, too.
That may sound like an exaggeration, but if you head to the multiplex this week, you can catch a double-feature of “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” and “They Will Kill You,” two films so remarkably similar in tone, style and theme that they read like parodies of each other. Their formulas are simple: A woman unwittingly finds herself in an isolated environment filled with satanist cult members who want to kill her to fulfill a Faustian blood pact. She must escape their clutches — the fate of the world might even depend on it — but she can only do it with the power of winking humor and clever violence. Watch as the fluid camerawork makes her kills look nastier, and the preposterous script allows her to outwit her foes, even with the cards stacked against her at every turn. If Quentin Tarantino pastiche were a crime, these films would be hauled off to the clink. But I suppose someone’s got to take up Tarantino’s mantle while he’s busy devising new ways to build a film around gratuitous foot shots.
(Searchlight Pictures/Pief Weyman) Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton in “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come”
These aren’t kitchen-sink movies; they’re garbage disposal rejects, alloys composed of leftover scraps. And the viewers who are supposed to see themselves in these tough-as-nails characters deserve better.
Like so many horror trends, these gonzo cat-and-mouse games are a unique product of our time. Savage inhumanity is the new global currency, and while the world plunges further into war, the TikTok dance economy remains strong. It’s bleak, to put it mildly. How do you make a film scary when every waking day is scarier? Give the audience a stand-in for themselves, a proxy they can use to project themself into whatever horrific scenario is playing out on-screen, and imagine fighting back. “Ready or Not 2” and “They Will Kill You” supply their characters with almost inhuman agency and dexterity because they reflect a moment when the viewer desperately wishes they could have those things, too. We fantasize about resisting makeshift regimes, about tearing the satanist scoundrels who control the world a new one. But, more often than not, retribution isn’t an option. Helplessness is the flavor of the week, the month, the year. And if we can’t go to the movies to escape this overwhelming feeling of forced vulnerability, where else can we go?
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The problem isn’t that so many of these types of films have popped up over the last decade, as fascism rears its head stateside; the issue is that they offer nothing new while building on an already rickety pile of haphazard horror rip-offs. It’s far worse for a film to posture like it knows some grand truth — or pretend that it’s saying something bold when it’s not — than it is for a movie to admit that all it wants to be is fun. And that’s where films like “They Will Kill You” and “Ready or Not 2” become mired by the ambition necessitated by the modern moviegoer. These days, a horror film must also be a blistering allegory for real life, with plenty of subtextual significance for the thinking viewer to glom onto. Horror movies need to be scary but relevant. They have to be entertaining but dire. And they must seem intelligent without actually being enterprising enough to stand out from the crowd of near-identical films. These aren’t kitchen-sink movies; they’re garbage disposal rejects, alloys composed of leftover scraps. And the viewers who are supposed to see themselves in these tough-as-nails characters deserve better.
Oddly enough, the first “Ready or Not” film felt like it was striking out at something new. When it was released in 2019, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s movie slotted nicely alongside “Hustlers” and “Parasite,” all released in the same year and signaling a new guard of “eat the rich” filmmaking that could poke fun at the wealthy without taking itself too seriously. “Ready or Not” was a blast, and the ideal showcase for its star Samara Weaving, whose similar cat-and-mouse horror movie, “The Babysitter,” — also about a satanist cult, but formed by horny teenagers — flew under the radar just a couple of years prior. In “Ready or Not,” Weaving’s blushing bride-to-be, Grace, discovers that she’s marrying into a family of devil-worshippers who sold their souls for eternal wealth, and they must sacrifice her to keep the money rolling in. Some thrilling kills and generous splatter gore later, Grace comes out on top, using street smarts attained by growing up in foster care (of course) to battle her way through every last assailant. As a standalone film, it’s a succinct tale of determination, and a very fun way to spend a Friday night.
But this is 2026. Nothing stands alone anymore, and neither does Grace, who kicks off the sequel handcuffed to her sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), and is tasked with playing the game all over again with a new set of ultra-rich opponents. Naturally, the evil goes far deeper than anyone could’ve imagined, and the cabal of bloodthirsty billionaires has only multiplied — sound familiar? Grace and Faith must work together, using their namesake virtues to outsmart the scoundrels and stay alive, and to say it’s far less effective than it was seven years ago is an understatement. The formula still entertains, sure, but its bite has been blunted by the weight of copycats that came after the first installment. If “Ready or Not” appealed to viewers who felt like the world was stacked against them, “Ready or Not 2” should alienate the same crowd, who have been made easy financial marks by a film that’s by-and-large a beat-for-beat retread of the first.
(Warner Bros. Pictures) “They Will Kill You”
It’s unfortunate that “They Will Kill You” is landing in theaters alongside “Ready or Not 2,” as writer-director Kirill Sokolov’s film feels somewhat fresher than its thematic companion, ratcheting tension and crafting relatively compelling (if analogous) territory to explore. But the proximity of these two films only invites comparison. They’re both about surprisingly skilled women who learned to defend themselves in unfortunate circumstances (in this case, Zazie Beetz’s Asia, who just got out of prison), duking it out against satanists. All the more unlucky: both Asia and Grace are urgently trying to protect their sisters from falling into the cult’s grasp. Sokolov’s eye for visual flair brings some much-needed panache to this well-worn formula, but even his playful directorial spirit isn’t enough to shake the feeling that one has seen this film before. The characters’ fate is predestined by cat-and-mouse conventions, and there are no big surprises when watching the parts come together. “They Will Kill You” feels like helping my two-year-old niece put together a fairly simple, 12-piece puzzle, and watching her exclaim with delight before asking if we can assemble it again. Sooner or later, the final picture is going to lose its novelty.
The more films like this we get, the less effective they are. We know the world is run by a cabal made up of the rich and powerful. The mask is off. The shock is stock. Millions of people voted to see these shadowy figures’ ugly mugs on the news every single day.
There is, however, some innovation to be found in “Pretty Lethal,” Vicky Jewson’s Prime Video original that bucks conventions where “They Will Kill You” and “Ready or Not 2” fail. Jewson’s film is thankfully scrubbed of satanic panic, but still focuses on a damsel — or, in this case, damsels — in distress, attempting to escape the bizarre, clandestine ritual they’ve found themselves at the center of. When their bus breaks down on the way to a showcase, a troupe of ballerinas led by “Dance Moms” alum and one-time Sia protégée Maddie Ziegler becomes stranded in a remote hotel-bar-dungeon-arms factory outside Budapest. There, a wicked ex-dancer named Devora (Uma Thurman, with a delightfully off-kilter Russian accent) makes the ballerinas pawns in a longstanding rivalry with a mob boss who killed her ballet career.
(Amazon MGM Studios/Prime Video) “Pretty Lethal”
The story is completely absurd, filled with plot holes and characters as thin as a prima ballerina. Yet, “Pretty Lethal” is packed with run-don’t-walk folly that demands to be seen to be believed — if only to throw up your hands and say, “I guess!” The film may look a fair bit like its cinematic familiars, but there’s nothing in “They Will Kill You” or “Ready or Not 2” that’s as charmingly stupid as ballerinas putting box cutter blades in their pointe shoes and slitting their assailants’ throats by pirouetting to “Swan Lake.” It’s a cat-and-mouse movie with some initiative, and even if that drive ultimately goes nowhere, the film at least manages to make its characters’ strength under duress believable. Blessedly, these ballerinas didn’t learn their skills in prison or the foster system, and their tutus are not fodder for a satanic pyre.
While I’m reluctant to credit a film like “Pretty Lethal” with moving this exhausted horror subgenre away from its threadbare formula, it’s a twirl in the right direction, just as something like “Urban Legend” did in the ’90s, when “Scream” rip-offs were all the rage. Horror is filled with trend-hopping and mimicry — the genre itself holds a mirror to our cultural anxieties, replicating them with chilling, hyperbolic intensity. But just like the blip in time when “No Strings Attached” and “Friends with Benefits” attempted to revamp the romantic comedy for a new generation, and were bogged down by inevitable comparisons in the process, cinema is capable of giving us too much of a good thing. Watching women fight off the arms of the occult has a clock on it. The more films like this we get, the less effective they are. We know the world is run by a cabal made up of the rich and powerful. The mask is off. The shock is stock. Millions of people voted to see these shadowy figures’ ugly mugs on the news every single day. We’ve already been forced to figure out how to fight back, just to make each day bearable. Watching it play out all over again on screen is starting to feel less like a movie and more like a never-ending reality show.
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