HBO Max is a treasure trove of horror. The streamer’s catalog of scary content features titles from across the decades, spanning from early cinema classics to modern, critical hits, and the 2010s hasn’t been neglected. HBO Max is the streaming home for some of the best titles from the decade, including The Witch, Get Out, and The Conjuring, and the streamer just added one of the last great horror movies of the 2010s.
As Lee Cronin prepares to head back to the big screen with The Mummy later this month, his directorial horror debut is now streaming on HBO Max. A24’s The Hole in the Ground joined the platform on April 1st. The 2019 supernatural horror film was a notable late-2010s entry to the genre and serves as a modern take on changeling folklore. The movie centers around Sarah O’Neill, a single mother who moves to the countryside to start over with her young son, Chris. When Chris begins to have unsettling behavioral changes after a strange encounter with a massive sinkhole in the woods, Sarah becomes convinced that Chris is not her real son and has been replaced by an ominous entity.
Lee Cronin’s The Hole in the Ground Is an Underappreciated Horror Gem
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A “superbly scary country horror” and “an unsettling bout of paranoia that makes for a memorable directorial debut” for Cronin is how The Guardian’s Mike McCahill and Cultured Vultures’ Jay Krieger described The Hole in the Ground. A perfect option for fans of quiet, character-driven horror like The Babadook or Hereditary, the movie utilizes horror to explore familial trauma and parental fear. Rather than relying on jump scares, the movie perfectly plays on the changeling myth to drive the tension, focusing on the strained, deteriorating mother-son relationship and Sarah’s increasing paranoia. Cronin also did a great job of using the lonely, Irish countryside and ominous sinkhole to create a suffocating, slow-burn atmosphere.
The movie had a limited theatrical release and ultimately went on down as a standout hidden gem of the era. Its high 83% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes made it one of the best horror films of the decade. The Hole in the Ground became the 12th-highest-rated horror movie on Rotten Tomatoes for the year of its release and even ranked No. 76 on the review aggregator site’s list of 100 best horror movies of the decade. Although the film was largely slept-on, it was an impressive, atmospheric debut for Cronin, who returned to the genre on the big screen just a few years later with Evil Dead Rise and is set to continue his work in horror with the upcoming The Mummy and Evil Dead Burn later this year. Cronin is also attached as executive produce Evil Dead Wrath.
Other Horror Movies Now on HBO Max
HBO Max is always a guaranteed great destination for horror, and the streamer has already added tons of additions to its lineup this April. On April 1st, the streamer stocked the Alien franchise alongside the original The Mummy movies. More horror titles are scheduled to roll out throughout the month, including the arrival of Alien: Romulus on April 3rd and the streaming debut of Bryan Fuller‘s Dust Bunny on April 17th.
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