Film At Lincoln Center (aka FilmLinc) has regularly been putting together series focusing on films from all parts of the world, but one of its great series that got waylaid by COVID was the annual look at horror and genre films. “Scary Movie” is back after five years away, and if you’re a horror buff, you’ll want to check out the schedule carefully, since many of the movies playing it will only screen one time.

Sponsored by streamer Mubi and running from August 15 through 21, this year’s “Scary Movies XIII” (lucky #13!) begins on Wednesday with Alexander Ullom’s It Ends, which follows the journey of three friends on a car trip in a Jeep Cherokee down a road that never ends. As they go along, they encounter others, but they also get into philosophical questions about this endless journey and what it means, and whether they should just give up and stop driving. Ullom’s film features a quartet of young faces in Mitchell Cole, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, and Phinehas Yoon, who we’re likely to see more of… down the road.

Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy, which follows a loyal dog who moves into a rural home with its owner where it has to contend with paranormal forces, already got a high-profile premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in March. Starring New York horror legend, Larry Fessenden, this will play one night only on August 19, and it’s yet to find distribution, oddly, so it might be your only chance to see it for a while.Goo

A dog also plays a central role in Jérôme Boivin’s Baxter, a collaboration with French auteur Jacques Audiard, a regular at FilmLinc over the years. Adapted from Ken Greenhall’s 1977 novel, Hell Hound, it follows the film’s titular bull terrier as he’s shuffled from one owner to the next after being adapted from the kennel.

This year’s New York Asian Film Festival recently concluded up at FilmLinc, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be anything from Asia in this year’s Scary Movies. In fact, Kim Soo-jin’s Korean horror film Noise takes its cues from J-horror with its story of a number of conflicts within a residential building involving noises between floors. It’s something that many New Yorkers can probably relate to, because we’re all living on top of each other.

Filmmaker Bryan Bertino first got attention for writing and directing the 2008 home invasion movie, The Strangers, recently remade as a trilogy directed by Renny Harlin (Deep Blue Sea), but Bertino’s 2020 release, The Dark and the Wicked, never got a proper theatrical release due to COVID. Until now, was FilmLinc will screen the film about grown siblings (Marin Ireland, Michael Abbott Jr.) returning to their childhood home to care for their father. Abbott will be on hand for a QnA after the screening on Thursday, August 21. (UPDATE: I’ve been informed that Bertino and the ENTIRE cast and most of the few will be at this very special screening on the 21st.)

Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap, starring Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen, first premiered at Sundance back in January, and it’s another movie you’ll want to try to catch at “Scary Movies,” with no planned distribution release date as of yet. The film takes place in 1976, following Darcy and Daphne Davenport, a London sound engineer and experimental musician, as they move into a remote cabin in Wales and encounter a strange young child (Jade Croot) of unknown origin (or gender, for that matter) who says they live nearby and becomes a fixture in the couple’s life, while also drawing them out to the area “fairy circles.” Rabbit Trap is another movie that feels more like a fantasy-thriller than horror, but it also shows the variety in the films being screened this year.

Swiss-American filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe has a number of docs about horror classics under his belt, with Memory: The Origins of Alien and 78/52 (about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho shower scene). His new movie Chain Reactions is all about the legacy of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. This one is playing one time only on August 15.

In general, international cinema is also something that plays a large part in this series from Swedish filmmaker Mattias J.Skoglund’s The Home set in a memory care facility, to the French horror of Abel Ferry’s Squealers, Andrea Prochaska’s German psychological thriller Welcome Home Baby, and Diego Figuero’s A Yard of Jackals from Chile. The last three of those are all North American Premieres.

In other words, there’s a lot to discover at this year’s “Scary Movies XIII,” and as mentioned above, many of these movies won’t be hitting American theaters anytime soon, but you can get tickets for all or some of the above at “Scary Movies XIII.”