Jeremy Saulnier’s gripping last film, Green Room, took place almost entirely within a dingy room in a basement nazi bar. The director’s follow-up is set in the Alaskan wilderness, but despite the wide open space, is somehow no less terrifyingly claustrophobic. Hold the Dark stars Riley Keough as a young mother living in a remote village with her six-year-old son, while the two await the return of Keough’s on-screen war hero husband, played by perennial sexy vampire Alexander Skarsgård. Things take a turn for the downright traumatizing — for both the characters and the audience — when Keogh’s son disappears, and a wolf hunter (Jeffrey Wright) is hired to investigate the disappearance. As we soon learn, Keough’s kid isn’t the first person to missing in the icy wilderness, and the wolves might not be entirely to blame, unless you count town locals in creepy masks as part of the canis lupus family.
Hold the Dark is no doubt one of the spookiest films coming to Netflix this fall, but it’s not the only one giving new meaning to the term “Netflix and Chill.” One of the streaming juggernaut’s most exciting recent announcements includes an entire “sophisticated horror” series directed by Guillermo del Toro. At the end of last year, Netflix dropped a spine-tingling German crime series called Dark, which was, you guessed it, very dark. Consider leaving the lights on when you crawl under the covers to watch Saulnier’s equally shadowy wolf movie on September 28.