Reuniting Call Me by Your Name pair Timothée Chalamet and director Luca Guadagnino, Bones and All is many things. It’s a horror movie. (It’s more specifically a cannibal horror movie.) It’s a road movie. It’s a coming-of-age tale. But perhaps most crucially, it’s an empathetic portrait of romance rooted in unsavoury origins.
Bones and All sees young Maren (Taylor Russell) embark on an American odyssey to track down her roots, after her latest cannibalistic outburst sees her finally abandoned by her father (André Holland) and left to fend for herself. Encountering other ‘eaters’ like herself, she forms a connection with drifter Lee (Timothée Chalamet), and the two fall in love while navigating their need for human flesh.
Your typical love story, then. If Bones and All has you salivating for more romances wrapped in bloodlust, here are seven horror gems (in chronological order) that have love or infatuation at their centre. Given the genre involved, it should be no surprise that few of these films end on a happy note. And since they are romances in horror movies, their inclusions here don’t necessarily reflect healthy relationships or advice to follow. i-D accepts no responsibility if you watch these films and then attempt to reanimate your deceased partner in a suspicious laboratory.
Subscribe to i-D NEWSFLASH. A weekly newsletter delivered to your inbox on Fridays.
1. The Fly (1986)
Known for its still incredible practical effects, David Cronenberg’s The Fly is also one of cinema’s great tragic romances – a Frankenstein tale where scientist and monster become one. Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) tests his own technological breakthrough in teleportation on himself, unaware that a fly got into the teleportation pod with him. Their DNA’s fused, Seth gradually transforms from man to giant insect, while his new love Veronica (Geena Davis) deals with his illness and the chance she’s also pregnant with a monster. If your heart’s not broken by the final scene, you may in fact be a monster yourself.
2. Return of the Living Dead III (1993)
The early section of this zombie horror is a little rough-going to get through, as is some questionable racial stereotyping of supporting characters later on. But at its centre is a compelling allegory concerning letting go of relationships at their natural endpoint, rather than dragging things on to only cause destruction. Having recently witnessed a top-secret military project to reanimate the dead, a grieving teenager breaks in and performs the same operation on his girlfriend after she perishes in a motorcycle crash. She’s revived but as her sentience deteriorates, her craving for brains only grows.
3. Memento Mori (1999)
Ghost story Memento Mori was one of the first mainstream Korean movies to depict lesbian characters, leading to controversy at the time when released domestically in South Korea. Told in a non-linear narrative, the wistful and moving film sees a young romance destroyed by repressive social structures, leading to the death of one girl, who then returns to haunt her high school.
Memento Mori is the second stand-alone film in the popular Whispering Corridors series. What connects them all are supernatural plot points, the setting of an all-girls high school and the presentation of taboo topics, such as the then-controversial subject of a gay teenage relationship.
4. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
A darkly comic story of enduring love among the undead, Jim Jarmusch’s film casts Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as vampire couple Adam and Eve, living apart in Detroit and Tangier at the film’s start but brought together again by Adam’s latest existential crisis. They’ve been blood-suckers for hundreds of years but avid consumers of culture for just as long, with one of their close vampire friends in fact being the 16th-century playwright Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt). A droll but genuinely romantic comedy, the film is a fun exploration of how to make a long-term relationship work after so many years, finding new things to talk about when you’ve already been around for multiple lifetimes.
5. Spring (2014)
Less fatalistic than The Fly, Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s Spring is another body horror movie for the hopeless romantic. After his mother dies, American Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) travels to Italy on a whim. Getting a farm job in a village near Mount Vesuvius, he ends up dating a beautiful genetics student, Louise (Nadia Hilker), who secretly harbours strange recurring wounds and a tendency to transform into various monstrosities. And yet Evan, believing he’s found his soulmate, carries on trying to be with her even after finding out about her condition, which she keeps in check with doses of a scientific formula. Funny, sexy and enchanting, Spring is something like if Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise was directed by H.P. Lovecraft.
6. Beast (2017)
For the most grounded option on this list (no fantastical entities), we have a British thriller that’s arguably only borderline eligible when it comes to genre classification. But unlike some serial killer stories, there’s enough explicit horror film-influenced atmosphere and imagery in director Michael Pearce’s debut feature to warrant a highlight here. Jessie Buckley plays Moll, a troubled young woman living in Jersey, stuck in an oppressive cycle with her strait-laced family. As a series of murders disrupt the island, Moll is drawn to rough, secretive outsider Pascal (Johnny Flynn), who becomes a suspect in the killings.
7. Thelma (2017)
Before The Worst Person in the World, director Joachim Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt gave us an altogether different portrait of a young woman finding herself. Often described as a Norwegian spin on Stephen King’s Carrie, this chilling thriller sees the title character (Eili Harboe) head to university in Oslo after an isolated countryside upbringing. Raised devoutly Christian, she struggles to make friends, until a rapport with fellow student Anja (Kaya Wilkins) forms. As things develop, it seems like Anja is actually in love with her. But are these feelings genuine or is Thelma influencing things with her subconscious psychokinetic powers? As repressed memories and emotions come to the fore, so too do violent lashings out.