Amazon Prime Video hosts some of the best mainstream movies, like The Naked Gun, A Minecraft Movie and Knives Out.
But the streamer also has plenty of hidden gems buried in its library, and sometimes they need a little extra push to get in front of the right eyes.
This March, Watch With Us thinks you should give a few hours of your time to stream some fantastic, underrated flicks.
Our top selection is The Blackcoat’s Daughter, the feature debut of Longlegs director Oz Perkins.
Read on to learn about all three of our picks.
‘The Blackcoat’s Daughter’ (2017)
Split across three timelines, The Blackcoat’s Daughter tells the story of three young women: Rose (Lucy Boynton), Joan (Emma Roberts) and Kat (Kiernan Shipka). When the students at a prestigious boarding school head home for the winter break, Rose is left behind, alongside fellow student Kat. While Rose secretly believes she’s pregnant — having lied to her parents about break dates to buy herself time — Kat begins exhibiting strange, disturbing behavior. Meanwhile, a recently escaped mental patient named Joan hitchhikes with an unsuspecting couple.
Before Oz Perkins terrified audiences with Longlegs, he proved a mastery at the art of slow-burning, atmospheric horror with The Blackcoat’s Daughter. A movie that feels like drifting through a waking fever dream, The Blackcoat’s Daughter is best enjoyed with as little information as possible about the plot when going in for the first time — but repeated viewings become even richer as you notice tiny details that you’d missed before.
‘Pulse’ (2001)
Tech anxiety becomes pure nightmare fuel in the fantastic J-horror Pulse, which developed a cult following in the years following its release. After the discovery of a college student’s suicide, several young people living in Tokyo begin to experience strange phenomena connected to their computers. More people disappear as it becomes clear that the internet is spreading a malevolent force. The three separate stories of Michi (Kumiko Asô), Ryosuke (Haruhiko Katô) and Harue (Koyuki) converge as they attempt to find the source of the evil force and stop it before it consumes the world.
Bereft of blood, gore and excessive special effects, Pulse instead draws its power through simple suggestion, through creating a mood of immense dread and fear as our protagonists grapple with a villain that cannot be caught. Pulse creates its terror through the limitless malignancy of the World Wide Web, at a time when movies like The Matrix and Hackers captured fears of Y2K. But unlike a Hollywood blockbuster, Pulse is pared down to a frightening degree — the simple act of looking at your computer in the dark may begin to unnerve you.
‘The Neon Demon’ (2016)
Following the mysterious deaths of her parents, aspiring model Jesse (Elle Fanning) moves to Los Angeles following her 16th birthday to achieve her dreams. Though she’s told by the head of her new agency that she has what it takes to be a star, she finds herself on the receiving end of barbs from the older women in her cohort, jealous of Jesse’s youth and beauty. While simultaneously fending off the creepy manager (Keanu Reeves) of the motel she’s staying at, Jesse makes her way up the ladder. But her personality begins changing in ways she hadn’t expected.
Nicolas Winding Refn doesn’t tend to make crowd pleasers, and unsurprisingly, The Neon Demon experienced a mixed reaction back in 2016. But the movie deserves the shooters that it has, who praise the film for its indulgence in guilty pleasure, in its obscene and provocative imagery and its transgressive aesthetic sensibilities. Ultimately, The Neon Demon is a bold and breathtaking journey into the devastating cultural obsession with beauty.
