Asked of its audience in Sheitan’s opening shot, “You ready?” Having already seen the French film, I can answer for you: No, you are most assuredly not ready. You have no idea what’s in store for you, but the next title card may provide a solid hint: “Lord, don’t forgive them, for they know what they do.”

“They” are the gaggle of vaguely young and utterly obnoxious friends who spend the evening of Dec. 23 clubbing and tripping balls. Horniness gets the better of them, which must be why they agree to go the remote country home of the alluring Eve (Roxane Mesquida, Rubber), whom they just met. Initially, it appears the guys have only three items of concern: hangovers, goats blocking the dirt road and competing for Eve’s attention and affections, which is to say her vagina.

But then they meet Joseph, the home’s caretaker. Played by Vincent Cassel (Brotherhood of the Wolf), he possesses overly boisterous hospitality, yet casual racism, a shit-eating grin, a wavering dedication to hygiene and hairpin shifts in mood. His behavior immediately strikes the kids as off-center, to put it mildly. After that, director and co-writer Kim Chapiron (Smart Ass) makes sure to erase “mildly” from his film’s vocab. As Joseph’s true nature is revealed, things escalate on the thermometer of wrongness with the speed of a steroid-ridden rabbit. We would expect nothing less, considering the home’s living room is adjacent to a workshop filled floor-to-ceiling with plastic doll parts.

Sheitan (the title translates to “Satan”) is something of an eye-opener on multiple levels, starting with Cassel. Those of us used to seeing him as wiry and stature-short in his American films (e.g. Black Swan and Ocean’s Twelve) will be taken aback by how burly he appears here, yet his commanding presence isn’t all physical. Cassel embodies a master class on malevolence that penetrates the viewer’s psyche in order to fuck with it for the film’s increasingly anxious entirety, right down to a shocking subliminal frame that interrupts the roll of ending credits.

Ultimately more disturbing than scary, Sheitan toys with you with a calculated menace. Chapiron and company are shrewd enough to front-load the film with laughs so that you’re caught off-guard by the whiplash turns they take. The humor continues, but grows tonally to match the darkness of a rotting lung, making you question if all the sick bastards truly reside on one side of your TV screen. —Rod Lott

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Not to be confused with 1970’s Carnival of Blood is Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood. Although the two are similar in subject matter and equally penny-pinching, the Pennsylvania-lensed Malatesta is the only one to feature TV’s Fantasy Island sidekick Hervé Villechaize as Bobo the dwarf. In his initial scene, Villechaize delivers what I expect is fairly helpful exposition, yet he is unintelligible. And with that order of business out of the way …

Inventive and impressive, the regional indie begins with the curiously named Mr. Blood (Jerome Dempsey, Network) giving Mr. and Mrs. Norris the nickel tour of the 20-year-old amusement park he manages. With their teen daughter (one-credit pony Janine Carazo) cruising the midway, the Norrises are there under the pretense of working for the fleapit, but in actuality — sssssssssshhhhh! — are sniffing around for their son, who vanished after a visit.

From the outset, the title informs viewers that management is not exactly on the up-and-up, starting with Mr. Blood and extending all the way up the org chart to the owner, Malatesta (Daniel Dietrich, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead). This Manos-esque master serves as the man behind the curtain — the robed ringleader to the murderous hippie cannibals who lurk in the limestone caverns underneath the roller-coaster, the Tunnel of Love and other rundown attractions. Eager for flesh, the hungry freaks snatch the customers right out of their rides like so many crumbs of funnel cake. Explains Mr. Blood, not quite as an apology, “Nobody ever told them eating people was wrong.”

And if eating people is wrong, I don’t wanna be right! In his only feature credit as director, Christopher Speeth (DP on the über-obscure Video Wars) had the good fortune of built-in production value by shooting at Willow Grove’s Six Gun Territory, an actual amusement park just a few years away from extinction. With its behind-the-scenes warehouses and chintzy décor of Visqueen and bubble wrap, the near-decrepit place has a lack of polish that actually works to Malatesta’s benefit and fits right in line with Speeth’s long, handheld takes. Carnival funhouses already operate as nightmarish and hallucinatory — another extant gain for the flick.

Perhaps knowingly compensating for poor acting, Speeth squeezes extra practicality just by having his assemblage of cannibals milling in front of such classic silent horrors (read: public domain) as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera projected onto a wall behind them. As with the movie as a whole, the effect works — and better than you’d think. Ask your doctor if Malatesta is right for you. —Rod Lott

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From 2013, All Hallows’ Eve jelled as an anthology because of the unifying touch of Damien Leone. It’s not that he’s an infallible filmmaker (as 2015’s Frankenstein vs. the Mummy proves), but that he was the single creative force behind its segments. For the inevitable All Hallows’ Eve 2, however, Leone is credited only as a producer — one of 36 (!), in fact — and each of the eight stories contained within comes from a different director. Unlike the recent Tales of Halloween, they were not created for this movie; like the recent Zombieworld, many are even several years old.

In the original Eve’s wraparound, a babysitter found a mysterious VHS tape delivered to her; here, it’s a plump-lipped honey (Andrea Monier, Day of the Mummy) in lingerie and with a glass of merlot. Because of course she still owns a VCR, she watches it instead of the knife-wielding, pumpkin-masked trickster (Damien Monier, 2010’s Grim) standing outside her apartment. We see what she sees: one great short followed by seven that are not.

How curious it is to have unquestionably the strongest segment kick off the collection: “Jack Attack,” by Bryan Norton and Antonio Padovan, is the story of a boy, his babysitter and the pumpkin they carve, all ending in a wonderful twist flavored heavily with equal pinches of EC and WTF. Much of what follows is bound to disappoint viewers; at the same time, no subsequent portion is so bad to touch incompetence, no matter how low the budgets go. I’m more put off by the fact that half of them have nothing to do with Halloween. Notable among one of those (but not for the right reasons) is Elias Benavidez’s “A Boy’s Life,” which recalls The Babadook and Home Alone … and complete predictability. —Rod Lott

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Southbound represents a logical extension for the guys and gals behind the V/H/S series: another indie-horror anthology featuring work from the likes of Roxanne Benjamin and the Radio Silence collective, but the rare omnibus that dares to ditch the rickety wraparound device in favor of a seamless flow of one story into another. They number five in all, concluding with something of a mind-blower.

With filmmaker Larry Fessenden (2013’s Beneath) acting as a radio DJ — our ersatz Wolfman Jack, yet neither seen nor consulted — the movie opens on a stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere, as two guys specked with blood are on the run from … something, yet caught in a Möbius strip. Their maddening journey gives way to a riot grrrl band stranded, thanks to a blowout on their VW van, only to be “rescued” by a very odd couple.

Southbound peaks with the middle tale, “The Accident,” in which another unlucky motorist (Mather Zickel, I Love You, Man) attempts to save a downed pedestrian by performing emergency surgery, assisted only by instructions given to him over the phone. Written and directed by David Bruckner (2007’s The Signal), the scene builds from nervousness to an agonizing intensity. Anything following that would be at a disadvantage, but “Jailbreak” from Patrick Horvath (The Pact II) is a letdown either way — the only dud of the bunch. Not to worry, as the pleasure of terror quickly snaps back into place with a You’re Next-level home invasion, with a kick. And what a kick!

Admittedly, Southbound is not styled for mass-audience consumption. For starters, it refuses to dish out full details or satisfy your curiosity about every question it raises; it assumes you are smart enough to fill in the blanks, even if what unfolds before your eyes gives the finger to laws of nature. —Rod Lott

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I have a morbid fascination with the efforts of classic-era Hollywood directors who, post-Exorcist’s Oscar and box-office glory, tried their hand at modern horror, too. Perhaps they were always drawn to the genre; perhaps they just wanted to show the big studios that they, too, “could stay hip with the kids.” Whatever their reasoning, they pretty much sucked at it: Arthur Hiller’s Nightwing, John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy and, of course, John Boorman’s most infamous Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Exhibit D, fittingly: Phobia, courtesy of John Huston, the legendary director of certifiable, for-the-ages gems as The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Today, there’s good reason Phobia remains forgotten — or perhaps repressed.

Fresh off a four-year stint playing the top half of TV’s Starsky and Hutch, a sleepy and ineffectual Paul Michael Glaser stars as Dr. Peter Ross, a psychiatrist specializing in helping patients conquer their fears, albeit through highly controversial methods. For example, scared of snakes? Dr. Ross will make you handle one. Terrified of heights? Prepare to traverse the girders of an under-construction building like a trapeze wire. The doc’s problems begin when he takes an agoraphobe prone to severe panic attacks, plops her at the corner of a bustling city street and orders her to walk to his nearby home. When she arrives and he’s not there, a file cabinet goes kablooey, killing her instead of the intended target: Ross. Shit happens.

Over and over it happens — patient after patient, each while confronting his or her own fears — yet all at a ho-hum, humdrum pace. Although working from a story by genre vets Gary Sherman (Raw Meat) and Ronald Shusett (Alien), Huston has no grasp of suspense in this realm, as if it must be treated entirely different from the ways of film noir. (It doesn’t.) Was Huston desperate or just drunk? Either way, the misbegotten, near-worthless Phobia embodies one character’s line of disdainful dialogue: “This whole thing smells to high heaven!” Yep. —Rod Lott

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