Like Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, Richard Greenwood Jr.’s This Land hinges on a double-booked weekend rental property. Unlike Barbarian, This Land’s threat lives outside the home’s walls.

A year after losing their in-utero daughter to an assault, the mixed-race Owens spouses — a pragmatic, PTSD-afflicted nurse (Hostile Territory’s Natalie Whittle) and an ineffectual, NPR-addicted soy boy (Nazis at the Center of the Earth’s Adam Burch) — rent the Cortez Grove manor for the Fourth of July. They stay despite all the red flags: skinning shed out back, sink full of dirty dishes, blood seeping from the eyes of paintings in crooked picture frames, bowl of saltwater taffy in the living room …

But guess who’s also coming to dinner? Mr. and Mrs. Moss: a chaw-spittin’ (ptui!), flannel/camo-clad, deer-huntin’, deer-grillin’ redneck (John J. Pistone, whose part certainly would’ve gone to David Koechner under a more generous budget) and his Karen-esque wife (Mindy Montavon, #iKllr).

Having these mismatched peeps’ reservations all screwy is no accident. See, every four years, the townsfolk put on their best purple cloaks and have themselves a good ol’ fashioned blood sacrifice to honor “The Flayed One,” a misnomer for “corpse that looks like a human Slim Jim.” To the death!

What begins with pure cringe — a flashback of Whittle speaking in an unnatural manner to her belly’s unborn child — quickly becomes a moderately stimulating story of survival horror and satanic panic, spring-loaded with a couple of functional jump scares. It also makes hot-take statements on such triggering topics as our political divide, emotional trauma, economic inequality, gun control, abortion and — you betcha — race. Compared to like-minded, well-meaning indie thrillers of late, This Land’s makers comment on society without the hammer-slamming; it knows it doesn’t have the panache to pull off taking itself too seriously.

Lest you take This Land for a treatise, Greenwood’s first feature is exploitation first and foremost — so “most,” in fact, it contains the line, “According to the welcome book, it’s an Aztec death whistle.” (Plus, the Moss patriarch announces his teen daughter “done gone preggers.”) In other words, it’s aware of its limitations, so the third act leans hard toward delirium, especially with Garret Camilleri’s performance as the park ranger. That he stands on the opposite end of the tonal spectrum from Whittle’s fully grounded (prologue excepted) work? Eh, I had enough fun to forgive. —Rod Lott

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Cram finds college student Marc Lack (John DiMino) having to do just that, in order to write a paper overnight for class. Working on his laptop in the library, he’s having problems getting past page 2. His friends slowly abandon him as the night rolls toward quitting time.

When the building closes for the night, however, Marc is left inside. That’s a scary prospect for viewers who’ve put in long hours at any university library, as their grand architecture and maze-like aisles make them ideal locations for horror. So of course, strange things start to happen, beginning with Marc’s Word document and notebook pages suddenly becoming blank.

Clearly, he’s dreaming, and writer/director Abie Sidell keeps Cram on that realm for the film’s duration without outright acknowledgment. That’s a difficult line to toe for long, which may account for why Cram clocks in at a mere 45 minutes. Although Sidell gets away with teasing between fantasy and reality scene after scene, I didn’t like where the thing lands: at an overly chatty denouement between Marc and another person. Telling instead of showing, this protracted end halts the swift, quick-pivot pacing of everything before it.

With assured direction and acting, Cram finishes just above average, albeit graded on a curve. —Rod Lott

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If you’re making a folk horror movie, especially on a miniscule budget, the one thing you must do is take advantage of the United Kingdom landscapes. In the anthology Rewilding, his first effort as writer or director, Ric Rawlins does this in spades — all in a smidge under an hour, Millicent. From shores to forests to fields, Mother Nature deserves a co-starring credit in each of “three folk tales.”

Each story centers on its setting. After two people enter a seaside cave, inexplicably vanish, then turn up safely and say they saw the devil, an aging archeologist professor investigates. A woman working on a book of interesting trees is told about a man so obsessed with one, he perished there. And finally, for the Halloween edition of the newspaper, a journalist visits a remote village to witness its festival.

All the rage since Robert Eggers’ The Witch broke big in 2015, folk horror is arguably more popular now since its early-1970s heyday. Among its points of appeal are the deep-seated mysteries in its roots; although any go unresolved in part or whole, audiences are willing to sacrifice answers if they get a good jolt in return. The short-form film is the ideal delivery system for this sort of storytelling, and Rawlins succeeds by batting a fitting 0.666.

Naturally, its Midsommar-on-$2-a-day financial limitations mean a few performances resemble Ren Faire theatrics. So Rawlins powers through by leaning into his influences — Picnic at Hanging Rock to Eyes of Fire to The Wicker Man — and coming out the other side with no fewer than three shocking and disturbing images that are hard to shake. —Rod Lott

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