In one of those Hollywood coincidences you couldn’t make up, this year saw Jessica M. Thompson’s Dracula retelling The Invitation opened at the top of the domestic box office earlier in the summer.
While that isn’t strange in itself, it can’t be ignored that filmmaker Karyn Kusama was also working on a modern-day update on the iconic vampire story before it was canceled weeks before the start of shooting, with the project marking the Jennifer Body‘s director’s first foray into horror since her 2015 feature called… The Invitation. Spooky.
One of the most unsettling slow-burning psychological thrillers of the last decade, Logan Marshall-Green heads up the cast as Will, who accepts an invite to a dinner party being hosted by his ex and her new husband, marking the first time they’ve connected since they got divorced in the wake of their young son’s tragic accidental death.
Once there, though, Will becomes increasingly convinced that everyone else has attended the soiree for reasons that are a lot more mysterious and a great deal more sinister than they’re willing to let on, with Kusama ratcheting up the tension from scene to scene as it begins to reach almost unbearable levels by the time the revelations begin flying thick and fast.
Despite a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score of 89 percent signaling widespread acclaim, The Invitation was allowed to fly too far under the radar at first. Thankfully, it’s become a skin-crawling cult favorite in the years since, with an appreciation thread on Reddit the latest to celebrate one of the genre’s most unfairly overlooked nightmares. It even manages to stick an ambitious landing that could have fallen flat in lesser hands, but you’ll need to track it down to discover the jaw-dropping finale for yourself.