13 Movies Like The Wailing

The closest thing to a Wailing successor Korea has made since. A shaman, a geomancer, and an undertaker take on a wealthy family's cursed grave and unearth something that should have stayed buried. Same shamanic ritual, same escalating dread, same sense that the people fighting the evil barely understand it.

The only film here Na Hong-jin had a direct hand in. He wrote the story and the screenplay and produced it, with Banjong Pisanthanakun directing. A documentary crew follows a village shaman in northeastern Thailand and keeps filming as a young woman in the family begins behaving strangely. It works the same shamanic register as The Wailing, treats rural belief as literal rather than superstition, and shows the same refusal to state plainly what is happening.

A documentary filmmaker investigates a chain of disappearances and cursed sites, and the deeper he digs the worse it gets. If The Wailing's spine is an investigation that damns the investigator, Noroi is the found-footage version, patient and genuinely unnerving.

A rural Thai family watches their eldest daughter fall to something the village's monks and shamans can name but cannot reliably drive out. It sits on the same axis as The Wailing: an affliction that arrives inside one household, folk ritual as the only recourse anyone has, and a family losing ground by degrees. We score it 7.0 overall and 7.0 on Fear.

Robert Eggers' cold Puritan nightmare. A family exiled to the edge of the woods comes apart from the inside while something waits just past the treeline. It shares The Wailing's rural isolation and its refusal to tell you what is real until the damage is done.

Grief curdling into something occult. Ari Aster builds the same slow architecture of dread, a family picked apart by a force that was always a step ahead. The possession register and the sense of a plan closing around ordinary people are pure Wailing.

A true-crime writer moves his family into a murder house to research a book and finds footage he never should have watched. The man-in-over-his-head investigation is the direct parallel, and the dread builds as steadily as the found footage gets worse.

Starts as a hitman drama and descends, one wrong job at a time, into folk-occult horror. The final stretch reframes everything before it. Like The Wailing, it is happy to leave you shaken and unsure what you just watched.

Two brothers in rural Argentina find a man in the late stages of a demonic infection, and handle it badly. It is the closest film here to The Wailing's central idea, that evil behaves like a contagion running on rules nobody has fully written down, and that the people responding to it are improvising against something they do not understand. We score it 7.8 overall.

Two coroners work through the night on a body that will not give up its secrets, and every finding makes things worse. A contained, procedural investigation into an occult evil, exactly the kind of methodical dread The Wailing runs on.

Four friends take a shortcut through Scandinavian woods and find the wrong gods. Folk horror built on something ancient watching from the trees, with the same escalating helplessness of men who realize far too late what they have walked into.

A grieving family and a mockumentary investigation into a daughter's death that keeps peeling back new layers. Quieter and sadder than The Wailing, but it shares the mournful register and the sense of a mystery that hurts more the closer you look.

Ari Aster's daylight folk-horror about a couple who follow a Swedish commune's midsummer festival to its logical end. Less occult mystery than slow-motion ritual, but the folk dread and the outsiders-in-over-their-heads structure land in The Wailing's neighborhood.