It’s a good time to be a horror fan; or at least a fan of quirky, twisty, and sometimes funny horror films.

This weekend, movies like Bodies Bodies Bodies, Orphan: First Kill and The Black Phone are in theaters, streaming or both, and they all offer something a little different for fans of the genre.

In Bodies Bodies Bodies, available only in theaters now, a hurricane combined with Gen Z affectations like drugs, TikTok videos and role-playing games make a perfect storm of mayhem and murder. Halina Reijn directs the movie, written by Sarah DeLappe and released by A24 earlier this month.

The movie stars Amandla Stenberg, Pete Davidson, Lee Pace, Maria Bakalova and more as a group of wealthy 20-something friends who gather at David’s (Davidson) house to ride out an impending hurricane. Stenberg plays Sophie, one of the uber-rich kids, who is bringing her shy girlfriend Bee (Bakalova) to meet her friends for the first time.

In addition to David, Bee meets his actress girlfriend Emma (Chase Sui Wonders), the overwrought Alice (Rachel Sennot), her much-older boyfriend Greg (Pace), and the enigmatic Jordan (Myaha’la Herrold). Another guest, Max (Conner o’Malley), left prior to Bee and Sophie’s arrival after a fight with David.

The gang gets wasted, drunk and slap-happy (literally), with tensions between the various members of the group bubbling not very far beneath the surface, and then one of them suggests the group play a game of Bodies Bodies Bodies, where one person is designated the ‘killer’ and the rest have to avoid getting tapped out of the game.

Naturally, the game of pretend murder leads to real murders, and uncertainty as to who the killer is means that everyone is suspect. It’s impossible to say much more without ruining the near Hitchcockian twist ending, but the plot is frenetic, face-paced, and the ending is probably not what you’re thinking. While the characters veer from relatable to obnoxious, with obnoxious weighted a bit too heavily, their fear and suspicion is palpable. It’s twisted enough to fit under the A24 banner, if perhaps not as boutique (or utterly strange) as Hereditary or Midsommar.

Orphan: First Kill was released this week simultaneously on streaming (Paramount Plus) and in theaters. Serving as a prequel to 2009’s Orphan, both movies star Isabelle Fuhrman as the titular…well, neither orphan nor parentless child really applies here. In Orphan, Fuhrman played Esther, a Russian girl who was adopted by an unsuspecting family headed by Vera Farmiga, only to be exposed as an adult with a disorder called hypopituitarism, which made her unusually small of stature. ‘Esther’ was also a psychopath who killed a LOT of people.

First Kill takes us back to Esther’s origins, when her name was Leena Klammer and holed up not in an orphanage, but in the Saarne Institute for the insane. Leena engineers an escape and to get away pretends to be a missing American child whom she closely resembles.

The missing child is Esther, and her parents, played by Julia Stiles and Rossif Sutherland are overjoyed to find out that their missing little girl was found alive in Russia. Tricia (Stiles) goes to retrieve Esther and brings her home. It’s all very awkward at first, as Leena struggles to play the role of Esther based on what little clues she has about the girl she is replacing.

Of course its odd that the now 25-year-old Fuhrman is playing a character younger than the one she played back in 2009, when she was 12, but thanks to practical effects like forced perspective, makeup and very tall shoes worn by the rest of the cast, that’s not really an issue here. What’s good about First Kill is that it lobs a curveball so that you aren’t getting a remake of the original. Again, the twist does not need to be spoiled but it really livens up what might otherwise be a rote retelling of the same tale.

Also new to streaming is Blumhouse’s The Black Phone, released in theaters in June but now available to stream on Peacock. This movie is set in 1978 during an outburst of child disappearances by a mysterious man dubbed “The Grabber” by the press and police. The tone of the film is dour, unsurprisingly, with the town’s residents gripped by the kind of melancholy you have when an unacceptably large number of children go missing. The police are helpless, all the adults are abusing substances, and the kids are either bullies or victims.

Mason Thames plays one such victim, 12-year-old Finney, the son of an alchoholic loser unevenly played by Jeremy Davies. Finney is mercilessly battered at home and school, but he has one thing on his side: his little sister Gwen, played with admirable fierceness by Madeleine McGraw. Gwen not only stands up for herself and Finn, she has a mysterious psychic talent to receive messages from…somewhere, which is a talent she shares with her late mother.

Finney gets grabbed, of course, by Ethan Hawke in creepy makeup and later an eerie two-part mask. Finney is tossed into the basement of the Grabber’s home, which has the bare basics of existence – bed, toilet, lights…and a wall-mounted black rotary dial telephone.

The Grabber wants to play a twisted game with Finney, for example testing him to see how far he can push him by leaving the door to his prison unlocked, in the hopes that the boy will try to escape and earn a punishment. The rest of the time, though, Finney is left on his own. And then the phone, which has a cut cord, rings.

Who is on the other end of the phone, the one that shouldn’t ring? There’s a strong element of magical realism in the screenplay, which comes from a story by Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son), and without it, this would be a fairly standard kidnapping/murder plot. The calls are coming from The Grabber’s previous victims, who give Finney clues on what his captor has planned for him. And Gwen is getting psychic messages that slowly help her to find her missing brother, though her father refuses to listen to her.

Without the mystical elements of The Black Phone, there wouldn’t be a lot to recommend it, but it’s passably enjoyable as it is, if for nothing else but to root for Gwen, who carries most of the movie on her small shoulders.