Secuestrados, or translated as "Kidnapped" to the English-speaking market. Home invasion horror/thriller movie, shot in one long over-the-shoulder take, like you're a mute ghost bearing witness to the terrible, abhorrent events unfolding in this middle-class Spanish home that is hijacked by an entourage of thugs who hold the family hostage for money. Casual cruelty abounds by the all-business home invaders, particularly by the ringleader. Very tense and very terrifying. Closest thing to
Rec that you mentioned in your post.
Anything by Michael Haneke. He's probably known most for
Funny Games, another psychological thriller/horror home invasion film. Haneke is German and he made a short-for-shot English remake of his own film, so you can take your pick. A pair of creepily polite young men start imposing themselves on the hospitality of a bourgeoisie couple on a vacation retreat at a summer lakeside home and things escalate when they take the family hostage (two parents, one child, and the family dog) and force them to participate in a number of pointless, cruel, manipulative psychological games or risk further injury and death. Shot and directed in a way that the violence is not of the lazy, popcorn flasher-movie variety, but meant to purposely make you feel queasy and wrong.
However, Haneke has directed many morbid and disturbing films in the career. It's something of his forte, really, starting with
The Seventh Continent, which is the story of an Austrian family who decides to commit mass suicide at the end of the movie after destroying all of their possessions, to
The Piano Teacher, about a sadomasochistic relationship between a middle-aged piano tutor and her teenage pupil, to
Amour, which is about the horrorshow of indignity and despair that is old age.
Session 9, an American psychological horror indie directed to Brad Anderson, no stranger to these things (he also directed
The Machinist and
Transsiberian). The plot is five working-class asbestos abatement crew members are working a rush job to decontaminate an abandoned psychiatric hospital within a week over Columbus Day weekend. They are all somewhat underachievers in their own lives and plagued by individual hang-ups and regrets, not to mention petty in-fighting. As they work they are slowly traumatized by the psychic energy of all the terrible things that happened in the old asylum's halls. Is it the work of malefic ghosts? Or are they just losing their marbles? Very effective thriller. The best thing about the movie is Danvers State Mental Hospital itself, a real building with that real purpose at the time of filming, with a pedigree going back to the 19th century. If you like this one, then check out
The Machinist by the same director. It was one of Christian Bale's most demanding roles where he lost 1/3 of his body weight to play the strung-out, haunted, emaciated protagonist. His skeletal body is enough of a horrorshow, not even including the rest of the movie.
, a period film from 1999. Part cannibal movie, part western, part black comedy, part supernatural horror film set at a remote army outpost in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the mid-19th century. Inspired in part by real-life instances of cannibalism in The Donner Party and [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alferd_Packer]Alferd Packer. The film moves and is paced pretty well. Lighter fare than what I suggested above while still falling squarely in the "horror" genre.
