The Wailing (Na Hong-jin, 2016). In this warped horror film, Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won) is a police officer in a South Korean mountain village. He operates with a sort of hapless distractibility that makes him especially ill-suited to contend with a series of horrific murders that are the result of a paranormal infection. He’s got too much messiness to contend with in his own life to sort of the mayhem of these weirdly possessed people tearing about their loved ones. I was mildly frustrated when Na Hong-jin shuffled through tones in the first act, all a little too aimlessly. He sure does finish strongly, though. After the confused set-up, the final two acts of The Wailing are strikingly well-done. In particular, a scene involving a pivotal moment when our baffled protagonist receiving conflicting instructions from two different influences with unclear motivations is a marvel of staging and slow-burn build-up and payoff. Among the strong performers in the cast, Chun Woo-hee is the standout as a woman in white who moves in and out of scenes with contained intensity.

Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980). Maybe knowing something about the absurdity to come across a decade-plus of sequels is causing me to round up, but the cheapo simplicity of the first excursion to Crystal Lake was more entertaining than I expected. As the film begins, the summer camp has been shut down for some time due a a bad reputation caused by a couple straight summers of deadly tragedies. A group of young camp counselors have been brought in to help get the place ship-shape enough to welcome in new campers, and one of the most amusing aspects of the film is how often the characters need to make adjustments to the infrastructure to have basics like lighting and running water. Before long, shoddy accommodations are the least of these problems. The acting in Friday the 13th is uniformly mediocre — including from Kevin Bacon, the one future movie star in the cast — and the films is occasionally clumsy and crass. Still, there’s a reason it set a template for so much horror filmmaking to come. The narrative mechanics are simple but strangely satisfying, and there were a few moments when I was genuinely impressed by Sean S. Cunningham’s direction, led by a patient tracking shot outside of a cabin that eventually reveals severed telephone lines.

The Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986). Rutger Hauer plays his madman role, a hitchhiker who terrorizing the unfortunate young schmuck (C. Thomas Howell) who picks him up on a barren Texas highway. with a vocal tone and furious calm that suggests an unholy melding of the most menacing characteristics of Paul Newman and Kirk Douglas. There’s probably a pretty tidy thriller here, and director Robert Harmon occasionally seems close to finding his way to it. The Hitcher ultimately gets undone by the decision to make Hauer’s ride-seeking ruffian into the sort of omniscient, seemingly unstoppable killing machine that had already locked in as the default threat of nineteen-eighties horror. Howell isn’t up to the task of instilling sympathetic humanity into his victimized everyman. He either overacts or underplays. As the truck stop waitress who gets drawn into the whole horrific affair, Jennifer Jason Leigh shows little of the quicksilver invention that would soon be dazzlingly present in her acting work, though its amusing to see her seemingly aping some of the screen mannerisms of Jessica Lange in early scenes that call for mild flirtations across a diner counter.