I once made someone watch The Fly on a third date. They stayed. That is either the best thing that ever happened to me or a sign that my judgment cannot be trusted, and honestly both of those things might be true.
Horror romance is a specific kind of damage. Here are five films that do it right.
The Fly (1986)
Jeff Goldblum dissolving while Geena Davis watches and does not stop loving him is genuinely one of the most heartbreaking things Cronenberg ever put on screen. The practical effects are grotesque. The love story is more grotesque. The first act earns the second act so completely that you let the whole thing happen to you, and that is the part that gets you.
Let the Right One In (2008)
Oskar is twelve and being bullied and has nobody who understands him until Eli moves in next door. Eli is also twelve, technically, and has been twelve for a very long time, and has a specific and ongoing problem that Oskar slowly pieces together. None of that is what the film is about. The film is about two people who find each other and what you do with that when the world is not going to let you keep it.
Tomas Alfredson made this look like the coldest winter on record, and it is still warmer than most love stories you will see.
Near Dark (1987)
Nobody talks about this one the way it deserves. Caleb is a farm kid in Oklahoma who meets Mae at night, and she bites him. Then he is on the road with her family of very old, very violent vampires who need to know if he can survive what they are. This is also a western.
It is also one of the most underrated love stories of the 1980s and the fact that it did not make back its budget on release is one of the quiet injustices of that decade. Kathryn Bigelow made this before anyone was paying attention to Kathryn Bigelow. Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton are in the vampire family and I feel strongly about both of them.
Bones and All (2022)
Luca Guadagnino made a cannibal romance set in 1980s America and somehow the road trip is genuinely tender. Taylor Russell is trying to figure out what she is. Timothee Chalamet already knows what he is. Neither of them has anywhere to go except forward and the film is long and deliberate and the first time I watched it I ate dinner immediately after and did not think about why until about a week later.
Crimson Peak (2015)
This movie did not deserve what happened to it at the box office and I have not gotten over it. Del Toro built a genuine gothic romance with ghosts in it and audiences came expecting a haunted house film and got something slower and more devastating, and some of them left early. Mia Wasikowska is in love with Tom Hiddleston, who is hiding something catastrophic, and the house is full of ghosts trying to warn her, and she is not listening yet, and the whole film is saturated in amber and crimson and bad decisions, and it is beautiful.
This one is specifically for everyone who walked out in 2015 and has been wrong ever since.
Start with The Fly if you want something that will physically hurt you. Start with Let the Right One In if you have already seen everything else and want the one that will stay with you the longest.
