People go to the movies for different reasons. For cineastes, though, the director of a film is often the biggest draw. We’re not necessarily going to see a new Ryan Gosling movie; we’re going to the new Refn flick. And like with all the greats—Malick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Lynch, Nolan, take your pick—the cast might be amazing, and the story might sound great, but it’s the force behind the camera that gets our asses in seats.

But those names, among many, started small. In the horror genre some of the best films of late aren’t the perennial, mid-budget, studio sequels to franchises like The Conjuring, Annabelle, Oujia, or their imitators. Instead, it’s up-and-coming indie directors who have been renewing the imagination and vitality of the horror genre, with small films that turn tropes on their ear in a big way, while having something to say about the world we return to once the lights go up.

The best horror and suspense films, like most genre movies, are a commentary on human nature. They’re open to interpretation and context, both narratively, or contrasted against the political culture of their era. With that in mind, here are five directors who you’ll want to keep your eye on.

Jeremy Saulnier

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Image via A24

After his feature debut, Murder Party, gained a modicum of cult status, Jeremy Saulnier proved with his sophomore effort Blue Ruin that the he was capable of much more than quirky horror-comedies. The haunting, meditative character study of a loner with a headful of vengeance revealed the budding auteur’s formidable command of tone and foreboding atmosphere, as well as his assured hand at storytelling. Ruin earned a place on more than a few Top 10 lists. His latest, Green Room, is the best of those worlds, and one of the best films of 2016.

With unlikely humor (the kind that lets you breathe for a second) matter-of-fact violence, and riveting suspense, Green Room, plays off a political climate where racial animosity has been stoked by seven years of a black president, increasing economic inequality, the rise of Black Lives Matter, and that nefarious federal gubmint telling white Christians to get over themselves. All of which has emboldened the worst of society to let their racism flags fly—and has served to mobilize creepy white supremacists (afraid of losing their cultural hegemony) for a war they’ve been anticipating for decades.

Saulnier crafts a taut film that’s genuinely scary. That’s largely due to his skillfully written characters, and his casting (having someone as loveable as Patrick Stewart play a villain is comparable to Henry Fonda being cast as the bad guy in Once Upon A Time in the West). He elicits alternately sympathetic and visceral performances, while building the tension of his script with the technical mastery of a much more experienced filmmaker—opening our eyes to the seductive malevolence of the anarchic underworld he explores. Saulnier frames it all with deft camera work that always seems to be perfectly placed within a scene, accentuating the ever building tension.

If you’re afraid of a certain subset of your pissed-off fellow Americans right now, Green Room is a white-knuckle window into why.

Karyn Kusama

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Image via Drafthouse Films

This one’s a bit of a cheat. Kusama (whose troubles on Aeon Flux deserve their own article) only recently found herself in the rarefied atmosphere of female horror directors with 2009’s, Diablo Cody-penned Jennifer’s Body.

In the 90s, while moonlighting as a nanny after a stint in film school, Kusama met John Sayles and began working as his assistant. Her time as an amateur boxer inspired her to make her critically-acclaimed first feature Girl Fight in 2000, which opened the door to the troubled production of Flux in 2005. Despite that film being taken from her, and rendered intolerable, it was clear that Kusama possessed a notable stylistic signature.

Redeemed by the success of Body she returned in 2015 with her best work, The Invitation. Something of an ideological mirror to Green Room’s neo-Nazis, The Invitation feels like an examination of the extremes of cultish liberalism. Basically, it’s what would happen if a bunch of West Coast, anti-VAXXers found their Jim Jones. Kusama winds the socio-political themes of spirituality, brainwashing, and murder into a progressive iteration of alt-right subculture.

It’s a great flick, largely resting on Kusama’s ability to confidently ratchet the slow burn tension to joyous levels, and her eye for naturalistic performances. Adopting something of a handheld mumblecore aesthetic, the tone of The Invitation fits comfortably in the wheelhouse of films like Creep and Baghead.

Ben Wheatley

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Image via Drafthouse Films

I really haven’t seen much of Ben Wheatley’s work. There’s the vague memory of the British director’s Sightseers, and I know I must have seen his entry in ABCs of Death, but then I don’t remember much about that film, either (26 shorts in a row is too many, guys).

So it came as something of a revelation when his latest, High-Rise, marked a work by not just a talented director, but a visionary one.

High-Rise is what would happen if Gary Johnson became President. Based on an anti-Communist cautionary tale by J. G. Ballard, the film finds Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) moving into a state-of-the-art tower block in a desolate development outside of London. Each tenant’s personal wealth determines what floor they get to live on. The low-rent live on the bottom while the truly affluent live at the top. Laing, who lives on a middle floor, is a literal representation of the disappearing middle-class. The building is entirely self-sufficient to the point that, aside from going to work, one would never have to leave, at all.

Which the tenants largely stop doing, instead becoming more insular and throwing near constant parties that steadily become more depraved and violent. The objectivist libertarian idealism quickly devolves into anarchy. Just like it would in real life.

Wheatley paints a portrait of inevitable libertarian breakdown with poetic strokes of cold dystopia. Hypnotic visuals mix with disjointed montages and temporal editing, and a pulsing score by Clint Mansell. It feels like a primordial nightmare descent into feudalistic, emotional and physical anarchy. He captures a Black Mirror-esque, near-future sci-fi tone with his camera, recalling the chilly compositions of Andrew Niccol and David Cronenberg, while crafting a subtle satire that also succeeds as psychological horror.

Ben Wheatley will be considered one of the greats, sooner rather than later.

Robert Eggers

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Image via A24

Where High-Rise is a nightmarish window into a Johnson presidency, Robert Eggers’ feature debut, The Witch, is what would happen if Ted Cruz got the job.

Set in the early 17th Century, The Witch follows a Puritan family that has been exiled from their village, due to an overabundance of piety (as opposed to the absence of it). The Church doesn’t want merely pious adherents, but also obedient ones, after all. Finding themselves scratching out a difficult and meager existence on the edge of an impassive forest, the family is thrown into terrified discord when their youngest child disappears, borne away by a decrepit witch. The loss of the baby, and apparently God’s favor, snowball as the corn grows rotten and their goat’s milk turns to blood—fraying their familial bonds along with their sanity.

Set in a time when women’s rights didn’t exist, The Witch represents nostalgia for some, reflected in today’s ongoing, right-wing war on their sexual autonomy, rooted in fundamentalist religious dogma. It’s a dogma based—again—on the cultural hegemony of white men, where not only women are subjugated, but also the land, and any heathens (or Natives) that might be living there in unenlightened sin and darkness. This is God’s will, defined by us, so convert, fall in line, or die. Evil can have different faces, depending on your perspective.

And while those times are behind us, it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to picture a modern version, should the likes of Cruz or his Dominionist brethren return us to the theocracy they so fervently dream of.

The film itself seemed to divide audiences, but there’s no arguing that Eggers created a gorgeous movie from his deeply researched script. This thing just drips with dread. And while the exquisitely deliberate pacing, punctuated by unnerving scenes of psychotic rabbits and child sacrifice wasn’t for everyone, Eggers’ cinematic formalism and narrative vision—owing a big debt to Kubrick’s compositions—redefines the word “haunting.”

Jennifer Kent

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Image via IFC Films

Aussie director Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook plays with reality in somewhat the same way as The Witch, where Eggers baked in the possibility (with the rotten corn) of ergot-induced psychosis to cast doubt on his character’s reality—and, by proxy, the audience’s perceptions.

Here it’s the perception of Amelia (Essie Davis) a widowed, single mother of a six-year old boy. She’s already at wit’s end trying to maintain their lives when her son becomes convinced the monster in a creepy fairytale book called the Babadook is stalking him. When increasingly weird shit starts happening in the house, Amelia is forced to consider whether or not she’s losing her mind, or if The Babadook is, in fact, very real.

The film leaves enough doubt to make up your mind about how literal it is, but I couldn’t help but think of the devastating underfunding of mental health programs, especially in my state of Oklahoma. The stigma of mental illness hasn’t really changed much in a societal sense. The inherent mistrust of people who are “a little off” based on the conventional wisdom that medical ailments can be fixed, while psychological ones can only be held in check. The added layer of single motherhood, another stigma that hasn’t much changed, combine to create a crushing sense of dread. After all, what’s scarier than being terrified of your own mind? Nobody believing you.

Tonally, thematically, and technically, Kent nails it. Getting a great performance out of Davis that traces the arc of her breakdown with crushing inevitability, Kent’s script feels like an allegory and a horror film all at once. And her direction of it carries a sophistication that recalls the claustrophobic joys of Polanski’s Repulsion, if he were directing The Shining instead.