Credit: Dangerous Minds / A24

Sinners might be a vampire flick, but it’s not among the year’s best horror movies.

To be clear, that’s because Sinners outgrew the grotty world of horror sharpish. It’s a copper-bottomed blockbuster, and the fact that it’s an original story and can still say that with its entire chest is a miracle. It’s also a masterpiece, if I haven’t made that perfectly clear. However, the year’s best horror film is something very different and a hell of a lot darker.

Directed by Danny and Michael Philippou as the follow-up to their spectacular debut feature Talk To Me, Bring Her Back is a delicious little nightmare of a horror picture. Their first film helped its undeniably effective scares go down with a variety of stylish grace notes, not to mention Danny and co-writer Bill Hinzman’s script showing a genuine understanding of their teenage characters. On the other hand, Bring Her Back goes for the jugular.

A bleakly terrifying, genuinely disturbing psychological horror film anchored around an unforgettable turn from Sally Hawkins, Bring Her Back is the very opposite of a good time at the pictures. Yet, despite the scares that linger long after you’ve staggered home and slept with the light on, there’s an argument to be made that the scariest aspect of the film does not lie in the film. Instead, it can be found, as can so many other terrifying things, on the internet.

Part of the marketing campaign for Bring Her Back contained an Alternate Reality Game. If you haven’t heard of them, then first off, congratulations on spending that almost no fucking time on the internet. Secondly, an Alternate Reality Game (or ARG) is kind of exactly what it says on the goddamn tin. Half game, half immersive storytelling that is often set within the world of an upcoming film or video game.

What happened in the ‘Bring Her Back’ ARG?

Now, some of these promotional ARGs can be whole projects in and of themselves. Almost the entire marketing campaign of the 2008 found footage monster film Cloverfield was an ARG built around uncovering more information about the film and its characters. The ARG connected to Bring Her Back doesn’t have that scale because it doesn’t need it. It amounts to little more than a website, which ends up being just as, if not more, nightmarish than anything in the film.

Without wanting to spoil too much of Bring Her Back, a major part of the story concerns an occult object being bought on the black market. If you type blackangeltapes.net into your browser of choice, you can find the website she supposedly sourced the occult object from. The Black Angel Tapes is a marketplace for items that one wouldn’t be able to sell through normal avenues.

To say more would be spoiling the experience, but suffice to say there’s a short story collection’s worth of thrills and chills to be found here. A collection of short videos, props and stories all designed to make an unsuspecting visitor think, even for a second, that they’ve stumbled into a part of the dark web that they should have left well alone. There’s even an easter egg for fans of Talk To Me there for the real ones.

I’ll leave the rest for you to discover for yourself, but a word of warning. If you find a link to something called thisisnotacult.xyz and it’s after dark, for the sake of your sleeping pattern, don’t click it. Seriously.