In spite of the scenes that make us feel uncomfortable, horror movies have a comfortable familiarity. They follow a pattern, and, as Scream pointed out so brilliantly, have certain rules and tropes. But often these tropes are so overused that they become rote and dull. We all know it’s likely someone will trip while running away from something, a car won’t start, everyone will lose cell service at a critical moment, or, if it’s a SyFy Original, people will spend five solid minutes shooting at a badly-rendered CGI monstrosity that can’t be killed by bullets. When Geico makes a commercial about horror tropes, they’ve truly jumped the shark into cliché-ville.

So it’s great to find a couple of low-budget films that do something interesting with the same old tropes. Here are two that are currently streaming on Netflix.

Warning: Here be spoilers.

Late Phases

Late Phases (2014) directed by Adrián García Bogliano, stars Nick Damici as Ambrose McKinley, a crotchety blind veteran with a guide dog who is being moved into a retirement community by his son, Will. The community is on the edge of some woods, and people have been dying of animal attacks. Will doesn’t want Ambrose to live alone, but Ambrose is defiant, and, once in the house, immediately starts alienating his Stepford wife neighbors, Gloria, Anne, and Clarissa, one of whom keeps her husband in an iron lung in their bedroom.

He strikes up what might be the beginning of a friendship, with his neighbor, Delores, until that evening, when through their shared wall he hears her being brutally murdered. When he calls out to her, the murderer—a werewolf—breaks into his home and tries to kill him, but is driven off by Ambrose’s dog, who is mortally wounded in the process. Despite his blindness, Ambrose quickly figures out the beast is a werewolf, and, furious at the loss of Delores and the dog and the general distain the police show for the members of the community (who, it should be pointed out, Ambrose scorns himself), Ambrose decides he has one month—until the next full moon—to figure out who the beast is and kill it. Damici does a great job of showing us Ambrose’s grief for the dog and sad determination while still maintaining his crusty persona. He knows he’s the only one who can stop the monster and he’s not going to survive the next encounter, but he’s resigned to his fate.

The werewolf in Late Phases is well done and quite scary, but the really terrifying thing about the film is what it says about how we sequester older people off from the rest of society. Although it’s clean and neat, the retirement community exudes hopelessness and abandonment. The furnishings are stuck a couple of decades behind, and the people are forgotten. It’s especially creepy because with the exception of the guy in the iron lung, the neighbors are still able-bodied enough to get out into the world beyond the community, but except for church we really don’t see them participate much outside their gates. This makes the community seem even more insular and stifling. The three women neighbors are excited when Ambrose moves in because at least there’s something new happening—and it doesn’t hurt that he’s a single man. But they’re stuck in their own little social world, too, and when he rebuffs them, they fall back into it as if they never tried to step out. Before the werewolf attack, when he first arrives, Ambrose talks about going to the community to die, and there’s a sense that everyone else in the community is in a holding pattern—riding the free bus that circles through the neighborhood until it’s time for them to go. It’s just ironic—or convenient—that there’s a werewolf to help them along.

It’s great to see a decently made movie where almost the entire cast is over 50. And although the “kill the dog” horror movie trope is one of the very worst, in this case at least it’s a critical plot point, because it sets Ambrose on his path. The retirement community and Ambrose’s relationship with Will are sad, but there are shots of humor throughout the film, too. Cantankerous old Ambrose will grow on you by the end. Check it out, if only to see—really big spoiler alert—septuagenarian Tina Louise, of Gilligan’s Island fame, as a werewolf.

From the Dark

On the surface, the Irish film From the Dark (2014), directed by Conor McMahon, is nothing but horror tropes. A farmer (Gerry O’Brien) is doing that most-Irish-of-things, digging out peat in a field around sunset, when he comes across a corpse with bound hands, staked to the ground under a rock. Since this is a horror movie and there must be tropes, he pulls out the stake (Horror Trope #144), and the corpse comes to life (Trope #7) and attacks him.

Meanwhile, a young couple on a road trip in the countryside have car trouble (Trope #62) and end up at a remote farmhouse (Trope #48), where they find the farmer, who has a gash on his neck and shoulder and has been infected with . . . something. The farmer jumps out a window, the couple learn they’re being stalked by the corpse and figure out that it can be hurt by light, and the film quickly becomes a fairly typical “survive until dawn” horror story (Trope #19), where the characters, although plucky and engaging, make some really dumb decisions (Trope #1).

Where From the Dark gets interesting is the folklore of the corpse creature. What is it, exactly? When the farmer first unearths it, we see a hand, bound by rope. The hand looks bloated and soggy, much like body parts in the iconic photos of the famous Tollund Man and Graubaulle Man bog bodies. Bog bodies are human remains found in peat bogs in Northern Europe. Because of the peat, they’re extremely well preserved, and sometimes include hair and fingernails, and even stomach contents. Some date from as long ago as 8,000 BCE. Most of the people found met violent ends, and it’s theorized that they were either criminals or sacrificial victims. Many were found staked to the bottom of the bog. So since the corpse creature is soggy, found with a stake and bits of rope in a bog, it might have been a bog body.

But the creature is also sensitive to light and infects people by scratching them. The people it infects can be killed with light. And when we finally glimpse it, in profile it looks remarkably like the vampire from the 1922 version of Nosferatu, if he were dressed as a medieval peasant, although it never drinks blood. So maybe it’s a bog body vampire?

But it gets more interesting. The Irish have many legends about vampire-like creatures, but one of the most relevant to the From the Dark monster is the story of Abhartach, who was a (mythological) fifth-century Irish ruler with magical powers who was so brutal to his own people that they had him murdered by another local chieftain. But after Abhartach was buried, he returned from the grave, demanding blood from his subjects as nourishment. He was killed and buried again, and returned a second time, demanding blood. This time the people went to either a wizard/magician or a Christian saint, depending on the version of the story, who told them that Abhartach was the walking dead, and that he could never be killed, but they could imprison him by stabbing him with a yew (or hawthorn, depending on the version) stake or sword (again, version) and burying him upside down under a large stone. Which they did. In From the Dark, when the farmer unearths the corpse and removes the stake, it comes alive again, so maybe the moviemakers meant it to be old Abhartach rising from the grave.

In 2000, Bob Curran, lecturer in Celtic History and Folklore at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, published a peer-reviewed paper in History of Ireland hypothesizing that Abhartach, not Vlad Tepes, was Bram Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula. There’s a very cool article about that and other Irish vampires the History Ireland site.

Whether the monster is a bog body or Abhartach or just some weird Irish vampire, From the Dark has strong performances—particularly by Niamh Algar as Sarah—some lovely camera work (Ireland is freaking gorgeous), and a solid soundtrack, so it’s worth a look, despite its reliance on a lot of tried and true tropes.