For those of you genre fans out there always on the lookout for interesting horror and sci-fi films to enjoy from the comfort of your own home, March’s VOD selections feature several great indie movies that should make for some entertaining viewings this month.

Ava’s Possessions, a film I really dug out of last year’s SXSW Film Festival, is finally making its way onto VOD this Friday and Emelie, the babysitter thriller from Dark Sky Films, is also getting a digital release that day. Other titles arriving on VOD in early March include The Wave, Road Games and Camino.

The month’s VOD titles are being capped off by a film that I’ve been excited to see for some time, Baskin, which is being released by IFC Midnight on March 25th. Other notable VOD titles for March include Dudes & Dragons, You’re Killing Me, A Haunting in Cawdor and festival favorite They Look Like People.

Dudes & Dragons (Momentum Pictures) – March 1st

A hilarious fantasy comedy starring Kaitlin Doubleday (Fox's top-rated show, Empire), fan favorite James Marsters (Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Smallville), and an appearance by Luke Perry.  

When a powerful wizard (Marsters) vows to rid the land of love through the use of his fire-breathing dragon, a brave team of eccentric warriors embark on a grand quest to break the curse, defeat the wizard, and slay his terrible beast.

Ava’s Possessions (Momentum Pictures) – March 4th

Ava Dobkins (Louisa Krause, Martha Marcy May Marlene) is recovering from demonic possession. With no memory of the past month, she is forced to attend a Spirit Possession Anonymous support group. As Ava struggles to reconnect with her friends, get her job back, and figure out where the huge bloodstain in her apartment came from, she's plagued by nightmarish visions - the demon is trying to come back.

Ava's Possessions is written and directed by Jordan Galland and features an original score by Sean Lennon. The film stars Krause, Jemima Kirke (HBO's Girls), Carol Kane (Netflix's The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), and Alysia Reiner and Deborah Rush (both of Netflix's Orange is the New Black), alongside horror favorites Whitney Able (All the Boys Love Mandy Lane), William Sadler (Tales from the Crypt presents Demon Knight), Lou Taylor Pucci (The Evil Dead), and Dan Fogler (NBC's Hannibal).

Emelie (Dark Sky Films) – March 4th

As their parents head out for a date in the city, the three young Thompson children immediately take to their new babysitter, Anna (Sarah Bolger, Into the Badlands, Once Upon a Time), who seems like a dream come true: she’s sweet, fun, and lets them do things that break all of their parents’ rules. But as Anna’s interactions with them take on a more sinister tone, the kids realize that their caretaker may not be who she claims to be. Soon it’s up to big brother Jacob to protect his siblings from the increasingly nefarious intentions of a very disturbed woman whose weapon is trust, and whose target is innocence.

Featuring tour-de-force performances from Bolger and its three young leads, EMELIE is a multidimensional, nail-biting thriller that asks the question: how can you put an end to horror after you’ve already let it in?

Road Games (IFC Midnight) – March 4th

After a disastrous summer trip, Jack finds himself hitchhiking through the sun-drenched rural French countryside with nothing but his British passport. Unaware of dangers that are plaguing the roads, he tries without much success to get home. Along the way, he partners up with another hitchhiker, a beautiful French girl, Véronique. But when they accept a ride from a local oddball (Frédéric Pierrot), the pair finds themselves thrown in a deadly game of cat and mouse in which nothing is what it seems. Bursting with nonstop twists and turns and an undercurrent of Hitchcockian malice, this riveting psychological thriller is a hell of a ride. Legendary cult actress Barbara Crampton co-stars.

The Wave (Magnolia Pictures) – March 4th

Nestled in Norway's Sunnmøre region, Geiranger is one of the most spectacular tourist draws on the planet. With the mountain Åkerneset overlooking the village — and constantly threatening to collapse into the fjord — it is also a place where cataclysm could strike at any moment. After putting in several years at Geiranger's warning centre, geologist Kristian (Kristoffer Joner) is moving on to a prestigious gig with an oil company. But the very day he's about to drive his family to their new life in the city, Kristian senses something isn't right. The substrata are shifting. No one wants to believe that this could be the big one, especially with tourist season at its peak, but when that mountain begins to crumble, every soul in Geiranger has ten minutes to get to high ground before a tsunami hits, consuming everything in its path.

Those ten minutes are some of the most nerve-rattling you'll experience in any movie this year, but as The Wave continues the stakes only get higher. Ace director Roar Uthaug keeps things hurtling forward in a state of high anxiety until the very end. Giving Hollywood a run for its money, the film's canvas is broad, its effects eerily realistic, and its scale immense. Here comes the flood. 

Camino (XLRator Media) – March 8th

Set in 1985, war photographer Avery Taggert (Zoë Bell) has built a solid career with her stark and honest imagery, all the while remaining emotionally distant from her subjects. When she embeds in the jungles of Colombia with a squad of missionaries led by a beloved and charismatic Spaniard known as "El Guero" (Nacho Vigalondo), she finds herself in the middle of a conflict as violent as any she's photographed. One night, she happens upon El Guero committing a heinous atrocity, capturing the vile act on film, an image with the potential to discredit and destroy El Guero. Knowing this brilliant psychopath will employ every tactic at his disposal to destroy that photograph - and the photographer who took it - Avery flees into the harsh jungle with nothing but the camera hanging around her neck to escape from missionaries twisted into violent guerrillas by the madman intent on destroying all enemies.

Excess Flesh (Midnight Releasing) – March 8th

Jill is obsessed with her new roommate Jennifer, a promiscuous and sexy hotshot in the LA Fashion scene. New to the city and recently single, Jill is unable to keep up as she binges and purges to stay thin; eventually hating herself and everyone around her. Her jealousy and rage spiral out of control -- Jennifer has everything, and Jill wants to be just like her. If Jill can’t BE Jennifer, she must destroy her.

Terror Birds (MarVista) – March 8th 

College student Maddy Stern (Jessica Lee Keller) knows something is wrong when her father (Craig Nigh) goes missing during a weekend birdwatching trip on a desolate East Texas ranch.  As she enlists the help of her good-looking college pals to trek into the wilderness to find him, rampaging, six-foot-tall prehistoric “terror birds” with man-eating tendencies are the last thing anyone expects to find … much less a wealthy mad scientist (Greg Evigan) – but that’s exactly what they find, and they’ll need to run for their lives if they are to escape the wrath of the Terror Birds! 

The Corpse of Anna Fritz (Invincible Pictures) – March 8th (exclusively on FlixFling.com)

Anna Fritz, a beautiful Spanish actress and one of the most desired women in the world, has suddenly died. Her body is transferred to a city morgue, where a withdrawn young orderly, Pau, becomes fascinated with her lifeless cadaver. When Pau sends a picture of the dead celebrity to his two friends, they show up at the morgue for a glimpse of the beautiful starlet. As the whiskey bottles and coke packets empty, the three friends decide this is an opportunity they can’t pass up to get up close and personal with the corpse of Anna Fritz. However, when they are alone with the body, they soon realize that things aren't exactly what they seem.

You’re Killing Me (Wolfe Video) – March 8th

George (Jeffery Self), a narcissistic wannabe Internet star, starts dating Joe (Matthew McKelligon), a monotone serial killer. While all of George's friends agree that Joe seems a bit strange, George claims his new beau "isn't scary, he's gorgeous." But as George's friends start to disappear, the remaining group decides to take matters into their own hands.

Directed by Jim Hansen, creator of the viral video smash series "The Chloe Videos", this gay mixture of "Dexter" and "Gilmore Girls" blends witty banter, pop culture references and good old-fashioned murder. YOU'RE KILLING ME employs humor, camp, and razor sharp wit to tell a morality tale about self-obsession and our growing disconnection with the world around us.

A Haunting in Cawdor (Uncork’d Entertainment) – March 11th

In this tense tale of psychological terror, Vivian Miller is a young twenties woman who’s serving out her jail sentence at a work release program in the Midwest. Her 90 days of probation takes her to The Cawdor Barn Theatre, a dilapidated summer stock theater run by Lawrence O’Neil. Lawrence, a failed Broadway director, is now reduced to staging amateur productions with young parolees and raging over the mistakes from his past. Vivian’s arrival in Cawdor starts a terrifying series of events that brings Lawrence’s secret past to the present. After Vivian views an old taped stage production of Macbeth, a force of evil is unleashed which soon turns its sights on her. With the help of Roddy, a local outcast, Vivian sets about trying to discover who the supernatural killer on the tape is before she becomes the next victim.

They Look Like People (Gravitas Ventures) – March 11th

Suspecting that people are transforming into malevolent shape-shifters, Wyatt flees to New York City to seek out his estranged childhood friend Christian. As the mysterious horrors close in on Wyatt, he questions whether to protect his only friend from an impending war, or from himself. A genre-bending story about love, loyalty and living nightmares.

The Revenant (Fox) - March 22nd on Digital HD (iTunes, Vudu, Google Play...)

DiCaprio gives “a virtuoso performance” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone) in Oscar® Winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s (Birdman) cinematic masterpiece. Inspired by true events, THE REVENANT follows the story of legendary explorer Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) on his quest for survival and justice. After a brutal bear attack, Glass is left for dead by a treacherous member of his hunting team (Tom Hardy; Mad Max: Fury Road). Against extraordinary odds, and enduring unimaginable grief, Glass battles a relentless winter in uncharted terrain. This “boldly original” (Calvin Wilson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch) epic adventure captures the extraordinary power of the human spirit in an immersive and visceral experience “unlike anything you have ever seen” (Jake Hamilton, FOX-TV).

Baskin (IFC Midnight) – March 25th

A five-man unit of cops on night patrol get more than they bargain for when they arrive at a creepy backwater town in the middle of nowhere after a call comes over the radio for backup. Entering a derelict building, the seasoned tough guys and their rookie junior, who’s still haunted by a traumatic childhood dream, do the one thing you should never do in this kind of movie: they split up. They soon realize they’ve stumbled into a monstrous charnel house and descend into an ever-more nightmarish netherworld where grotesque, mind-wrenching horrors await them at every turn. This is one Baskin (that’s “police raid” to you non-Turkish speakers) that isn’t going to end well. But wait! Things aren’t what they seem in this truly disturbing, outrageously gory, and increasingly surreal film whose unpredictable narrative pulls the carpet from under your feet and keeps you guessing right up to the final moment. A wildly original whatsit that reconfirms Turkey as the breakout national cinema of the moment.

  • Heather Wixson
    About the Author - Heather Wixson

    Heather A. Wixson was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, until she followed her dreams and moved to Los Angeles in 2009. A 14-year veteran in the world of horror entertainment journalism, Wixson fell in love with genre films at a very early age, and has spent more than a decade as a writer and supporter of preserving the history of horror and science fiction cinema. Throughout her career, Wixson has contributed to several notable websites, including Fangoria, Dread Central, Terror Tube, and FEARnet, and she currently serves as the Managing Editor for Daily Dead, which has been her home since 2013. She's also written for both Fangoria Magazine & ReMind Magazine, and her latest book project, Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Volume One will be released on October 20, 2021.