I like horror movies with smart, agentic protagonists, while staying in horror genre rather than thriller or action. These are rather thin on the ground. In the spirit of Scott Garabant’s Puzzle Game post, here is my list of favorites and an invitation to add yours.
My favorites:
Oculus.
Hush
Green Room
Honorable mentions. These aren’t quite the total package, but are close and extremely good such that they still seemed worth including:
The Ring’s protagonist is not dumb, but it’s more “solving a mystery” than “well does this weapon work?”
Tremors would need to change very little to be a horror movie, but it is in fact an action movie.
It Follows spends a little too much time denying the problem
The Thing: classic
Eden Lake
Misery
10 Cloverfield Lane
Gone Girl: not horror, but I specifically like it because of how agentic the protagonist is
2., 3. and 4. have in common that there is some sort of abusive relationship that develops, and I think this adds another layer of horror. (A person/group of people gain some power over the protagonist(s), and they slowly grow more abusive with this power.)
I was going to say The Thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(1982_film)
And afterwards you can watch Thingu, approved by John Carpenter.
Honorable mention for “The things”, a short story by Peter Watts. It retells the movie from the point of view of the monster, revealing the sensible— perhaps even admirable— motives behind its actions.
I’m not a particular fan of horror, but:
Get Out feels rational to me: the protagonist is smart and keen, he doesn’t follow the title’s wise advice as soon as he might but it’s understandable (he doesn’t want to ruin what he thinks is his shot at being well-liked by what he hopes will be his future in-laws), and in general there’s no big Idiot Ball moment for anyone I can think of.
Cabin in the Woods is a very thorough and very funny deconstruction of the typical “bunch of teens in an isolated location get picked off by some evil entity” plot, and it has a lot of intelligent meta commentary about the genre as well as characters smarter than average (in fact, there’s a plot point that lampshades their usual stupidity in similar movies instead).
Happy Death Day is perhaps not terribly rational but it’s a Groundhog Day style loop about a girl getting killed over and over again by some mysterious maniac, so obviously it’s a very puzzle-like kind of story. Dodge the sequel though, that one’s awful.
It’s a TV series instead of a movie, and I don’t know what the difference between horror and thriller and action are, but I enjoyed The Fall of the House of Usher. (I think it’s like a 6⁄10 on them being smart and like a 7⁄10 on them being agentic, tho I think you could argue with both of those ratings.)
That’s created by Mike Flanagan. I haven’t liked his recent stuff as much but he is responsible for two of the three movies on the winners list so sure seems promising.
A Quiet Place
What a great question! I realize in retrospect that my favorite horror films are ones in which people confront horror rationally, and the horror is rationally understandable. Some examples:
Splice (2009) They‘re not mad scientists, they’re perfectly sensible (albeit ambitious) scientists who have unleashed a manmade horror beyond their comprehension. Nice escalation of the reasons to keep the experiment around as the horror escalates, so you can see why they don’t just kill it while it’s small. A lot of movies would just let the characters hold the idiot ball.
Altered States (1980) More perfectly sensible ambitious scientists. Moral: if something incomprehensible and terrifying happens to you, stay in the lab until you figure it out; don’t go home and try to sleep it off.