HBO Max Adding Underrated 2021 Horror Movie

February may be the month of love, but that isn’t stopping HBO Max from giving subscribers a taste of spooky season. The streamer, one of several major competitors in the ongoing streaming wars, is set to add the underrated Guillermo Del Toro-produced horror movie Antlers later this month. Antlers is set to be available for streaming on the platform on Friday, Feb. 11, exactly four months after it first premiered at Beyond Fest in October 2021. The film enjoyed a theatrical release in the U.S. later that same month.

Adapted from Nick Antosca’s short story “The Quiet Boy,” Antlers is set in an isolated Oregon town and follows a middle-school teacher and her sheriff brother. Believing that one of her students is suffering from personal problems in his home life, the teacher and her brother soon find themselves embroiled in a dark secret, unaware that the student is harboring a dangerous entity in his house. Antlers is directed by Scott Cooper and stars Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons, Jeremy T. Thomas, Graham Greene, Scott Haze, Rory Cochrane, and Amy Madigan.

Antlers has been viewed as a mostly underrated film that has garnered mostly mixed reviews. Its critics consensus on Rotten Tomatoes, where critics have given it a 60% approval rating, reads, “it struggles to find a successful balance between its genre and allegorical elements, but Antlers is sharp enough to recommend as a richly atmospheric creature feature.” The film received a 68% audience score on the site, with the audience consensus reading, “Antlers can be a little heavy-handed and it isn’t very scary, but if you give this slow-burning story time to work, it’ll get its hooks in you.” Meanwhile, the film has a weighted average score of 57 out of 100 based on Metacritic.

In their review for The Wrap, Todd Gilchrist called Antlers “a handsome, meticulous, yet overly serious entry in a horror sub-genre explored too infrequently; Guillermo del Toro was right to choose Cooper, but what the film needs is more of del Toro’s own exuberance to truly bring it to life.” A.A. Doward wrote for AV Club, “Antlers sustains a note of unyielding moroseness through its muted palette and melancholic strings. It’s rare to see a monster movie, or a big-studio movie, this relentlessly dour.”

Antlers is not the only new title arriving in the HBO Max streaming library this month. The streamer is set to stock its library with everything from the Season 2 premiere of Ridley Scott’s Raised by Wolves to the premiere of Stephen and Ayesha Curry’s highly anticipated new game show About Last Night. February is also set to see the season finales of hit shows like Peacemaker, The Righteous Gemstones, And Just Like That…, and Euphoria.