Red Sands

Red Sands (2009) is Alex Turner's war-horror you can watch online on iFILM. Bored on a desert mission in the Middle East, a squad of U.S. soldiers shoots up an ancient stone statue — and wakes something that had stayed silent for centuries.

At first, nothing. Then the small wrongness creeps in: bad dreams, noises, the sense that someone extra is in camp. The men start seeing things that aren't there and turning on one another. The thing freed from the rock — a djinn out of Arabian legend — doesn't charge in; it works through their minds, one soldier at a time. Shane West leads a unit that's bleeding out without a shot fired.

Turner builds a contained scare about fear on foreign ground, where the real enemy might be the desert, or the soldiers' own guilt. J.K. Simmons turns up as a military officer. The budget is modest, but the dread is genuine — good for fans of cursed-ground military horror. Stream Red Sands (2009) online on iFILM.