If you're in Turkey this week and fancy an evening off from sightseeing, the country's cinema schedules just got a crowded refresh. Seven new titles open on Friday, spanning pretty much every mood: two Turkish productions, a batch of international horror, a rom-com and a hangout comedy.

The homegrown headliner is "Soy," a supernatural horror boasting a seriously familiar cast — Barış Arduç, Farah Zeynep Abdullah and Tuba Büyüküstün. The setup is classic cursed-house territory: Can and his friends head to a mysterious mansion in Istanbul after a call from his dying grandfather, only for a thick fog to cut them off from the world while a cursed painting starts working its dark magic. Friendships fray fast.

Also Turkish, but from a very different shelf, is "Ateş" — a crime drama directed by and starring Savaş Satış. Its hero is a Special Forces major whose brother is murdered, and the film follows his drift between justice and revenge as he digs into the organisation behind the killing. On the lighter local side, "Medeni Haller" from director Selçuk Aydemir is a romantic comedy about Aylin, a successful divorce lawyer whose feelings for her closest friend resurface just as he gets married — until she meets a civil registrar at a wedding and things take a new turn.

The international slate leans heavily spooky. "Other Mommy," directed by Rob Savage ("Bird Box") and adapted from Josh Malerman's novel "Incidents Around the House," centres on eight-year-old Bela, who finds a doppelgänger of her mother lurking in her bedroom. Alex Ullom's "It Ends" traps a carload of recent graduates on an endless two-lane road after a wrong turn, with cosmic forces piling on. And "The Curse of the Seven Sins" rounds out the horror options.

If horror isn't your thing, "Spa Weekend" comes from Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the pair behind "The Hangover" — three friends book a luxury spa retreat, an old friend with a gift for chaos tags along, and relaxation goes out the window. Rounding it all off, the 2024 film "Fall" returns to theatres for anyone who missed it first time around.

For travellers, this is a genuinely cheap and easy slice of local life: a cinema ticket in Turkey costs a fraction of what you'd pay in Western Europe, major malls in Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir screen films in original language with Turkish subtitles (local productions are dubbed-less, naturally, so brush up or just enjoy the atmosphere), and catching a brand-new Turkish release while it's actually in Turkish cinemas is the kind of cultural souvenir you can't buy at the bazaar. Check showtimes on apps like Biletix or the cinema chains' own sites — Friday openings fill up fast on weekend evenings.