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The fears encapsulated by the best horror movies of 2024 are both modern and primordial in scope, encompassing the full range of human frailty and cruelty. We fear the inexorable creep of age and uselessness, which serves as motivation to transgress against nature itself in The Substance. We fear the veil of beyond, and the way long-buried sins may rise again in the likes of South Korea’s Exhuma. We fear the burdens and responsibility of being the only one who can shelter a new life, as in The Girl With the Needle. We fear possession and surrender to plague and madness, in Nosferatu. And yeah, we fear a bunch of really gross spiders in Infested as well. Spiders are icky; haven’t you heard? Too many legs, no thanks.
These are all equally valid fears, charged with apprehension for our future and reckoning with our collective past. The horror movies of 2024 touch on topics such as classic movie monsters, but tackled them in morosely modern ways–a teen bloodsucker navigates her complex feelings toward death in Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, while zombies rise from their graves and are subsequently cared for by their confused and grieving family members in Handling the Undead. A slasher paradigm is inverted completely in In a Violent Nature as we trudge behind a silent killer stomping through the woods, while the seeming imperative of low-quality horror prequels is obliterated by the unexpected brilliance of The First Omen.
It was a year of unexpected, bloody delights, particularly for horror fans with the patience to reward non-English language filmmaking with their attention.
Here are the 25 best horror movies of 2024:
Director: Parker Finn
The pop world is the perfect setting for Smile 2, Parker Finn’s follow-up to his unexpected Ring-ish horror smash from 2022. In that movie, the no-win rules of this demonic attachment were established: If you witness the death of someone momentarily possessed by this mostly-invisible demon with the telltale sign of a rictus grin, the curse jumps to you, causing reality-bending hallucinations until you, too, surrender to its quasi-suicidal whims, passing the curse along to a witness, and so the cycle perpetuates. Could this have something to do with the idea of… trauma?! If that seems like well-trod territory, just think of how those sorts of buzzwords get flattened and then reinflated by the “relatable” pop-industrial complex. Fake smiles, emerging from trauma, and stylized imagery are the currency of Skye Riley’s realm, which is rarified enough to take on a hallucinatory quality even without the aid of a demon. Are those fans silently grinning because they’re struck dumb by their love, or is it something more sinister? Is that a real stalker in her midst, or is her mind just spinning out from an uncomfortable earlier encounter? Finn must understand the hellish potential of it all; his movie has plenty of set pieces where characters frantically claw their way through a waking nightmare, starting from a bravura single-take opening sequence that’s half horror, half propulsive action with a doomy punchline. —Jesse Hassenger
Director: Michael Sarnoski
A Quiet Place: Day One centers on the terminally ill, misanthropic Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), who lives in a hospice right outside of New York City with her service cat Frodo (the remarkably chill star of the picture). At the start of the film, care worker Reuben (Alex Wolff) promises her pizza and a theater outing if she joins a group trip to Manhattan. That same day, of course, meteor-like objects attack the city from the sky and extraterrestrial creatures, sensitive to sound, begin to ravage the hordes of inhabitants afterward. The group of cancer patients, including Sam, are stuck in the chaos.
Sam plays more like a walking archetype rather than a full character, though Nyong’o’s performance is one of the film’s strengths, often filling in gaps in her character that don’t follow logically. For instance, Sam’s unyielding desire to head to her favorite pizza place, Patsy’s Pizzeria in Harlem, even after A Quiet Place: Day One’s apocalyptic event, is only barely convincing because Nyong’o is so skilled at portraying the most basic of emotions: fear, despair, loneliness, belligerence. She is our proxy. She wants to get pizza from a place that’s probably been destroyed due to a burgeoning alien invasion? Sure, we’re with her. Maybe. The introduction of Joseph Quinn’s Eric, a British law student, is also a highlight, simply because he is adequate at embodying a pathetic, cat-like nature that works opposite Sam. His attachment to Sam and Frodo feels natural only due to Quinn’s ability to evoke the qualities of a dying bird. —Hafsah Abbasi
Director: Tilman Singer
Cuckoo is a twisty, giallo-inspired, semi-body horror mystery that double acts as an impressive lead showcase proving that Schafer is more than just an “it girl.” Gretchen, a moody American teen grieving the recent loss of her mother, is forced to move in with her father Luis (Marton Csokas), his much younger English wife Beth (Jessica Henwick), and their mute daughter Alma (Mila Lieu). Luis and Beth have relocated from the States to the Alps, where they had once honeymooned at a lavish resort and subsequently conceived Alma. Both architects, the couple has been solicited by the resort’s owner, the overly pleasant Herr König (Dan Stevens) to build him a new resort. Thus, their project leaves them, and now Gretchen, with an indefinite stay in Germany. This is much to Gretchen’s chagrin, to put it lightly. She resents her stepmother and half-sister in what is customary for this archetypal character dynamic: a new mother has laid eggs in Gretchen’s nest, stealing resources. So, too is Gretchen’s relationship with her father strained. She had previously been under her mother’s welcomed custody, but in the wake of her untimely passing, Gretchen is now required to encroach upon her father’s new, younger family whom he had willingly abandoned her for.
One could argue that Cuckoo’s chief failing is that it doesn’t allow its tone to lean into the pure, visceral absurdity of its narrative. But I’d argue back that the seriousness adds to a certain charm, in a way where it’s clear that Singer isn’t trying to be overly self-serious; certainly, Argento characters are still taking the graveness of their stakes to heart. That König is so dead-set in his absurd goals is delightful, because there’s still a little twinkle in his eye, and Cuckoo manages to imbue this vibe with an earnest terror that makes for an exceedingly entertaining horror film. —Brianna Zigler
Director: Paul Duane
Ireland is a lush green country with at least one haunted house story for every village and hamlet, an ongoing contrast between timeless beauty and eldritch terror. Writer/director Paul Duane puts that dynamic at the center of All You Need Is Death, where a lost song is found, performed and translated, and every party involved in each step of the journey comes to the conclusion that some things are lost for good reason. Two keys help unlock Duane’s work here. The first is the soundtrack, provided by Ian Lynch, the co-founder of the great contemporary Dublin folk group Lankum, most recently of the stunning 2023 album False Lankum. Duane likes to hold on moments for as long as possible, and in a dialogue scene between Breeze (Nigel O’Neill), Rita’s younger brother, and Ron (Barry McKiernan), a kind if hesitant helper to Anna and Aleks, O’Neill rasps and lilts at McKiernan, filling in details of Breeze and Rita’s childhood. As this scene unfolds, the score’s harsh, discordant notes hang over the conversation – reminiscences of bygone dread bleeding into the now with terrifying inevitability. We don’t quite know what conclusion Breeze is building toward before the petrified Ron. Frankly, it’s somewhat hazy what the conclusion is even when Breeze gets there; such is the film’s mild hallucinatory energy. What’s unmistakable is that nothing good will come from the song, because nothing good came from it before. —Andy Crump
Director: Jayro Bustamante
It’s a delicate proposition, to approach a story of real-life horror and shocking depravity through the lens of fantastical parable. Such a road is one that the likes of Guillermo del Toro are known for walking, although in the case of stories such as Pan’s Labyrinth or The Devil’s Backbone, the Mexican master of horror and fantasy crafts his tales around fictional people suffering on the fringes of real-world historical conflicts, rather than directly adapting ripped-from-the-headlines cases of recent tragedy. The latter makes for a significantly more difficult assignment in finding a tone that doesn’t come off as lacking in dignity, which is part of the task tackled by Guatemalan filmmaker Jayro Bustamante in his newly released Rita, a harrowing dark fantasy/horror hybrid that centers around a real-life incident involving the deaths of more than 40 young girls in the country only seven years ago. Bustamante ultimately succeeds in his intention to highlight the inhuman suffering foisted on vulnerable girls via the country’s broken Social Welfare framework, even as he skirts the boundaries of decorousness in telling their story and indulges in some visual showiness that simultaneously amplifies and arguably detracts from his thesis. What remains is a visually sumptuous and evocative, but uneven feature.
Bustamante has ventured into this kind of territory previously, most recently via 2019’s well-received La Llorona, (not to be confused with the same year’s The Curse of La Llorona) which coupled the pervasive, ghostly urban legend of the Spanish-speaking world with a story about the countless indigenous people murdered or forcibly disappeared during the brutal Guatemalan Civil War. Rita, on the other hand, takes a far more recent inspiration: A 2017 incident in which a fire at a decrepit “safe home” or orphanage claimed the lives of 41 girls between the ages of 14-17, all of whom had been confined in a single room following a mass escape attempt the previous day. The film is told from the eyes of one of these girls, newcomer Rita, who enters the “safe house” system as a result of abuse, only to find even more systematic, dehumanizing treatment waiting for her there. —Jim Vorel
Director: Larry Fessenden
Being a werewolf sounds fun, until it happens to you: The late nights, the insatiable hunger, the undying rage, the ballooning of your clothing budget as every outfit you own inexorably falls apart with each moonlit transformation. The cuisine isn’t great, either, unless you’re the over-adventurous type to whom eating animals alive sounds like a test of intestinal and gustatory mettle. It’s enough to make an afflicted person lose their zest for life, which might in turn be enough to make shuffling oneself off one’s own mortal coil an appealing alternative. That’s the space Larry Fessenden occupies in his new movie, Blackout, an existential and depressive character study of Charley (Alex Hurt). Charley is a man once bitten and, as the story begins, twice a killer: In a slowly creeping POV shot, Charley stalks and savages a young couple screwing in an open field, claws slashing flesh to the tune of their helpless screams. Blackout cuts to the morning after, as Charley, an artist, wakes up in his hotel room, where he has apparently enjoyed an extended stay while plotting liberation from his supernatural burden. Putting down a dog just takes a tranquilizer and pentobarbital. Putting down a werewolf demands much more effort. Firearm stores don’t typically line their shelves with silver bullets. —Andy Crump
Director: Damien Leone
The venial sins of selfishness–refusing to hold the door for strangers, tipping waiters stingily, cutting cars off in bumper-to-bumper traffic, being a dick to strangers as you livestream–are a far cry from the protracted atrocities Art the Clown subjects hapless victims to in Damien Leone’s Terrifier films, including, but not limited to, sagittal bisection, flogging, flaying, acid attacks, amateur knifepoint penectomies, cannibalism, and bludgeoning, all conducted using homemade weapons or rusty hardware. (For a lucky few, Art resorts to guns.) But what Leone makes clear across each of these movies, and what David Howard Thornton, the man behind the harlequin makeup, expresses through his performance in Terrifier 3, is how much delight Art takes in killing. Going by the KonMari method, savage violence is absolutely what sparks joy.
Art isn’t the first of slasher cinema’s masked villains to derive if not joy, then at least a hearty belly laugh, from painfully shuffling people off of their mortal coils. Charles Lee “Chucky” Ray and Freddy Krueger are ur-texts for Art’s background; both of them like murdering people, and both of them go deep in the tank to devise new, creative ways to take life. (Krueger has a noticeable edge in this contest, but you gotta respect Chucky’s industriousness.) Think of either character; the first thing that comes to mind is likely to be their appearances, but the second thing is equally as likely to be their echoing cackles, which are as core to their personas as the accouterments we associate with their names.
What separates these classic 1980s figures from Art, though, is the way he merges their conflicting sides into a single profile. Art doesn’t make noise. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t whistle. He doesn’t gasp with excitement or scream in anguish. He’s a silent killer, like a gas leak. At the same time, he’s ferociously loud in gesture; Thornton contorts his mouth into donut-sized “O’s” to articulate surprise, he grins like the Cheshire Cat to prime the audience for incoming carnage, he mock-cries at his victims’ suffering, he shuffles, he struts, he glides. Even at just a hair over 6’ in height, Thornton reads as diminutive next to those ’80s-era big boys, but his commitment to the role gives him the effect of feeling larger than life. He takes up the screen whenever he’s on it: A black and white jester who speaks volumes with his face and his body. —Andy Crump
Director: Josh Forbes
Destroy All Neighbors is one of those movies I knew I’d like the minute the opening credits started. Though many films abandon them these days, opening titles can be fantastic tone-setters, especially in the realm of horror movies, and director Josh Forbes clearly understands this. So he recruited animator Rich Zim to give us something that’s both dazzling on its own and, with the aid of music by Ryan Kattner and Brett Morris, delivers a taste of the film that follows in microcosm: An all-out assault on the senses that’s fun, funny, and still capable of making you a little queasy. That’s Destroy All Neighbors in a nutshell, but that’s also just the beginning.
Jonah Ray Rodrigues stars as William, a struggling musician and sound engineer who’s trying to achieve his dream of crafting the perfect prog rock album in his spare time, no matter how few people believe in him. Lately it feels like everyone around him is pushing his dreams aside, from his girlfriend Emily (Kiran Deol) to his boss (Thomas Lennon) to a pushy rock musician who’s taken over his day job (Kattner). Thankfully, William still has his hero, a prog-rock bassist (Jon Daly), to keep him company through a series of throwback instructional videos, so at least he’s not totally without inspiration. But everything gets even harder thanks to the arrival of Vlad (Alex Winter, in heavy makeup), a loud and obnoxious new neighbor who wears tracksuits, yells, and plays insufferable dubstep music at all hours while he lifts homemade weights. A clash is coming between neighbors, a clash that will change William’s life forever, and put him on a path that might mean his triumph, or his doom. —Matthew Jackson
Director: Ariane Louis-Seize
On the page and on screens, vampires come in a range of makes and models: Sexy, hideous, humanoid, monstrous, cunning, coarse, kindly, cruel. But the massive popularity of franchises like Twilight suggests that some audiences harbor an inferiority complex over their frailty compared to the indomitable power of the average vamp. They’re faster than us. They’re smarter than us. They’re stronger than us, more worldly than us. They have perfect hair, forever. Quebec’s Ariane Louis-Seize has a radical counterpoint to this formulation of the vampire archetype, and pretty much all the other variants taking up real estate in horror at this moment: What if vampires were just like us? Her feature debut, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, is not only packing one of 2024’s standout titles; it’s the most original vampire film of the 2020s so far.
Sasha (Sara Montpetit) is in her teens, meaning she’s really 68. (Here, vampires aren’t eternally youthful; they age, but slowly, so three centuries for them looks like seven decades for us.) An only child to her father Aurélien (Steve Laplante) and mother Georgette (Sophie Cadieux), Sasha struggles with vampires’ core survival mechanism: Hunting. She can’t bring herself to kill. She takes her blood from hospital bags instead, until Aurélien and Georgette show her tough love. What’s the point of living if it means either hurting others or suffering with crushing loneliness? It’s a simple question bearing rich fruit: A kinship between mortals and the ageless that’s uncommon in the genre. —Andy Crump
Directors: Colin and Cameron Cairnes
The brothers behind Aussie cult horror-comedy 100 Bloody Acres, Colin and Cameron Cairnes return to the uneasy balance of genres for Late Night with the Devil—and they throw in a new one for good measure. Not content to simply be charmingly hacky or tightly gruesome, Late Night with the Devil is also a great movie about (and existing within the form of) talk shows. Thanks to its commitment to the ‘70s made-for-TV bit, ever-escalating stakes and nervously swaggering lead performance, the ratings ploy from Hell finds substance inside its shtick.
Much of that is due to David Dastmalchian, who was born for the role of an underdog late-night host, occupying the uneasy space between slick smarm, hungry entitlement and genuine empathy. His piercing eyes and faltering smile persist through the patter and the cue cards. He’s half-charming, deeply fake, his mediocrity tinged with sadness. Eventually, his slimy confidence sloughs away to reveal credulous, abject panic. Dastmalchian’s a captivating performer, especially in genre film where his characters’ tics and imperfections (often conveyed through his deep, sad stare, darkened under his heavy eyebrows) ground the over-the-top goings-on. When it’s clear that his Jack Delroy has brought something he could never hope to understand—let alone control—onto his flagging program Night Owls as a final resort, we’re plummeting on the roller coaster right alongside him. —Jacob Oller
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Schoenbrun’s film follows Owen (initially played by Ian Foreman before aging into Justice Smith for the majority of the runtime), a kid floating through the ennui-infused haze of his late-’90s suburban upbringing. He meets Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a high schooler obsessed with the TV show The Pink Opaque, which reads like a Nickelodeon SNICK show filtered through the monster-of-the-week sensibilities of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Owen has longed to watch the show himself, but it always airs after his bedtime, prompting him to sneak over to Maddy’s house for a surreptitious watch party sleepover. Thus begins a fixation where the lines of the show’s reality and the unreal malaise of Owen’s daily existence start to dissolve, begging questions of identity and repression in a world that seems gradually more hostile for its banality.
To delve much deeper into the film’s sparse plot would be to deconstruct the mystery of its central metaphor, but if there is one thing that Schoenbrun excels at, it is empathetically communicating transgender experience through cinematic language instead of direct representation. There’s a pervasive sense that nothing fits together in Owen’s world, that he’s outside his own life looking into a reality that is wrong for him to inhabit. His attraction to The Pink Opaque, a show targeted at teenage girls, is an unspoken masculine taboo, and his initial interactions with Maddy are of an outsider desiring connection with someone who shares his fixated interest, a compulsion that even he doesn’t fully understand. Eventual discussions of claiming hidden selves and the suffocating feeling of failing to embrace that truth are emblematic of why people transition at all, and if I Saw the TV Glow is to be considered a horror film, that horror is entirely existential, the terror of lost personhood in the prison of suburban comfort. —Leigh Monson
Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
The crew at Radio Silence knows how to build an ensemble, as evidenced by their work assembling a new cast to merge with the old in 2022’s Scream and forging the dysfunctional family dynamics of Ready or Not. But the filmmaking collective led by directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and producer Chad Villella are more than great shoppers for the ingredients; they can also really cook. The ingredients are assembled again for the group’s latest feature, Abigail, a new take on Universal’s classic Dracula’s Daughter story, albeit one with an entirely different story dreamed up by writers Stephen Shields and Guy Busick. As with their previous major releases, Radio Silence brings the right atmosphere, the right blend of horror and comedy, and a great ensemble cast led by some seasoned horror performers. It’s a beautifully set table, but Abigail really comes alive when Radio Silence flips that table and sprays it with gore, transforming a high concept into a chaotic, gleefully gruesome piece of popcorn horror.
The girl of the title, played by Alisha Weir, looks like a cute young ballerina with a rich father. But, as every trailer for the film has informed us, she’s actually a vicious and clever vampire, which spells lots of troubles for the sextet of kidnappers who’ve been hired to abduct her for a hefty ransom. The kidnappers, each given Reservoir Dogs-style codenames derived from the names of the Rat Pack, have all taken this job with very few details, drawn in by the gig’s seeming simplicity and a promised payout that’s too good to pass up.It’s only supposed to take about 24 hours of keeping Abigail at a spooky old country house before the ransom money pours in, so everyone decides to get a little drunk, try to relax, and wait for the long day to end in piles of cash. Right away, though, Joey senses something is wrong, particularly when Abigail starts to peel back her scared little girl persona just enough to let some not-so-veiled threats slip through. Soon, intrigue, paranoia, and sheer brutality emerge, as the kidnappers begin to realize they’re in way, way over their heads. —Matthew Jackson
Director: Thea Hvistendahl
A zombie tragedy of false hope and brutal realizations, Handling the Undead adapts John Ajvide Lindqvist’s follow-up book to Let the Right One In with contemplative quiet. Director and co-writer Thea Hvistendahl positions three families afflicted by the sudden resurrection of a newly dead loved one as isolated units, staring in disbelief at the thing we’ve been trained since birth to avoid. A grandfather and mother care for a boy whose distended belly and unseeing eyes are like punishments inflicted upon them. An elderly woman jabbers away about her garden with the wife that walked back from her funeral. A comedian and his children ride an emotional roller coaster after his wife doesn’t stay dead after a car accident. Each is shot in strict compositions defined by straight lines, distancing angles and obscured frames. Hvistendahl’s lovely yet unnerving aesthetic is as cold and tangible as its corpses, paced with plenty of time for us to think. In this telling, the realities of death don’t go away with the unreality of revitalization, and the cannibalistic motivations that drive similar genre stories to crisis are avoided in favor of a creeping, omnipresent desperation. Where Let the Right One In‘s austere and icy vampire tale played more to our sympathies for its characters, Handling the Undead allows us to project our own fears and sadnesses onto its unaware zombies—just like those still living in its world. –Jacob Oller
Director: Chris Nash
When In a Violent Nature’s boogeyman (Ry Barrett) rises to spill the blood of campers who’ve wandered into his wood, it doesn’t have the look or feel of a horror movie. The forest is serene, shot as if its lumbering antagonist was just another part of nature. With gorgeous bright greens and a commitment to fully viewing its muddy, ragged creature design, In a Violent Nature isn’t hiding anything. Confident, imposing, bright daylight photography is more concerned with establishing an unassuming setting. We trudge past the inherently uncanny human rot lost out in the woods: A gutted shed, a burned tower, a rusted-out car. All the while, the killer lurches along, the camera at his back, in quiet pursuit of those unlucky enough to have disturbed him. And I do mean quiet—there’s only diegetic music in this film, adding tremendously to its methodical atmosphere. The daylight stuff is so imposing and confident that, when it flows into night, the fading visibility is so organic that it sneaks up on you. That’s not to say Nash and team try to take advantage of us in the dark. Some of the best, inventive and juicy kills come bright and early. The gruesome, delightfully disgusting kills are as nonchalant as they’d be for this creature—even the most elaborate and ridiculous (and they do get elaborate and ridiculous) play like he’s working through a set of crunches. And boy, do folks get crunched. —Jacob Oller
Director: Robert Morgan
Folks on the prowl for monstrously uncanny thrillers need to prioritize Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion. The award-winning short filmmaker’s hallucinatory feature debut remarkably blends stop-motion with live-action like it’s a commonplace horror practice. Its themes stoke the harmful fires that entrap creative types who lose themselves in their projects, recalling the delicious instability of Prano Bailey-Bond’s delirious Censor or Peter Strickland’s sonically sinister Berberian Sound Studio. Morgan bleakly and ingeniously captures what it means to be a “tortured artist,” hybridizing an icky yet alluring stop-motion style that feels like a collaboration between claymation celebrity Lee Hardcastle and slasher legend Leatherface.
Aisling Franciosi of The Nightingale and The Last Voyage of The Demeter fame stars as Ella Blake, an aspiring stop-motion filmmaker under duress. Ella’s overbearing mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet), can no longer continue her legendary stop-motion career due to crippling arthritis. Ella’s primary role is as Suzanne’s caretaker and co-creator on her last project before she passes, but Ella feels more like an assistant than an equal partner. That’s until Suzanne suffers a stroke and is hospitalized, leaving Ella to her own devices as she decides whether to carry out her mother’s dying wish or start anew. Ella chooses the latter with the help of a curious child roaming around her new apartment complex (played by Caoilinn Springall), which morphs into something bizarre as her ideas—primarily a ghoulish woodland entity dubbed the “Ashman”—begin to invade Ella’s daily routine. —Matt Donato
Director: Arkasha Stevenson
Unless it’s something like the Evil Dead franchise, I generally don’t give horror sequels or prequels a passing thought other than “obvious insta-garbage.” How wrong I was about The First Omen, the feature debut of writer/director Arkasha Stevenson. Her film immediately struck me not as a franchise cash-in, but as the work of someone who deeply understands what makes good horror tick and who made this installment almost completely their own. The small handful of Marvel-esque Easter eggs are entirely negligible for how well the film succeeds at being an affecting and stomach-churning work of modern horror. The First Omen kicks off with a queasy conversation between two English priests, Father Harris (Charles Dance) and Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), over the conception of an unknown cursed child, a girl (Damien is a boy, yes—but I’ll keep this review spoiler-free) whose birth will bring forth an all-powerful evil. Kept elusive and told via a collage of disturbing yet striking images, we leave this scene and cut to the arrival of a young American nun-to-be named Margaret (Nell Tiger Free). She befriends her new roommate, the free-spirited Luz (Maria Caballero), who is determined to use her remaining days of secular freedom spent as the hedonistic young woman she still is. One night, Luz gets a reluctant Margaret all gussied up and drags her to a disco, where Margaret meets a nice Italian boy with whom she shares an intimate moment. The next day, she wakes up in a puddle of her own sweat, the memory of the previous night already erased; Luz assures her that she got Margaret home safely. A grave encounter with Father Brennan portends impending doom, and Margaret begins to see and experience strange, diabolical things. Stevenson, aided by co-writers Tim Smith and Keith Thomas, makes The First Omen remarkably fresh while utilizing old tricks. Pans and zooms give the filmmaking a throwback feel (cinematography credited to Aaron Morton), jump scares function as earned accoutrement for a well-crafted atmosphere instead of supplanting actual horror filmmaking, and there are images that are genuinely difficult to look at—not just because they make the audience look at something particularly visceral, but because of the way the shot is blocked, the way the lighting is lit, the way a body is not quite as it should be. Not overtly gory but just off, which is often far more skin-crawling than blood and guts ever are. The First Omen is an exceedingly successful first feature, and an invigorating film within a genre’s increasingly limp mainstream. –Brianna Zigler
Director: Greg Jardin
Masks are important in horror movies, but not just the ones you can pluck off a shelf and wear. Jason, Michael, and Ghostface all have their masks, of course, but a good horror film can also focus in on the masks we as regular humans wear at work, at home, or among friends. Who we really are versus who we hope we are is a source of phenomenal dramatic tension in any genre. Throw in some horror concepts and some scary atmosphere and you’ve got what’s (hopefully) a compelling concoction about the fear of facing your true self, and the fear of learning those closest to you aren’t who you thought they were.
It’s What’s Inside, the new horror/sci-fi/comedy from writer/director Greg Jardin, is certainly compelling, but it’s what the film does beyond the basic tension of challenging its characters on their own identities that makes its special. Fiendishly clever, beautifully designed, and driven by a great ensemble, it’s a genre-hopping romp that plays like the perfect movie for a Friday night in October, even as it also functions as a nerve-shredding exploration of the masks we wear. It’s a film about masks, yes, but also about mining the insecurities, fears, and longing of others to get to the truth of who you really are, then realizing you might not like the results. It’s a smart, sexy, riotous assault on the senses, and it deserves a spot on your Halloween watchlist. —Matthew Jackson
Director: Sébastien Vaniček
Arachnophobes beware: Infested is the best spider-centric horror movie since Arachnophobia. Sébastien Vaniček’s feature debut is a no-bullshit tour de force about eight-legged assassins that nearly perfects the subgenre. Imagine [REC] and Attack the Block but with spiders. Lots of spiders. Giant-ass spiders—but not to be confused with the comedic tone of Big Ass Spider! Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting is the arachnid horror flick to watch this month if you’re looking for something more lighthearted, but Infested is a paralyzing nightmare caked in webbing that’ll have your skin crawling for weeks.
Vaniček’s debut for the ages hits all the hallmarks of exemplary horror cinema, which is shockingly accomplished for a first-time credit. Vaniček and co-writer Florent Bernard use low-income housing to sneak commentary underneath the nerve-shredding experience, especially since the film was once titled Vermin (a reference to how Kaleb’s community is treated). It’s very Attack the Block in its gentrification undertones and classist experiences, but visually ruthless and atmospherically ferocious like the claustrophobic [REC]. An overfilled grab bag of fears about spiders is exploited on repeat, from being hidden inside shoes to nesting within air vents—and that’s just the beginning. Infested is an arachnophobic smorgasbord of “absolutely ‘effing not” imagery, from body horror grossness to animal attack violence, as Vaniček reels us in the more his characters struggle to escape. —Matt Donato
Director: Andrew Cumming
Some fears are older than history. It’s one of those truths that makes horror stories so exciting, so primal for those of us who indulge in their particularly dark delights: The sense that we’re examining a continuum of experience that stretches back eons, that unifies all of human history regardless of demographic persuasion. We can all understand fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, fear of isolation, because we have millennia of ingrained, evolutionary understanding built into our gray matter. Or, put another way: Some fears are so ingrained we can never escape them, which only makes them scarier.
All of this means that Out of Darkness, the buzzy new horror film from director Andrew Cumming, begins with a kind of visceral allure even beyond the attractiveness of its high-concept. Lots of horror films deal with universal fears, of course, but with this film, set 45,000 years in the past, Cumming makes that subtextual universality into text. The aim is to deliver something that’s both a gripping throwback and a shockingly timeless exploration of human terror. Happily for horror fans, the film mostly hits the mark, and becomes a must-see genre film along the way. —Matthew Jackson
Director: Robert Eggers
What a strange yet hypnotizing task, the business of remaking Nosferatu, only slightly mitigated by the fact that it’s been done before. F.W. Murnau’s original 1922 silent film, subtitled A Symphony of Horror, adapted Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula without permission before the authorized 1931 edition (and is not especially less faithful to the novel than that early Universal Horror classic); then, in 1979, Werner Herzog remade the film as Nosferatu the Vampyre, a more verdant, eerily quiet version, expertly suffused with the grim unease that it could be taking place closer to our world.
That sense of creeping inevitability bleeds into the 2024 edition of Nosferatu, adapted by Robert Eggers – whose film that comes closest to a contemporary setting, The Lighthouse, takes place around the time Stoker’s novel was published. His Nosferatu echoes its official source, as the earlier film echoed its inspiration: In the nineteenth century, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) travels to the remote castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), in the scenic Carpathian Mountains, to complete a real-estate transaction. Orlok becomes entranced by a photo of Thomas’s wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), and when he makes his way to his new home, he brings vampiric pestilence with him as he stalks his adopted hometown, and Ellen in particular, with a kind of rigorously evil devotion. To call it love or even lust would not quite do justice to the totemic figure he cuts. This Orlok is neither the beastly, rodent-like version played by Max Shreck nor the elegant, be-caped Bela Lugosi. Get ready for a main vamp with a beard more prominent than any fangs, somewhere between a lumberjack and a living tree. This Orlok gives the impression of a vampire who audibly gulps down blood not exactly out of hunger, but to collect and taste what he lacks. —Jesse Hassenger
Director: Osgood Perkins
The first thing I wanted to do after seeing Longlegs is take a shower. Some horror movies have you looking over your shoulder on the way out of the theater, jumping at shadows in the parking lot. These are the horror movies that follow you. Longlegs doesn’t follow you. You’re drenched in Longlegs. It’s all over you—in your hair, on your clothes—by the time the credits roll. Its fear is less tangible than a slasher or a monster, even less than a demon. It’s just something in the air, in the back of your mind, like the buzz of a fluorescent lamp. Oz Perkins’ satanic serial killer hunt is his most accessible movie yet, putting the filmmaker’s lingering, atmospheric power towards a logline The Silence of the Lambs made conventional. Precisely crafted and just odd enough to disarm you, allowing its evil to fully seep in, Longlegs is a riveting tale of influence and immersion.
Longlegs’ dominos may somewhat inelegantly tumble through the (not hard to guess) twists and turns of its finale, but those pieces are of impeccable craftsmanship. A handful of impressively controlled performances, a dilapidated aesthetic rich with negative space, a queasy score, a methodical but always gripping pace, and one of the most original and upsetting horror villains in a long while. Perkins’ haunted vision is so convincing, you also might feel like scrubbing it off of you after you’ve hustled back to the safety of your home. —Jacob Oller
Director: Magnus von Horn
Such is the brutal pragmatism of director Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle, a gorgeously shot testament to the world’s callousness and cruelty, divorced from the petty construct of gender as it foists unimaginable suffering on the weakest among us. Difficult to classify, but hovering in the conceptual space between psychological horror and traumatic biography, the film is inspired by a real-life series of atrocities committed toward newborn babies in 1910s Denmark. Protagonist Karoline witnesses these horrors as both victim and accomplice, a woman whose dubious claim of ignorance resides in the moral gray area of what we can effectively choose to ignore by claiming to not understand. Sometimes, this is simply easier than uncovering the horrors of the truth we may suspect.
This kind of nihilism and cinematic misanthropy would perhaps unsurprisingly threaten to make the film oppressive to watch beyond even the degree to which this is absolutely intended, but that’s where the incredibly beautiful filmmaking of The Girl with the Needle raises it beyond the mere horrors of its depictions. Its visuals are absolutely stunning: Dramatic, high-contrast black and white cinematography captures a mythic, almost fairy tale sense of macabre wonder in the streets of the bleak, shadow-shrouded Copenhagen. In the back alleys, unpaved dirt paths hold pools of disgusting, stagnant water while dripping “apartment” rooms full of mold await residents who can cough up the difference between sleeping outside and with a marginal roof over their heads, a symbolic chasm between the lowest tiers of haves and have-nots. The active camera of cinematographer Michał Dymek cruises the streets like a pickpocket urchin, capable of evoking even a sense of sumptuous romanticism at times, as in the sequence where Karoline and her factory owner boss walk down opposite sides of the street as they flirtatiously gaze on each other. That brief sense of beauty is then expertly dashed with an immediate smash cut to the couple now rutting in a dirty alley while passerby stroll past in the background 30 feet away, ignoring the abjectly disgusting spectacle. Rarely does a piece of editing make you feel like you should immediately go shower away the secondhand filth of watching it. —Jim Vorel
Director: Damian McCarthy
The success of Damian McCarthy’s Oddity is a testament to the Irish filmmaker’s ability to get the maximum possible mileage out of the smallest units of filmmaking verve. Compared to some of the other entries on this list, Oddity is understated, slowly paced, supremely patient. It depends almost entirely on the strength of its skin-crawlingly good opening sequence and a few key elements: The performance of Irish actress Carolyn Bracken, a unique and visually engaging shooting locale, and the creepiest goddamn mannequin ever put on the silver screen.
Oddity is a story that happens in the wake of a brutal but mysterious tragedy, part of which we witness in its transfixing opening moments, which deliver a “what would you do in this scenario?” prompt for the ages. A woman is alone late at night in a creepy home being renovated, cut off from internet access or cellular reception, when a frightening looking man appears at her door. The agitated man insists that he saw an unknown person enter the woman’s home, that she is not safe because there’s someone in there with you. He begs her to open the door and allow him to come to her aid, seeming sincere despite his apparent derangement. So, which do you fear more: The potential threat you can see, or the one that may be hidden around the next corner? Rarely has any recent indie horror crackled with as much palpable tension as McCarthy immediately establishes here, and he milks it for all it’s worth.
Oddity then morphs, though, into a narrative happening in the wake of those opening moments, as the woman’s blind sister (Bracken), a clairvoyant with the power to read the energy and history of inanimate objects, investigates the circumstances of the crime. She knocks it out of the park, delivering one of the genre’s best 2024 performances as the incisive and prickly Darcy, a woman who suffers no fools even as she leverages a full bag of occult tricks in getting to the bottom of what happened to her sister. The most notable of which is of course the aforementioned wooden mannequin, an absolutely disturbing creation for which effects artist Paul McDonnell deserves special credit. In the mode of a filmmaker such as Demián Rugna, who made the motionless corpse of a young boy sitting at a dinner table nerve-shredding in 2017’s Terrified, McCarthy delights in playing here with the audience’s certainty that the malevolent mannequin will eventually–must eventually–be animated by some energizing force of revenge. Suffice to say, you’ll eventually get what you paid for, but Oddity’s true joys are in the moments before the madness; in Bracken’s cutting quips and steely resolve, and McCarthy’s mastery of eerie suspense. Thoroughly old fashioned and absolutely delightful, Oddity is simply expertly crafted and conceived horror filmmaking. —Jim Vorel
Director: Coralie Fargeat
In terms of sheer dominance over The Discourse, there can be no doubt that 2024 belonged body, mind and soul to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. A quantum leap forward in terms of ambition and sophistication after her slick but streamlined 2017 debut thriller Revenge, The Substance is an ode to self-destruction and bruised egos, greed and blindness to cycles of perpetuated avarice.
Much of the film’s success comes down to the incredible willingness that Fargeat taps into in its performers to make themselves as reprehensible–and yes, “ugly”–as possible, becoming portraits of desperate individuals who have long since abandoned common decency or a shred of empathy. That of course includes Demi Moore’s Elisabeth, who pathetically clings to the faintest shreds of vicarious achievement despite the fact that she can’t really enjoy them, addicted to the rush of seeing her avatar succeed even as she resents herself and physically drains herself dry. It includes Dennis Quaid’s not-so-subtly named Harvey, a slavering psychopath who treats his talent with no more respect or tact than he puts into masticating an entire plate of shrimp in a sequence that rivals any of the other stomach-churning sights of The Substance. And the willingness to tap into the depraved side of human nature even applies to Margaret Qualley’s pristine Sue as well, a woman so eager to debase and objectify herself just to live up to the archaic standards of success once set by Elisabeth, never once considering that her unique circumstances could afford her a second chance to live life different than Elisabeth previously did “in her prime.” The tragedy of The Substance is that Sue can’t even conceive of a more fulfilling alternative than willingly throwing herself into the exact same meat grinder that chewed up Elisabeth and spit her out, except Sue is apparently determined to speedrun the entire process.
On a thematic and visual level, The Substance has perhaps been given more credit at times for its outrageousness or uniqueness than it necessarily demands, which mostly serves to illustrate how this kind of boundary stepping body horror has become a rarity to see on a big screen in recent years. Reactions to the film almost serve as a litmus test for whether any prospective horror geek has ever gotten around to seeing Brian Yuzna’s Society from 1989–if you have, then you probably find Fargeat’s film a bit less shocking. But the sheer, unapologetic gusto with which The Substance tackles its squelchy, bone-cracking delights makes its combo of visceral transformation and misanthropic satire into a vital piece of modern horror filmmaking, anchored by some of the best performances the genre has seen in recent memory. —Jim Vorel
Director: Jang Jae-hyun
Writer/director Jang Jae-hyun’s Exhuma bobs and weaves in ways American exorcism stories couldn’t fathom. Shades of The Wailing’s transformative storytelling covers its haunted burial grounds, traditional exhumation practices and resentful spirits, all with filmmaking ambitions that think outside the (coffin) box. Exhuma presents as ordinary until it’s not, a splendid feature of slippery South Korean thrillers. Jang’s gravedigging ghost hunt takes multiple forms, each one more ferocious than the last, as nationalist histories manifest as a seething threat to modern generations.
Exhuma follows a quartet of afterlife specialists: There’s renowned shaman Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun), her full-body inked partner Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun), “Geomancer” AKA feng shui master Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik) and mortician Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin). A wealthy Korean American family hires Hwa-rim and Bong-gil to eliminate a “Grave’s Call” curse afflicting their newborn son; Sang-deok and Yeong-geun are enlisted to help locate the problem ancestor’s grave. Together, near North Korea’s border, the party discovers a nameless tombstone. They’re in the right place, but Sang-deok can’t shake an alarming aura around the site. Some jobs aren’t worth the payday, as Sang-deok and his fellow undead bloodhounds are about to find out.
Jang’s approach welcomes international audiences into South Korean lore, where spirituality thrives without scoffs or sarcasm—it’s an immersive treat because there’s no disbelief or doubt to bog down the storytelling. Hwa-rim doesn’t waste time clashing against that one annoying pest who continually downplays supernatural experiences (the “they’re not real” plant). A propulsive energy trims fatty tropes off Exhuma’s lean cut of vengeful, hereditary malevolence. —Matt Donato
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