The post-pandemic theatrical landscape has mostly been an anxiety disorder punctuated by the occasional high. But one genre has consistently drawn audiences back to the multiplex in the past few years: horror.
No longer just pegged to Halloween, horror movies now dot the release calendar year-round. M3GAN 2.0 may have fizzled last month but 28 Years Later found new blood in a franchise only a fraction younger than its title. The legacy sequel I Know What You Did Last Summer, which opened last weekend, tests the limits of ‘90s nostalgia, while Dave Franco and Alison Brie’s Sundance body-horror hit, Together, arrives July 30. Hopes also are high for Weapons, with Josh Brolin and Julia Garner, opening early next month.
Since the turn of the 20th century, horror — first in literary form and later in movies — has reflected social anxieties about a rapidly changing world. In a 21st century plagued by such concerns as global warming, the rise of AI technology, democracy in peril and the demonization of “the other,” it’s unsurprising that horror in the past 25 years has become unusually fertile terrain, ushering in what might arguably be called a new golden age of screen terror.
That made it a challenging task to whittle down a roundup of just 25 favorites, covering studio releases and indies, American and international. For every film included on the entirely subjective ranked list below, a handful of others regrettably got bumped (see Honorable Mentions for several of them).
I make no apologies for personal preferences that lean more toward atmospheric or allegorical horror than sadistic schlock, so you won’t find The Human Centipede slithering here. Likewise, I’ll take monster movies and ghost stories over torture porn — don’t look for Saw or Hostel representation. And as much as I enjoyed X, Pearl and MaXXXine, Ti West’s playful trilogy showcasing the vixenish charms of Mia Goth, I opted to skip slasher flicks in favor of the occult.
Finally, please don’t bitch and moan about David Lynch’s incomparable Mulholland Drive not being here. Love it, but the genre-defying stunner is not horror.
Honorable mentions: Barbarian (2022), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), The Eye (2003), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), Goodnight Mommy (2014), The Innocents (2022), It Comes at Night (2017), Midsommar (2019), Nanny (2022), The Orphanage (2008), Prey (2022), Pulse (2005), Raw (2017), She Dies Tomorrow (2020), Thelma (2017)
horror romance, adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis, is a love story bathed in the pools of blood spilled during the cannibal protagonists’ feeding times. The Italian director also bathes the movie in unexpected sweetness, poetry, lush sensuality and emotional depth. Evincing simmering chemistry, Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet play the protein-diet drifters on a cross-country road trip, feasting whenever they can, “bones and all,” on human flesh. Separating and reuniting, they find a home in each other and attempt to live a normal life, until the past — in the maximum-eccentricity form of Mark Rylance — catches up with them in a shattering final act. Guadagnino cites Terrence Malick’s Badlands as an influence, but this oddly tender trail of death evokes a whole panoply of American outsider tales.
possession spook show, a violent cautionary tale warning us not to mess with the spirit world. A group of Adelaide teens who never met a frightening moment unsuitable for social media sharing somehow get a hold of what’s allegedly a severed forearm encased in ceramic. By clutching the hand and saying the three words of the title, they invite the dead to occupy their bodies. But there’s a strict 90-second limit before the presence puts down roots. In a knockout big-screen debut, Sophie Wilde plays Mia, whose mother’s apparent suicide makes her especially receptive to spiritual exploration. But a crisis explodes when Mia’s surrogate little brother stays too long at the party. The talented Philippous handily sidestepped the sophomore jinx with this year’s Bring Her Back.
alien-invasion chiller that became a sizable worldwide hit. With solid support from Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe, the suspenseful film tracks a family’s survival ordeal in a post-apocalyptic America overrun with spindly, blind extraterrestrials whose acute sense of hearing allows them to pinpoint their doomed targets in seconds. Early on, Krasinski folds in shattering tragedy that many films might have saved for the climax. Instead, here it raises a pulse rate that seldom slows down. The sequel, A Quiet Place: Part II, and prequel, A Quiet Place: Day One, are not half bad either.
spellbinding story of supernatural siege, inspired by the British Iranian director’s Tehran childhood. Set in 1988 as post-revolutionary conflict rages on, the movie plays like one of Asghar Farhadi’s intense domestic dramas deftly crossed with paranormal horror in the vein of Poltergeist or The Babadook. The cultural specificity of its political turmoil and the feminist view of a society that oppresses women turn up the alarm of a former leftist radical (played with fierce grit by Narges Rashidi) trying to save herself and her young daughter from a seemingly inescapable war and an infestation of djinn — Middle Eastern spirits carried by the wind — bent on dividing or destroying them. The most haunting image of this white-knuckle watch is a faceless figure in a whirling chador that threatens to engulf the mother.
Amulet, Peter Strickland’s beguilingly weird Berberian Sound Studio and Joe Cornish’s Spielbergian sci-fi monster comedy, Attack the Block. One of the best is Remi Weekes’ debut, a highly original marriage of haunted house terror with harrowing social realism. The film depicts the refugee experience as its own kind of horror — fleeing the violent massacres of a war-torn country; making a perilous crossing in an overcrowded boat; surviving, albeit with sacrifices and guilt; and then facing the endless bureaucratic red tape that asylum seekers are required to navigate, along with the myriad anxieties of cultural displacement. Wunmi Mosaku (a standout in Sinners) and Sope Dirisu bring agonizing depth of feeling to their roles as South Sudanese refugees. Their adjustment to life in England goes from difficult to hellish when they discover that their dilapidated government-assigned housing is inhabited by an “apeth,” a night witch that has followed them from East Africa to claim retribution for their sins.
lo-fi fright feast, sex is the means of transference for a dark force bringing certain death to whomever is last on the copulation conquest list. The only escape is by sleeping with someone else and letting them fend off the lethal entity, which can take on any form, including that of friends and family. Maika Monroe stars as the young Detroit suburbanite with a target on her back, who enlists her friends to help thwart the possibly supernatural assailant. Mitchell cited George A. Romero, John Carpenter and still photographer Gregory Crewdson as influences on the taut, almost unbearably tense film’s seductive visual compositions, full of virtuosic pans and voyeuristic tracking sequences. It’s a surreal fusion of 1950s horror with dreamy adolescent limbo.
haunted house movie as gripping and scary as this low-budget quickie from Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp. That central spark is the choice to shoot the entire single-location film in first-person perspective, with the camera standing in for the unseen entity of the title. In a sense that also makes us the ghost that gives a chilly welcome to the home’s new owners, gradually slamming the family with the full force of its diabolical intent. It’s a dazzling exercise in sustained tension and steadily mounting dread, with a terrific ensemble led by Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan.
Black Panther, Ryan Coogler delivered his first entirely original blockbuster — not based on real-life events or existing IP — with this genre-crossing panorama of the Jim Crow South. It stars a magnetic Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers known as Smoke and Stack, Chicago gangland veterans returning to the Mississippi Delta to open a juke joint. But beyond that compelling narrative spine, the movie is a soaring ode to the spiritual and supernatural power of the blues, an allegory about the elusiveness of freedom and an orgy of vampire violence. The time and care spent on character and milieu make the explosive carnage pop in a pulse-racing thriller with a lot on its mind.
crackling debut tests the boundaries between faith and insanity via a palliative care nurse who becomes a Christian convert and assumes the godly name of the title after the shock of losing a patient at her former hospital job. Welsh actress Morfydd Clark plays the tightly wound Maud as a zealous self-appointed savior, obsessed with rescuing the darkened soul of her private patient Amanda, who is slowly succumbing to cancer. Played by a never-better Jennifer Ehle with a cymbal clash of withering hauteur and fearful neediness, the once-celebrated dancer seems an unlikely candidate for absolution — she’s an unapologetic hedonist, a non-believer and a fiend for sins of the flesh, indulging during regular visits from her girlfriend. The enthralling interplay between the principal characters steers them toward mutual destruction as Glass orchestrates a crescendo in which demonic visions and splinters of the supernatural collide with religious ecstasy.
immortal vampire tale travels the same tar-black depths, but casts its own unique spell. Bill Skarsgard plays the lugubrious Count Orlok with Lily-Rose Depp as the young woman who becomes his “affliction,” her seeming purity masking a raw sexuality and innate darkness that bind them together with a heady erotic charge. A fever dream of a movie steeped in disturbing poetry and intoxicating imagery, it’s a triumph of design, atmosphere and malevolent intent, with a superlative cast also featuring Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
cryptic creep show, can still spark shudders years later. The Wilson family’s beach vacation is interrupted one night when Adelaide (Nyong’o), her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two kids are startled to see four doppelgängers silhouetted in their driveway. Those uncanny twins — sadistic, animalistic, feral versions of the Wilsons wearing red jump suits — are known as “the Tethered,” shadows connected to their counterparts, set on untethering themselves by the bloodiest means possible. I confess I cackled at the double of Elisabeth Moss’ Kitty clumsily applying lipstick with a maniacal smile, but mostly I cowered. A deeply distressing reflection on the enemy within us that mercilessly skewers the “Kumbayah” spirit of “Hands Across America.”
domestic shocker about a family hammered by sinister events after the death of their secretive grandmother. Having contributed an indelible portrait of a sensitive but spiky mother in one of the ’90s’ most iconic horror hits, The Sixth Sense, Toni Collette reaches almost operatic heights of hysteria as another spooked mom, Annie, notably in a spectacularly angry meltdown with her traumatized teenage son, played by Alex Wolff. The entire ensemble, which also includes Gabriel Byrne, Milly Shapiro and Ann Dowd, is exceptional. Making Annie a mixed-media miniature artist specializing in architectural models allows Aster to frame the entire story as if in a dollhouse, depicting the home not as a refuge but a point of entry for a malevolent coven. Thanks a lot, Grandma.
supernatural freakout ushered in the Warrens as central characters, played with an optimal balance of grave seriousness and warmth by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. The intelligence, conviction and mounting heebie-jeebies with which the married couple approach their work anchors the movie as the Warrens in 1971 battle to save a Rhode Island family whose house stands on land cursed by the Satanist witch who died there. Old-fashioned in the best possible sense of favoring practical over digital effects, it locks the viewer in a stranglehold of fear. My blood froze as the Warrens attempted to communicate with the mother possessed by the dark entity (Lili Taylor in spectacular form), and she wheeled around snarling, “She’s already gone.”
tenebrous fairy tale unfolds soon after, in the early days of the Franco regime. It parallels the ruthless efforts of a sadistic Civil Guard officer to eradicate rebel freedom fighters with the fantastical wanderings of his 10-year-old stepdaughter through an ancient stone labyrinth. Among the magical beings there, she meets a faun. Believing her to be the reincarnation of an underworld princess, the creature assigns her three tasks to complete in order to acquire immortality and return to her kingdom. A work of unbridled imagination and breathtaking beauty.
action thriller about flesh-eater mayhem on a high-speed inter-city train from Seoul. That claustrophobic setting, along with the gratifying amount of time and attention allotted to character establishment, gives the thrill ride an entertaining kinship with ‘70s disaster movies. Among the passengers is a workaholic finance manager trying to repair the broken bond with his daughter, a blue-collar couple expecting a child, a snaky COO, a high school baseball team and a homeless stowaway. Yeon fosters genuine investment even in the stock characters and their ordeal as they band together — or look out for themselves — in the fight to survive.
nerve-rattling debut finds psychological complexity and visceral fear in a child’s imagination — fueled by a gothic picture book right out of Edward Gorey — and in the 6-year-old boy’s fraught relationship with his depressed mother, a widow played in a wrenching whirl of despair, rage and helplessness by Essie Davis. The Australian director artfully blurs fantasy and reality in a story that’s as much about grief and the dread of parental failure as it is about the malevolent, black-hatted, steampunk-styled entity that emerges from the clothbound pages of that creepy kid-lit volume. It’s a gruesome assault on the senses with a hand-tooled aesthetic that evokes pre-digital horror stretching back to the German Expressionists.
Showtime series) is one of the most distinctive and delicately textured vampire movies in decades. A bullied 12-year-old boy finds companionship when a pale, mysterious girl who appears to be around his age moves in next door. While never edging away from pre-sexual innocence, their friendship evolves into love, even as gruesomely murdered bodies mount up and she is revealed to be an ancient vampire with an insatiable bloodlust. Light years away from the surging teen hormones of Twilight, this mortal-undead romance is equal parts melancholy, tender and bracingly scary.
first feature, with its provocative reflections on racial divisions, loss of identity and Black bodies treated as commodities by the white privileged class. The writer-director uses horror tropes to address needling questions that hung in the air at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency and have been steadily amplified in the years since. Daniel Kaluuya stars as a photographer meeting the parents of his white girlfriend (Alison Williams), thrust into a nightmarish reality in which the aggressively welcoming, seemingly ultra-liberal WASPs — played to insidious perfection by Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener — have other plans for him. Both terrifying and hilarious, it’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers with well-heeled upstate New Yorkers as the predators.
Under the Skin (2013)
Image Credit: Everett Collection
With a slender output of just four features over 25 years, Brit director Jonathan Glazer has established himself as an exacting craftsman across different genres. It’s no surprise that he would make the most original and enigmatic horror movie of the new century — also among the most polarizing — with this experiential adaptation of the Michel Faber novel. Scarlett Johansson is in quiet command as an extraterrestrial female in Scotland, preying on lone men whom she lures into an inky abyss, until the discovery of human empathy scrambles her instincts. The scene in which the alien seduces and then spares the life of a facially disfigured man played by Adam Pearson is as affecting as it is disturbing. Few films deliver more hypnotically on the promise of their title.
