Has 2024 been a great year for movies? The general consensus right now seems to be that it definitely hasn’t been a bad one, but whether 2024 will be looked back on in 10 years as a banner year for Hollywood seems like a slim possibility right now. It’s been a year punctuated by a lot of alright or pretty-good movies, with a few gems emerging as the best among a batch of mid-tier titles. If one genre has thrived in 2024, though, it’s undoubtedly horror.
Over the past 12 months, genre fans have been treated to a diverse and bold lineup of new horror movies. Some films, like M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap and Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, have been fun, low-stakes big-screen horror experiences, while others, like Cuckoo and In a Violent Nature, have taken unforgettable creative swings. Of everything that it’s had to offer, here are the eight best horror movies that 2024 has given us.
8. Oddity
One of the year’s most underrated films, writer-director Damian McCarthy’s Oddity is a tense, refreshingly brutal thriller about a woman who is killed under bloody, mysterious circumstances and her blind twin (both played by Carolyn Bracken), who uses her clairvoyant powers to investigate her sister’s death. A lightly tongue-in-cheek mix of a folk horror film and a straightforward slasher thriller, Oddity tells its story in a tight 98 minutes and packs in enough well-executed scares, confrontations, and twists to make it feel like it’s practically bursting at the seams with creative energy and memorable moments.
Combine that with the fact that it makes the absolute most out of the creepy wooden mannequin at the center of its second act, and what you get is a horror movie that understands exactly how to use each of its elements to achieve the result that it wants. It’s a strikingly crafted slice of Irish horror that deserves a far wider audience than it’s accrued up to this point.
7. I Saw the TV Glow
Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow follows Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a pair of teenagers whose connection to a cult TV series forces them to question not only their own identities, but also the reality they’ve been taught to accept. The resulting film is an expressionistic fever dream that beautifully and hauntingly captures what it’s like to feel both lost and trapped at the same time. The movie saves many of its biggest horror moments for its last third, but what lingers is the quiver in Smith’s voice when he speaks or the way he hunches his shoulders as he walks through I Saw the TV Glow‘s school hallways.
These moments signal a profound discomfort with one’s self that is heart-wrenching and — yes — terrifying. It’s a coming-of-age story told through the lens of psychological horror. That I Saw the TV Glow still ultimately manages to find some hope in its nightmarish vision is fitting for a film that feels as indebted to The Matrix as it does Twin Peaks.
6. It’s What’s Inside
This has been a year full of playful and surprisingly experimental horror movies, and none is more so than writer-director Greg Jardin’s It’s What’s Inside. This single-location thriller follows a group of longtime, former college friends whose get-together the night before a wedding is quickly turned upside down when one of them arrives with a machine that allows its users to swap bodies. What starts out as an uncanny sci-fi riff on an identity game like Werewolf or Mafia quickly spirals disturbingly out of control as personal grievances and unspoken desires take hold. Jardin, for his part, uses neat, analog lighting and visual cues to keep viewers up to speed at all times on who is who, which allows It’s What’s Inside‘s story of long-simmering grudges and insecurities to get as zany, extreme, and convoluted as possible. There isn’t another movie from this year like It’s What’s Inside, and few are as fun and ingenious.
5. Longlegs
When it hit theaters in July, Longlegs seemed to both benefit and suffer from its excellent marketing campaign, which propelled it to a gobsmacking $126 million box office gross and also raised viewers’ expectations higher than the film was capable of reaching. The latter effect resulted in Longlegs briefly gaining a bit of a lackluster reputation. Time has, however, been fairly kind to Longlegs. It’s a Silence of the Lambs-esque detective story about a young FBI agent (Maika Monroe) whose investigation into the stomach-churning work of a serial killer (Nicolas Cage) leads her to revelations about her own life that turn out to be more sinister and perverse than anyone could have seen coming.
The film, written and directed by Osgood Perkins, may not be able to match the perfection of its influences, but it still emerges as an utterly enthralling, fully realized thriller. Sinister forces seem to constantly lurk beyond the edges of each of Perkins’ immaculately composed frames — further reinforcing Longlegs‘ exploration of the horrifying truths that are purposefully kept from us as children and which we then teach ourselves not to see as adults.
4. Heretic
Heretic is a twisty, mean thriller full of sudden narrative left turns and flashy camera moves, but it is anchored and lifted up by an against-type horror performance for the ages from Hugh Grant. The rom-com icon hits a new high-point of the current, subversive second-half of his career by bringing devilish charm and chilling malevolence to his role as a pseudo-intellectual, anti-religion psychopath who takes two young, female Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) hostage and forces them into a “test” of their beliefs.
Heretic never goes anywhere nearly as interesting as its first act suggests, but its pace never feels anything but propulsive across its 111 minutes, and Grant’s central, villainous performance keeps your eyes glued to the screen at all times. It’s a horror movie that’s as entertaining as practically any other film you’ll see this year, and it’s crafted with a level of confidence that makes going along for the ride as easy a decision as possible.
3. The First Omen
On paper, no 2024 movie might seem as unnecessary as The First Omen. The film’s mere existence prompted many to understandably ask before its release whether there was even a point to making a prequel to a self-explanatory horror classic like 1976’s The Omen? It is, therefore, a testament to how well The First Omen justifies its own existence that, nine months after its release, it still ranks as one of the year’s best horror films. First-time feature filmmaker Arkasha Stevenson gives the prequel a dreamlike visual quality that strengthens its story of supernatural forces conspiring together behind-the-scenes. Nell Tiger Free, meanwhile, gives one of the year’s best and most fearless performances as Margaret, a young American nun who ends up a pawn in a demonic cult’s plan.
Free’s performance adds palpable, infectious fear to every scene she’s in and strengthens each and every beautifully composed, shockingly gross horror visual that Stevenson hurls at the viewer. Together, the director and star manage to add further depth to The Omen by forcing viewers to consider the women whose control over their own bodies was ripped away from them in order for that horror classic’s story to even unfold in the first place. In an age of endless remakes and unnecessary prequels, The First Omen proves that invigorating art can still emerge from even the most shameless of IP cash grabs.
2. Nosferatu
Speaking of seemingly unnecessary remakes and prequels, Robert Eggers’ new take on Nosferatu is the rare perfect match of a filmmaker and a pr-existing Hollywood property. The film, a remake of the 1922 silent movie of the same name, is a loose adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that — like all of Eggers’ movies — casts a startling, powerful spell. Featuring a pair of transformative lead performances from Bill Skarsgård and Lily-Rose Depp as an immortal vampire and the woman he’s obsessed with claiming as his own, Eggers’ Nosferatu feels, in many ways, like the film he’s been working toward his entire career.
Set in 19th-century Germany, it’s a fittingly feral, yet mannered gothic horror thriller about our innermost repressed desires, as well as both the potential dangers and liberation we open the door to when we willingly give into them. It is, like everything Eggers has made, stunningly well-crafted, and it features one of the best final images of any movie released this year. The sequence in which Nicholas Hoult’s Thomas Hutter unknowingly puts himself in the grasp of Skarsgård’s villainous Count Orlok may also, rank as the most arresting piece of filmmaking that Eggers has yet put together.
1. The Substance
In a year full of bold, boundary-pushing horror films, none come close to matching the gutsiness and unhinged creativity of The Substance. A body horror extravaganza that definitely earns the title of the Grossest Movie of the Year, French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s follow-up to 2017’s Revenge follows an aging movie star (Demi Moore) who, after being fired due to her age by her misogynistic producer (Dennis Quaid), takes a black-market drug that creates a younger version of herslef (Margaret Qualley). When the initially symbiotic relationship between Moore’s Elisabeth and her younger self becomes adversarial and parasitic, however, queasy consequences quickly emerge.
Where The Substance goes from there is best left as unspoiled as possible. But Fargeat uses the film’s body horror twists to explore the unrealistic beauty standards women feel pressured to meet, body dysmorphia, the toxicity of eating disorders, and the dangers of 0ver-glorifying youth. All of these ideas and more are bouncing around The Substance, humming beneath the actual text of its scenes, as Fargeat dishes out one shocking piece of body horror imagery after another. She does all of this while finding the perfect line between heightened satire and genuine tragedy — arriving at a finale that is just as deeply sad as it is gut-bustingly funny and vomit-inducing. The Substance is a one-of-a-kind nightmare, and the best horror film of 2024.
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