The best horror movies of 2023 had one foot in the past and the other in the multimedia forms of the future. Though the returns of franchises in pretty much every other genre under the sun is an immediate harbinger of doom, horror’s adaptability allowed both Saw X and Evil Dead Rise to flourish—alongside fresh talent given ample, bloody freedom and a longtime helmer given the emotional space to breathe. But aside from those outliers, some of the most exciting work in horror came from those crossing over from YouTube. RackaRacka’s Danny and Michael Philippou exploded into the big leagues with the fresh-and-feisty Talk to Me while Kyle Edward Ball’s Bitesized Nightmares slowly, methodically crept into our own with his terrifying art installation Skinamarink. And don’t forget about our number one horror movie of the year: Five Nights at Freddy’s! Just kidding. But there is a feeling of youthful expansion in the genre, one that naturally follows the shut-in years of the pandemic. Shudder, don’t think we don’t see you ramping up your acquisitions. People are making their dream projects, showing off what they’ve been obsessing over, and it’s scaring us senseless. The best horror movies of 2023 were beginnings, whether that meant the mainstream breakout of a filmmaker long appreciated by the subgenre’s deepest nerds (Demián Rugna wasn’t hiding from anyone who’s seen Terrified) or the birth of new icons like M3GAN. The movies were returns to form for genre notables with names like Cronenberg, Aster, Roth and Shyamalan. They were also showcases for debut filmmakers like Paris Zarcilla, Alexis Jacknow, Michelle Garza Cervera, Kenneth Dagatan and Laura Moss. The amount of first-time features on this list is staggering, but indicative of a genre that’s as healthy as it’s been in a long, long time.
Here are the 20 best horror movies of 2023:
20. Jethica
Back in 1999, M. Night Shyamalan’s third feature The Sixth Sense posed an unnerving existential question: If you were a ghost, would you know it? Pete Ohs revisits that question with his own third feature Jethica, in which the dead don’t necessarily realize they’re dead, and where the audience isn’t privy to details on who’s dead and who isn’t until halfway through the film. We can guess, of course, but everyone in Jethica’s slim cast of characters exhibits one form of odd behavior or another: they’re withholding; they’re hard to read; they walk with a stiff gait, as if desperate to find a restroom. The film’s mystery runs deep. The run time, however, does not. Jethica clocks in at a cool 70 minutes, and the first half’s setup, established through Ohs’ gliding, ambling craftsmanship, pays off for the second half. It’s nice being able to distinguish baffled wandering specters from flesh-and-blood people, but there’s a certain pleasure to the mystery Ohs establishes from the movie’s very first scene, where Elena (Callie Hernandez, who co-wrote with Ohs) bangs a stranger in his car, then spins him a macabre tale about that one time she accidentally killed a man with her Honda. Jethica is a circular movie. The plot and its framing device loop around on themselves. Ohs’ spiraled filmmaking removes us immediately from Elena’s post-coital confession, then takes us through a montaged window into her life. By choice, Elena stays isolated from others, save for hitchhikers she picks up on the snow-dusted road by her trailer. It’s a meager existence. Only occasional fill-up runs to the local gas station interrupt her solitude, and it’s on one such errand that she runs into Jessica (Ashley Denise Robinson, another one of Ohs’ co-writers), her old high school pal, whom she hasn’t spoken with in years. It’s a recipe for a joyful reunion, except that Jessica acts cagey and declines Elena’s offer of coffee and conversation. She gets back in her car, snacks in hand, fuel in the tank, and motors away. But remember the loop. No sooner does she leave than Jessica immediately 180s back to the station, and before we can say “holy camera pans,” she opens up to Elena with the truth: She left California to escape her abusive, unhinged stalker, Kevin (Will Madden, also pulling double duty as—you guessed it—co-writer), and while she didn’t intend to stumble across Elena’s remote prairie abode, it’s a stroke of cheery fortune she did, because there’s no way in frozen hell Kevin will find her there. Then, Kevin finds her there. Very few horror movies, and frankly very few movies in general, can claim a script like Jethica’s, which confronts the most awful, and awfully mundane, actions a man can commit with curiosity and pity buttressed by natural judgment. Instead of patronizing Elena and Jessica with droll didactic bullshit ripped from a Twitter thread while gawking at their victimhood, Ohs and the gang deliberately pick apart the abuse dynamic driving the film’s plot. Jethica’s gradual style is occasionally disrupted by Evil Dead-style tracking shots; the combination allows dread to build on paranoia, while the minor Raimi homage also opens the door for unexpected bursts of black comedy. Jethica is impressive as a feat of economy and miraculous as an act of empathy rolled up in a spooky, constitutionally American ghost fable, where the lost souls wandering the shoulder of far-flung highways may really be that, and where a simple traffic sign gains new meaning contextualized with Ohs’ thoughts on death: “Pass with care.”–Andy Crump
19. Perpetrator
Though we tend to associate anything scary with hiding under the blankets until the fear goes away, horror storytelling is, at its best, an act of expansion, a swelling of reality as we know it. It’s here that Jennifer Reeder’s Perpetrator finds purchase, and grows into something dark, beautiful and compelling. The character of the film’s title is a mask-wearing psycho who, in opening beats that will be familiar to any student of horror cinema, abducts teenage girls and takes them back to his own personal chamber of horrors. He’s already responsible for a number of disappearances and deaths in an upscale part of town when Jonny (Kiah McKirnan) shows up to live with her Aunt Hildie (Alicia Silverstone, relishing every second of her performance) after years of living with a father who has no idea how to handle her. After spending her days breaking into cars and burglarizing houses, Jonny feels the immediate culture shock of Hildie’s elegant, restrained life, complete with attendance at a fancy private school lorded over by a demanding principal (Christopher Lowell) who forces his students into brutal drills to ward off everything from school shooters to would-be kidnappers. But the changes in Jonny’s life are more than external. On her 18th birthday, she experiences a profound and violent change that Hildie refers to as “Forevering,” a shift in her biological makeup that grants her the gift of radical, unflinching empathy as well shapeshifting. Before her own eyes, Jonny is becoming a new kind of creature, and her shifting existence is about to put her face-to-face with the killer taking young girls. Though the horror elements are present, and quite chilling, from the very beginning, Reeder also launches her tale with elements of dark fantasy and primal mystery, expanding Jonny’s world as she comes to grips with her new abilities and the consequences of her gifts. Visual metaphors are laced through this process, from a toilet soaked in blood to an 18th birthday cake with powerful digestive aftereffects, giving the whole affair an added flavor of body horror— even folk horror—as the weight of Jonny’s strange lineage begins to set in. It’s a wonderful blending of subgenres, but what makes Perpetrator work is how committed Reeder remains to evolving the story with each new act. And it continues to pull that balance off right up until the end, when the horror crescendos in unforgettable oceans of blood. By the time the credits roll, all the ingredients Reeder’s been carefully marshaling come together in surprising, satisfying ways, delivering a horror film that leaves the world a little bigger, a little stranger and a little scarier.–Matthew Jackson
18. Raging Grace
Joy (Max Eigenmann) is a Filipino immigrant living in England, doing her best to carve out a life with her mischievous daughter Joy (Jaeden Paige Boadilla) while scraping together enough funds to legitimize her permanent residency in the U.K. It’s a hard life, one in which Grace and Joy often get by through squatting in the upscale homes Joy cleans while their owners are out of town. Just when her resources begin to run out, Joy gets a call that might change everything, a request which sends her to an elegant country estate where a wealthy man (David Hayman) is slowly dying in the care of his niece Katherine (Leanne Best). With concerns of her own to attend to, Katherine offers Joy the job of cleaning the massive house and caring for her ailing uncle, with a healthy under-the-table payday on offer. Joy takes the job, sneaks Grace into the house, and gets to work, unaware that something much more grim than a dying man is lurking inside. Writer/director Paris Zarcilla clearly knows these kinds of stories and how to play by their spooky rules, delivering the Gothic goods with a deft hand, but he also never forgets that he’s making a modern story about two people just trying to make a life for themselves in a world that would rather push them into a corner. While the threats of the story emerge out of the Gothic tradition, the key tension of the film comes from the mother and daughter bond at its core. Because of this, Eigenmann and Boadilla are tasked with some intense emotional heavy lifting, and both rise to meet the challenge. Our desire to care for them and for their success as a family in a hostile world, only heightens the atmospheric dread hanging heavy over the whole story, and boosts our interest in what might happen next. In that way, even the occasional stumble works in Raging Grace‘s favor, making it a satisfying and remarkable debut from a new horror voice.–Matthew Jackson
17. Thanksgiving
Quite charmingly, Thanksgiving is a feature-length expansion on Roth’s fake trailer which preceded screenings of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse double feature back in 2007. Growing up in Newton, Massachusetts (not terribly far from the film’s, and the Mayflower’s, location of choice) and loving horror and slasher films, Roth and his childhood friend Jeff Rendell (who wrote the screenplay) always wished for a Thanksgiving-themed horror film to finally roll out and make Massachusetts proud. It’s incredibly sweet, then, that Roth’s wish finally came to fruition 16 years after that Thanksgiving trailer—and that the film it turned into is handily Roth’s best since 2015’s Knock Knock. The kills in Thanksgiving are not just fun and creative, but shockingly brutal; the kind of crunchy, touchable horror-movie brutality that feels far too sparse in mainstream American horror—even noticeably CGI blood fountains look perfectly acceptable. The impact is bolstered by some impeccable sound design, atmospheric tension and misdirection—as in the case of Security Guard #2, whose gutting-by-electric knife catches you off-guard in a well-earned jump scare. There are also hilarious logical improbabilities that aren’t actually a detriment but an asset, such as the town agreeing to continue to hold their annual Thanksgiving parade despite the presence of an active serial killer who is murdering people in particularly demented ways. The real trailer for the real Thanksgiving looked ridiculous and clearly in on the joke to some extent. And while the film in its entirety very much is, it also plays the material earnestly. Roth and Rendell find the perfect balance of humor and horror, understanding the absurdity of their premise while still making their characters buy into the world. What that creates is a film embracing its own silliness, free of irony, while avoiding the pitfalls of oversentimentality. The characters are scared shitless of a guy dressed up as a pilgrim hacking peoples’ heads off and, somehow, we are a little bit, too.–Brianna Zigler
16. Clock
Alexis Jacknow’s debut feature Clock joins a recent crop of horror films that probe cultural anxieties surrounding pregnancy, birth and motherhood. Among American offerings, Clock might be the first film that manages to feel genuinely engaged with the discussions women are having about the prospect of bearing a child—particularly among those who feel no natural compulsion toward mothering. A fantastically frenetic performance from Dianna Agron, a truly chilling central entity and interrogations of Jewish heritage elevate Clock (and the potential of further monstrous motherhood stories) above otherwise lackluster competition stateside. Despite being a renowned interior designer, Ella (Agron) can’t help but feel unfulfilled. This largely has to do with her being 37 years old and staunchly opposed to the idea of starting a family with her husband Aidan (Jay Ali). While he claims no official problem with staying child-free, just about every other person in Ella’s life finds her stance objectionable. Without telling her husband, father or friends, she enrolls in the experimental trial with lauded Dr. Elizabeth Simmons (Melora Hardin). As expected, things don’t go so well. Clock follows Ella during her inpatient treatment at Dr. Simmons’ facility and for several uneasy weeks afterwards, never lingering too long in any one setting. The film’s 90-minute runtime is well-utilized, a jaunty ride with plenty of thrills to sustain it. While much of Clock is concerned with Ella’s unraveling psyche, it also incorporates a tall, pale and sincerely frightening figure that manifests as a representation of her Jewish guilt. Clock’s quietly cryptic conclusion counters that even the most peculiar creatures are worthy of awe. We do not need to create life to be bewitched by it. —Natalia Keogan
15. Huesera: The Bone Woman
Huesera: The Bone Woman is a body horror film about pregnancy and motherhood, but not in the ways that might immediately come to mind when tying that subgenre with those themes. It’s not particularly interested in distended stomachs or bleeding tubes; “huesera” is Spanish for “bonesetter,” and one of its marketing photos (a headless skeleton holding a skull in each hand, contorted to look like a uterus and fallopian tubes) indicates what’s going to happen. The movie is all about nerves, discomfort and contortion–the pain of forcing yourself to try to be and want things you’d rather not be or do. It’s about a queer punk rocker trapping herself in a picturesque, unfulfilling, heteronormative lifestyle to meet (mostly) unspoken familial expectations, excavating parts of herself that she’s hidden, and struggling with what that means for her goals of a family. Directed and co-written by Michelle Garza Cervera, Huesera: The Bone Woman stars Natalia Solián as Valeria, a young woman trying to get pregnant with her husband Raúl (Alfonso Dosal). In the opening minutes, we’re introduced to two reproductive rituals: Praying alongside her mother at a giant golden statue of the Virgin Mary, as nearby faithful sing “La Guadalupana,” and a semi-passionate utilitarian sexual experience with her loving (but stereotypically unaware) husband. It is apparent that Valeria is not a huge fan of children, though we see her working in her workshop, using power tools to build a cradle, and decorating the nursery walls. Valeria is presented as beautiful but not dainty, committed in action to the goal of motherhood but mixed in her heart and mind. Cervera makes admirable use of her runtime: Huesera: The Bone Woman is very well-paced, and it feels like a lot happens without any cramming, alternating moments of slow buildup and scene-setting with sharp moments of tension. Huesera: The Bone Woman may have needed more scares or a darker ending to push it over the top, but as is, it’s a thoughtful meditation on choice, love and the anguish of expectation, dressed in the clothing of a clear-eyed, anxious body horror.–Kevin Fox, Jr.
14. Skinamarink
This is a daring, unsettling, inscrutable and at times deeply boring venture into the farthest boundaries of horror esotericism, utterly unlike anything that most viewers will have ever seen before. If someone hosted a filmmaking competition where the stated goal was to engineer a work as divisive as it possibly could be, surely Skinamarink would be a shoo-in to win the grand prize. Created on a budget of $15,000 (Canadian!) as the feature debut of filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball, and dedicated to assistant director Joshua Bookhalter, who passed away during post-production, Skinamarink is an exercise in experimental, sensory-driven horror filmmaking. Now, when one says “sensory-driven” in this context, one might expect that to imply a certain lushness that overwhelms the senses, a la James Cameron’s approach in Avatar: The Way of Water. Skinamarink, however, is more like the opposite–the film’s ultra grainy visual aesthetic and muddy audio (with cleverly hardcoded subtitles) slowly but surely hypnotizes the viewer into a state of heightened suggestibility, until the viewer’s mind begins to provide its own hallucinatory meaning to what it is seeing. Ostensibly, Skinamarink is about a pair of siblings: four-year-old Kevin and six-year-old Kaylee. They live in an unassuming little house with their unseen father, with the status of Mom a veiled mystery that hints at pain and separation. One night, they awake to find that the house seems changed–doors and windows have disappeared, and any parental presence is missing. Objects are strewn around in seeming patterns, while a deep, gargling voice whispers from the darkness. “Oneiric” is the most perfect single word for the experience. Its images are like watching closed circuit security camera footage of someone’s mental projections during a fever dream. Its sounds recall things heard in the dead of the night from a childhood bedroom, and then blissfully forgotten by morning, only to be recalled in a moment of terror decades later. I look forward to watching the wider world discover Skinamarink, feeling for all purposes as if they’ve blundered into a parallel dimension. Like the titular child of The Twilight Zone‘s “Little Girl Lost,” they’ll watch as a familiar place becomes a seeming prison, bound by dream logic, boundless and empty. I certainly won’t forget it.–Jim Vorel
13. Brooklyn 45
If you want proof of the endless creativity present in the horror genre, look no further than the single-location scary movie. It’s not surprising that Ted Geoghegan knows exactly how to deliver on this kind of film, at least not if you’re familiar with his previous supernatural horror film, the remarkable We Are Still Here. That film, while not a single-location story, made excellent use of intimate surroundings and a small cast to tell a moving, frightening story of grief, regret and the ever-present past. Brooklyn 45 allows Geoghegan to return to familiar themes and a stripped-down narrative scaffolding, while delivering something very different from his past horror success. A period piece that’s part locked-room mystery, part ghost story and all showcase for a glorious ensemble of character actors, it’s another triumph of single-location horror storytelling—and proof that Geoghegan has only just begun to show us what he can do. As the title suggests, the film opens in Brooklyn on a December night in 1945. World War II is over, but the wounds of that great struggle are still very fresh, particularly in the hearts and minds of the five people who’ve just gathered in a beautiful brownstone for a bittersweet reunion. Longtime friends Marla (Anne Ramsay), Hock (Larry Fessenden), Archie (Jeremy Holm), Paul (Ezra Buzzington), and Marla’s husband Bob (Ron E. Rains) all carry scars of the war as they enter Hock’s elegant parlor, but what they don’t yet know is how deep those cuts really run. Once a towering military leader and the glue of their friend group, Hock has been reduced to a grief-riddled mess, diving into texts on communicating with the dead as a way to cope with the loss of his wife. With these ideas in his head, and his ride-or-die inner circle gathered around him, he proposes a simple ritual to try and gain some peace: Lock the parlor doors, hold a séance and try to contact his wife. This setup—and the straightforward elegance with which Geoghegan and company deliver it to the audience—is so beautifully laid out and simple that it could almost function just as well as a stage play. Perhaps with that idea in mind, the filmmaker summoned a cast of committed, constantly compelling stars to fill the parlor for this holiday season’s conversation with the great beyond, and it’s through that cast that Brooklyn 45 builds something bigger than a riff on a classic ghost story setup. There are echoes in this film of Hollywood’s great postwar dramas as well as its great ghost stories, making it a surprising and often poignant blend of The Best Years of Our Lives and The Changeling, and it’s remarkable that Geoghegan is able to walk that line so well.—Matthew Jackson
12. Attachment
To love someone is to graft together two lives, whether you’re joined at the hip or connected by a long digital umbilical cord spanning thousands of miles. It’s a joining of two independent beings, and with that joining comes a certain acknowledgement that you’re not only giving a part of yourself away, but allowing that part of you to move freely around the world without you. It’s a moving, beautiful thought, but in the right context it can also be a terrifying one. It’s a universal dilemma, which makes it perfect fodder for horror storytelling. In Attachment, writer/director Gabriel Bier Gislason examines that dilemma with keen, incisive eyes. Attachment begins with attraction, the sudden collision of two women who simply seem to fit together. Leah (Ellie Kendrick), a visiting academic from London, meets Maja (Josephine Park), a Danish woman with a past as an actress, in a cute and endearing encounter in a library. They strike up a conversation, which turns into a weekend affair, which turns into a more complicated relationship when an accident leaves Leah with an injured leg and a harder road back to London. Rather than leaving her new flame to recover by herself, Maja makes the decision to follow Leah to London, where she meets her girlfriend’s overbearing mother Chana (Sofie Gråbøl), a devout Jewish woman who values her daughter’s health and safety above everything else, to an often unhealthy degree. As the trio settles into an awkward new dynamic, Maja and Leah try their best to forge a real, lasting relationship from the strange circumstances of their togetherness, while Maja does her best to get along with the suspicious and often standoffish Chana. But within that sincere desire to forge a connection, new wrinkles emerge. If you’re willing to settle into Attachment’s pace and follow down all its dark and complex corners, you’ll be rewarded with a quietly upsetting, deeply affecting horror film that nails its romance and family dynamics with clarity.—Matthew Jackson
11. Evil Dead Rise
If there’s anything that could have an entire audience cheering when a possessed pre-teen drags a cheese grater across her aunt’s calf like it’s a fresh block of cheddar, it’s an Evil Dead movie. The first film to grace the beloved franchise in a decade, Evil Dead Rise is everything you could ask for from an Evil Dead flick: It’s disgusting enough to make you physically recoil, it’s funny as hell and, perhaps most importantly, it might just wield more blood than I’ve ever seen in a movie. If the film has one downfall, it’s that director Cronin sometimes sacrifices too much to get his shocking, gore-filled images on the screen. The film only works if the five main characters aren’t able to leave their apartment. As a result, no one tries particularly hard to. And while I am endlessly thankful for all of the horrible, depraved things that I witnessed in that theater, at times I could imagine Cronin asking “What is the grossest thing I could put in a movie?” and working backwards from there, without paying too much mind to the plot. Still, you have to hand it to him: Cronin gave Evil Dead fans (myself included) precisely what they wanted with Rise. All of the gore, humor and callbacks you could possibly ask for, packaged into 90 minutes. You can’t ask for much more than that—though it’ll be a while before I eat grated cheese again. —Aurora Amidon
10. In My Mother’s Skin
Warm, stuffy and slowly encroaching like the creeping threat of starvation, In My Mother’s Skin will worm its way under yours. Filipino filmmaker Kenneth Dagatan conjures a fantastical horror with the thematic interests of Guillermo del Toro and the brutality of Joko Anwar. In My Mother’s Skin blends a child’s chance encounter with a tricky fairy—elaborate and ornate in her insectile ensemble—with a World War II backdrop to craft a thoroughly haunting midnight thriller. Rich with subtext and warring cultural iconography, it’s got body horror, religious doubt and enough delicious flesh to leave gorehounds completely sated. Colorful and bold, it’s a beautifully scary affair. Dagatan’s skills lie both in conventional horror sequence construction and the unique setting of a highly specific period stage. There will eventually be a possession-like incident, leading to a stalking force. Scares linger, scares jump. But none would be as impressive if they didn’t all take place in a once-lovely estate, now fading amid the lush greenery of its surroundings, under existential threats and ones all too human. Tala (Felicity Kyle Napuli) lives with her mom (Beauty Gonzalez) and little brother (James Mavie Estrella) in a posh house, staffed by two servants, on the edge of the jungle. Her dad does, well, something that was once lucrative, and, seeing as the Philippines were smackdab in the middle of the Japanese and the Americans tearing the Pacific apart in 1945, that something was probably a little sketchy. That’s what a local Japanese collaborator thinks, and he’s convinced his Imperial pals that the family is hiding gold. When the dad hits the bricks for a bit to escape this heat, times get tough. Tala and her brother are running out of food. Her mom starts coughing up blood. What’s a girl to do? As Dagatan painstakingly starts leafing through his morbid fairy tale, you see the problems coming on every tattered page. Tala, young and desperate and (just a little) cocky, never does. Like del Toro’s scheming supernatural creatures, an alluring force steps out of the shadows to provide. A fairy (Jasmine Curtis-Smith), abuzz with promises and potential, sees Tala’s need and strikes. The resulting body horror—which gives Tala’s mom a much worse problem—is disgusting, as grim and gory a counter to the fairy’s glistening beauty as seeing a cloud of butterflies strip a corpse to the bone. When the fairy arrives, any methodical pacing or languid humidity drops away. You’re moving fast, in a cold sweat, struck by the immediacy of the danger, heralded by a terrifying creature. It’s a wonder of DIY fabrics and light, translucent and with all the colors of the rainbow captured in their bubble-like shine. It’s also a wonder of performance, with Curtis-Smith’s brilliantly understated face framed in gold. All together, the monster merges into an intoxicating, terrifying, fucked-up cicada goddess. She embodies the kind of symbolic (or, in the very worst cases, literal) carrion-feeding that wartime inspires, riffing too on the traditional insect-using magic of the mambabarang. As the fairy’s magic burrows deeper and deeper into this family’s life, reality blurs into dreams; nature encroaches into the home; local legend starts whipping Catholicism’s ass. Pray all you want, folks, but the colonizers aren’t going to help you and neither is their religion. In My Mother’s Skin is a nasty little morsel that uses its fantastical mastery to inch us closer and closer to the wretched crunch of cannibalism. Its cabin in the woods—or its isolated mansion in the jungle—blends genre generalisms with a specific time and place to serve as a perfectly personal calling card for writer/director Kenneth Dagatan.–Jacob Oller
9. Saw X
Saw X is a lot of things. It’s almost unbearably disgusting, wickedly fun, delightfully inventive and unexpectedly sentimental. There’s also a very real chance that it will go down in history. And no, not because it’s the first movie to show someone getting their eyeballs vacuumed out while simultaneously having all of their fingers broken (well maybe for that reason, too), but because I’m pretty sure it’s the only time a ten-quel has been one of the best films in a franchise. This time, Saw X really feels like a revenge flick, which is what the previous films have arguably always been too afraid to present themselves as. While the Saw franchise has always postured John Kramer/Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) as a semi-vigilante with a broken—but still present—moral compass, it’s undeniably more fun when we don’t attempt to justify his cruelties, and finally admit that he is just some crazy motherfucker doing some remarkably crazy shit. The way I see it, the perfect Saw trap needs to pass two simple tests: It needs to be inventive, and it needs to be bloody. In Saw X, the traps are inventive in two important ways. One, the mechanisms themselves are unexpected, well thought out, and well executed (pun intended). But the type of pain inflicted on the victims is itself imaginative, as well. Have you ever imagined what it would feel like to give yourself brain surgery? Thought not. And the “bloody” portion naturally comes with the territory. While making John Kramer the protagonist of a Saw film is a welcome first, perhaps the most rewarding thing about Saw X is that it is a return to form—a perfection of what makes these films so great. It’s torture-forward, funny, preposterous, imaginative and puts into practice what the franchise should have learned a long, long time ago: There is no reason to reinvent the saw blade.—Aurora Amidon
8. Where the Devil Roams
Where the Devil Roams takes the Adams family’s innate gift for making movies to new, ambitious and uncharacteristically gruesome places. The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender both rely on atmosphere and sensation, prioritizing emotional resonance over the visceral effect of gorier details. In Where the Devil Roams, there will be blood, lots of blood; axes, cast iron skillets, ice picks, glass shards and fire pokers do a lot of leg work (and neck work, and skull work) for the Adamses’ characters, Seven (John), Maggie (Poser), and Eve (Zelda), likewise a family making horror shows for a paying audience. The difference is the period (Depression-era America), and the vocation (sideshow acts), and of course a habit of murdering society’s haves for extra scratch. Like the Adamses themselves, Where the Devil Roams’ trio have their parts to play: Seven stands stock still and blindfolded to the carnage, Eve photographs the aftermath, and Maggie does, well, everything else. Where the Devil Roams takes an episodic approach to their story, following them as they drive from place to place, putting on their show for scant audiences and slaughtering hapless wealthy dolts along the way. In most cases, the victims have it coming: A philanderer, a judge, a land baron. In others, they’re collateral damage, like the Norwegian farmer whom Maggie mistakes for a German and slays in vengeful wrath. If Where the Devil Roams has any antecedents, they’re in the ballpark of Carnivale and The Devil’s Rejects, with an unexpected dash of Hemingway for good measure: Grisly, grungy, a tad anarchic and, in its gentler moments, poetic — even romantic. Remarkably, the Adamses see these qualities as harmonic. It could be that their cinema’s character is a natural expression of their family bond, because families are nothing if not complex in contradictory ways. The roughness around their edges parallels the intentional raggediness of the Adamses’ aesthetic. Whatever the film, whatever the setting, whatever the niche, their work feels handmade, and that texture gives Where the Devil Roams earthly grounding for staging its savage violence. Maggie, Seven and Zelda’s story reads an effective reflection of a time in American history where the majority of its people lived on the edge and around the fringe; it feels unmoored from that history at the same time, through the coarseness of the Adamses’ technique. That contrast between real and surreal, craftsmanship and pathos, has absorbing power — the “let’s put on a show” quality that keeps each Adams movie tucked under one umbrella. Where the Devil Roams takes up the most space in their body of work. It’s their biggest swing to date. But the payoff is grand, as a macabre exercise and a moving gut punch. The Adamses clearly have confidence in their cinema, even if their laidback style veils it well.–Andy Crump
7. Beau Is Afraid
I could see a lot of myself in Joaquin Phoenix’s perpetually overwrought Beau Wassermann, who finds that the world that he fears is out to get him really is. It’s the worst-case scenario for the nebbish Jew archetype. Beau Is Afraid is like if a Woody Allen protagonist was the Griffin Dunne character in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, and the plot of that movie was pumped with existentialist steroids. It’s a paranoid, sexually repressed, labyrinthine odyssey with a schlubby hero—a bit like Under the Silver Lake, another movie that distributor A24 had no idea how to market to their clamoring, hyper-online, teeny bopper audience. And like After Hours, Beau Is Afraid similarly plays out like one really long joke. For his third and most ambitious film (I’m loath to conjure Magnolia comparisons), Aster leans all the way into the funny bone he was wont to exhibit in his seemingly ultra-austere first features, Hereditary and Midsommar. In Beau Is Afraid, Aster’s got a lighter, more playful touch despite the intimidating 179-minute runtime. Aster cultivates a uniquely absurd and off-kilter world, crafted meticulously by production designer Fiona Crombie, wherein character motivations are erratic, hilarious and questionably driven. In this strange universe (in which it’s never quite clear, or necessarily important, what the time period is), there is never a sense of safety for poor Beau. Even the idyllic suburban family home—which hosts a rehabilitating Beau after he’s hit by its owner’s truck (a bizarre incident which followed another bizarre incident involving invading hobos and Beau’s bathtub)—is its own well-tended house of horrors. Beau Is Afraid is very much a black comedy that utilizes well-placed horror techniques–Aster has a solid command of tension and loves to swing his camera to and fro to create a sense of vulnerability. Even scenes which purport deadly earnestness feel intentionally silly when one steps back and sees the bigger picture, in a film that can’t help but come across like, at its core, an intricate gag about the worst possible reality for a stereotypically paranoid Jew with mommy issues. Beau Is Afraid is more exciting than Aster’s debut and sophomore features, and not just because it’s more ambitious, slightly unwieldy and three hours long. It makes sense that a director like Aster would make his third film a sprawling epic–going so far as to incorporate impressive animation sequences of shifting media–after the head rush of initial acclaim. It’s admirable that it’s disarming, strange and deeply unserious, as if to rattle the critics who have called him the opposite. It also all pretty much works. It’s hard to say whether detractors of Aster, exhausted by prestige horror schtick, will be turned to the other side by Beau Is Afraid. It’s easy to continue to accept his tone at face value. But it does make you question if that’s what we’ve been mistakenly doing all along.—Brianna Zigler
6. M3GAN
Long before M3GAN hit theaters, the film’s titular cyborg, who can best be described as a mashup of Renesmee from Twilight (if she was a raging sadist) and a yassified Baby Annette, became a viral sensation. Somewhat miraculously, M3GAN manages to live up to its spectacular advertising. (Though in retrospect, this new triumph in horror camp shouldn’t be that surprising, as Malignant’s James Wan and Akela Cooper, AKA the people who gave us this scene just last year, co-wrote the film). After losing both of her parents in a tragic car accident, young Cady (Violet McGraw) moves in with her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), a toy company roboticist partially responsible for PurrpetualPetz: Stuffed animals that have human-like teeth and, among other things, take shits. Realizing she is not equipped to care for a youngster, Gemma makes it her mission to finish building M3GAN—or Model 3 Generative Android—a robot designed specifically to be your child’s most loyal BFF. Soon enough, M3GAN starts to take her “protect Cady at all costs” programming a little too literally (who could’ve seen that coming?), resulting in a string of darkly comical sequences of violence—one of which may or may not involve the talking doll zealously wielding a nail gun. M3GAN is more than just another solid entry into this horror subgenre. I might even be so bold as to say that it is horror’s newest camp classic, and M3GAN one of the greatest horror icons of recent years. M3GAN, somewhat miraculously, perfects the horror-comedy tone, able to consistently toe the line of too silly—from M3GAN’s passive-aggressive, condescending and sickly sweet timbre (nailed by Jenna Davis, the “penny nickel dime” girl from Vine), to her raggedy blonde wig—without ever actually crossing it. M3GAN’s most impressive feat, at the end of the day, is that it gives us cinematic sickos exactly what we want without sacrificing greatness in the process. And yes, what we want is a breakdancing, murderous doll. Is that such a crime?—Aurora Amidon
5. Knock at the Cabin
Knock at the Cabin has a twist that audiences won’t see coming, if only because it defies what people have come to know about director M. Night Shyamalan. It’s a twist, but it isn’t, but it is, but it also isn’t. But in Knock at the Cabin—adapted from the novel The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay—it’s less about the destination than the journey. A film preoccupied with the frequent use of intimate, shot/reverse-shot close-up conversations, Knock at the Cabin opens with one between Leonard (Dave Bautista) and Wen (Kristen Cui—no Haley Joel Osment, but she’s mostly fine). Leonard bears Bautista’s imposing figure, but Bautista knows how to handle himself with a gentle touch. He’s soft-spoken and warm, and has a tenderness implicit in his presence akin to a large stuffed animal. Accompanied by two women, Adriane (Abby Quinn) and Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and a hot-headed man named Redmond (Rupert Grint, whose first feature role in eight years proves he’s a force of nature), Leonard and his group forcibly enter the Airbnb housing Wen and her adoptive dads, Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and Eric (Jonathan Groff). The groups was united by shared visions of a forthcoming apocalypse that will bring about the end of humanity, and the only way to stop it is if this particular family makes the choice to sacrifice one of themselves willingly. Knock at the Cabin is, perhaps, the quickest 100-minute film ever made. From the quiet and meditative opening sequence—the last moment of normalcy in Wen’s life—the film is propelled forward with a sense of urgency that parallels that of the doomsday group. Even in moments of calm, there is a constant, tense and invigorating momentum forward. If you’re a fan of Shyamalan’s, or just familiar with his style, you’re accustomed to “dialogue real people wouldn’t say” and “actions real people wouldn’t take.” It’s an oft-held complaint about Shyamalan’s films by his naysayers, but it’s not a creative deficiency. It’s just part of Shyamalan’s cinematic language, one that functions in a sort of un-reality that prioritizes story, emotion and theme over pedantic logistics in dialogue. At this point, you’re either with it or you’re not. And if you are, Knock at the Cabin could be seen as career-best work.—Brianna Zigler
4. Birth/Rebirth
What if everything went right for Dr. Frankenstein and Igor, and they became the platonic parents of a beautiful, bouncing, (reanimated) baby Monster? Director Laura Moss and their co-writer Brendan J. O’Brien imagine a sharp, modern version of this best-case scenario (at least, until its own problems come to life) with the horror Birth/Rebirth. With dark irreverence, their transposition is a bolt of lightning into the undead subgenre that’s tight script keeps the two-hander as fresh as the day it was buried. Put your fan-fiction aside: Mad scientist/forensic pathologist Rose (Marin Ireland) and loving mother/maternity nurse Celie (Judy Reyes) don’t need any nudging to forge their lives together. Just the untimely death and untimelier resurrection of Celie’s young daughter Lila (A.J. Lister). As the two crash together, jammed into a single apartment-laboratory when they’re not taking shifts at their hospital, they become a wry reminder that a family can look like anything: Even two women trying to bring an elementary schooler back to life. From this working relationship raising a kid (from the dead), Birth/Rebirth nurtures all sorts of amusing, icky insight. The film is a sharp comment on hospital workaholics who, either through ego, altruism or a mix of both, can’t stop themselves from bringing it home with them. They might not inherently be playing God like Herr Doktor, but they’re certainly meddling with the stuff of life—and once you have some power over that, it’s gotta be hard to sit by and do nothing with it. On the lighter side, Birth/Rebirth draws funny connections between the undead and children in general. Who couldn’t imagine Frankenstein’s creation moaning in displeasure if its Cocomelon got turned off? While the film starts relying on a few contrivances after a solid set-up—its faith in itself wavering a bit between its great premise and banger of a conclusion—Birth/Rebirth is a clever, tight little horror that will leave sickos (like me) smiling and shaking our heads at Moss’ bravado. Moss’ creation is more than a sentient pile of parts with a fresh coat of mortuary makeup: It’s a savvy, gross, black-hearted gem with a humanity all its own.—Jacob Oller
3. When Evil Lurks
When Evil Lurks starts with a bang. Well, two bangs, to be precise. The film opens with brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomon) awoken by a pair of gunshots that pierce through an otherwise quiet night in their sleepy rural town. The two then set off to investigate the noise, only to come across a rotting subhuman bathing in his own fetid fluids and excrement. Directed by Demián Rugna, When Evil Lurks follows Pedro and Jimmy’s desperate attempts to contain the infectious evil at hand. It quickly leaps out from under a boldly original and bone-chilling premise and wastes no time hooking its viewers and setting the scene for a film that is impressively committed to defying horror conventions and being its own beast. Indeed, When Evil Lurks takes place in a uniquely-crafted and novel world where characters are all-too familiar with the disease that has taken root in their village. But When Evil Lurks isn’t just a grim and nightmarish cautionary tale – it’s also insanely fun. The film is filled with a profusion of I-can’t-believe-they-went-there moments, one of which involves the creepiest goat you’ve seen since The Witch, another of which sees a kid getting bitten by a zombie dog, and the rest of which are so delightfully gruesome that you’ll simply have to see them to believe them. These shocking moments shine even brighter when juxtaposed with the understated stylization of the film. Mariano Suárez’s cinematography is refreshingly restrained, and through limited, stagnant camera setups, he positions his characters in a stark and eerily real world. Similarly, When Evil Lurks manages to escape the trap of punctuating every jump scare with a deafening musical cue. Instead, the score simply accompanies the viewer through the film’s emotional beats without being manipulative. When a filmmaker finds a way to talk about fears that have existed for literal centuries, that’s something to celebrate–and that is exactly what Rugna has done.—Aurora Amidon
2. Infinity Pool
Heartbeats and cumshots are the alpha and omega of Brandon Cronenberg’s vacation in White Lotus hell, where the tourists loosen their collars and let loose their lizard brains. The limbic system and the most basic biological processes of life dominate Infinity Pool, the filmmaker’s descent into a slimy, sexy, terrifying world where death is just another game for rich people. It’s a hit-and-run satire of Western nonsense, dismantling the havoc our destination-hopping upper-crust wreaks on other cultures and the faux-mystical enlightenment hawked by gurus and Goop fools—those too wealthy to have real problems, those aspiring to achieve this status, and those taking lucrative advantage of both. In this tropical trial, they spill into each other, forever and ever. Ego death has nothing on Brandon Cronenberg’s brilliantly warped resort. The dangled, juicy lure isn’t subtle: A seemingly normal couple being approached by weird (probably swinging) Europeans always leads to trouble. We’d be fools not to be suspicious of Gabby (Mia Goth) and Al (Jalil Lespert) when they come up to their estranged hotel-mate couple James (Alexander Skarsgård) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman). One of them is played by Mia Goth, which is a sure sign to hightail it back to your room and flip the “do not disturb” sign. But James is a novelist, with one bad book to his name (The Variable Sheath, a fantastic fake title) that only got published because he married the rich publisher’s daughter. Gabby’s proclaimed fandom strokes the part of his ego that’s all but shriveled up and crumbled to dust—he’s weak, he’s hungry for it, he’s the perfect mark. When the white folks inevitably do something irreversibly horrible to the locals of Li Tolqa, their unprepared alienation in their culture is disturbingly hilarious. They don’t speak the language, and can’t read the forms the cops ask them to sign. But it’s stranger than that. Brilliant production design, location scouting and cinematography lock you into a late-night freakout. Getting too deeply into what exactly happens in Infinity Pool is like outlining the recirculating edge of its title’s horizon-flouting construction. It won’t take away from its pleasures, but you can’t really understand until you’re in it. Until Cronenberg drives you down an unlit backroad, long enough that you start wondering if you’re dreaming or awake. But what’s clearest in this gallows comedy is that its characters exist. The people who think they’ve solved reality, the conceited class with the luxury of being horny for death, because death has never been real to them. Infinity Pool’s inspired critique of this crowd is fierce and funny, its hallucinations nimble and sticky, and its encompassing nightmare one you’ll remember without needing to break out the vacation slideshow.—Jacob Oller
1. Talk to Me
Talk to Me, the feature directorial debut of RackaRacka YouTube creators Danny and Michael Philippou is fierce, fun, and steeped in youthful energy. It’s a film that’s willing to go to some truly dark places in its exploration of grief, death and what it means when we reach too far into the beyond, but it’s also never afraid to laugh along the way. Talk to Me is a séance story, specifically a séance story revolving around a severed, ceramic-encased hand with a mysterious history. These days, the hand is hanging out in the possession of some Australian teenagers, who break it out at parties for 90-second “talk to me” sessions in which partygoers can briefly commune with, and be possessed by, the dead. It’s a quick thrill, the kind of thing perfect for taking smartphone videos to share on social media, and it’s all so detached and laugh-worthy that people either think it’s fake or liken it to a more pedestrian thrill like a drug trip. But when teenage Mia (Sophie Wilde), who recently lost her mother, hears about the hand, she’s eager to see if she actually can reach the other side, where her lost Mom might be waiting. Her best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) thinks it’s all fake, but she’s still willing to accompany Mia to a party, where a brief encounter with the hand will change both their lives. This is, even non-horror devotees will notice, a riff on classic séance narratives in which humans open a door that’s not to be trifled with, and let something dark and dangerous out. Talk to Me never tries to mask its roots in time-honored formulas, but approaches its tropes and recognizable story beats with an earnestness that’s both endearing and frank. And the horror, when it hits, hits with visceral intensity. Anyone who’s ever seen a RackaRacka horror short knows how well the Philippou brothers can craft a surprising scare, and those scares emerge with real ferocity in Talk to Me. At a time when we spend far too much energy trying to swing horror movies into one side or the other of a senseless binary, Talk to Me reminds us that fun and true existential terror don’t have to be mutually exclusive areas of storytelling. Talk to Me is as funny as it is frightening, as poignant as it is pulse-pounding, and the whole thing is rooted in a modern reality that feels like you could step into it tomorrow, which only adds to both the humor and the fear.—Matthew Jackson