10 Best Horror Movies of 2024

Caught after running away from home, 13-year-old Rita (Giuliana Santa Cruz) is sent to a reformatory that’s run by demonic guards and a warden with more than a passing resemblance to a witch. Most of the inmates belong to gangs that take on animal characteristics, from muzzled dogs to bunnies; she falls in with “the Angels,” who wear giant feathered wings and are planning an escape. Rita has also attracted the attention of “the Stars,” the institution’s mysterious clique that wear body-length black veils, look like human constellations, and may or may not be ghosts. Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante (La Llorona) threads in a host of fairy-tale elements in his horror-fantasy fable about female empowerment, and makes extremely good use of his heaven-and-hell imagery as everything moves to a violent, disquieting climax.

Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter) delivered a one-stop-shopping serial-killer thriller that drew from virtually every previous highlight of the horror subcategory and then — what the hell, why not? — added a Satanic cult element in for good measure. Thanks to a truly expert marketing campaign, this tale of a profiler (It Follows’ Maika Monroe) hunting down whoever is responsible for a series of unexplained homicides was a huge win for Neon, who may now be looking to beat A24 at their creepshow game. It’s more of a vibe than anything else, but it still spooked the bejesus out of us, and you can never underestimate the power of Nicolas Cage in smeared pancake make-up.

Zoe Kravitz’s directorial debut was unfairly given the high-hat treatment when it hit theaters in the dog days of summer, which was a pity — her social thriller about a formerly shamed, now reformed billionaire (Channing Tatum), a smitten gig-economy worker (Naomi Ackie), and an ongoing island getaway that starts to seem suspiciously endless is way better than its lackluster reception would suggest. Credit Kravitz’s ability to maintain the tension and sustain the central mystery for as long she does, and a perfectly cast Ackie and her costars — including Alia Shawkat, Christian Slater, Hit Man‘s Adria Arjona, Haley Joel Osment, Simon Rex and Geena Davis — for letting you see the cracks in the facade of nonstop hedonism before the dam eventually bursts. The last act is fueled by pure fury, and while some accused the social commentary of being a tad clumsy, we’ll counter that sometimes a blunt instrument works better than a scalpel when you’re trying to demolish institutional toxicity, in both its micro- and macro-forms.

The former Radio Silence scamps who gave us the Scream reboot (sorry, “requel”) and the eat-the-rich fable Ready or Not — Matt Bettinelli-Open and Tyler Gillette — return with a humdinger of a riff on The Ransom of Red Chief, complete with fangs and flying bloodsuckers. A gang of criminals kidnap the title character (Alisha Weir), who’s the daughter of a feared gangster. At first, only her direct liaison (Melissa Barrera) suspects something is off with this little girl in a tutu. Soon, the entire group — including Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand, Will Catlett and the late Angus Cloud — find out that they are indeed in over their head… and are likely to lose said heads in a very literal way. It’s an undeniably fun genre mash-up, and proof that this duo can gin up jugular-spraying carnage with the best of them.

The logline could not sound more hokey: Here is the long-lost footage of an old 1970s talk show, in which a troubled host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) attempts to summon the devil in his studio to boost ratings. The end result, however, is both a loving homage to the Carter era’s wave of demonic-possession B-movies and the late-night showbiz schtick of the Carson era, anchored by a truly delirious performance from a prolific character actor we too often tend to take for granted. Dastmalchian is the main reason that this horror flick from writer-directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes feels grounded enough to sell its high-concept premise from the start, and game enough to gleefully join in the madness once things take a truly surreal and psychotronic turn in the final 20 minutes. Kudos to Ingrid Torelli for her commitment to giving the young guest with Satan-summoning powers a creepy-as-fuck vibe — her unnerving stare into the camera is a great complement to Dastmalchian’s steady-unraveling act.

A massive box-office hit in South Korea, Jang Jae-hyun’s story of a “geomancer” (Oldboy‘s Choi Min-sik) and his young shaman associates (Kim Go-eun, Lee Do-hyun) investigating a cursed burial site starts out in slow-burn mode — you think you’re watching the pilot for a supernatural police-procedural type of show à la Evil, as the group navigates suspicious family members of the deceased and deal with a restless spirit. It almost feels like the mystery is over before it’s really begin, until they unexpectedly find a second coffin — and then things quickly shift into beast mode, adding both a good amount of gore and some long-held cultural animosities into the mix. Hold on to your livers, folks.

You could argue that Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair isn’t a horror movie per se, and more of just the type of oddball, obsession-fueling movies that inspire cults and arthouse programming perfect for the midnight hour. Fair enough, if you judge scary movies strictly on a 1-to-10 jump-scare scale. So why do we still feel so creeped out, so perpetually unsettled, so deeply disturbed nearly a year after first seeing their parable of basing your identity on a TV show not wisely but too well? Justice Smith and Brigitte Lundy-Paine both fixate on the Buffy-like monster-of-the-week series The Pink Opaque for different reasons, but their dive down the rabbit hole results in the same feelings of loss, existential dread and something resembling madness. And when the film takes a slight detour in Cronenberg territory near the end, you begin to feel like something has transmitted itself into your psyche as well. It deserves modern-cult-movie-classic status right from the jump.

Imagine the Dardenne brothers got high one night and decided to make a slasher flick. That may be the best way to describe Chris Nash’s addition to the killer-in-the-woods canon, in which a hulking figure rises from the grave and vengefully slaughters everyone in his path. The catch is: Viewers are riding shotgun with this homicidal maniac for long periods of time between grisly murders, with the camera trailing behind. (Including several sequences involving actual shotguns.) You can practically hear purists yelling “elevated horror” sight unseen, but trust us: It’s a genuinely scary, splatterific take on an old warhorse of a narrative, making the notion of a seemingly unstoppable fiend gutting clueless campers feel formally fresh while still keeping one rotting foot in the genre gutter.

Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse) takes on the daunting task of re-envisioning the 1922 German Expressionist “symphony of horror” about a gentleman named Count Orlok, a Transylvanian lord who travels across the sea in search of a fresh start and even fresher blood. (The similarity to other tales of vampiric predators was anything but coincidental, causing the Bram Stoker estate to sue back in the day.) Much like Werner Herzog’s similar 1979 redo, it retains its main character’s bat-like appearance and the original’s basic plot points: Fiend bites man, fiend goes in search of man’s wife who he believes to be his eternal soulmate, fiend is pursued by noble men and gets a nasty sunburn. But Eggers is never one to simply copy and paste a narrative into a prefab template or phone anything in, and his version significantly ups the operatic flourishes, the Gothic stylings, the gloomy terror and the sexual overtones. There’s something feral about Bill Skarsgaard’s skeletal ghoul, even with his royal Vlad-the-Impaler mustache; both Nicholas Hoult and Lily Rose-Depp lean in to the unspeakable dread and unholy lust aspects, respectively; and Willem Dafoe’s Van Helsing in all but name makes a meal of the line “I’ve seen things in this world that would make Sir Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb.” Above all, Eggers’ take on the material is scary in a way that harkens back to Grimm fairy tales and childhood nightmares. Thank god he finally got around to making this primal scream of a pet project.

You’d assume that the latest provocation from French genre expert Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) would be smart, savvy, bold and bloody. Not even a foreknowledge of her past work could prepare you for the instant body-horror classic, which watches as a TV star (Demi Moore) deals with being pitilessly aged out of the industry. She then finds out that a secret subscription service would allow her to foster a younger version of herself, although the plan requires both her and her dewy twentysomething “twin” (played by Margaret Qualley) to abide by a strict set of rules. Let’s just say this this riff on The Picture of Dorian Gray goes ballistic in the best possible way, and gets very gory before the end credits roll. (You want a climactic bloodbath that puts The Shining‘s plasma-gushing elevator to shame? You got it!) The Substance won’t reset society’s fixation on youth or cure Hollywood’s hypocritical, hyper-sexist ills. It will, however, remind you that when you’re chasing your past by any means necessary, you are always your own worst enemy.