Isn’t it weird how the single most influential piece of Christmas-related media is technically a horror story? One of the greatest literary hits of the 19^th century, one can even make the argument that Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol paved the way for the rise of Victorian Spiritualism during the following decade. And while the book’s iconic phantoms were immortalized by the gorgeous illustrations by John Leech, future adaptations of the story would all offer different interpretations of the ghosts that terrify Ebenezer Scrooge into becoming a better person.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to celebrate the holiday season by highlighting six of the scariest ghosts from over a century of A Christmas Carol adaptations. After all, with so many spooky spirits haunting cinema and television screens, we’re bound to run into some festive nightmare fuel along the way.

As usual, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite yuletide ghosts if you think we missed a particularly creepy example.

With that out of the way, onto the list…

6. The Ghost of Christmas Future – A Christmas Carol (2019)

The first of several Ghosts of Christmas Futures on this list, Nick Murphy and Stephen Knight’s reinvention of what is traditionally the scariest spirit of the bunch pushes this high-profile event series into even darker territory. Not only is this ghost played by the underrated character actor Jason Flemying, but the show also justifies spirit’s silence by giving him a crudely stitched mouth that more than makes up for the character no longer resembling the grim reaper.

The miniseries may have its issues, pushing an already spooky story into needlessly edgy territory (not to mention the absurd three-hour runtime), but Flemying’s take on the silent ghost – and Guy Pearce’s appropriately horrified reaction to him – is an undeniable highlight here.

5. Ghost of Christmas Present – A Christmas Carol (1984)

While this celebrated TV special is an all-around great adaptation, I especially appreciate how director Clive Donner depicts the usually jolly Ghost of Christmas Present as a more commanding figure willing to put Scrooge in his place – with Edward Woodward putting on a hell of a performance as this multifaceted phantom.

This is especially true during the scene where he chastises Scrooge using the old man’s own words and then reveals an oft-forgotten bit of Charles Dickens’ original story – Scrooge’s sickly “children,” appropriately named Ignorance and Want. I guess there’s a reason why most family-friendly adaptations leave this bit out…

4. The Ghost of Christmas Past – The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

Jim Henson always fought for his puppetry to be taken seriously, advocating for a future where specialized artists like himself could be allowed to tell adult stories within their craft. And while the first Muppets film to be produced after Henson’s death was still technically a family picture, The Muppet Christmas Carol still features some appropriately chilling scares through its portrayal of the story’s classic ghosts.

You might expect me to feature their kick-ass design for the Ghost of Christmas Future here, but the fact is that this movie used to give me nightmares as a kid because of Brian Henson’s re-imagining of the typically innocuous Ghost of Christmas Past. Here depicted as a childlike doll with an uncanny face that floats around the screen like a true Victorian phantom (with the puppet actually having been filmed underwater), I still find myself haunted by the character’s oddly vacant stare.

3. Lew Heyward – Scrooged (1988)

Here’s a fun fact: Scrooged was originally released here in Brazil as The Ghosts Have Fun in order to cash in on Bill Murray’s previous success in Ghostbusters. This isn’t all that surprising when you consider that pitting Murray against a new set of visually diverse phantoms was one of the driving forces behind this troubled production. That’s why Richard Donner and his team went all-out when the time came to develop their modern-day twist on these undead messengers, with the film’s very first “ghost” also being one of its best.

Renamed to Lew Heyward, our stand-in for Jacob Marley is depicted as more of a walking corpse than a proper phantom, with the decomposing miser being brought to life by a mix of disgusting makeup effects and a memorable performance by John Forsythe. Of course, he’s only really scary when he takes off those ridiculous sunglasses!

2. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come – Scrooge (1935)

The first feature-length “talkie” to adapt Charles Dickens’ classic novella, Henry Edwards’ Scrooge still stands out amongst countless other adaptations of the same story by incorporating elements from German Expressionism into its visuals. And while the entire film is bathed in deeply gothic lighting and production design, this attention to detail also extends to the film’s depiction of the iconic ghosts.

More specifically, Scrooge features a surprisingly freaky reimagining of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, with the character borrowing from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu in the way that he moves across the screen like a living shadow. It’s a small change, as the ghost doesn’t even appear that much due to the gimmick, but it really adds to the film’s darker sensibilities.

1. Ghost of Christmas Future – Scrooged (1988)

My personal favorite ghost design on this list, Scrooged’s take on the Ghost of Christmas Future remains both visually and conceptually frightening. While the spirit’s outward appearance has a lot in common with classical portrayals (and even the Muppets version), this more modern take on the ghost features a psychedelic television screen instead of a face – with the haunted TV’s programming being interrupted by nearly-subliminal flashes of a terrifying skull.

Of course, the most memorable moments involving this ghost occur when he opens his robe and reveals that his desiccated chest is inhabited by the lost souls of the damned, with the top-tier practical effects work being the reason why I think this this ghost is slightly scarier than Lew Heyward.

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David Fincher’s fifth feature film was the thriller Panic Room starring Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart, and Variety reports that a Brazilian remake of the 2002 movie is in the works.

The Brazilian production company Floresta (Shark Tank Brazil, Top Chef Brazil), which is owned by Sony Pictures Television, is behind the upcoming remake that’s set to be directed by Gabriela Amaral Almeida (Friendly Beast, The Father’s Shadow).

Variety details in today’s report, “The new version, currently in pre-production, will feature a fresh take on the thriller with popular Brazilian actor Isis Valverde stepping into the lead role.”

“The adaptation follows a recently widowed woman and her young daughter as they seek refuge in a secret panic room after burglars invade their home. What they don’t know is that the intruders are after something hidden in the very room in which they’ve locked themselves.”

“Besides an extremely current plot, we developed an electrifying thriller that also brings an important ethical discussion,” says Floresta’s Artistic Director, Thiago Teitelroit. “The story, an IP of Sony, aligned with what we were looking for: a product that allows great performances from the cast and direction in a narrative capable of appealing to a wide audience.”

In David Fincher’s original movie, which is getting a 4K Ultra HD release next year, “Trapped in their New York brownstone’s panic room, a hidden chamber built as a sanctuary in the event of break-ins, newly divorced Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart), play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with three intruders—Burnham (Forest Whitaker), Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) and Junior (Jared Leto)—during a brutal home invasion. But the room itself is the focal point because what the intruders really want is inside it.”

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Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”

Eric Roberts appears early on in Shawn C. Phillips’ Amityville Bigfoot. He turns up at the derelict cabin that is purportedly a laboratory for Amityville Chemical and proceeds to dress everyone down for allowing Bigfoot to escape.

It’s not a great role and Roberts is very clearly playing Eric Roberts, but the over the top charisma (and chicklet teeth) of the slumming C-lister is enough to temporarily lift the latest Amityville film out of its doldrums and become something briefly interesting. Not necessarily something watchable, but at least a film that isn’t horrendously boring.

The same cannot be said for the non-Eric Roberts scenes. Phillips, a prolific Amityville contributor, takes a threadbare premise and, along with co-writer Julie Anne Prescott, strings together multiple scenes with humans in front of a camera to create a nearly 90 minute “movie.”

Well…that might be generous. A more appropriate description would be “Multiple (often unrelated) vignettes of a rotating cast of amateur actors, most of whom scream their lines, in an insufferably long 90 minute disaster with barely enough content to fill sixty minutes.” It’s not as bad as, say, the Nick Box trilogy of repurposed Amityville films that felt like poorly executed experimental exercises (Frankenstein, Interview and Elevator), but considering how many times Philipps has revisited this well, it’s hard to shake the idea that the man – who acts, co-writes, and directs this monstrosity – is running on fumes.

That’s not simply because the film is content to poke fun at the Amityville “franchise” or even Phillips himself (one of the final lines is a character acknowledging that “Shawn C Phillips would make a movie like that…He has zero shame”). In fact, if the film had leaned more into self-aware humor like Amityville Christmas Vacation and Amityville Vibrator or more recent entries like The Last Amityville Film and Amityville Ripper, some of this might have been less insufferable.

It’s the glimmers of possibility – an effective joke or a solid practical effect – that makes Amityville Bigfoot so aggravating to watch. At select points, I found myself bemoaning, “if only the rest of the film were like this”; alas those moments are brief and fleeting and then the film returns to its juvenile frat-boy jokes, one dimensional characters (who come and go at a moment’s notice) and the flimsiest of bare bone plots.

The plot, as it were, concerns Amityville Chemical, which is conducting some kind of test on a captured Bigfoot. Researcher Ian (Phillips) is in equal parts lust and competition with co-worker Annie (Amityville Karen’s Lauren Francesca). She is uninterested in Ian, however, because she is secretly part of an animal activist group seeking to liberate Bigfoot, and also because she is in love with the creature.

After co-worker Gregory (Kyle Clarington) allows Bigfoot to escape, boss Simon (David Perry) calls in company boss Dominic before disappearing from the narrative. This happens frequently: characters appear and then immediately disappear or are killed, with little or no bearing on the plot or other characters.

It’s almost as though Phillips had a rotating roster of friends with limited availability, so he just shot random footage at different times with different groups. The result is an overstuffed and underdeveloped collection of actors without relationship to one another, including a group of unhoused people stealing food from a Bigfoot film, a trio of men (and one of their wives) searching for a nudist colony, a YouTuber named Raptor Rich and Waylon (Jake Pearlman), who was recently in a mental institution.

This random assortment of characters would be more tolerable if they were, you know, actual characters. Or if the dialogue weren’t simply a garbled collection of non-sensical statements that plays like bad improv. Or if there was anything resembling conventional plot mechanics, like rising action or even a climax.

So while there are brief glimmers of comedy that works, and some of the deaths are surprisingly effective, these tolerable moments are few and far between. The end result is a long, boring slog of a film; Phillips isn’t just phoning this in, Amityville Bigfoot plays like a filmmaker that doesn’t even care anymore. And it shows.

The Amityville IP Awards go to…

• Eric Roberts: Dominic turns up again in the film’s final moments as the “secret” villain, revealing that he was not only wearing the Bigfoot costume, but got to test the suit’s “fecal dissolving sauce,” “acid breast juice” and Dominic “even got to penetrate a man’s sphincter hole.” That’s just not something you hear every day.
• Good Gore: One thing the film does truly well is gore on a budget, including an impressive decapitation that looks *amazing*. There isn’t a ton of onscreen violence, but when we do see the gory results of Bigfoot’s attacks, it looks great.
• Rape Jokes: In true “poor taste” comedy tradition, there are multiple rape jokes, including Dominic’s aforementioned sexual assault of a (fully clothed?) man, Bigfoot shoving a camera up the director’s ass, as well as Ian’s “comedic” misunderstanding when Annie insists that she was raped by Bigfoot.
• Potty Humor: Phillips is big on potty humor in general: Annie believed she and Bigfoot were in love because she gave it an enema and “extracted his special juices.” In one of the few jokes of this kind that work, a single father trying to impress his daughters on a camping trip catches Bigfoot’s projectile stream of urine in his open-mouth, mistakenly believing it is “golden rain.” The joke goes on for too long, but it is amusing.
• Doggy Death: In one of the film’s most ridiculous moments, Bigfoot steals a baby carriage containing the dog of a nudist, pushes it down a steep hill and then lobs a rock at the pup, causing it to dramatically explode. It’s surreal, bizarre and completely out of the blue, which makes it more memorable than 99% of the rest of the film.
• Meta Moment: At one point the two hot actors from the Bigfoot film take a moment to collect their thoughts after an attack. The female lead, Francesca (Ashleeann Cittell), observes, “You know if this was a movie we would kiss right now?” prompting Eli (Bryant Smith) to respond: “God, I hate that part. Let’s keep moving!” Kinda funny. But then they end up together by film’s end, so what was the point?
• Outrageous Annie: Francesca, whose committed performance was a highlight of Amityville Karen, initially seems completely out of her depth and ill-suited for the role of Annie. As the researcher becomes more hysterically in love with Bigfoot, however, the actress mines a lot of laughter from utterly wild lines like this (after Bigfoot has “died”): “His balls! His poor balls! His special juices! I thought I was gonna live forever!”

Next time: we’re not done with Julie Anne Prescott just yet because she’s also the co-writer of Amityville Turkey Day (2024), the sequel to Amityville Thanksgiving.

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Much has already been teased about Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok in terms of appearance in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, a new take on the classic 1922 vampire film from F.W. Murnau. But there’s a lot more to Count Orlok than his shocking look; the film’s central villain also has a unique bite that’s accompanied by a gag-inducing sound.

Set to release in theaters on Christmas Day, the R-rated Nosferatu “is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.” 

Skarsgård previously teased that he “worked with an opera singer to bring his voice down to its lowest possible pitch” and “spent three to six hours every day in makeup and prosthetics.” But transforming the actor so fully went beyond altering his voice and appearance. Writer/Director Robert Eggers drew from folkloric origins when creating his vision of Count Orlok, which didn’t just reflect in the character’s design but in the way his vampire would feed.

We won’t spoil the details, but let’s just say that this version of Count Orlok eschews convention when it comes to movie vampires and the way they feed on their victims.

“Very often, folk vampires didn’t drink blood,” Eggers tells Bloody Disgusting. “They would sometimes suffocate people. They would sometimes return to their widows and fornicate with their widows until they died from being oversexed. But these early folk vampires, if they did drink blood, they would often drink it from the chest.”

Eggers continues, “For this film that is both a scary horror movie but also a tale of obsession, a love triangle, a Gothic romance, there’s something poetic about drinking heart blood. I also think it comes from Old Hag syndrome; sleep paralysis where you’re having a waking dream, and you feel the pressure on your chest. So that’s where it comes from.”

When Count Orlok does feed in Nosferatu, the sound is intense and nauseating. So much so that even Eggers was surprised. “The sound, honestly, I didn’t expect the sound to be quite so intense,” the filmmaker reveals. “But Damian Volpe, the sound designer, played it for me. It was even crazier in the first version, but I thought, ‘There’s actually something to this.’ The slurping is so visceral; we dialed it down a little bit from the first draft, but it’s pretty cool.“

The sound design only enhances Eggers’ unique take on the character and material. I wrote in my 5-star review, “It’s a grotesque twist on a love triangle, one that Eggers fearlessly pushes into revolting territory thanks to his eponymous vampire. There’s nothing romantic at all about the walking corpse with an insatiable appetite for blood, though lust may be a different story.”

Focus Features will release Nosferatu in theaters for Christmas on December 25, 2024.

Lily-Rose Depp stars as Ellen Hutter in director Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU, a Focus Features release.
Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC

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It should be no surprise that, as another year winds to a close, horror continued to dominate in 2024. Terrifier 3, for example, became the highest-grossing Unrated movie in box office history, throwing all the indie cinema rules out the window in the process. Longlegs caught everyone off guard, becoming Neon‘s highest-grossing film upon release in July, and streaming service Mubi smartly acquired the body horror movie The Substance, where it became the platform’s highest-grossing film at the box office.

That doesn’t even touch on the huge studio earners like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, or Alien: Romulus. Yet the surprises extend well beyond how well horror performed at the box office; 2024 horror is defined by the way it refused to stay within its tidy genre bounds.

This is reflected in the way that 2024 horror found new angles to push franchises forward through prequels and sequels, with films like The First Omen finding new ways to expand a franchise through stunning artistry and delicate yet dark subject matter. It’s reflected in new shifts in true crime-inspired thrillers like Red Rooms, a cold, clinical depiction of true crime obsession. Slashers like In a Violent Nature got experimental with a familiar formula to an exciting albeit divisive degree, while Exhuma shook up the tired exorcism horror subgenre.

It’s also a year where horror got deeply personal, featuring no shortage of films framed from a singular perspective, including I Saw the TV Glow or Stopmotion. In short, 2024 pushed the genre forward in exciting ways, introducing new voices while finding fresh fertile ground in even some of the more well-trodden corners of the genre.

Without further ado, here are the top fifteen best horror movies of 2024.

15. Oddity

Writer/Director Damian Mc Carthy‘s sophomore effort feels like a narrative and thematic extension of Caveat.  Aside from the brief return of at least one familiar face and a nightmare bunny, Oddity continues the filmmaker’s exploration of supernatural karma and retribution with offbeat characters and a unique vision for scares. Playing like a whimsical Irish folk tale with expertly crafted scares that send icy shivers down your spine, Oddity relies on pared-back storytelling that lets its horror elements and dual performances from Carolyn Bracken shine. While simple in setup, there’s a more assured tone and polished plotting to Oddity that makes it easy to hope Mc Carthy continues his exploration of this strange, frequently haunting cinematic universe.

14. The Coffee Table

A jaw-dropping inciting event transforms the film into a relentless pressure cooker that never gives its audience a moment to breathe in Caye Casas’s grim dark horror comedy- emphasis on dark. The gallows humor here might warrant a trigger warning for its boundary-pushing horror that serves as the catalyst. The filmmaker mines horror from a freak tragedy to a degree that often leaves those on board with the insanity torn between laughter and edge-of-the-seat suspense. A mundane task turns into an unspeakable nightmare that somehow only escalates the insanity until a doozy of a finale. It’s audacious in plot but even more impressive for the way it shreds your nerves with glee.

13. Woman of the Hour

Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut shakes up the true crime format with this stranger-than-fiction tale of serial killer and rapist Rodney Alcala and his bizarre appearance as a bachelor on the TV game show “The Dating Game.” Screenwriter Ian MacAllister McDonald and Kendrick tell this harrowing story nonlinearly, methodically painting a stark picture of Alcala’s tactics as he targets vulnerable women across the country throughout the ’70s. It’s not horror in the traditional sense, but Kendrick wrings abject terror through nail-biting, suspenseful sequences and one bone-chilling performance by Daniel Zovatto as real-life killer Rodney Alcala. An unsettling killer and centerpiece suspense sequences ensure Kendrick’s debut rattles. But it’s the unwavering empathy for Alcala’s victims and a powerful final gasp that earns this stunner a spot on our list.

12. Stopmotion

Horror is filled with stories exploring the lengths an artist will go to for the sake of their art, but BAFTA-nominated filmmaker/animator Robert Morgan fuses Stopmotion with tactile, squelchy stop-motion animation that sets it apart. The film’s deft blending of live-action and stop-motion animation is utterly captivating, grounded by Aisling Franciosi’s portrayal of a woman coming undone by her ambition. It’s not just the animation that stuns while simultaneously inducing revulsion but the unnerving sound design. Open wounds and puppets alike often come with discomforting, squelching sounds and wet noises that ensure an immersive experience.

11. The Devil’s Bath

The latest from Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala happens to be their most despairing yet, making a powerful show that history is horror sometimes. A grueling depiction of a harsh life in 18th-century Austria, the film follows a dreamer too fragile for this unforgiving world. The Devil’s Bath saturates itself so thoroughly in her misery and psychological distress that it’s difficult not to be affected by Agnes’ plight. It’s a gorgeously made film, shot on 35mm, with an impressive lead performance from Anja Plaschg. The Devil’s Bath isn’t horror in the conventional sense, but Agnes’ journey becomes so despairing that it careens straight into violent, grim horror territory with ease. It’s such an emotional gauntlet that it’s one that you won’t want to revisit anytime soon. 

10. Azrael

The latest from director E.L. Katz (Cheap Thrills) and writer Simon Barrett (The Guest, You’re Next) makes for a fascinating experiment in dialogue-free horror, with a text card establishing the post-Rapture setup behind this apocalyptic horror movie. It’s so devoid of dialogue that modern horror stalwart Samara Weaving can’t even rely on her trademark scream; her character had her voice box severed prior to the film’s events. All of which is to say that Azrael potentially makes for a tough sell on paper. Instead, Katz makes you forget almost entirely that Azrael is devoid of speaking parts. Its nonstop barrage of horror violence gets doled out over the course of 24 hours, making for a gory survival thriller that doesn’t have time to dwell on the story specifics. Weaving’s capable performance and the visceral siege horror ensure this experiment succeeds right up to its memorable final moments.

9. A Quiet Place: Day One

The prequel to 2018’s A Quiet Place merely uses the initial alien invasion that plunges the world into a silent apocalypse as a thrilling backdrop for a soulful, poignant portrait of human connection. A mundane day in New York City gets shattered by a sudden invasion that leaves the city destroyed with a devastating death toll, an easy genre allegory for 9/11, no doubt, but writer/director Michael Sarnoski is more interested in exploring the human triumphs that rise in the face of brutal adversity. Day One ensures the requisite genre thrills and creature feature chase sequences are aplenty, but it’s the tender, unlikely friendship forged between Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn’s characters, along with a scene-stealing cat, that elevate this prequel into something remarkable. It’s the type of deeply stirring storytelling that makes you want a hug and a slice of pizza. Most of all, following a woman determined to meet life and death on her terms fills you with hope.

8. Infested

Director Sébastien Vaniček delivered a shot of adrenaline with his feature debut, ensuring that spiders haven’t lost their touch when it comes to inducing paralyzing fear, even in those not prone to arachnophobia. The simple setup that sees a rare venomous spider loose in a ramshackle apartment building, free to breed and wreak lethal destruction, becomes anything but thanks to class commentary and a terrifying escalation of horror. Vaniček keeps his characters and their conflicts grounded in realism, letting him cut loose with the increasingly intense spider horror. It’s not just that Infested employs real spiders for many of the close, squirmy encounters with the eight-legged beasts, but the filmmaker wrings extreme tension even from the quiet moments. Infested isn’t afraid to kill its characters in excruciating ways, either, making it easy to see why Vaniček was immediately snatched up to helm an upcoming Evil Dead movie.

7. I Saw the TV Glow

A deeply personal examination of identity and dysphoria told with a singular vision. Few films match the striking imagery found within writer/director Jane Schoenbrun’s latest, genre or otherwise. I Saw the TV Glow captures the viscerally jarring, existential horror of ignoring all warnings until you no longer recognize yourself, framed around two outcasts who bond over a ’90s tv show. It’s that specificity and dreamlike vision that mines horror from a relatable touchstone of youth– a period where we often form our identities based on our pop culture obsessions and cling to them like lifeboats in tempestuous waters. It’s a somber, meditative allegory that emotionally devastates, even as its potent visuals cast a haunting spell. More than just an assured piece of arthouse horror surrealism, it’s a stunning and bittersweet cautionary tale to be true to yourself.

6. The First Omen

Richard Donner’s 1976 horror classic centered around the Antichrist spawned three sequels, a 2006 remake, and a direct sequel TV series to diminishing results. When a prequel to the original film was announced, it’s not surprising that it didn’t exactly set the internet on fire; The Omen laid out the details behind Damien Thorn’s birth well enough, after all. What sounded like a typical, uninspired cash grab to extend the life of a fairly dormant horror franchise transformed into a compelling surprise in the hands of director Arkasha Stevenson. Stevenson helms her feature debut with impressive confidence, delivering an exquisitely crafted piece of horror that lends a tactile quality and atmosphere with a piercing score from Mark Korven that also serves a narrative purpose. It’s a breathtaking film befitting of its period setting, anchored by star Nell Tiger Free’s audacious performance. The First Omen finds inventive ways to breathe new life into the franchise while operating within the confines of established IP lore, shifting its focus to bodily autonomy while pushing boundaries with bold subject matter and shocking horror imagery. 

5. Smile 2

As someone who found Smile a solid film bogged down by its familiar horror influences, Smile 2 caught me off guard. In true sequel fashion, the scale is expanded, and the scares are far more visceral and violent this round. But writer/director Parker Finn’s exponential growth between films is what really excites about this sequel; this filmmaker has only honed his scare-crafting chops to the sharpest of edges and is having a blast doing it. This is a filmmaker with mounting confidence, and Finn finds no shortage of ways to keep the lengthy runtime moving at a rapid clip without ever diminishing the oppressive, inescapable horror and tension it yields. It certainly helps that Naomi Scott delivers a career-defining performance, tackling so many layers of her character’s traumas with seemingly effortless ease.  It’s not just the sequel’s razor-sharp and inventive, gory scares that surpass its predecessor, but a profoundly complicated heroine shaping the edgier style of horror.

4. Exhuma

Exorcism horror, for the most part, remains beholden to tired tropes and outdated ideas on faith and religion that make it a tough sell these days. One surefire way to break from convention is by framing exorcisms through a different cultural lens. Writer/Director Jae-hyun Jang (Svaha: The Sixth Finger, The Priests) combines introspective cultural and historical themes with creepy, atmospheric horror told through a yin-and-yang style narrative structure. Exhuma uses a cursed grave to unleash supernatural terror and a potent folkloric examination of the dark history between Japan and Korea. The two distinct story halves highlight the stark contrast between cultures, modern society, and ancient customs without sacrificing the genre’s fun or scares in the process. It’s the type of horror movie that brings cultural depth and worldbuilding while featuring a behemoth samurai oni rampaging through a pig farm. This isn’t your typical exorcism horror movie; its gonzo physical manifestation of past historical trauma makes for one of the year’s biggest horror surprises.

3. Longlegs

It’s safe to say that few films captured the curiosity and attention of audiences this year quite like Oz Perkins’ latest, thanks to the enigmatic marketing behind it. The refusal to reveal much at all ahead of the film’s release also extends to Longlegs’ storytelling, which keeps things close to the vest as it centers on young FBI recruit Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) and her bid to uncover the identity of an elusive serial killer. Longlegs injects a true crime story with putrid Satanism and refuses to handhold, serving as a visceral rebuttal to society’s compulsive need to find logic in the most heinous of crimes. Nicolas Cage’s minimal screentime, combined with his shocking transformation as the eponymous killer, only fuels the film’s elusive, existentially horrifying quality. But it’s the way that evil is a constant, voyeuristic presence in Longlegs that unnerves most; a beastly Satan watches on from nearly every shadowed corner throughout. Yet, as foreboding and palpably evil as Longlegs is, it’s not without a sense of humor. It makes for Perkins’ most accessible horror film yet as well as his most downright unsettling. 

2. The Substance

There’s something remarkable about the way that writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s latest somehow surpasses her debut film Revenge in terms of gory carnage while racking up the accolades, garnering award nominations and a spot on the Oscars shortlist. Fargeat can barely contain her venom as she lambasts Hollywood’s unrealistic beauty standards that fester and, in turn, create vicious cycles of self-loathing. Yet it’s not without humor; there’s an almost whimsy to the insanity that plunges Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle into a destructive pattern of monstrous body horror in her attempts to stave off aging and forced retirement. The Substance exists in a heightened sense of reality that’s as hypnotic as off-putting, with a protracted finale that unleashes buckets of flesh and gore in Grand Guignol fashion, the precise type of gooey climax that would make Brian Yuzna proud. Fargeat helms with assured confidence, delivering a tactile visual feast for the senses and creating one of the year’s sharpest, most wickedly entertaining entries in horror. 

1. Nosferatu

There’s not a single facet of Nosferatu that doesn’t impress for the sheer artistry on display. Night scenes in Robert Eggers’ macabre masterpiece are re-envisioned as monochromatic nightmares, evocative of black and white gothic horror classics like F.W. Murnau’s seminal vampire tale. Craig Lathrop’s exquisite production design whisks audiences on a tactile, immersive journey filled with dread-inducing decrepit castles, a city torn asunder by plague, gypsy camps, and beyond. Robin Carolan’s triumphant score, combined with Damian Volpe’s unsettling sound design, ensures the twisted love triangle at the heart of this gothic horror movie repulses and delights in equal measure. Bill Skarsgård’s unrecognizable transformation as Count Orlok startles, but it’s Lily-Rose Depp’s mesmeric performance as Ellen, the outcast trapped on society’s margins and forced to become both victim and hero, that stuns. Productions on this scale are rare in horror, and Nosferatu is operatic and dramatic, bold and revolting, with a powerful final shot for the ages.

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