(Nick Taylor / For The Occasions)
Horror films took one step past elevated this 12 months: Startling private statements have been made within the often-zomboid style; self-image, tradition and faith got freshly dug-up views; and conventions obtained turned on their ear or vivified with vibrant artistry.
“The year’s best horror movies are exciting because they don’t all have to be a Blumhouse-style jump scare or a franchise reboot that’s just a little more socially conscious than before,” says Jane Schoenbrun, whose singularly eerie “I Saw the TV Glow” hyperlinks trans identification with dire nostalgia. “A lot of people are trying different, fun things.”
Author-director Robert Eggers contends, “Horror right now is where filmmakers who have a unique voice and something to say are able to say it.” The filmmaker’s 2015 debut characteristic, “The Witch,” was a landmark in elevated horror, and his remake of the unique arty vampire film, “Nosferatu,” arrives at Christmas. “It’s one of the very few places where you can explore interesting ideas in commercial cinema at the moment.”
Listed below are six films that superior the style in 2024:
“It was meant to press all of the buttons that bring horror audiences joy,” says “Longlegs” writer-director Osgood Perkins.
(Uncredited / Related Press)
‘Longlegs’
Osgood Perkins wrote and directed this waking nightmare about Maika Monroe’s psychic FBI agent on the path of … if not fairly a serial killer, the looniest homicide influencer ever. Nicolas Cage’s title superfreak channels Nineteen Thirties horror villain Dwight Frye, “The Silence of the Lambs” baddie Buffalo Invoice and a smidge of the filmmaker’s father, Anthony Perkins, who starred within the mom of all genre-changers, “Psycho.”
“‘Longlegs’ has got dolls, the devil, nuns, serial killers, FBI, demons, voices, ax murderers …,” Perkins factors out. “It was meant to press all of the buttons that bring horror audiences joy. I didn’t think it was the scariest movie of the decade or whatever earlier notices framed it as. It was much more of a Pop art piece that I just wanted people to really groove on. I got lucky that my taste coincided with the need for some originality in art and culture.”
Hugh Grant takes a dialog about faith to extremes in “Heretic.”
(Kimberley French / A24)
‘Heretic’
In a fantastic 12 months for spiritual horror — “Immaculate” and ”The First Omen” expanded the nunsploitation subgenre — “Heretic” turned probing discourse into existential menace. Co-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote “A Quiet Place,” went the opposite method with this story of a voluble Hugh Grant difficult, then terrorizing, Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher’s younger Mormon missionaries.
“It’s an adult conversation about religion and faith in the context of the horror genre; we felt like we hadn’t seen that before,” says Woods. “The thrill of ‘A Quiet Place’ was how can we tell a scary, emotionally resonant story without any dialogue whatsoever. This one was how can we only use dialogue to provoke, terrify and generate suspense.”
That required virtuoso performing versatility.
“The ebb and flow was so important,” Beck notes. “It’s one of the reasons Hugh Grant was such an exciting idea. Everybody knows Hugh from romantic comedies; he feels safe, familiar and charming. He has that capacity in this movie, but it also goes to his deeper, darker register that plays the audience like a piano.”
“It’s a fun but really artistic ride with powerful twists and surprises,” producer Bob Yari says of “Strange Darling,” starring Willa Fitzgerald.
(Allyson Riggs / Magenta Gentle)
‘Strange Darling’
“Crash” and “Yellowstone” producer Bob Yari selected JT Mollner’s “Strange Darling” — a cannily time-shuffled remodeling of “final girl” slasher tropes — to launch his indie movie distribution firm, Magenta Gentle. It’s his first funding within the horror style.
“This absolutely takes a step away from your standard horror/thriller film and pulls a ‘Pulp Fiction,’” Yari enthuses. “It’s extremely clever in its construct. You watch it in this out-of-order fashion, yet your brain somehow assembles it in linear form. It’s a fun but really artistic ride with powerful twists and surprises.”
And a scream queen like no different is born in Willa Fitzgerald’s unnamed protagonist.
“There’s an element of female empowerment in that, ‘Hey, we can be just as bad as guys,’” Yari observes. “I know that’s kind of a weird take on it, but I’ve actually heard women say they thought that was a cool part.”
“When she’s past the normal human appearance, the character can finally see herself for who she is,” says writer-director Coralie Fargeat of “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore.
(Christine Tamalet/Univerdsl Photos)
‘The Substance’
Physique horror explodes oppressive feminine magnificence requirements in “The Substance.” Demi Moore’s ageing TV train host takes the mysterious title compound and a youthful, fitter, hotter model (Margaret Qualley) emerges to renewed media success — till the Substance is abused with monstrous outcomes.
“We’re asked to be nice and delicate, thin, smiling,” says Coralie Fargeat, the movie’s French writer-director. “I wanted the character, at the end of the movie, to be the total opposite: loud, gross, violent, excessive. When she’s past the normal human appearance, the character can finally see herself for who she is and not care anymore about what she looks like.
“I don’t write a lot of dialogue, so my movies seek the strongest symbols for the story I want to tell,” Fargeat provides. “I love the grammar of powerful images because they stay with you. That’s what drives me to horror, where there is this simplicity of symbol usage to say stronger things underneath.”
“I Saw the TV Glow,” with Justice Smith, “is not so much trying to scare you as express coming into self and queerness,” says writer-director Jane Schoenbrun.
(Spencer Pazer / A24)
‘I Saw the TV Glow’
Schoenbrun discovered a connection between an curiosity in all issues horror and subsequent gender affirmation.
“I grew up so in love with horror and spooky nocturnal things, and only later on, as I came out to myself as queer and transgender, I realized there was a relationship between that and other things that people found grotesque,” they reveal. “The movie is trying to articulate and reflect on this, not so much trying to scare you as express coming into self and queerness.”
The goofy supernatural present the movie’s ’90s teenagers are obsessive about doesn’t conclude satisfactorily. That gives a cautionary metaphor for investing an excessive amount of within the popular culture previous.
“I loved the idea of the ghost of that VHS tape that you might have this vague memory of becoming a symbol of your inability to become yourself, grow up or resolve your own cliffhanger in life,” Schoenbrun says.
The eye to element creates the creepiness in “Nosferatu,” with Willem Dafoe.
(Aidan Monaghan/Focus Options)
‘Nosferatu’
Each body is, properly, value framing in Eggers’ richly mounted remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Expressionist masterpiece. Invoice Skarsgård’s Depend Orlok is extra a Romanian people vampire — decayed however nonetheless fairly libidinous — than suave, previous aristocrats limned by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee.
“I have joked — and it’s not a bad comp — that we’re reaching for Merchant/Ivory doing Hammer Horror,” says Eggers, who staged a model of the Germanic “Dracula” doppelgänger in highschool.
He filmed the brand new “Nosferatu” inside studios and out of doors castles in Japanese Europe, striving for authenticity in all the pieces from 1830s peasant garb to retrograde psychological beliefs. But it surely’s all of the little issues that add as much as true creepy artwork.
“There were more challenging sequences, but I’m very pleased by our cemetery funeral,” Eggers factors out. “It has a very dialed-in version of traditional Gothic atmosphere with the fog machine and leafless trees, the design of the grave markers and mausoleum, and the Victorian mourning attire. It’s a very satisfying version of that kind of scene.”