Horror films of the 2020s

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Attachment

A Danish-Jewish folk horror about a dybbuk, a mother, and a relationship the mother will not permit.

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Hellbender

Made by one family during lockdown for almost nothing, and it looks better than films with fifty times the budget.

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Sissy

An Australian wellness influencer at a hen weekend. Much sharper and much nastier than the premise suggests.

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You'll Never Find Me

A stranger knocks during a storm at a caravan-park trailer, and neither of the two people is quite what they seem.

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The Coffee Table

A Spanish couple buy a hideous coffee table, and then the worst thing imaginable happens in the first act.

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Huesera: The Bone Woman

Mexican, and the best pregnancy horror since Rosemary's Baby. The joint-cracking sound design is the thing.

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Deadstream

A disgraced livestreamer broadcasts himself alone in a haunted house for the clout, and gets exactly what he deserves.

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The Blackening

A group of Black friends at a cabin play a racist board game that traps them, and the whole film is the joke that the Black character always dies first.

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The Front Room

A pregnant woman is forced to care for her husband's monstrous, dying, evangelical stepmother.

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Enys Men

A lone woman on a Cornish island in 1973, a flower, a standing stone, and time coming apart.

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Azrael

A near-wordless survival film in a post-apocalypse where a cult has cut out their own tongues.

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Birth/Rebirth

A morgue technician and a grieving mother reinventing Frankenstein without any of the theatrics.

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Censor

A BBFC examiner during the video nasties panic starts to come apart. Essential viewing for this site specifically.

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In a Violent Nature

A slasher shot entirely from behind the killer, at walking pace, with no score. A formal experiment that works.

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Incantation

A Taiwanese found-footage film built around a curse the film itself tries to pass to you.

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It Lives Inside

An Indian-American teenager unleashes a demon from Hindu folklore while trying to assimilate.

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Oddity

Irish, small, and it contains one of the best-constructed scares of the decade. The wooden man.

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Skinamarink

Ninety minutes of ceilings and corners at 4am. Either the scariest thing you have seen or nothing at all.

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Piggy

Spanish, a bullied teenager, and a moral problem she is left holding alone.

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The Dark and the Wicked

Bryan Bertino's bleakest film. Two siblings return to the family farm as their father dies and something takes the household apart.

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In the Earth

A scientist and a guide walk into a forest during a pandemic and find a man, and a spirit, that do not want them to leave.

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No One Will Save You

A woman alone in a farmhouse fends off an alien home invasion, with almost no dialogue in the entire film.

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Sting

A girl raises a spider that fell from space in a New York apartment block, and it grows.

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The Sadness

Taiwanese, and among the most extreme things released this decade. Go in warned.

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When Evil Lurks

Argentinian, merciless, and it establishes early that the film will not spare anybody. It means it.

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The Devil's Bath

Austrian, based on real 18th-century court records, and about a form of despair almost nobody has filmed.

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You Won't Be Alone

A Macedonian witch story told as a Malick film, and it is about what it is to be a person.

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Hatching

A Finnish girl raises a monster from an egg, and it is about a mother's Instagram-perfect lie.

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The Medium

Thai-Korean, a documentary crew following a shaman, and the last twenty minutes are relentless.

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Host

Shot over lockdown on Zoom in twelve weeks, runs 56 minutes, and is better than it has any right to be.

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Relic

Dementia as a house that grows corridors. The last ten minutes are unexpectedly tender.

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Strange Darling

Told out of order in six chapters, shot on 35mm by Giovanni Ribisi. The structure is the whole trick.

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Watcher

An American in Bucharest who cannot speak the language and is not being believed. Quietly excellent.

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Possessor

Brandon Cronenberg working the family seam without embarrassment. The practical effects are appalling in the right way.

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Woman of the Hour

Anna Kendrick's directorial debut, about the serial killer who appeared on The Dating Game mid-spree.

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Exhuma

Two shamans and two geomancers exhume a cursed grave in Korea, and what is under it is worse than the curse.

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His House

A South Sudanese couple in British asylum housing. The haunting and the bureaucracy are the same thing.

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Cuckoo

A German alpine resort, Hunter Schafer, and Dan Stevens doing an accent. Deeply strange.

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Late Night with the Devil

A 1977 Halloween talk show broadcast, live, going wrong. David Dastmalchian finally gets a lead.

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Men

Alex Garland being about as subtle as a church door. The final sequence is remarkable regardless.

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I Saw the TV Glow

Barely a horror film and one of the most upsetting things on this site. About a life not lived.

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Speak No Evil

Danish. About politeness, and the ending is the bleakest thing in this decade of horror.

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Fresh

The title card arrives 33 minutes in, which tells you what kind of film it intends to be.

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Presence

Soderbergh shoots the entire film from the ghost's point of view, handheld, in long takes. It works.

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Bring Her Back

The Philippou brothers' second, and considerably harder to sit through than the first. Sally Hawkins is the reason.

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Infinity Pool

Brandon Cronenberg again. Wealthy tourists, a legal loophole and Mia Goth having a wonderful time.

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Lamb

Icelandic, extremely slow, and entirely dependent on you accepting the thing in the second act.

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Pearl

Technicolor melodrama with a pitchfork. Mia Goth's final monologue is a single unbroken take.

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The Empty Man

Dumped by the studio with no marketing, runs 137 minutes, and has a 20-minute prologue people rave about.

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Thanksgiving

A fake trailer from Grindhouse turned into a real slasher, and it is a very good one.

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The Night House

Rebecca Hall carrying a film about grief with unusual use of negative space.

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Godzilla Minus One

Seventy years on, the series returns to what it was for: the war, the guilt, and the cost.

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MaXXXine

The weakest of West's trilogy and still a better-shot 1985 Los Angeles than most films manage.

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Terrifier 3

Unrated, made for very little, outgrossed studio horror, and the effects are the entire proposition.

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The First Omen

A prequel nobody wanted that turned out to be the best-directed studio horror of its year.

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Malignant

James Wan spending studio money on something deranged. The third act is one of the great swerves.

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Abigail

A kidnapping that goes wrong in the most enjoyable way. Very wet, very fast, very funny.

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Candyman

The shadow-puppet sequences are the best thing in it. A sequel that is actually about the original.

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Immaculate

Nunsploitation with a real budget. The last shot is a single unbroken take and it is the reason to watch.

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The Monkey

Osgood Perkins doing King as a gore comedy. The deaths are elaborate and the film is laughing.

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Renfield

Nicolas Cage plays Dracula as a toxic boss, and his familiar wants to leave the relationship. A horror comedy about codependency.

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Talk to Me

An embalmed hand, a ninety-second rule, and teenagers filming it. The Philippou brothers' first feature.

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Beau Is Afraid

Ari Aster's three-hour anxiety odyssey, and it is horror only in the sense that being alive is.

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Heretic

Two missionaries, one house, and Hugh Grant enjoying himself enormously as the worst man alive.

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Longlegs

Marketed better than almost any horror film this decade. The first hour earns it, the last act is arguable.

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X

A porn crew shoot on a Texas farm in 1979. Ti West doing the texture of the era properly.

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Barbarian

Go in knowing nothing. The structure is the point and every synopsis ruins it.

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Trap

Shyamalan's high-concept swing: a serial killer takes his daughter to a pop concert that is a police trap for him.

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Cocaine Bear

A black bear ingests a fortune in dropped cocaine and goes on a rampage. Loosely, very loosely, based on a true event.

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Companion

A weekend away with a reveal in the first act rather than the third, which is the smart choice.

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Evil Dead Rise

Moves the cabin to a Los Angeles tower block. The cheese grater is the sequence people talk about.

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M3GAN

A robotics engineer builds an AI doll to parent her orphaned niece, and the doll takes the job seriously.

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Nope

Peele's best-looking film. About spectacle, and about what happens to the people who handle the animals.

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Smile

A curse that passes by witnessing. Cheap scares, but the mechanism is sound and the ending commits.

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Titane

Won the Palme d'Or. A film about a woman, a car and a grieving fireman, and it is not a comedy.

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Nosferatu

Eggers going back to Murnau rather than to Stoker. Filthy, plague-ridden, and Orlok has a moustache.

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The Invisible Man

Reworks Universal's monster into a film about being disbelieved. The empty corners of the frame do the work.

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Weapons

Seventeen children leave their houses at 2.17am. Cregger structures it as overlapping chapters and it pays off.

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28 Years Later

Boyle and Garland back together, shot largely on iPhones rigged in arrays. Stranger than the sequel anybody expected.

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Alien: Romulus

Fede Alvarez taking the franchise back to basics: young colonists, a derelict station, and one very bad idea.

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Sinners

Coogler in 1932 Mississippi with twin Michael B. Jordans and a juke joint. Shot on 65mm and it shows.

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The Substance

Body horror about how the industry treats women over fifty, with Demi Moore doing the bravest work of her career.