This year’s horror films reflected our cultural tensions back to us, riffing on taboos linked to gender, sex, and political biases. But they were also a particularly unusual and admirably bug-fuck vintage this year, reveling in the genre’s potential to tap into life’s irrational textures, from the unnerving natural monsters of Just Philippot’s The Swarm to the, uh, runaway tumor of James Wan’s Malignant.
Wan’s film offered up a giallo by way of a 1980s action movie (and with more than a soupcon of Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case), apparently all for little other reason than to allow its maker to flex his cult-film muscles again after a slew of for-hire projects. And on the indie side of things, filmmakers played fascinatingly with the very definition of a “horror movie,” fusing intensely personal and obsessive character studies with metaphors that would be right at home in an early David Cronenberg film or Bret Easton Ellis novel.
If a wave of nostalgia continues to course through the contemporary horror film, particularly for the American horror genre of the ’80s, these titles were largely willing to interrogate such obsessions. The applecart of pastiche was frequently upset this year with unsettling, psychologically acute imagery, from the lonely dreamscapes of Anthony Scott Burns’s Come True to the river of anonymous depravity that exists just under the cozy retro surface of Jacob Gentry’s Broadcast Signal Intrusion.
Most exciting of all was the fact that virtually all of the films on this list spring from very new voices, suggesting that a new golden age for the genre could be on the way. We certainly have the requisite real-life upheaval to serve as fertilizer for new and nightmarish visions. Chuck Bowen
10. The Night House (David Bruckner)
David Bruckner’s The Night House is about the suffocating presence of absence. Beth’s (Rebecca Hall) husband, Owen (Evan Jonigheit), recently committed suicide just outside of the lake house that he designed and built for them, and his death haunts more than just the rowboat by the dock where he pulled the trigger. The filmmakers, though, are hellbent on upending the clichés that practically define such stories, and they do so in surprising and intriguing ways. In a telling moment, Beth opens up to her best friend, Claire (Sarah Goldberg), about how she was officially declared dead for four minutes following a horrific car accident when she was a teen, and that she saw no white light at the end of the tunnel. “There’s just tunnel,” she declares definitively—a statement that makes plain the woman’s eerie familiarity with the crippling absence that death promises. As Beth begins digging into Owen’s personal effects, searching for some sort of reason for his death, she’s forced to grapple with the sense of unease and incompleteness that often grips survivors of suicide loss, only to find disturbing secrets that further escalate her suffering and confusion. Derek Smith
9. Agnes (Mickey Reece)
The setup of writer-director Mickey Reece’s Agnes sounds like the typical starting point for a gauntlet of spiritual horror. At the start of the film, the eponymous nun (Hayley McFarland) is seen having a profane and apparently telekinetic outburst over dinner with her fellow sisters, after which two priests are dispatched to perform an exorcism on her. Midway through, though, the film abandons its exorcism conceit and switches to another nun’s perspective some time after she leaves the convent. Throughout this extensive stretch of the film, Reece’s script homes in on Mary’s (Molly Quinn) search for something new to be devoted to and live by, which she finds briefly in the company of a stand-up comedian (Sean Gunn) who was once a lover and teacher to Agnes. As such, Agnes files religion alongside other power structures that can provide comfort and stability but also create space for abuse of the power dynamic. The film is neither an explicit condemnation or celebration of earnest belief, but rather a thoughtful examination of the human desire for it and the accompanying hope that it may exorcise the emptiness we feel. Steven Scaife
8. Detention (John Hsu)
John Hsu’s Detention is a startling exploration of real atrocity, which it merges with a surreal scenario. The film is set in Taiwan in 1962, when the country was governed under martial law and punished with torture and death anyone who spread left-wing ideologies. In a high school, children are secretly taught forbidden literature and, just as the stage is set for a higher-stakes Dead Poets Society, Hsu jarringly upends the film’s sense of reality. Suddenly, two children wake up in a condemned version of the high school, a nightmarish realm with heightened colors and frightening monsters that suggests a Mario Bava adaptation of Silent Hill. The disorientation that Hsu nurtures is more than cinematic game-playing, as this irrational hellscape suggests the confusion that totalitarian regimes sow in their populaces with cruel, nonsensical rules that ultimately serve to inspire terror and accommodation. Resonantly, the ghosts and monsters of Detention have no eyes, as they’re products of a government that destroys free will and most of history. Bowen
7. Broadcast Signal Intrusion (Jacob Gentry)
Virtually every low-budget sci-fi and horror film that’s released these days seems to hark back to the genre cinema of the 1970s and ’80s, which abounded in analog effects, actors who looked like everyday people, synth-heavy scores, and often blunt politics. Even at their crummiest, such productions felt handmade and personal. Like his prior Synchronicity, Jacob Gentry’s Broadcast Signal Intrusion is in love with the tactility of genre films past, offering in this case a mixtape of vintage conspiracy thriller and horror tropes. But Gentry’s latest is more intriguing for the way he allows his deep nostalgia to rhyme with his hero’s, building the film up as an intense critique of cultural tunnel vison. James (Harry Shum Jr.), who’s mourning the inexplicable disappearance of his wife, at one point discovers enough truth about the titular videos to drive him mad, and while this development is sudden, it’s still haunting, suggesting a sick person’s need to contort the irrational into rational shapes. One sequence, in which a potential torturer becomes the tortured, begging for mercy and crying and drooling through a white mask as James assumes the role of filmmaker-detective-slayer, punches through all of Broadcast Signal Intrusion’s layers of homage to arrive at a place of true horror. Bowen
6. Malignant (James Wan)
With Malignant, James Wan unshackles himself from the chains of the increasingly dismal Conjuring universe to give us a refreshingly bonkers, nü metal-inflected giallo that recaptures the anything-goes creativity of his early work. Wan gleefully relishes every ludicrous moment of Malignant’s archetypal tale, which follows troubled Madison Mitchell (Annabelle Wallis) as she experiences portentous visions of the gruesome murders of people in her orbit. Could it have something to do with the hazy memories of Madison’s pre-adoption childhood and a potential long-lost brother named Gabriel? The inevitable (and much-ballyhooed) third act reveal isn’t so much a twist as a lurid confirmation of what the film had been explicitly telegraphing all along, in everything from the repeated use of the phrase “cut the cancer out” to the inspired use of an orchestral synth rendition of the Pixies’s “Where Is My Mind?” But it’s Wan’s gung-ho commitment to the consequences of this plot turn that truly sets Malignant apart, culminating in an absolutely berserk finale that bridges the gap between typical slasher-movie bloodbath and Matrix-like martial arts extravaganza. And in the grotesquely fashioned and erratically kinetic Gabriel (physically portrayed by dancer/contortionist Marina Mazepa), we finally have a new horror movie icon for the ages. Mark Hanson
5. The Beta Test (Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe)
Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe’s The Beta Test conjoins two contemporary issues—the Me Too movement and the access we unwittingly grant to companies via social media—and draws surprisingly uncomfortable and empathetic conclusions. This is a livewire thriller-slash-parable, dashed with audacious elements of farce, about how a man rechannels his longings. It’s also one that’s governed by a knowing complicity with a devil. It’s easy to feel virtuous when decrying the crimes perpetuated by Harvey Weinstein, but what of the casual ways we manipulate and exploit one another daily? The film’s lynchpin is a series of scenes between Jordan (Cummings) and Jaclyn (Jaquelin Doke), a young assistant whom Jordan utilizes as a punching bag, a foil for his roiling frustrations. Cummings and McCabe don’t play these moments for easy pathos, instead homing in on how each character is conditioning themselves, and one another, to play preordained roles. It’s as if Jordan is trying to teach himself how to behave as Scott Rudin, while Jaclyn is learning the rules of the survivor who flourishes (we feel her yearning for power as viscerally as his). The filmmakers understand that Jordan is a tormented schmuck who, with the right luck, could be allowed to turn into the monster of his dreams. Bowen
4. The Swarm (Just Philippot)
Just Philippot’s The Swarm is an ecologically minded monster movie that’s been invested with an unusual wealth of authentic details, pertaining to farm life as well as to the cultural and political implications of an imperiled and uneven economy. A widow, Virginie (Suliane Brahim), attempts to save her farm in the south of France from foreclosure by raising locusts, which she roasts and grinds up and markets as farm feed. The insects aren’t proliferating, though, and the local farming community isn’t especially amendable to letting Virginie into their ranks, its sexism mirroring its racist antipathy toward Virginie’s North African friend (Sofian Khammes). Meanwhile, Virginie’s children wrestle with their own resentments, particularly with being associated with a woman with a strange and unpromising business. Philippot draws these various relationships sharply, establishing a robustly resonant foundation for the narrative’s metaphorical flourish when the locusts develop a taste for blood, growing out of control. Rather than rendering the bugs as flavorless CGI abstractions, Philippot utilizes real insects, filming them with a naturalistic intensity that’s unnerving. Along the way, he springs many a memorable image, emphasizing the locusts as fluttering, chirping embodiments of a farming family’s agonies, as well as of a politically riven country in which notions of “small business” appear to be dying. Bowen
3. Titane (Julia Ducournau)
Julia Ducournau’s Titane expands on the filmmaker’s interest in the collision of flesh-rending violence and familial reconfiguration. It also ratchets up Raw’s combination of body-horror explicitness and art-film abstraction, making for a wild ride through a female serial killer’s techno-sexuality that would make J.G. Ballard blush. At question early on in the film is the way bodies become seen as machines, instrumental objects with components and fluids onto which we project our desires. Alexia’s (Agathe Rousselle) role as a dancer who gyrates on top of expensive vehicles makes her into a sexual object for the men who flock to watch her, but for Alexia it’s clearly always been about a fusion with the metal. The pure audiovisual trippiness of Titane’s final two thirds is welcome—in particular an excursus into the bodily dangers of fire zones and an enigmatic, homoerotic sequence featuring Vincent’s firefighters dancing in slow motion to a Future Islands song. And the film’s exploration of corporeal transformations both willed and unwelcome—based in the alchemy of flesh, gender, and the desire for inorganic hardness—makes for some imagery that taps into deep anxieties about the uncanniness of inhabiting the fluid-filled sack that we call a body. Pat Brown
2. The Amusement Park (George A. Romero)
This 52-minute film was commissioned by the Lutheran Society, which wanted an educational piece to encourage support for the elderly. The organization hired Romero, and he delivered a rallying cry for elder needs that’s also, well, a full-tilt Romero horror film. After 71-year-old actor Lincoln Maazel’s prologue, Romero drops the hammer in The Amusement Park, fashioning a slipstream of horror imagery that bridges surrealism with lo-fi docudrama, in an effort to approximate the experience of aging in a society that’s concerned with money and sensation. Romero viscerally links elder abuse with capitalism, astutely suggesting that resentment of aging people subliminally stems in part from their inability to consume as rapidly as younger individuals. As a metaphor, the amusement park here is clearly a trial run for how Romero would utilize a shopping mall as a symbol for unbridled, amoral commerce in Dawn of the Dead. The film’s sound design, coupled with the endless and distorted close-ups of older people in misery, intentionally renders The Amusement Park an ordeal to watch, with the slim running time coming to feel as the only reprieve. Though even that small mercy is eclipsed by a disturbing implication: Eventually we may get old and return to a form of this hell, reminiscing about our younger selves as society picks our bones dry. Bowen
1. Come True (Anthony Scott Burns)
Cinemagoers have remarked on the dreamlike quality of film since the medium’s inception, yet commercial films about dreams that manage to capture something of their ambience remain few and far between. Dreams, after all, tend to repulse the coherence that’s the default mode of narrative cinema. Come True is among those few, but in contrast to Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, which revels in the anarchic freedom of lucid dreaming, Anthony Scott Burns’s film specializes in the sense of powerlessness that makes nightmares so terrifying, stressing the horror side of horror sci-fi. Burns trades jump scares for slow POV tracking shots, their inexorable drifting movement plunging us into shadows where Jungian archetypes hang upside down and the silhouette awaits with glowing eyes. This device reproduces the feebleness experienced by the angst-ridden Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) during sleep paralysis, that state in which dreamers are, say, confronted by an incubus, and attempt to scream or jerk awake but find their muscles unresponsive. Rather than subjecting dreams to the logic of narrative cinema, which would neutralize their potential to both fascinate and terrorize, Burns allows his subject matter to suggest all manner of formal deviations from genre expectations. William Repass
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
