The 10 Best Horror Films of 2020

Attempting to divine coherence among films shepherded by various artists via dissimilar methods can be a fool’s errand, but the best horror movies of 2020 were starkly united. Whereas last year’s horror films were generally political in scope, horror this year was intensely concerned with the destruction of the family unit, which is to say that 2019 and 2020 horror inadvertently document a “cause” and “effect” situation between a rigged class system and domestic life. Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, Leigh Whannel’s The Invisible Man, and Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s Swallow explore how corporate culture splinters or warps families, while Natalie Erica James’s Relic and Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers use supernatural tropes as symbols for the agonies of dementia. Even the traditional survival thrillers on this list (John Hyams’s Alone, Shawn Lindon’s Hunter Hunter) are, at their heart, parables of families collapsing under external pressures, most pointedly of the financial variety. Next to the terror of paying the bills, especially during a pandemic overseen by an indifferent government, a malignant spirit can seem comfortably, well, containable. Chuck Bowen

10. A Good Woman Is Hard to Find (Abner Pastoll)

Abner Pastoll’s A Good Woman Is Hard to Find as a horror film version of Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You. In both types of films, characters are often stymied by systemic poverty and injustice, but thrillers frequently offer the catharsis of violent fantasy that occasionally suggest a balancing of social ledgers. There’s a moment in Abner Pastoll’s A Good Woman Is Hard to Find that’s more imaginative, and seemingly torn from human experience, than any scene in Sorry We Missed You. Sarah (Sarah Bolger) is about to use her vibrator only to discover that it needs batteries. Having none, she checks her remote controls, which are dead, and scrambles around until she finally removes the batteries from of one of her children’s toys with a butter knife. Despite the bloodshed that eventually occurs Sarah’s home, and which is telegraphed by the opening image, this sequence is the most suspenseful in the film, as we’re led to desperately wish for this woman to experience this modicum of pleasure. The vibrator also foreshadows a wicked joke. After a drug dealer, Tito (Andrew Simpson), takes over her house and dramatically oversteps his bounds, Sarah stabs him in the eye with the vibrator, asserting herself for the first time in the film, turning a fake cock against a figurative dick who comes to resemble an extreme version of every asshole who taunts Sarah on a daily basis. Such a rebellion will not be permitted in a world that sees people like Sarah as pitiful, and so a stream of atrocities is unleashed. Bowen

9. The Dark and the Wicked (Bryan Bertino)

Evil is a force implicitly summoned by personal dysfunction in Bryan Bertino’s films, whether it’s the failed marriage proposal of The Strangers or a mother’s alcoholism in The Monster. Bertino certainly doubles down on familial decay in The Dark and the Wicked, a supernatural fable that elevates the subtext of the director’s earlier work to the level of text, in the process nearly dispensing with a monster altogether. It’s an elusive freak-out in the key of a Val Lewton production, with a lonely western-like atmosphere that reflects the protagonists’ disappointments. Aiming for a mood piece in which narrative particulars and characters are secondary to an enveloping tonality of loss and regret, Bertino and cinematographer Tristan Nyby bathe a family’s farm in shadows and define it by a negative space that suggests the demanding, lonely hours of farm life, as well as offers dimensions in which a demon could be lingering anywhere. As he illustrated in The Strangers, Bertino has a very capable, Carpenter-esque way of establishing and exploiting spatial dynamics, which he utilizes here less for set pieces than for impressively sustaining an inchoate sense of dread. Bowen

8. Relic (Natalie Erika James)

Though Relic is her debut feature, Natalie Erika James demonstrates a confident grasp of tone and imagery throughout the film. She and cinematographer Charlie Sarroff strikingly conjure an ominous stillness, particularly in the scenes set inside Edna’s (Robyn Nevin) increasingly unfamiliar home, where the characters appear as if they’re being suffocated by the walls, railing, low ceilings, and doorways. Relic fixates on rotting wood, the monolithic scope of the Australian woods, and the colors on Edna’s front door’s stained-glass window that meld, eventually, into a single dark spill, as though the house is infected by the old cabin that haunts Kay’s (Emily Mortimer) dreams. In its inventive climax, the film abruptly shift into a visceral nightmare that tears apart notions of body and space and then sews them back together in a new, ghastly form. James resists bringing the story’s subtext to the forefront, in the process imbuing her enigmatic images with a lasting power, turning them into ciphers of broader ideas like abandonment, responsibility, and resentment as they relate to the withering human figure. Never relenting with its atmosphere of suffocating decay, the final stretch of Relic, if nothing else, heralds the arrival a bold and formidable voice in horror cinema. Steven Scaife

7. Hunter Hunter (Shawn Linden)

Across Hunter Hunter, writer-director Shawn Linden links us empathetically to every member of a family living off the grid, rather than merely favoring Mersault (Devon Sawa) and his determination to remain in the wild. His wife, Anne (Camille Sullivan), isn’t written as a one-note nag of a wife, but as a poignant fount of common sense, and his 13-year-old daughter, Renee (Summer H. Howell), is shown to be torn between being a hunter and a normal little girl. Linden skillfully draws us into this narrative, emphasizing the nuts and bolts of hunting and the terrifying anonymousness of the drab and shadowy woods, before springing a series of startling traps—of both the narrative and literal variety. In the end, the wolf that torments them throughout the film is revealed to be the lesser of two evils, and it’s here that Hunter Hunter deviates from traditional survivalist tropes, drifting into the realm of neurotic and nihilistic horror. A new menace cunningly conjoins Mersault’s and Anne’s worst fears: of the invasion of the private woods by outsiders and of Mersault’s manly pride as an inadvertent agent of death, respectively. Anne’s final act of ultraviolence is hauntingly understood as revenge as well as a wail of rage, an annihilating reaction to a bleak lifestyle fashioned by sick and selfish men. Linden lends an old and sexist cliché—hell hath no fury like a woman scorned—visceral and queasy credence. Bowen

6. The Wolf of Snow Hollow (Jim Cummings)

Jim Cummings’s The Wolf of Snow Hollow is set in a small, picturesque mountain town that’s being plagued by a series of murders. The victims are torn apart in a manner that suggests a large wolf, though there’s also a sense of control and calculation to the acts that implies human intelligence. Soon, the townies are talking werewolves while the police haplessly attempt to find the perpetrator. Cummings’s willingness to deconstruct small-town incestuous-ness, while acknowledging the homey attraction of an intimate place in which everyone knows everyone’s name and eats the same meals in the same diner, is unmistakably reminiscent of Twin Peaks. The filmmaker’s risky mixture of comedy and violence clearly owes a debt to David Lynch as well—a debt that’s acknowledged by Robert Forster’s presence here in his final role before his death. Forster’s Sheriff Hadley suggests a continuation of the character he played in Twin Peaks: The Return, and Cummings fashions a swan song worthy of the legend. Hadley is a poignant fading titan whom Officer John Marshall (Cummings) feels he cannot equal, and so the aging man suggests a past version of America, a dream from which we have awakened in order to face a nightmare. Cummings doesn’t have Lynch’s formal daring, but he has reinvigorated an oft-told tale with personal, thorny preoccupations. Bowen

5. His House (Remi Weekes)

In writer-director Remi Weekes’s debut feature, His House, the unresolved trauma that strips away at an immigrant family’s defenses is horrifyingly manifested when they finally move into their designated low-income housing, and struggle to navigate a foreign culture that insists on assimilation. Bol (Sope Dirisu) is desperate to fit in, ensuring the immigration bureau that he and his family are good people and telling his wife that, in their new surroundings, they’re “born again.” But his wife, Rial (Wunmi Mosaku), doesn’t share his eagerness, as her experiences in England have been almost entirely unpleasant, from the indifference and condescension of their smarmy, burnt-out case worker, Mark (Matt Smith), to the outright xenophobic, such as when three black neighborhood kids mock her and tell her to go back to Africa. As Bol and Rial contend with their adversities, their home becomes an increasingly dangerous battleground in which they’re forced to wrestle with their inner demons and find ways to adapt without fundamentally changing who they are. This house, with its porous walls and ragged, peeling wallpaper, is eerily symbolic of its new inhabitants’ damaged psyches, their grief and guilt manifesting as ghosts—most chillingly in the form of zombified migrants who died during the perilous crossing to England that opens the film. Derek Smith

4. The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell)

Perhaps as a result of it being one of the last films to open before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered most movie theaters around the world, The Invisible Man inevitably took on new meaning in quarantine. Leigh Whannell updates H.G. Wells’s 1897 science-fiction novel to focus on the trauma inflicted on a woman, Celia (Elizabeth Moss), after she escapes her violently possessive boyfriend’s (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) clutches and attempts to begin a new life. Across a series of expertly mounted set pieces, Whannell and cinematographer Stefan Duscio recharge the haunted-house genre. Precise camera pans force viewers to anticipate the horrors lurking just off screen, pushing us to examine each corner of the frame for the movement of objects possibly being guided by the invisible man’s unseen hands. In a high-intensity performance, Moss captures the profound agony of her character’s emotional and physical abuse, and the suffocating feeling that Celia is being watched at all times. Whannell’s film cleverly ties form and theme: The surveillance state is literally manifested into an abusive partner, and the further the film leads Celia and, by extension, the viewer down the conspiratorial rabbit hole, its set pieces become increasingly more imaginative. As we went deeper in our own isolation, The Invisible Man felt as if it was embodying our shared anxieties. Ben Flanagan

3. Alone (John Hyams)

John Hyams’s Alone sometimes suggests what might happen if someone were to merge the principles of slow cinema with a 1970s drive-in-style thriller like Steven Spielberg’s Duel or Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point. As in slow cinema, the impact of even small changes and gestures is viscerally felt here, as Hyams expertly drums up a sense of anticipation and dread via stately pacing. Throughout, he’s devoted to rendering Jessica’s (Jules Willcox) state of mind in direct physical terms with little exposition. The mountainous, wooded realms that she soon drives into appear capable of swallowing her up, as Hyams frames her car in gliding shots that contrast the unruly vastness of the land with her unmistakably suburban, impractical-in-the-wild vehicle. Hyams never whips up phony hysteria, instead counterpointing the lurid, derivative plot with detailed staging. The film has little subtext apart from the double meaning of its title, which refers to the aloneness that renders Jessica vulnerable to a horror that she must also navigate solo. But to be fair, this anonymity appears to be intentional and is resonant on its own terms. Life isn’t conveniently subtextual after all. Shit happens, and lean, exciting genre films like this one aren’t to be taken for granted. Bowen

2. Swallow (Carlo Mirabella-Davis)

Writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s Swallow pivots on a queasy premise: the uncontrollable urge of a young trophy wife, Hunter (Haley Bennett), to swallow inedible objects. The film is initially marked by a driving tension, as we’re led to wonder just how awful and crazy Hunter’s habit will become. It’s never as gross as one might fear, as Mirabella-Davis is less interested in shock-jock flourishes than in sincerely rendering Hunter’s physical pain and mental anguish. As such, Hunter’s choking—the most disturbing detail in the film—becomes a piercing affirmation of her struggle to feel something and be seen. Throughout, Mirabella-Davis is willing to take his main character to task for her own alienation, as people often tune her out because she has so efficiently rendered herself a dully accommodating and complacent Stepford wife. Her psychological disorder, known as pica, partially appears to be a response to her knowledge of this fact, serving as a contemptuous act of self-punishment, with perhaps an element of sexual gratification. The narrative contains multitudes of subtexts, and Bennett superbly modulates between learned impassivity and outright despair, capturing the pain of a kind of actress who has come to feel trapped in her role. Bowen

1. Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg)

Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor is obsessed with tensions between mind and body, and old and new technologies. An analog man in a digital world, Cronenberg invests a narrative along the lines of his father David’s eXistenZ and Christopher Nolan’s Inception with psychedelic imagery and jolts of gouging, bone-splitting, unambiguously in-camera body horror that rival anything in modern cinema for tactility and pure outrageousness. In the process, he imbues Possessor with a disturbing irony: The film’s violence serves as a kind of relief for its perpetrators, who’re displaced by technological doodads and come to long for tangibility, corporeal terra firma, no matter how perverse. Cronenberg represents new-school displacement via old-school effects, refuting the everything-digital flim flam of more polished, “respectable” tent-pole productions. In Inception, mental violation is equated arbitrarily to levels in a video game, signifying Nolan’s ongoing effort to render subjective elements of human life tediously objective. Cronenberg also physicalizes subjective terrain, but in a manner that nevertheless preserves the mess of neuroses. If Nolan is a classical violinist, Cronenberg is a punk drummer, thrashing away, fashioning images that suggest what might happen if Ingmar Bergman’s Persona were run through the filter of splatter-punk horror. Bowen