The 10 Best Horror Films of 2022

The maxim goes: The worse the times, the better the horror. Such is our lot that a year like 2022 could feel like maybe only the third or fourth worst year of the last five, but even so, it brought with it a slew of new horror classics in every shade and tenor—from one of the most formally successful entries in “elevated” horror to one of the scuzziest throwbacks to the “glory” days of torture porn, from the heady heights of true international consciousness to the barrel-scraping lows of Blumhouse. And, of course, any year in which we get David Cronenberg’s latest missive on the globby mess of cellular activity that would otherwise be deemed humanity, it frankly matters not whether the rest of the straight world considers it to have been a good or bad year. They’re all gross as hell. Eric Henderson

10. Resurrection (Andrew Semans)

Andrew Semans’s Resurrection follows in the tradition of pulpy movies about women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But while most of these types of stories hit familiar beats—generally revolving around a past trauma leading to the unravelling of a carefully maintained life—the psychological disintegration portrayed here plays out in a manner that steadily increases in macabre lunacy. And with Rebecca Hall as the film’s emotional anchor, Semans has an actor willing to boldly tackle this bracing madness head on. Semans, who explored a less explicitly fraught but comparably oblique conflict in his debut feature, 2012’s Nancy, Please, keys the audience to Margaret’s (Hall) perspective throughout so that we’re never quite sure what’s real or imagined. As a result, Resurrection becomes one of the more abrasive and intrinsically frightening evocations of a traumatized mind since David Lynch took us through the last week of Laura Palmer’s life in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Mark Hanson

9. Smile (Parker Finn)

Parker Finn’s Smile dexterously threads the needle between splashy, FX-heavy set pieces and fine-grained character work. And though the film takes more than a few pages from early-2000s J-horror, its somber gloss is more reminiscent of that regional boom’s American remakes, such as Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, Jim Sonzero’s Pulse, and Eric Valette’s One Missed Call. Its urban legend-inspired conceit also has more than a little bit of David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows in its DNA. All of this is to say that everything Smile is doing is familiar enough at this point to be considered old-fangled, but the striking precision of its craft sloughs away any sensations of déjà vu. The filmmakers use shallow-focus photography and place their actors at the dead center of the frame to unnerving effect. The horror genre is thoroughly rotten with films that use allegorical tools to explore how people attempt to exorcise their personal demons, but Smile brings audiences that catharsis in the most unexpected of ways. Rocco T. Thompson

8. Pearl (Ti West)

Ti West follows a proficient and self-conscious slasher movie, X, with a character study of a young woman with hungers that her small town can’t possibly satiate, changing tacks in a genre that often demands repetition of setting and body count. David Gordon Green tried a similar gambit this year with Halloween Ends, which cancelled out the pleasures of a Halloween movie without offering anything in their place. But West has at least two advantages on Green: interest in his subject matter, which isn’t recycled from an undying franchise, and the most startling performance by an actor in a horror film since Sissy Spacek in Carrie. Without Mia Goth’s wrenching, audaciously goofy performance, Pearl would add up to little and West knows it. The film is above all a tribute to Goth’s inventiveness, a coming-out party for an actress who in X wasn’t quite given the pedestal that she deserved. Chuck Bowen

7. Mad God (Phil Tippett)

A humanoid referred to in the credits as the Last Man (Alex Cox), costumed in a kind of warrior outfit that resembles a fusion of deep-sea diving gear and WWII-era military regalia, descends into a strange world on a corroded diving bell. Upon landing somewhere in the recesses of a valley, after passing by relics and dolls and bric-a-brac that suggest life as lived in a giant attic from hell, the Last Man consults a map. He intends to do…something. That’s the entire plot of Mad God, as Phil Tippett cannily turns our familiarity with post-apocalyptic lone-hero clichés against us. As the Last Man traverses this world, he becomes acquainted with overlapping food chains defined by subjugation and slaughter. There’s no beauty here, and not even any speech, and so the straw people, the only creatures designed with a sense of sympathy, zone out in front of TV sets. Like these people, our eyes are tickled by the sensory stimulation that Tippett offers, while our souls are sickened by the carnage and unrelenting hopelessness. Which is to say that Mad God is a compact, despairing, wildly inventive song of mourning. Bowen

6. Watcher (Chloe Okuno)

Chloe Okuno’s Watcher takes full advantage of Bucharest’s sparsely populated streets and unique juxtaposition of modern architecture and communist-era block housing. This clash between new and old, as well as that between wealth and poverty, is embedded in the conflict between Julia (Maika Monroe) and the man who may or may not be stalking her, as her high-end flat is a stark contrast to the rundown piece of brutalist architecture her window looks out on. In the end, the film reveals itself as a sly commentary on the internalized fear that women are forced to live with and the frustration of constantly having their instincts dismissed as overly emotional by men. Okuna is clearly nodding to the #believewomen movement, but she never belabors the point, instead using the lack of belief or support that Julia receives as a means to intensify her feelings of helplessness and dread. Watcher gives a feminist twist to a throwback genre, but never does the film’s topicality dilute its gripping suspense. Derek Smith

5. Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg)

Given his lifelong obsession with the merging of man and machine, it’s perhaps fitting that David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future could have been concocted by feeding his most celebrated films through an AI algorithm. Bringing together elements of Videodrome, The Fly, and eXistenZ, his triumphant return to body horror after more than two decades stars Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux as a performance artist couple who carry out invasive biological modifications in front of live audiences. Genetic mutations have greatly diminished the capacity to feel pain for much of humanity, ushering in a brave new world where “surgery is the new sex.” Cronenberg is certainly playing the hits here, revisiting his most familiar themes: metamorphosis, voyeurism, and the blurred line between trauma and erotic transcendence. But his imagery retains its uniquely grotesque beauty, and the film’s haunting, gothic prologue stands out as one of his most memorable sequences. If he’s lost some of his power to shock, it’s only because society seems to be finally catching up with the unsettling post-human future that he’s so often predicted with a greedy anticipation. David Robb

4. Nope (Jordan Peele)

Jordan Peele’s three films to date have followed a kind of Goldilocks pattern. Get Out was conceptually bold but executed with a relatively generic aesthetic sense, closely adhering to contemporary trends in horror cinema. With Us, Peele showed off his evolving visual style and mastery of atmosphere but struggled to stitch together the film’s plot reversals and thematic undercurrents into a cohesive whole. With Nope, he got it just right, laying out stakes, mood, and reversals of expectation with a patience that’s become foreign to American cinema. Peele gradually fills in layers of character, history, and commentary to the point that the intrusion of a voracious and unfathomable alien is just one more data point in the multivalent story. The filmmaker takes seemingly unrelated ideas—the racial privilege of cinema, the folly of humans thinking they can understand and tame other creatures, the rampant desire to reduce everything to “content”—and yokes them together in a coherent, captivating narrative with direction that maintains a constant ambient unease while making much space for humor and the individual, humanizing touches that each actor brings to their parts. Jake Cole

3. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Jane Schoenbrun)

Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, being of a gentler nature than, say, a Slender Man movie, is primarily preoccupied with the existential dimensions of a girl’s crushing loneliness. This is a film that memorably gets under the skin—and literally so in one scene where Casey (Anna Cobb) views a video of a man grotesquely pulling a string of tickets out from his forearm. Schoenbrun, whose 2018 documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination is a collage of YouTube clips that delve into the Slender Man phenomenon, whips up tension from the randomness and anonymity of the videos and images that we regularly stumble upon. As Casey listens to playlists and watches an assortment of odd, contextless video clips, each one flowing into one another, you can’t help but get swept up in the sheer arbitrariness of this content overload. In this moment, for their depiction of how an ASMR video becomes a de facto parent to Casey and lulls the girl to sleep, Schoenbrun confirms that they are an artist adroitly plugged into both the current technological and sociological landscape. Hanson

2. Terrifier 2 (Damien Leone)

Damien Leone’s profoundly violent and at best amoral Terrifier 2 is rotgut sucked straight from the bottom of the barrel, which in this case is the history of the slasher film in all its incarnations. The best joke, though, is that the film is well-made, which means you can’t quite write it off. Following Art the Clown, an invincible serial killer who resembles a gargoyle in kabuki paint, Leone unleashes several authentically surreal and unsettling set pieces, particularly a long detour through a deranged children’s show that should shame the neutered scares of the recent It films. Most chillingly, David Howard Thornton’s unerringly precise performance as Art draws an explicit connection between Art’s killing and his, well, clowning. For this clown, murder is hilarious, and Thornton leans into that notion without mercy, turning Art’s heartlessness into kinesthetic slapstick art. Bowen

1. The Sadness (Rob Jabbaz)

Imagine a remake of 28 Days Later by Takashi Miike and you’re close to capturing the uproarious tastelessness of Rob Jabbaz’s The Sadness. Understanding that the human protagonists are usually the least interesting part of a zombie movie, Jabbaz delivers the ghoulie hurlyburly in ultraviolent spades, as if to give the finger to the increasingly preachy horror genre. When people, especially men, become infected, they revert to their basest selves, acting on the sort of primordial resentments and cruelties that have been outed by #MeToo. The zombies also revel in the bitterness that social media purposefully strokes, ensuring that we remain angry and divided little consumers. The creatures want what they want right now, regardless of who’s destroyed along the way, and by damn they’re going to get it. They take online bloodletting, and its attendant selfishness and demonizing of others, to its most extreme and literal realm. The Sadness makes horror dangerous again. Bowen