horror movies 2024
outside of making games and digital art, one of my greatest interests is movies. i thought i'd put together a curated list of horror movies for y'all to celebrate the beginning of fall. there have actually been quite a lot of good recent releases, so while it spans the entire history or horror, this list skews more modern than some i have curated.
i hope everyone reading this is safe and well this October 1st! it's a trying time for a lot of us. sending my care.
Alien (1979)
i can't count how many times i have watched this. unspoilable, deathly still, intimate, immaculately crafted. it's a movie which, by all rights, shouldn't exist. it brings a stately, etherial sensibility to its largely (and beneficially) understated world building. the crew of the
ship attempt to fill the void with warm patter, arguments over economics, hierarchy, and company protocol. one of the things which i always am impressed by is how deliberately sculpted the progression is. a truly astonishing work of choreography, it weaves a tight-knit, weird traversal through spaces which function as setting, but also as externalized bodies.
in the alien ship, the crew stumbles through beautiful flowing halls with no clear up vector, traverses cold blood vessels, visits vaults which might be temples. they are insects traversing a fossilized leviathan. within the Nostromo, they are also dwarfed. but the palette here is warm, filthy, a mixture of warren-closeness and toxic corporate mechanism which verges on cathedral severity. they are not the ship's masters. they crawl within it, breathing its breath, beholden to its moods.
the work the film does setting up this bodily relationship with scale, this situation of everything in terms of biological mechanism, reinforces the its dealings with (corporate) capitalism, endoparasitism, carnivory. against this aloof backdrop, robbed of agency, it's all the more jarring when they meet something which does care about them, which operates on their scale.
the environment art in this is the product of both well-honed craft and some kind of unbottleable lightning (though everyone involved in it has returned, many times, to try their hands).
credit for the film's success is often laid at Ridley Scott's feet. one of the faults of auteur theory is that it can't recognize a product born not of control, but of yielding, of collaboration. the film works because of a thousand weird crosscurrents. it's the AGARIC FLY control panel. it's the sun disk patches on the uniforms. it's the fact that it decided to upend gendered relationships with violence, that the writers reportedly made the imperfect but fascinating decision to write the characters as 'unisex' and then figure out their genders during casting. it's the cut scene where Lambert and Ripley discuss casual sex.
Alien, in part, was born of the creative stormcloud that was Jodorowsky's doomed Dune project. the generous preproduction process, the long gestation period, the creative crosscurrents that enabled had set a number of creative relationships in motion, and had laid specific creative groundwork which alien built upon. owing in part to O'Bannon having met him on the Dune project, H. R. Giger's poisonous dreams were reapproached by a production which actually made their realization feasible and, critically, gave him creative headway, iteration time, and had him personally involved in making actual props and costumes, with time to deliver at his desired quality level.
Ron Cobb crafted, for the Nostromo, a visual language and mechanical personality critical to the film's personality and feeling of being grounded in industrial process. Carlo Rambaldi, bless him, contributed some of the creature work. the effects crew were seasoned, at the top of their game, eager to push the envelope. and the actors who signed on understood what they were dealing with and delivered the strangely colloquial, candid feeling dialogue with
Buster Keaton
in
The Haunted House
(1921)
this seems like the only thing from this list i could possibly put after Alien.
i had a vague childhood memory of a silent short film set in a haunted house in which a flight of stairs collapsed into a slide. after a great deal of searching, i found it. and it turns out to be, fortuitously, an extremely good Buster Keaton short. this is only debatably horror but it is adjacent, and very seasonally appropriate.
(the title only works if it's spread out across three lines like it is on the movie poster.)
Huesera (2023)
a character focused horror movie about a carpenter who's exited a legibly queer phase of her life and entered into something resembling traditional matrimony. it's beautifully shot, has excellent, understated sound design, and perhaps most notably, a nuanced, expert hand with characters. it also has a remarkable way of carrying momentum forward.
it seems like some people have gone into this expecting a by the numbers horror movie, and come away confusedly looking at their partially fully trick-or-treat bags. it's better to look at this as a very well told story about the collision between queerness and normative society, with some of it rendered through a horror device. that said, it's both definitely horror, and also a very coherent and rewarding film if you approach it on its terms.
this carries subverbals so well. so much is carried by framing, sound, wordless half-formed expressions, things which are not said. i'm extremely grateful here for the fun, but very naturalistic portrayal of queer people. i really like the juxtaposition of Valeria in her shaved-head phase with her terrible present-day situation, with neither portrayed as more queer. her older gay aunt (and her friends, who briefly grace the screen!) are fabulous. more elder queers in movies, please. also particularly resonant is the witch with, bless, hyena posters on her wall. for particular audiences, there is a lot which is critically handled in a /very/ particular way, and there is a night and day difference between this and diversity cast movies with a few queer characters.
[spoilers beyond this point]
this is cast by some as being about the physicality of pregnancy as body horror. i'm inclined to see the emphasis as being elsewhere. the witch says "a spider's got you. a home, but also a cage." look at the spider plants in the background, the leglike branches seen through the car window at night. look at the compound eye motif: our vision of Valeria seen periodically through, plausible deniability, faceted glass; then later through the many eyes of the compound supernatural being. it's about externalities. the grasping, subtle grip of familial and societal pressures activated by motherhood.
Kwaidan (1964)
a spare, eerie, tonally fascinating collection of adapted folktales. these are not all equally effective, but they're all interesting. the best of them are truly astonishing and build atmosphere and supernatural dread incredibly well. part of what's so interesting about this film is that Kobayashi opts for extreme artifice- hand painted skies, landscapes built entirely on a sound stage. it makes the substance of the film more seamless, more malleable. it allows the film to verge into surreal territory, and renders every particular significant, because so palpably hand made and willful. this takes some incredible risks which pay off fabulously.
Book of the Dead (2005)
an animated short directed by Kawamoto Kihachiro, who i'd recommend heartily to anyone who likes stop motion or puppetry. a woman devoted to a life of learning and philosophy responds to the advances of a noble by weaving a shroud for him in the most meticulous, labor intensive way possible, and ends up transcending the framing situation completely.
note: i couldn't decide whether to include this, or his 'house of flames'. i would recommend watching
that as well.
Sweet Home (1989)
a movie crew visits a haunted mansion. stylized, with a particular eye for visual moments. it uses deliberately archetypal characters in a measured way, but still allows itself space to breathe some depth into both the main characters and the haunting itself. it has a sort of dry comedy which doesn't detract from the spookiness. it's mostly of note as aesthetic spectacle and historical curio, due to its connections to survival horror games. but it has more substance than i expected. if you appreciate practical effects, definitely watch this at the highest possible quality. it has some astonishing aesthetic decisions, like the ectoplasm chair (?). for a mainstream horror movie, it makes some pleasant character decisions, especially for the era.
[spoilers]
the male lead coming out of the cabinet at the end is solid gold.
La Llorona (2019)
there are various adaptations, but this is about the version directed by Jayro Bustamante.
a masterfully executed, intensely brooding modern version of the myth. we follow the female members of the family of a general responsible for horrors during the Guatemalan genocide. the general himself is distant, morally detached, rationalizing. his family members are buffered from reality, both wanting for agency and complicit in their family history. the curse, here, is reality emerging above that surface. this is a beautiful, dreadful slow build done right. the curse, and the intrigue of the family gradually unearthing their patriarch's wrongdoings, build in tandem. the supernatural presence grows, enfolding both household and reality in its insistence that things be made right.
Hatching (2023)
a remarkably well rendered, well orchestrated child's eye horror movie. the main character is a girl whose mother is a saccharine, domineering lifestyle influencer. the main character is kind and sensitive, and her efforts to thrive in this world create a berth for a supernatural force, which grows within the family, initially covertly. it begins with a strange, luminous egg which the girl incubates in secret. the egg grows, and hatches into a monstrous baby bird who is a magical externalization of aspects of the main character. the story progresses beautifully, deliberately, through a series of natural turns which i don't want to spoil. but i will say that it metamorphoses considerably, and i felt it was all done with a sensibility which vaults over the usual external threat tropes, with a goal, instead, of effectively weaving the supernatural into the emotional life of the family. has some wonderfully characterful creature fx. the budget or approach to cgi does hampers it in a place or two, especially when they opt for cgi composited over humans, but it's very forvigeable because it always lands expressively, and most of the time the film is absolutely beautiful. one of my favorite newer horror movies i've seen this year.
Goke: Body Snatcher from Hell (1964)
there are a lot of good body snatcher movies. i've decided to put two of them on the list this year. this has some overlap with others, but is a fresh, willful departure from the genre roots. beneath a blood red sky, a plane crashes in the wilderness. desperate and short on resources, the occupants of the downed plane begin to turn on one another. even before the alien presence shows its face, things are at fever pitch. this film is eerie and deliciously bleak, wears camp beautifully, and is dense and beautifully plotted. it features a beautiful, extremely well presented classic flying saucer, a wonderful villain who is absolutely perfect in his demeanor, and some extremely well-earned reveals.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
out of no lack of love for the original, i'm putting the remake on my list this year. i rewatched this recently and have found it is growing in my assessment over time. plantlike alien mimics arrive on Earth, borne on an interstellar wind. they are rendered luxuriously, through texturally rich practical effects and beautiful, intentional use of reverse motion. the aliens in this are mysterious, unfathomable, and a joy to behold.
this film builds magnificently. it begins by closely following the daily routines of the main character, who is a food inspector. through his interactions with them, we become familiar with the everyday moments of various people in a neighborhood. the film then slowly inserts ever stranger deviations and surreal disruptions into this routine, building a wonderful sense of paranoia and anticipation for what comes next.
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
this Romero zombie movie is widely percieved as one of the movies from which modern the zombie genre is descended. the zombie genre, these days, is infected with individualism porn, "protect your own" fantasies, fatalism, dreams of an apocalypse which absolves us of our moral responsibility.
it might come as a surprise, then, that 'Dawn of the Dead' is poetic, dreamlike, pointedly political. like the excellent 'Night of the Living Dead' before it, it is set in Pensylvania, this time in Monroeville Mall. several people, each lost in their own way, become trapped in the mall. draped in fur coats, they loot stores to survive. it's beautifully, necessarily desolate. but i think the most relatable characters in the movie are actually the zombies.
over time, the zombies have been pulled toward the mall from miles around, as if magnetically drawn there like migrating birds. utterly lost, they carry out a ritualistic echo of their previous materialistic lifestyle: pushing shopping carts, adorning themselves, moving in and out of food courts and up and down escalators. they work as satire, but what is most remarkable is how tragic and relatable the are, that they are so effectively given grace and afforded sympathy.
[spoiler]
my favorite scene in the movie is the incredible funeral scene, in which a character is buried in the ten inches or so of soil in a mall planter, surrounded by Philodendron giganteum.
i have no idea how they got the people who own the Monroeville Mall to sign off on this.
Phase IV
Saul Bass, who primarily worked as a graphic designer, was responsible for such things as the title animation for several Hitchcock films. in a strange twist of fate, he also directed two science fiction films. Phase IV is a bleak, psychedellic horror movie about the meeting between humans and an utterly alien mode of cognition. mysterious emanations from space have caused a sudden change, or awakening, in terrestrial ants. monoliths appear in the desert. human land use patterns are disrupted. the end of humanity seems inevitable. three humans are trapped in an entomological research station, desperately searching for a breakthrough.
'Phase IV' is visually striking, has a wonderful and appropriate score, is sincerely invested in the premise, takes significant risks and goes some very interesting places. as a case in point, it has an incredible scene in the middle which has no human actors, in which the ants have a funeral for their dead.
if you watch this, make sure to either find a version with the original ending, or to find it online and watch it after you finish the film. the two endings are similar, content-wise, but the original one conveys it more abstractly, through a beautiful sequence which i think flows better with the momentum of the film.
it bears saying that the film, while being remarkable in many ways, is not very thoughtful about how it deals with gender.
Possessor (2020)
dir. Brandon Cronenberg
interesting, weird, takes risks in a good way. perverse body puppeteering horror. a corporation abducts people (CEOs, politicians, etc., and installs technology in their brains which temporarily allows their operatives to control them. the main character is a puppeteer who is concealing the side effects she experiences while being groomed for a position higher up in the company.
Infinity Pool (2023)
dir. Brandon Cronenberg
terrible misanthropic disaffected rich people, through a lens both disaffected and misanthropic. it very effectively draws both the main character and audience into a brooding, through-glass perspective on the world over the course of the film.
it's difficult, i think, to make effective satire about rich people. there is a lot of horror which goes the route of simple monstrosity. this, i think, often fails either by being flat and unpenetrating, or by reifying the aesthetics of wealth. wealth, in Infinity Pool, is not seductive. it's ugly. it's flat decor. it's performativity. it's clawing for any feeling at all, through distance born of apathy and entitlement. significantly, i think, James, the point of view character, is not really one of them, but a hanger-on, an insecure writer who married an heiress who resents him. he has one completed novel, a threateningly long way in the past, and a desperate, growing sense of irrelevance. through him, the film is able to get at how proximity to wealth, and certain forms of compromise with it, are poisonous and result in moral contagion. it also deals with how different people are corrupted by power.
i thought at first perhaps that the beginning was too drawn out or could have benefitted from a more telegraphic or brisk editing approach, though now that i've finished it i'm not sure that's true. the drift from disaffection and entitlement into the other mode perhaps validates that decision.
the villain in this is wonderful, depraved, refreshing. the film escalates in a brooding, measured way. i thought initially it would be more of a bacchanal- but it needs its terrible periods of lostness, James' uncertainty and fickleness. it needs to bring you along with it, to enmesh you in the moral frame.
Brandon Cronenberg is really growing on me. if you find this or Possessor interesting, i'd also recommend 'Antiviral', which is about celebrity, entitlement to physical or emotional intimacy, and the commodification of the above.
The First Omen (2023)
there really were a remarkable number of pregnant nun movies recently. i don't currently have a coherent theory to explain this.
'The First Omen' is a prequel to the well regarded 1976 left field Canadian success 'The Omen'. i like the first two Omen movies in a subdued way. they feel earnest, methodical, perhaps a little unglamorous, but remarkably well cast and very well crafted on a character level. (later entries less so.)
one which bears mentioning is the remake of 'The Omen'. the remake is a long in the tooth cautionary tale. they somehow manage to make the portrayal of gender and family life more regressive than the original, despite the film being made over thirty years later. they ruin almost all of the memorable scenes by trying to make them "better", eg adding hokey shards of glass to the scene where the priest is impaled. for some reason they replace Gregory Peck with someone who has the emotional range of drying paint. anyway, please don't watch that one. it's very bad.
'The First Omen' is cut from entirely different cloth. it's an energetic, beautifully textural film with a very different approach to characterization and visual communication. where the first two films are businesslike, stoic, focused on character and writing, 'The First Omen' is generously visual, beautifully shot, conveys much of its characterization through the nonverbal. and perhaps more notably, much of its life stems from the emotional unfurling of the main character rather than plot, in a mechanistic way.
it's a tightly wound spring.
if you've seen other films in the series, there are some returning portents and lore. it's in conversation with the originals. but it's by no means necessary to watch any of the other Omen movies. this works very well as a standalone.
OKAY i said i was going to get this out for October 1st! i still have quite a few more movies i haven't written about. perhaps i will do a part 2? in case i don't, here is a tentative list of titles (this less well curated than the above):
The Keep (1985)
In the Company of Wolves
In the Earth
Birth / Rebirth
Fresh
Ultrasound
The Feast
When Evil Lurks
The Final Prayer
Monolith
the pre-Hayes code version of 'Minnie the Moocher'
The Innocents (2021)