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Welcome to Dread Central Unearthed 2024, where we’re sharing our favorite films, moments, kills, scares, and more from this year in horror. Today, we have our managing editor Joish Korngut’s personal top ten horror films of 2024!
The true value of 2024 horror was in how goddamn weird so much of it was. Maybe it was last year’s vanguard of experimental and weirdcore horrors like Skinamarink, The Outwaters, and Divinity that cleared the path for a breadth of strange new mayhem. Or maybe not, but I’ve still been excited to watch several bizarre genre outings take centerstage this year in more ways than one. From Nightbitch to I Saw the TV Glow, familiar tropes were subverted, inverted, and perverted to my gleeful surprise. So, let’s get to it!
Here are my ten favorite horror movies of 2024:
10. Nightbitch (dir. Marielle Heller)
This tonally bizarre play on the messiness of motherhood isn’t frightening in the strictest sense. Yet, its consistent use of nasty lycanthropic body horror to relay unpopular truths about child-raising should be visceral enough for the casual gorehound. Amy Adams is reliably phenomenal, and a final-act Joanna Newsom needle drop made me immediately forget any complaints I may have had. In my four-star review from its TIFF World Premiere, I touched on the film’s refusal to compartmentalize, writing: “This chaos of category embraces the film’s thesis that motherhood and womanhood are undefinable. Not good, not bad, but something to respect and maybe even fear.”
9. Smile 2 (dir. Parker Finn)
This quickly crafted follow-up to one of 2022’s darkest surprises continued to deliver audiences its fresh brand of fun, mean, and maddeningly inventive scares. This round felt like an intravenous drip of nonstop anxiety, and thankfully all of the macabre mayhem in this superior sequel is grounded by a much-needed dose of pitch-black humor. What’s most impressive about this skilfully constructed spook-house is its core performance from Naomi Scott as pop star Skye Riley. In my rave review for Dread Central, I summed up my thoughts by writing: “Naomi Scott elevates the sequel to new heights as Skye, giving each moment of classic horror an injection of prestige talent. It’s a performance that will go down in horror history.”
8. In A Violent Nature (dir. Chris Nash)
In the vein of last year’s breakaway Canadian experimental horror hit Skinamarink, special effects auteur Chris Nash’s disruptive directorial debut In A Violent Nature made an audible splash and polarized horror fans worldwide upon release. A strange, lush, and quiet answer to the age-old question of “what’s the slasher up to in between kills at summer camp?”, Nash’s bold and brutal pop culture experiment is as ingenious as it is nasty. Fans and critics alike agree that its “yoga” kill is one of the year’s most viscerally shocking moments. It’s arguably slow-paced, but personally, I found the beats of this instant classic brimming with gorgeous cinematography, effortless worldbuilding, and joyous yell-at-the-screen moments of casual insanity.
7. Sleep (dir. Jason Yu)
The paranoia lurking in the Korean chiller Sleep pulls its audience into a whirlwind of mystery and doubt, and continually challenges every theory we try to form. This stress blurs the line between reality and delusion, leaving us grasping for certainty. What we do know is this: when night falls, the terror begins. Building to a chilling crescendo, the plot sends its charming characters spiraling into always unexpected territory. Jason Yu’s masterful directorial debut immerses its viewers in the shadowy, enigmatic terrain of insomnia, where nothing is reliable. Every scene, every character, and every beat of the film is meticulously crafted, ensuring there’s no space for frills or fat. While its unsettling ambiguity and unreliable narrators won’t resonate with everyone, the sheer brilliance of its filmmaking is undeniable. I can’t wait to see what Yu dreams up next.
6. Nosferatu (dir. Robert Eggers)
Decades after the opulent gothic spectacles of the ’90s, like Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, Robert Eggers resurrects such sensibilities with his chilling new rendering of Nosferatu. Lily-Rose Depp delivers one of the standout performances of the entire year, embodying her tragic character with eerie grace and emotional depth—like a macabre ballerina spinning through webs of trauma and dread. What could have easily been a fragile, stereotypically waifish role is instead transformed into a magnetic force, eclipsing all of the seasoned talents who surround her. With his reimagining of cinema’s most enduring Dracula hijacking, Eggers has once again proven his mastery of atmospheric storytelling. Combined with its meticulous craftsmanship and hypnotic unease, Nosferatu is a genre triumph worthy of serious awards consideration.
5. Red Rooms (dir. Pascal Plante)
The film with arguably the least on-screen violence on this list is, paradoxically, among the most shocking, gruesome, and disturbing of 2024. Part post-true-crime thriller, part unflinching character study, and fully a hardcore exploitation standout, Pascal Plante’s French-Canadian gut-punch Red Rooms is the most important hidden gem of 2024 that you absolutely cannot afford to overlook. This heavy-hitter centers on a deceptively simple yet harrowing premise: an enigmatic protagonist becomes entangled in the murder trial of a man accused of killing three young girls during live-streamed “red room” events on the dark web. Juliette Gariépy delivers a mesmerizing performance in the lead role, whose connection to the horrifying streams slowly comes into focus, pulling the audience deeper into its unimaginable nightmare. This is not a film for the faint of heart, so proceed with caution—this one will stay with you long after it fades to black.
4. The Vourdalak (dir. Adrien Beau)
The Vourdalak is a haunting exploration of family bonds and the inescapable shadow of cyclical abuse. This French horror film weaves its eerie narrative through the story of a family plagued by the curse of the Vourdalak—a vampiric creature tied to love and destruction. Its chilling atmosphere and richly textured storytelling left me reflecting on the parallels to my own experiences with inherited family trauma, as its themes echo the trickle-down effect of inescapable mental illness I’ve seen in my own family, shaped by my late grandfather’s survival of the Holocaust and the German concentration camps during World War II. What makes The Vourdalak so impactful is how it transforms this universal fear of inherited pain into a supernatural fable, balancing moments of quiet dread with bursts of visceral terror. Also, it’s got a super messed up puppet at the center of all its mayhem.
3. The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat)
The dual performances of stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance are nothing short of extraordinary, showcasing a brilliant battle of woman archetypes—the ingénue vs. the crone—that evolves into a darkly mesmerizing, grotesque power ballad of desire and madness. Their dynamic is gruesome and intimate, a brittle death match that culminates in some of the most shocking and unforgettable cinematic moments of the year. While Qualley delivers a truly magnetic performance, it’s Moore who completely shatters all expectations. Her performance is nothing short of masterful—layered with heartbreaking vulnerability, ferocious power, and a spectacular, spiraling madness. Together, Fargeat, Moore, and Qualley are a force of cinematic nature, commanding the screen with such power that it’s impossible to look away. Their chemistry and raw talent transform The Substance into a landmark in horror, a film that erases any line between high art and visceral terror.
2. Oddity (dir. Damian Mc Carthy)
Don’t get me wrong—horror doesn’t have to be terrifying to earn its place in the genre. It’s a flexible space, capable of nuance, exceptions, and redefinitions. That said, when a film manages to genuinely, deeply scare me, I’m both surprised and thrilled. Oddity is, without question, the scariest movie of the year. I’m not talking about political scares or metaphorical chills, nor does it align with the highbrow, socially charged horror A24 has been delivering for the past decade. No, this is something else entirely. This is pure, simple syrup, classic haunted-house horror, the kind that taps straight into our primal fears of darkness and the unknown.
The story is deceptively simple: a curio shopkeeper uses a strange object to uncover the truth behind her sister’s murder. Yet under the direction of Damian Mc Carthy, the film becomes an unrelenting exercise in dread, channeling the fearsomeness of a young Wes Craven. It’s not just nerve-wracking—it’s immersive. It pulls you into the heart of a mean and unrelenting horror show. While Oddity doesn’t boast the same groundbreaking polish of 2024’s true breakout horror hit The Substance, its ability to evoke raw, visceral fear is nothing short of a bad miracle.
1. I Saw the TV Glow (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
The liminal generation, aka millennials, is the only group that existed both before and after the advent of ubiquitous personal technology. Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow taps into this explicable feeling. The gaze of this experimental horror-drama is squarely centered on Owen (played by Justice Smith), a surprisingly successful median representation of the generation at hand. Owen’s inexplicable sadness and lack of direction, coupled with his inability to be compartmentalized by any of the important late-90s goalposts—such as sexual orientation and gender—makes him especially vulnerable to becoming lost in the freakish void of this Frutopia nostalgia-fantasia.
Part of what makes I Saw the TV Glow so fascinating is how Schoenbrung works with a very specific type of trope-y ’90s YA genre TV series that all 30-somethings will immediately recognize. Then, once it’s hooked us, it binds us all together by the ankles and tosses us over the side of its dock.
Schoenbrun gives both direct and indirect nods to Buffy the Vampire Slayer here, but any millennial will be able to identify and remember their own cerebral ’90s YA series—the ones we turned to for brief, blissful moments of escapism before the invention of high-speed internet, ever-present portable technology, and the gift of permanent dissociation that followed.
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