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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 staff writer Chad Collins’ personal top ten horror films of 2024!
The greatest challenge in narrowing down the year’s best horror movies to a list of just 10 is that every horror movie, really, is trying to do something different. Below, you’ll see a mix of international fare, romantic horror comedies, and even existential coming-of-age sagas. They’re not really the same, even if they’re all horror conceptually, so ranking them is a near-impossible task. I tried, however, and stressed into the wee hours of the night perfecting what I think the best of the 2024 horror scene included. So, I present to you my picks for the year’s best, ranked from ten to one, with some honorable mentions at the end. Oh, and before you ask, I’m saving Nosferatu for theaters.
10. Your Monster (dir. Caroline Lindy)
A bit of a curveball here, but if you haven’t yet gathered from other lists on Dread Central, 2024 horror movies have been appropriately, decidedly grim. It should be. The world is angry. I’m angry. Horror as a lens into the present moment should reflect that, and this year, it absolutely has. Caroline Lindy’s Your Monster is really angry, most notably during a sensational, climactic bloodbath, though at the same time, it’s the cutest iteration of Beauty and the Beast since, well, Beauty and the Beast.
Melissa Barrera’s Laura has just recovered from a terminal illness only to get dumped by her longtime partner. Worse still (*cough* presciently reflecting some behind-the-scenes drama from this year’s Wicked, interestingly enough), he’s decided to take the show they worked on together to Broadway, offering the part to a hot young actress instead of her—despite it being a role that originated with her. Men suck, huh? Along the way, she meets a cute monster in her closet (Tommy Dewey), learns to love herself, etc. Yeah, it’s confectionary fluff, but Lindy’s script never takes it too easy. Behind the dance numbers and elaborate costuming is more than just another love story—it’s reinvention through horror. Barrera reanimates herself, and in the process, an entire subgenre.
9. Smile 2 (dir. Parker Finn)
I wasn’t a fan of Parker Finn’s Smile, and not just that film’s incredulously ill-conceived mental health politics. I just didn’t find it particularly scary. Feigned smiles are creepy and all, and even though it was spoiled in the trailer, that head snapping down in the car window still got me. But otherwise, I thought Smile was another victim in a long line of high-concept horror that can’t sustain itself beyond the novelty of its conceit. Smile 2, though? Oh, Smile 2 has it. Smile 2 has it more than most 2024 horror movies released, theatrical or otherwise.
Finn’s sequel is elevated considerably by an awards-worthy Naomi Scott in the lead role. Yeah, yeah, horror fans love saying their favorites deserve awards recognition (whether that’s true or not), but Scott is operating on an entirely different level here. So is Finn, whose sequel is crueler, bloodier, and scarier than ever. I can’t even point to a single standout scene because the entire movie is a standout. Sure, Finn at times plays with the hallucinatory nature of his central demon a little too liberally, stretching audience patience with another dollop of “is this really happening or not”. But narrative fidelity aside, Smile 2 is a damn scary movie. The mental health politics are still kind of… not great, but taken as a purely visceral genre exercise, Smile 2 is the best mainstream theatrical horror has been in a really long time.
8. Late Night with the Devil (dir. Colin and Cameron Cairnes)
Ghostwatch is one of my favorite movies of all time. I earnestly think it’s one of the scariest movies ever made, and Mr. Pipes—what with his elusive, still unknown number of brief appearances throughout— is Top 5 when it comes to movie villains that keep me up at night. I’m not even joking—if Mr. Pipes enters my mind before bed, I’m not sleeping. Colin and Cameron Cairnes’ Late Night with the Devil culls from more than just Ghostwatch, but as a whole, their take on late-night television is abounding with pastiche and homage. So, no, while it may not be an entirely original affair, the way they assemble so many familiar pieces is nothing short of remarkable.
Late Night with the Devil was a success for a reason—and, interestingly enough, still the best-reviewed horror movie of the year. While many accuse the film of running itself off the rails, I think its final ten minutes are terrifying in a deeply existential way I can’t quite describe. Is it great that the film used artificial intelligence to generate interstitials? No. Is it worse that the filmmakers made every excuse in the book instead of just apologizing? Yes. Unfortunately, a creative blunder has marred what is otherwise one of the most electric, dynamic horror movies of the year. David Dastmalchian, keep doing you.
7. Sleep (dir. Jason Yu)
I caught Jason Yu’s Sleep on a whim. I’d been waiting for a stateside release since our own Josh Korngut caught the film back in 2023 (I love South Korean horror cinema, so everyone is always keen to tell me what to keep an eye out for). I decided to attend a local film festival, unaware of what would be showing, and sure enough, Sleep was scheduled as the opening night film. My expectations were sky-high, but Yu’s terrifying tragicomedy more than delivered.
At its core, Sleep is a simple horror story. Hyeon-soo (the late Lee Sun-kyun) is plagued by an inexplicable bout of sleepwalking. He’s scratching himself, talking in his sleep, and at one point, almost stumbles over the apartment balcony into the streets below. His wife, Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) is committed to helping him, even as doing so proves more and more dangerous to both herself and her newborn son. I won’t spoil where Sleep goes, because it does shed its grounded origins for something more sinister. Throughout, however, Sleep will keep you guessing. Yu’s shocker is uncomfortably tense, endearingly romantic, regularly terrifying, and wholly, absolutely unlike anything you’ve seen before. Why Sleep isn’t a bigger breakout stateside is beyond me, but it’s one of the best 2024 horror movies.
6. Longlegs (dir. Osgood Perkins)
Love it or hate it, it’s always exciting to see something like Oz Perkins’ Longlegs come along. The indie darling had been a pretty polarizing, niche filmmaker before his breakout into mainstream success (thanks to an incredible marketing campaign). Longlegs was such a sensation when it was released over the summer, that I had horror-averse friends begging to see the film. After all, it was all anyone seemed to be talking about.
In the months since, Longlegs has fallen victim to the perennial cycle of horror success. It’s Hereditary, The Babadook, and hell, even The Blair Witch Project all over again. It’s not scary, it’s not good, yadda yadda. That’s fine. Genuinely, no one has to like the same things I do, and I earnestly accept that Longlegs might not have worked for you. But it did work for me. Really well. Comparisons to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure are apt, and while Longlegs never quite reaches those heights, it’s still the closest modern filmmaking has come to capturing that distinct sense of ambiguous, almost approximate evil. Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage are a match made in heaven, and Perkins—while risking expository fatigue in the finale—is at the top of his game here.
His style is uncompromising, and Longlegs has some of the most chilling beats the genre has seen in decades. Yes, it’s very scary. Open your mind and let the Man Downstairs in.
5. Oddity (dir. Damian Mc Carthy)
Oddity is very scary. Everything on this list is. I wouldn’t include them otherwise. But, when I say Oddity is scary, I mean really, really scary. The kind of traditional, throwback scary that will have you yelping, jumping from your seat, covering your eyes because you’re too afraid to see what happens next. It’s as pitch-perfect a ghost story as any, distilling decades of tropes and scare tactics into the perfect powder keg of a midnight horror show. Damian Mc Carthy’s sophomore feature is even scarier than Caveat, and that’s saying something.
His tale of blind psychics, unsolved murders, and terrifying wooden mannequins doesn’t have much to say, and it doesn’t need to. Mc Carthy’s film simply wants to scare the willies out of the audience, and on that level, it succeeds in the purest form possible. It takes a lot to scare me nowadays, and Oddity is a testament to how some filmmaking prowess, strong performances, and a classic haunting can still do that more successfully than most. This is the 2024 horror template.
4. Exhuma (dir. Jang Jae-hyun)
I love a good movie monster. Antlers had a great one, and The Ritual endures largely because of Moder, the demonic Jötunn. Even if a movie is otherwise weak, I think a movie monster can do wonders to elevate how well a film lands with me. Luckily, Jang Jae-hyun’s Exhuma not only has a great movie monster, but the movie surrounding that monster is pretty damn good, too. In my review earlier this year, I wrote, “Exhuma is thrilling, bold, and ceaselessly surprising in its excess.” Excess is the name of the game here, since the first half of Exhuma is a pretty grounded supernatural tale of familial haunts.
Some wealthy fools fear their ancestors have been improperly buried and are thus haunting them from beyond the grave. So, Feng shui master Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik, Oldboy) and his ragtag team of shamans look to relocate the grave and put the spirits to rest. An hour in, you might reasonably think Exhuma was over since that story is ostensibly resolved. Oh, boy, no it isn’t. Jang Jae-hyun introduces one of the gnarliest movie monsters in years and starts carving out a path of savagery that’s not only visceral in scale, but tragic in its historical context.
While the narrative pivot is liable to lose some viewers more aligned with the patient horrors of the first half (much like Insidious several years ago), I was absolutely on board for the big, bold, and uncompromising terror of Exhuma’s second half. It’s a movie I’ll be excited to dig up again and again.
3. The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat)
I’m not the first person, and I certainly won’t be the last, to spotlight one particular scene midway through Coralie Fargeat’s body horror extravaganza, The Substance. Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle, the aging movie star roped into using the titular substance to embody a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of herself, is poised to spend the night out with an old high school friend. Originally, she had no interest in doing so.
But as her younger self, Sue (Margaret Qualley, truly sensational) continues to stretch the substance’s firm seven-day rule, she concedes, desperate to regain some control. She gets dressed, or at least tries to, though she’s regularly impeded by her self-loathing. She hates every outfit, can’t figure out how to do her makeup, and upon catching her reflection in the doorknob on her way out, violently wipes her makeup off in the mirror, cursing herself for looking the way she does.
Anyone who thinks The Substance hates Elisabeth saw a different movie than I did. Yet, amid all the body horror and subversive, pointed French feminism is a tragedy that resonated with me more profoundly than most horror movies this year. I know Elisabeth’s horror because, in some ways, I’ve lived it. Oh, and Monstro Elisasue is one of my favorite things ever.
2. Red Rooms (dir. Pascal Plante)
Red Rooms has the juice. Pascal Plante’s interrogation of true crime culture and obsession is visceral and staggering, and Plante doesn’t even need to show a single act of violence for it to work. The audio design, augmented by Dominique Plante’s chilling score, is terrifying in its suggestive power. You’ll hear about the grisly crimes, and you’ll hear clipped audio from several, though Red Rooms wisely never veers into firm exploitation territory. The horror is all in the mind, anchored by a spiraling Juliette Gariépy as Kelly-Anne, a Montreal-based fashion model obsessed with the trial of killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos).
Kelly-Anne stalks the trial, going so far as to spend her evenings outside the courthouse, nestled in a little nook to be among the first ones there. During the trial, she meets Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a young Chevalier acolyte, and their relationship defies explanation. Red Rooms gets stranger, more dangerous, more daring, as it goes on, culminating in a finale that will leave you breathless. There’s a lot of true crime content out there, and if there’s any justice in this world, Red Rooms will have the subgenre’s superfans questioning whether it’s all gone too far.
1. I Saw the TV Glow (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
Was there any doubt? Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a masterpiece. At first, I was worried I’d been swept up in the Sundance hype. This year’s festival was my first in-person ever, and if you’ve ever wondered why so many festival hits land with a thud upon wide release, it’s because there are few screening environments as intoxicating and hypnotic as a midnight mountain showing.
When I caught Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature a second time, not only did it resonate more profoundly than before, I was more certain than ever that it is the definitive evocation of nineties nostalgia and latent queer grief. Decidedly trans and wholly unique, I Saw the TV Glow may not follow a traditional narrative structure, and it certainly isn’t conventionally scary, but Schoenbrun imbues so much heart into the beating core of TV Glow, every tragedy, every melting man of ice cream, is dialed up to eleven, impossible to shake. I Saw the TV Glow will have you cheering and reeling, gripping your own heart to combat a kind of nascent, nebulous ache. I’ll never forget it.
Heretic, Cuckoo, Love Lies Bleeding, Trap (I love Trap), Stopmotion, and The First Omen—among so many others—deserve mention here. I wish I could include everything, and believe me, narrowing it to just 10 was no easier this year than it has been in the past. Horror fans are feasting this year, though if I missed anything I want to know about it. Let me know over on Twitter @Chadiscollins what your favorite movie of the year was. Stay scary.
Categorized:Editorials
