The best horror movies of 2023

There’s Something Wrong With The Children, director Roxanne Benjamin’s twist on the creepy kids subgenre, begins as the story of two couples, one married with kids and one still contemplating making the leap to parenthood. This clash of personalities and ways of life forms the anchor of the narrative, which kicks into high gear when a hike to an old abandoned building brings out something different in both children. What follows is a twisty, brutal journey toward understanding for some characters and death for others. What makes the film especially memorable is how tightly Benjamin focuses on its key themes while never giving away all of its mysteries.

The Saw franchise returned for its 10th installment in 2023, and this time around its makers made the decision to not just resurrect Jigsaw himself, but to dig deep into the legendary game crafter’s psyche at a crucial point near the end of his life. Set in the franchise’s past, and featuring a wonderful central performance from Tobin Bell as John Kramer, Saw X is the most emotionally affecting and tense entry this franchise has delivered in quite some time, a movie that feels like a throwback to the early days of Saw in all the best ways.

If you’re looking for the Feel Bad Horror Movie of the Year, look no further. Based on a real serial killer cold case and dripping with uncomfortable atmosphere, Karim Ouelhaj’s Megalomaniac follows the children of a legendary murderer as they try to make their way through the world in the shadow of their father’s brutality. Eline Schumacher and Benjamin Ramon turn in remarkable performances within the dark world Ouelhaj has built, and the film’s unrelenting, vicious tone casts a strange, unbreakable spell. It’s a gem, even if it does leave you feeling like you need a shower.

Emily (Midori Francis) is a scared woman on the run from her violent ex-boyfriend. She’s lost her eyeglasses and her cellphone is broken. Sam (Jolene Purdy) is a convenience store clerk halfway across the country who accidentally dials her. When a desperate Emily calls back, Sam finds herself with no choice but to navigate the near-blind Emily through miles of wilderness with few resources and even less time, or the other woman might end up dead. Dark, funny, and edge-of-your-seat tense, Unseen fulfills all of the wonderful potential of its premise, and then some.

Director Andre Øvredal’s effort to tell an untold part of the Dracula legend was divisive among both critics and audiences this year, but that divisiveness is evidence of strength, not weakness. In attempting to do something with Dracula that we hadn’t seen on the big screen before, Øvredal made real, often bold choices with this hybrid creature feature and paranoid thriller, and the results are both memorable and often genuinely frightening. This could have been a much safer take on the legendary vampire, and instead, The Last Voyage Of The Demeter never stopped showing its fangs.

Part folk horror film, part possession narrative, part incisive probing of the immigrant experience through a horror lens, Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside is smart, stylish, and full of memorable images. The film’s scares are plentiful, atmospheric, and rich with detail, but it’s the human story, led by Megan Suri as an Indian-American girl just trying to find her way, that really makes the film shine.

Much of Swallowed plays like a straightforward crime thriller. It’s the story of a drug deal gone bad and the consequences for the two young people (Cooper Koch and Jose Colon) who were looking to make some easy money. Where Carter Smith’s film veers into pure horror territory is in the way it unpacks the implications of the deal, the drugs involved, and the sheer bodily terror that comes from what has to happen next. Throw in a towering performance by the legendary Mark Patton and you’ve got one of the year’s most intimate experiences in terror.

A horror anthology steeped in Central and South American traditions, creatures, and fears, Satanic Hispanics brings together some of the best Latinx filmmakers working today to create something special. Whether the film is exploring the dark comedy of an aging vampire trying to get through Halloween or unleashing a demonic presence on an unsuspecting police department, it’s addictive horror fun, and leaves you eager for more films just like it.

Though its story expands in many ways from its Stephen King source material, The Boogeyman retains something essential and deeply frightening about the short story which inspired its dark tale. Director Rob Savage and star Sophie Thatcher, along with the rest of the cast and crew, weave an immediately eerie and captivating spell as they depict a family trying to hold together under the dual weights of grief and an unseen, unspeakable presence that’s hungry for them all. It’s one of the most impressive Stephen King short fiction adaptations, and it boasts a truly unforgettable title monster.

Co-written by Scream mastermind Kevin Williamson, Sick emerged early in 2023 as a pandemic-themed horror movie that reminded us of the anxiety of those early lockdown days while never coasting on that feeling to get its story across. The film follows two friends who head to a secluded lake house for quarantine, only to find that they’re not alone, and from there the home invasion thriller vibes take over. Williamson’s slasher gifts are on full display—as are director John Hyams’ action instincts—and the film absolutely flies over the course of its 83-minute runtime. By the end, it brings you right back to those original pandemic fears, having taken you on a brutal journey to get there.

Though its release, and subsequent reception, were a bit middling when it finally arrived this October after several delays, don’t let the muted response fool you. Featuring fierce, imaginative direction by David Slade and a story packed with both over-the-top gore and touches of folk horror, Dark Harvest is a gem that deserves to be more eyeballs on it, a new Halloween legend writ large through big emotions, big kills, and beautifully visceral imagery.

Kaitlyn Dever is a force of nature, and she proves it through all 90 minutes of Brian Duffield’s sci-fi-horror showdown, No One Will Save You. Dever is not only asked to deliver an almost wordless performance, but to spend much of the film as the only human onscreen while aliens ransack her idyllic farmhouse. She doesn’t just pull it off; she knocks it out of the park, and Duffield’s tight, tense direction does the rest, delivering a horror ride that’ll keep you hooked right up until the unnerving final minutes.

The Ghostface survivors of Scream 2022 return for the next installment, with the entire Radio Silence filmmaking team once again in their corner, and the results are predictably fun and sometimes surprisingly ambitious. Billed as a Ghostface Takes Manhattan-type New York City adventure, Scream VI boasts some of the franchise’s most memorable kills, and builds on the previous installment to deliver a Ghostface unlike any other in the series. We might never recapture the magic of the original Scream, but it’s clear that this franchise still has plenty of stabbing left to do.

The latest low-budget effort from parents-and-children filmmaking collective the Adams Family, Where The Devil Roams is intensely atmospheric, casting a spell with its sights and sounds that lures you into its rhythm right up until that rhythm breaks with shocking, unexpected ferocity. The story of a family of carnival performers with a violent streak who stumble upon a magical artifact that might change their lives or might doom them, it’s more proof that these filmmakers are among the brightest and most promising voices in horror right now.

Though somewhat more impenetrable than his previous sci-fi horror efforts, there’s no doubting the pure intensity and dread-inducing atmosphere laced all through Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool. Set at a mysterious resort in an unnamed country, the film follows a writer (Alexander Skarsgård) whose encounter with a passionate fan (Mia Goth) sends him down a wormhole of doppelgangers, drugs, sex, and the promise of a transformative experience that could remake him or rip him apart. It’s the most ambitious movie yet from director David Cronenberg’s son, and through that ambition we get some of the most memorable horror imagery of the year.

The award for Horror Film That Best Understood the Assignment goes, without question, to Eli Roth’s long-awaited Thanksgiving, a killer pilgrim slasher with over-the-top gore effects and a seat-of-your-pants pace to match. Roth and his remarkably game young cast make no secret of the kind of movie they’re making, and if you can get on board with things like a woman being roasted like a turkey and a murder by corncob holders, you’re in for a real holiday treat. This is fun, funny, gnarly slasher cinema done right.

It might take you a moment or two to find the very particular vibe that Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb is going for, but once you find it, you’ll be on one of the most delightfully chilling rides of the year. A folk horror film that plays like a dark suburban fairy tale with moments of pure terror blended seamlessly into its magical world, it’s one of those movies that lulls you into a kind of trance, then drops plenty of scares that’ll leave your jaw on the floor.

A young woman with a past named Valeria (Natalia Solián) gets pregnant with her husband, launching what feels like a new era of joy and fulfillment in their lives. But something is shifting within Valeria’s mind, egged on by her family’s comments that she never seemed like the motherly type, something that has her seeing terrible things in the middle of the night. But is it all in her head, or is it the start of something darker? Rich in the cultural, familial, and historical consequences of pregnancy, Michelle Garze Cervera’s Huesera: The Bone Woman is a haunting work of folk-horror that also excels as an intimate piece of character dread.

The overbearing mother is a classic horror villain for a reason, but that particular trope takes a refreshing new spin in Attachment while never losing its potency. Gabriel Bier Gislason’s film follows two young lovers (Josephine Park and Ellie Kendrick) who are forced into a new level of intimacy by a sudden injury. It’s here that one of the women’s mothers (an incredible Sofie Gråbøl) gets involved, and the film starts to peel back layers of secrets and dangers rooted in a very dark corner of Jewish folklore. Come for the horror, stay for the incisive exploration of how codependency shapes and changes us.

A group of Black friends head out to a cabin in the woods for a reunion and find that a mysterious killer is playing a dark game with all of them. That’s the setup for director Tim Story’s darkly comic dive into the kind of horror tropes that supplied The Blackening with its “We Can’t All Die First” tagline, and it works from the start. But The Blackening is more than a slasher movie spoof. It’s a showcase for a tremendous ensemble of actors, and a comedy that’s willing to interrogate not just horror, but cultural tropes and stereotypes centered on blackness itself. That makes it funny as well as wickedly incisive.

Simultaneously a riff on Frankenstein and a dark journey into the depths of parental grief, Laura Moss’ Birth/Rebirth is an unnerving and hypnotic storm of emotion and primal terror. Driven by the dueling lead performances of Marin Ireland and Judy Reyes, and anchored by Moss’ wonderfully restrained direction, it’s a film that touches on deep universal anxieties, then begins to twist them into something new, sending us to places we can imagine ourselves going, even if we don’t want to.

The found footage subgenre is so packed with entries at this point that it’s hard to imagine another film that will deliver the kind of absolute terror brought on by the found footage classics. The Outwaters, from writer/director Robbie Banfitch, is one of those movies. The story of four friends who head into the desert to shoot a music video and find something horrifying along the way, it’s a nightmarish, relentless journey that will leave you shaken.

A group of friends, all haunted by the unspeakable horrors of the Second World War, gather for a seance just months after the war ended, and find so much more than guilt is haunting them. Rich with great performances by the likes of Larry Fessenden, Anne Ramsay, and Jeremy Holm, Brooklyn 45 is an intimate, deeply chilling tale of the horrors we carry with us, the ones we can’t escape no matter how much the glory of victory might shroud them for a little while. It’s one of the most effective indie releases of the year, and a wonderful companion to director Ted Geoghegan’s previous horror hit We Are Still Here.

Kyle Edward Ball’s low-budget chiller plays like an experimental film that tinkers with perspective, time, and reality, and in the process becomes one of the scariest movies of the 2020s so far. The story of two children trapped alone in a house with a mysterious entity, Skinamarink keeps building new layers of dread and unpredictable, ominous atmosphere into its bare bones narrative. And the tension keeps climbing and climbing until you’re hiding behind your hands. Skinamarink is an unforgettable meditation on childhood fears that’ll also make sure you never look at a vintage toy telephone the same way again.

One of the most talked-about genre movies of the final weeks of the year, Godzilla Minus One earns all of its hype and then some with a bombastic, deeply affecting thrill ride that makes the big guy truly scary again. Set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Takashi Yamazaki’s film strikes a remarkable balance between the emotional story of Japan’s fight to regain its national identity and the horror show that is Godzilla’s rise to power as a city-destroying giant. In an age when the character is increasingly viewed as an action spectacle vehicle, Yamazaki reminds us that Godzilla is, first and foremost, a machine that generates absolute terror, and delivers a powerful film to back that up.

A riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that’s compelling from its very first words, The Angry Black Girl And Her Monster is a remarkably confident, beautiful, and heartbreaking film from writer/director Bomani J. Story. Laya DeLeon Hayes stars as a teenage girl who sets out to cure death by resurrecting her brother after his gang-related murder. It’s a film that will break your heart and then stitch it back together a second later, a spellbinding exploration of how death haunts some families, and how far some people will go for a measure of control in a world that never offers them room to breathe.

We’ve seen killer dolls in movies before, and we’ve seen killer robots in movies before. But right away something felt different about M3GAN. One of the most memed movies of the year even before it hit theaters, this film about an artificially intelligent companion toy and how far she’ll go to “protect” her favorite little girl walked an impressive tonal and narrative tightrope. Simultaneously campy and scary, timely and oddly universal, Akela Cooper’s script is witty, horror-comedy fun, and the entire cast is game for the kind of film M3GAN became: A rewatchable thrill ride with an unforgettable villain.

A rundown apartment building becomes a playground for demonic monsters in Lee Cronin’s take on Sam Raimi’s classic horror mythos, and we reap the benefits. Featuring a cast led by a ferocious Lily Sullivan and Alyssa Sutherland, beautifully executed gore effects, and a conclusion unlike any other Evil Dead film so far, Evil Dead Rise is exactly the kind of horror fun we want at the movies. It’s got a maelstrom of screaming Deadites, cheese graters, and gallons of blood. It’s a viscerally entertaining movie that plays by Evil Dead rules while opening a few new cursed doors of its own.

Demián Rugna’s films come packaged with an innate, paradoxically seductive sense of true unease, a feeling that we’re not supposed to be watching, but we can’t look away. When Evil Lurks, a combination pandemic thriller and demonic possession nightmare, is no different. It plays like an extended, dread-filled panic that just won’t let you go, digging deeper into the innate darkness of its plot with unflinching, remarkably clear eyes. It’s not an easy film to watch, but if you have the stomach for it, you’ll find the stuff of horror greatness, a truly unnerving masterclass in keeping viewers’ hearts pounding.

Talk To Me, Danny and Michael Philippou’s feature directorial debut starts with a simple hook; A severed hand that can communicate with the dead. What happens next—a mixture of wild parties, teenage abandon, and meditations on grief and trauma—is what sets the film apart, a heady blend of heart, humor, and horror that wins you over and then devastates you in equal measure. It’s not just the horror film of the moment, but a horror film we’ll be revisiting and talking about for years to come.