2023 was a pivotal year for horror. From modern takes on classics to completely unprecedented
game changers, here are the top 10 terrifying films of the year according to our ranked ballot.
Brian Duffield has proven himself to be one of the strongest voices of the horror genre
in recent years, with his screenplays for The Babysitter films, Underwater, Love and Monsters,
and his directorial debut Spontaneous all becoming treasured fan favorites.
His newest feature, No One Will Save You, is a pulse-pounding home invasion and alien
flick with next to no dialogue, anchored by a dynamic performance by Kaitlyn Dever.
Rather than approach this alien invasion story like an action-forward explosion of lasers,
No One Will Save You provides an intimate look at the way society leaves us to fend for ourselves.
Instead of coming up with some unique design for the aliens,
Duffield leans into the classic gray aesthetic and taps right into the viewers' earliest anxieties
about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. However, these aren't ordinary grays.
Some are shown to expand their limbs to great size like gigantic spiders,
crossing well into the uncanny valley and terrorizing the psyche of anyone watching.
No One Will Save You is small in its setting but massive in its storytelling,
which is doubly effective considering there's virtually no dialogue throughout its duration.
Dever carries us through the film with exceptional emotional precision and a stop-at-nothing attitude
that you can't help but root for. No shade to Signs, but this is the alien movie we've been
wanting since M. Night Shyamalan's take on a farmhouse alien thriller came out.
Eli Roth has a pretty controversial history in the horror industry,
and there were a lot of ways his feature-length adaptation of a fake trailer originally made
for the double-feature Grindhouse could have gone wrong. However,
his modern slasher thriller Thanksgiving wound up being a heck of a lot of fun.
To be clear, the script is a little wobbly, the characters are thinly sketched,
and it doesn't take too much thinking to figure out who the killer is. However,
none of those critiques end up preventing the film from being a complete blast to watch,
and that quality invokes a lot of nostalgia for more classic entries to the slasher genre.
Rather than return to the grindhouse aesthetic of the trailer, Roth's film
feels more like a throwback to the '90s slasher boom ushered in by Scream. A year
after a Black Friday massacre at a superstore reminiscent of Walmart,
a killer in a pilgrim outfit begins stalking the residents of a small town on Thanksgiving.
This narrative allows Roth to get creative with a whole buffet of gore and inventive kills,
many of which use old-fashioned practical effects.
"The longer this goes, the more twisted it gets. The weapon he's
using is straight off a Thanksgiving table."
It's evident the filmmaker isn't trying to break new ground here. Instead,
Roth delivers a series of thrills and kills that are bound to appeal to even
the most jaded of horror fans. Here's hoping the already-confirmed sequel keeps up this trend.
While some might argue that Beau is Afraid isn't technically a horror movie,
the three-hour weird fest is full of horrific imagery that has the power to both amuse and
terrify. For that reason it's managed to earn a spot on this list. Joaquin Phoenix
plays Beau Wasserman, a man who lives in constant terror. Lonely and troubled,
he's haunted by the fact that his father died from a heart attack the night he was conceived.
When Beau's domineering mother dies, poor Beau has to travel home for the funeral. However,
the journey there will be fraught with peril and a constant weirdness that has to be seen
to be believed. Everyone Beau encounters seems to be unhinged in some bizarre way,
which only adds to the atmosphere of comical dread that Aster has created here.
It's entirely understandable why Beau is Afraid wouldn't work for everyone, as it's certainly
not the easiest film to get through. Even so, those with a stomach for the strange might find
it well worth a watch. The story itself, while weird, isn't impenetrable, and the film's grand
finale is so bleak and unflinchingly odd that it creates a genuine sense of horror in the viewer.
Brandon Cronenberg makes movies designed to make
viewers feel awful. Known for their nasty, violent, and ugly aesthetics,
some of Cronenberg's films may cause you to question why you're watching them at all.
As unappetizing as those qualities that may sound to some viewers,
he's found enough success in the genre to prove there's an audience for his particular brand of
nihilistic madness. While some might prefer Cronenburg's previous effort, Possessor,
the gonzo nightmare Infinity Pool packs one hell of a punch.
In Infinity Pool, Alexander Skarsgård plays a struggling writer on vacation with his wife in
the fictional country of Li Tolqa. There, the married couple meets another couple,
played by Jalil Lespert and modern scream queen Mia Goth.
After an accident lands Skarsgård's character in legal trouble,
he's presented with an utterly bonkers escape hatch: he can pay a huge fee to
have himself cloned, and then his clone can be punished in his place.
"It will also retain your memories,
so it will believe itself to be guilty of your crimes at the time of death."
This opens the door to a world of strange, vile, increasingly violent situations as
Skarsgård's character becomes more and more deranged and damaged by the experience.
Turning in performances so unhinged that they're legitimately scary, Infinity Pool
has made us more than excited to see what's in store for Cronenberg's next horrific entry.
There are a few unwritten rules in horror, and one of those is that if teenagers get their hands on
a cursed object they're almost surely going to mess around with it. Twin filmmakers Danny and
Michael Philippou shocked audiences across the globe with the Australian creepfest Talk To Me,
a film that one of /Film's writers described as "a gross, funny, creepy
saga that often feels like Australia's answer to Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead."
The story centers on a group of friends who figure out how to connect with the dead
through an embalmed hand, and it soon becomes a party game where teenagers see how long they
can allow themselves willing possession before there's no going back. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
someone lets the ghosts in for a little too long, and there's hell to pay.
Because we know from the jump that one of these kids is going to get possessed, the fun becomes
seeing how the ghostly hijinks will play out. The result is a whole lot of unexpectedly graphic
terror. Talk To Me goes to some seriously dark places, but there's always an aura of fun hanging
in the air. No matter how stupid the decisions of our teen leads feel or how relentlessly cruel
the actions of the spirits are, Talk To Me is one non-stop thrill ride from start to finish.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has served as the catalyst for many tales of terror,
and the latest film to draw on her classic story about
reanimating the dead is Laura Moss' wonderfully macabre Birth/Rebirth.
Both disturbing and darkly funny, Birth/Rebirth boasts a killer performance from Marin Ireland as
Rose, a pathologist who has been conducting experiments to bring back the dead. When
a 6-year-old named Lila dies, Rose sees her as the perfect specimen for her experiments.
However, Lila's mother, a nurse named Celie, soon learns that her daughter
has come back from the dead. From here, the film becomes a kind of odd-couple dark comedy,
with Rose and Celie both operating out of Rose's home to help Lila get back on her feet.
"My daughter is not an experiment."
As you might imagine, things don't go according to plan. To say any more would spoil the fun,
as part of the power of Birth/Rebirth is not being sure where all of this drama is leading.
If your experience watching this film is anything like some of our writers', you'll be thinking
about it for months after your first viewing. Argentinian filmmaker Demián Rugna made quite
the splash with his scare-heavy Terrified, but it's nothing compared to this year's follow-up,
When Evil Lurks. Rugna partnered with Shudder to create a hybridized possession
story that approaches concepts around exorcisms through an Evil Dead lens.
The mashup of outbreak paranoia and supernatural malevolence makes for one of the meanest watches
of the year, proving no one on the cast list is safe. Where Terrified gets the jumps and
jolts incredibly right, When Evil Lurks manages to completely rip its viewers' hearts out. It
oozes grossness, lunges for your throat, and won't rest until your skin crawls right off your body.
The film leads viewers through a gauntlet of senseless violence stemming from an evil
infection. Wherever characters go, death and sadness follow. Rugna protects no one
from what lurks, with children, animals, the elderly all ending up victims as he fearlessly
approaches horror with a piercing bleakness that obliterates the concept of salvation.
While hope is an essential theme in many horror stories, it's absent in When Evil Lurks. This
feels like a defiant choice, and unlocks the film's mesmerizingly devastating potential.
Sometimes, it feels good to feel bad, and the catharsis this film brings on is viscerally real.
Arguably the most polarizing horror film of 2023, Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink is also one of the
scariest. Shot in the director's childhood home, Skinamarink is a micro-budget analog horror film
about two children creeping around their house in the middle of the night. In the darkness,
the pair discover that the doors and windows have disappeared, their parents are nowhere to be
found, and the only source of lighting is an old tube TV playing public domain cartoons on repeat.
Skinamarink operates less like a narrative film and more like an
immersive experience. It regresses the viewer back into childhood and
forces them to remember what it felt like when the furniture felt too big,
the darkness seemed darker than humanly possible, and every unseen sound carried a threatening aura.
A viral sensation that quickly became the word-of-mouth hit of the year,
Skinamarink is only effective if the viewer is willing to let the film work its magic.
There are shots of walls in the dark that don't move for minutes on end, an act of psychological
warfare on Ball's part that triggers the audience's mind to start playing tricks.
Half of the terror is questioning if there's something hidden in the darkness that we can
just barely make out, or if this is a result of our own fear trying to make
sense of what's before us. Is there something in this house, or are the senses going into
overdrive and imagining something that isn't there? Watch and see for yourself.
"How did you do that?"
Lee Cronin takes Evil Dead out of the woods but doesn't lose any of the Deadite goodness
that's made the franchise so popular. As if the Los Angeles housing market wasn't
frightening enough, Cronin expands Evil Dead lore into the big city.
The neighborly setting of an apartment complex becomes home to another Necronomicon bloodbath,
tearing a family and their floormates apart. It's somewhat of a departure from Sam Raimi's approach,
but that's not a bad thing. Evil Dead Rise feels like an anthology
entry with a new flavor, adding a bit of variety to the series.
Cronin strikes a tone somewhere between Fede Alvarez's Evil Dead and Raimi's Evil Dead II. For
her part, Alyssa Sutherland turns in a magnificent Deadite performance as Maggot Mommy Ellie.
Evil Dead Rise nails the skin-splitting gore, revels in its diabolical storytelling,
and offers a few new twists on familiar Necronomicon mythos. It's the kind of
swing you want to see as new filmmakers like Cronin try their best to make Raimi
and Bruce Campbell proud. Cronin stays impressively true to the Evil Dead formula
while remaining faithful to his vision and his take on the Evil Dead franchise.
"Come get some."
In Toho's hands, Godzilla can be more than destructive and loud.
Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus One is as much about a tumultuous
era in Japanese history as it is about a reptilian kaiju decimating cities.
Before Godzilla even begins whipping his tail into skyscrapers, the film kicks off with Tokyo
already reduced to rubble in the wake of World War II. Yamazaki uses Godzilla as a metaphor,
not just a scaly monster, which realizes the full potential of
the iconic creature's presentation. The film features the same underfoot chaos present in
American adaptations that value action over all else, but also thoughtful storytelling
bursting with nationalistic commentaries built on the values of communal strength.
Godzilla Minus One doesn't crumble under the story's ambitions, nor does it undersell the
visual splendor of Godzilla's might. Destruction sequences feature a ferocious Godzilla laying
waste to metropolitan hubs, whether he's stomping around or blasting his atomic breath.
However, there's also a vocal post-war response to Japan's government failings,
led by a lead character who suffers from tremendous guilt as a surviving kamikaze
pilot. Thanks to this balance, viewers get scenes where Godzilla hurls battleships like
bathtub toys alongside thoughtful scripting about the courage it takes to fight back
when you're already facing adversity. Godzilla Minus One is a conflicted and
contemplative kaiju interpretation, which makes it one of the year's best films.