A dance party turned psychedelic death orgy.
A rock concert with the band held hostage.
A homicidal alien with a pretty face.
These aren't even the scariest premises to come out of A24's long list of horror films!
Director Oz Perkins' debut feature film may not be for everyone, but The Blackcoat's Daughter,
also known as February, is an effective and memorable chiller.
The atmospheric film tells the story of what happens when Kat, played by Kiernan Shipka,
and Rose, played by Lucy Boynton, are left alone at their prep school over winter break
after their parents mysteriously forget to pick them up.
The school exhibits unexplainable behaviors while the girls are stuck on campus.
A strange woman named Joan, played by Emma Roberts, is on a quest to arrive at the school
by any means necessary.
The closer Joan gets to reaching her final destination, the more intensely Kat is overwhelmed
by horrific visions.
When the three women's stories finally converge, it unleashes a new level of terror guaranteed
to unnerve the viewer.
The Blackcoat's Daughter is genuinely creepy and provides three absolutely fantastic performances
sure to shake viewers to their core.
Robert Eggers came out of the gate swinging with this debut feature, a stunningly haunting
period piece filled with terrifying imagery and a slow-building sense of dread.
The Witch is easily one of the best horror films A24 has ever distributed, and kicked
off the popular trend of the more drama-driven subgenre non-horror fans like to call "elevated horror".
The film put both Eggers and star Anya Taylor-Joy on the map, and will keep horror fans asking
one iconic question for decades:
"Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?"
Set in the 17th century and focusing on a Puritan family dealing with supernatural forces
after being banished from their New England colony, The Witch is an eerie folk horror
flick that starts out slowly, but packs a brilliant punch.
The "witchy" elements of the film are terrifying, as they should be, but the true horror is
the way in which Eggers showcases that the true monsters are not the ones that form outside
of natural existence, but the human beings so casually capable of abject terror.
Jeremy Saulnier truly does not miss when it comes to his films, but Green Room currently
serves as his magnum opus.
Green Room is a punk horror thriller about a band held hostage in a venue run by white
supremacists after they witness evidence of a horrific crime.
It's a film that thrives in its realism.
Struggling artists are thrust into an unfamiliar environment and forced to figure out how to
survive, all because they want to spread their art and follow their dreams.
If that's not a metaphor about modern life, who knows what is?
Similarly to how American History X gave a look into how young white kids can easily
become brainwashed by fascists, Green Room shows the unfortunate ease in which troubled
youth can get indoctrinated through nefariously motivated counter culture scenes.
To put it simply, the way Green Room depicts the common man combating real-world evil only
adds to its gruesome charm.
Not to mention how Patrick Stewart absolutely kills it as the skinhead crime boss.
It took director Jonathan Glazer a decade to create Under the Skin, and it'll take another
decade for audiences to fully grasp the poetic horror he unleashed upon the world.
Under the Skin is A24's first sci-fi horror film, and one of the most genuinely upsetting
entries in their catalog.
This hypnotic thriller starring Scarlett Johannson offers existential posturing on what it means
to be a human.
Audiences see the film through the perspective of a malicious alien life-form.
The alien seduces men with the intention of forcing them into a void of black goo, preparing
their meat and organs to be harvested for her fellow aliens on their home planet.
Given the film's glacial pacing, beginning with a three-minute abstract opening shot
that wouldn't be out of place in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it's easy for some viewers to completely
check out of the story.
For those who are willing to stay invested, they'll find Under the Skin to be a masterclass
of creeping dread, striking visuals, and erotic terror, featuring one of Johansson's best performances.
It's not often that a horror film takes place almost exclusively in broad daylight, but
Ari Aster managed to pull it off with Midsommar.
"That can't be right!
The sky is blue!"
"It's fine, it's Sweden."
"That's not fine!
Why is it like that?"
On the surface, Midsommar is about a group of Americans who travel to Sweden to attend
the traditional summer festival hosted in one of their college friend's homelands.
Soon, they discover the ceremonies involve increasingly violent and horrific rituals.
Alongside this series of traumatic demonstrations, the film is also an exercise in grief and
enduring domestic emotional abuse.
Despite its spectacular horror themes, the cultish folk horror flick does a masterful
job at exploring anxiety, depression, and panic attacks.
Nothing is hidden away in the shadows, as Aster lays bare the growing anxieties of the
American travelers who are clearly in no way prepared to process the traditions that surround them.
As terrifying as Midsommar is, it can also be viewed as equally cathartic.
The notorious ending serves a Rorschach test, where the viewer's interpretation of the final
moment explains more about them than it does Aster's intention.
Also, viewers will never look at bear onesies the same way ever again.
After nearly a decade away from the genre sphere, Ti West really kicked the door down
with his retro-horror slasher, X.
Set in 1979, X is about a group of filmmakers and actors who attempt to shoot an adult film
in the guest house of a pair of reclusive, elderly farmers.
Unfortunately, when the couple realizes what these pesky youths are up to, the cast and
crew have to fight for their lives.
X is a sexy, nasty, absolutely brutal film, and a total blast from start to finish.
West captures the spirit of exploitation cinema of the 1970s, the slasher boom of the late
'70s and early '80s, and offers a total subversion of the oft-maligned hagsploitation genre.
Fortunately, if you are a fan of this one, West shot a prequel film already called Pearl,
which is currently in post-production with an expected release in 2022.
The last few years, erotic cinema has experienced something of a drought.
In 2018, everyone's favorite weirdo, Gaspar Noé, provided a sweet, psychosexual hellscape
oasis with Climax.
The film centers on a dance troupe who are given drug-laced sangria during a celebratory
afterparty and descend into a nightmarish madness of sexuality and psychosis.
Climax echoes films like Andrzej Żuławski's Possession, and even a bit of Brian Yuzna's
Society, resulting in an extremely polarizing final product.
A film like Climax could easily fall into schlock territory if put in the hands of a
lesser director, but Noé's trademark style elevates this simple, drug-induced frenzy
into a full-on assault of the mind and spirit.
Every second of Climax feels more uncomfortable than the last, and that's exactly what Noé wants.
Climax certainly isn't a film for casual viewers, but that only adds to the film's entrancing allure.
If you're ever in the market to dedicate two hours of your life to recreationally spiraling
into a disturbing nightmare from which there is no escape or relief, Yorgos Lanthimos'
The Killing of a Sacred Deer might just be for you.
The film stars Colin Farrell as a surgeon who takes on a mentor role for a teen boy,
played by Barry Keoghan, who recently lost his father.
Suddenly, the surgeon's children show signs of paralysis and starvation, to which the
teen boy confesses is his doing.
He explains that to balance the loss of his father's life, which was caused by the surgeon's
failure during a procedure, one of the surgeon's family members must die.
"Yes, it's exactly what you think.
Just like you killed a member of my family, now you gotta kill a member of your family
to balance things out. Understand?"
The situation is made even more dire by the fact that if he doesn't kill one family member,
all three will die.
Keoghan delivers a powerhouse performance as the haunting Martin Lang that is so unsettling,
it's no wonder that Matt Reeves chose him to cameo in The Batman.
What makes The Killing of a Sacred Deer so effective is not that it's riddled with jump
scares or a mysterious threat, but that the horror is presented, matter of factly, right
in front of your face.
The audience is forced into a spectator position to witness an unstoppable tragedy and an impossible
moral quandary, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Described as "an acerbic, haunting film of maritime madness and mayhem," The Lighthouse
proved there would be no sophomore slump from director Robert Eggers.
Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson star as two lighthouse keepers who struggle to maintain
their sanity while stuck on a watch on a mysterious remote island off the coast of 1890s New England.
Shot entirely in black-and-white, The Lighthouse starts off creepy and never lets up.
The descent into madness from the two leads is scary enough, but as unexplainable events
plague the two, the commitment from Dafoe and Pattinson borders on its own meta form
of horror.
With every passing scene, The Lighthouse grows increasingly claustrophobic, with the jolting
images stalking the viewer as the film plays on.
Eggers effortlessly weaves an unforgiving tale of seaside lunacy, and solidified why
he's one of the best directors working today.
Word of advice: don't hurt the one-eyed seagulls.
To say that Hereditary rocked audiences to their core is the understatement of the century.
The film focuses on the Graham family after the loss of their problematic matriarch, leaving
her daughter Annie's family to unravel the generational trauma and horrific legacy their
late relative left behind.The family's fraught relationship is further complicated by the
sudden death of Annie's young daughter.
Toni Collette's unhinged dinner table speech is a horror movie monologue on par with Robert
Shaw's recounting of the tale of The Indianapolis in Jaws.
"Don't you ever raise your voice at me.
I am your mother.
Do you understand?"
Even an imaginary tongue click beats out most modern jump scares.
Paired with an obscenely graphic and suspenseful end sequence, Hereditary is the most terrifying
film A24 has made to date.
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