The best horror movies and shows of 2024 for a truly scary watch

Demi Moore gets her own Sunset Boulevard in a magnificently OTT body horror that’s the most visceral genre flick of the year. The ’90s superstar is perfect as a one-time Oscar-winning starlet who gets sacked from her aerobics TV gig when she turns 50 by Dennis Quaid’s slimy exec. Ageism is a Hollywood disease and Coralie Fargeat’s assault on it delves into a big bag of sci-fi nastiness via a mysterious cloning serum, pulling out some proper retina burns in the process. Spinal taps into necrotic flesh wounds, mutating torsos, veritable geysers of gore… it’s entirely not for the squeamish. Are you ready for this extreme close-up? 

A throwback to the dark FBI procedurals of the 1990s, with a twist of ’80s Satanic panic, the first great movie from writer-director Osgood ‘Son of Anthony’ Perkins opens a pit in your stomach in the first minutes. Nicolas Cage, looking like a cross between Marilyn Manson and a crazy cat lady, is the titular serial killer who purports to serve ‘the man downstairs’, but he’s really more spectre than star here. The film’s true anchor is Maika Monroe, assuming the Clarice Starling role as a rookie agent investigating a series of grisly murders who seems to know more than even she is fully aware of. She’s at once hypnotic and seemingly hypnotised, and confirms the promise flashed in It Follows as a scream queen for the era of elevated horror. Know as little as possible going in and watch a cult classic in the making unfolding in front of you.

Fede Álvarez builds on the suffocating tension of Don’t Breathe and the gnarly intensity of his Evil Dead reboot with a terrifically paced, inventively gory sequel. It jams itself into the Alien franchise timeline like a facehugger’s proboscis down a host’s throat, delivering jump scares and chase sequences that wring ridiculous levels of tension from airlocks and elevators, and offings that are as creative as any in the franchise to date. He has a ball with the xenomorphs’ acid blood too, turning it into his metal-and-flesh-melting secret sauce.

British horror is in a happy place – well, as happy as horror gets – with fast-rising filmmakers like Rose Glass, Claire Oakley, Prano Bailey-Bond and Remi Weekes marrying frights with real craft. To those bloody ranks add animator-filmmaker Robert Morgan. He brings his stop-motion skills to bear in a story of an unravelling director (Aisling Franciosi) that plays like a Ray Harryhausen fever dream. The Nightingale actress is magnificently intense, creating a stop-motion horror short that slowly takes over her life. Expect to hear a lot more about her monstrous creation, the relentless, bloody-eyed Ashman.

It’s been a hell of a year for horror-loving arborists. Every other slasher and exploitation flick has splattered blood on at least one set of tangled woods – and JT Mollner’s deceptive horror-thriller is no exception. It’s there that Willa Fitzgerald’s terrified moll finds herself cowering from the brutal male pursuer (Kyle Gallner) seemingly hellbent on her murder. But don’t rush to judgment: nothing is quite what it seems in Mollner’s chronologically reshuffled timeline – including his characters. Like Pulp Fiction’s mean-spirited cousin, it’s fresh, twisted and satisfyingly nasty.

All that’s missing from this eerily naturalist slasher is a David Attenborough voiceover to point out the interesting flora and fauna as its undead killer lumbers through some scenic backwoods and splatters them in gore. Chris Nash’s gnarly horror flick honours and pokes gentle fun at genre tropes, giving us gormless hikers, some Blair Witchy lore and at least one rusted but lethal saw mill. But it’s the film’s slow-cinema cadence that makes it such a singular watch, allowing your brain to race ahead and imagine scenes before they’ve even played out – and giving Nash plenty of time to subvert whatever terrors you’re anticipating. 

A baseball player forced into early retirement (Wyatt Russell) moves into a new family home with a water therapy-friendly pool. All goes swimmingly until, inevitably, the pool turns out to be knee-deep in ghosts. Bryce McGuire (Unfollowed) turns his own short into an effective feature-length horror that taps into our primeval fear of and attraction to water. He gets great performances from Russell and The Banshees of Inisherin’s Kerry Condon, as the partner who prays it’s not her turn to check the chlorine levels.

Immaculate might have beaten it to the nun-in-peril punch but Arkasha Stevenson’s Damien origin story is a surprisingly smart and insidious paranoid thriller. Backed by a strong supporting cast (Ralph Ineson, Bill Nighy, Sonia Braga, Charles Dance), an intense Nell Tiger Free is a revelation as the American novitiate in Rome who is drawn into a Vatican conspiracy of biblical proportions. Full of ’70s vibes, unsettling imagery, unexpected jolts and interesting things to say about the hypocrisy of organised religion, the result has a strong claim to be the best Omen film since the ‘76 original.

There’s been a legion of riffs on The Exorcist down the years, but few have transplanted its brooding Satanic menace with as much vividness or smarts as Aussie siblings Colin and Cameron Cairnes. Their slowburn possession horror has David Dastmalchian’s ’70s chat show host making a craven bid for ratings that invites the devil onto his TV set – quite literally. The splurge of gore in the final act is foreshadowed by some smart character work and a terrific performance from the still underappreciated Dastmalchian as man whose ego has long since vanquished his wisdom.

The Yorkshire moors provide a bone-chilling backdrop for Chris Cronin’s astonishingly atmospheric horror film. Twenty-five years after eight-year-old Danny’s disappearance, his grief-stricken father (David Edward-Robertson) and guilt-ridden playmate (Sophia La Porta) trudge the fog-bound marshlands together, looking for signs of Danny’s final resting place. What they find among the standing stones, runic carvings and treacherous sinkholes evokes peak ‘70s British folk-horror.

What would you give – and what would you risk – for two minutes with a dead loved one? That’s the question under the hood of this fiendish (fingers crossed) franchise-starter about a basement-dwelling monster with a burlap bonnet, offering an audience with the dead. The Witcher’s Freya Allen is terrific as the cash-strapped Gen Z-er who inherits the basement/monster combo, with horrifying consequences.

Regardless of whatever series creator Nic Pizzolatto has been posting on his socials, this fourth run of the HBO procedural is as good as the show has been since Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey were trading philosophical barbs back in season one. Showrunner Issa López applies the unsettling mood of a horror film, plus some outstanding gore, to its case of dead scientists in an Alaskan mining town. Evidence-led policing – okay, with the odd outbreak of brute force from Jodie Foster and Kali Reis’s cops – butts into indigenous folklore scares in a freezing, permanently dark landscape. Everything is scary in this show, even when it’s not.

Horror by dint of its striking neon images, nightmarish foes, occasional shocks and unsuual tackling of adolescent traumas, trans writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a strange, compelling feature. An allegory about ‘the egg crack’ when a person realises they are trans, Schoenbrun’s second feature looks at the strange friendship and lives of teens Owen and Maddy, avid fans of Buffy-ish horror TV show The Pink Opaque. Fans of unusual coming-of-age stories, Twin Peaks and 90s/noughties pop-culture nostalgia will all get a lot from this fascinating and original tale.

Lupita Nyong'o and Joseph Quinn are a couple of strangers thrown together in a gripping franchise origin tale conducted sotto voce. She’s a terminally ill New York poet making peace with her mortality; he’s an English lawyer terrified of dying. Writer-director Michael Sarnoski, the author of thoughtful Nicholas Cage thriller Pig, digs a bit deeper than your average alien invasion blockbuster to invest you in their fragile, desperate bond – and their quixotic quest for a slice of pizza – even as you gnaw your nails to the quick.

The second film in Damien Leone's barnstorming Terrifier trilogy was an endless and operatic kill-a-thon that reset the bar for a certain type of horror film. This new instalment – a full-on Christmas film – is a bit more conventional, but that's not to say it's a let down. How can any film with liquid nitrogen-assisted hammer deaths be considered anything but a triumph? Art the Clown is back to saunter his way, wordlessly, through Miles County, leaving a trail of viscera, skin and extremely sullied Santa suits in his wake.

There is no horror pleasure like a ‘nothing is sacred’ gorefest with its tongue in its cheek and its teeth at your throat. Everyone involved in Ready or Not pair Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s vampiric ballet, Abigail, is in playful harmony. Blood and laughs are spilled in equal measure as Melissa Barrera’s final girl tries to outwit Dracula’s daughter while trapped in a mansion with a deranged killer and Dan Stevens in a silly earring.

Sydney Sweeney’s overnight enshrining as a bona fide scream queen has been a decade in the making. She auditioned to play Immaculate’s tormented nun back in 2014, but the project went away – until, thanks to her new star-power, she resurrected it as producer-star. Unsurprisingly, she brings absolutely everything to the role of Sister Celicia, an innocent outsider in a walled-off religious community that harbours something dark and cultish within its cloisters. Jump scares, giallo shocks and a truly batshit ending, combined with some of the most gutteral screams ever to blast out in ear-piercing Dolby Atmos, make Michael Mohan’s (The Voyeurs) horror a whale of a time at the movies. It may not be immaculate, but thanks to Sweeney, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. 

Benjamin Brewer, a VFX-er on Everything Everywhere All at Once, teams up with Nicolas Cage for a second time after 2016’s The Trust, with satisfyingly gnarly results. His creature feature has Cage back in action dad mode to keep his teenage sons alive after an alien invasion. For a low-budget film, the effects work is minimal but effective. The terrifying aliens’ origins are kept ambiguous, making Arcadian all the more spine-tingling, with a strong sibling rivalry-turned-bromance at its core.

British-Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu lays herself and her Malay heritage bare in a body horror film based on superstitions surrounding puberty. Having left Malaysia to settle in London aged 11, her insights into this critical time in a girl’s life take shape in semi-autobiographical fashion as Zafreen Zairizal’s tweenager shapeshifts in monstrous fashion. Tiger Stripes is lit up by its stunning lead, a striking performance in a film that sensitively delves into schoolgirl bullying and takes a gory ride through the Malaysian countryside.

Someone annoying moved in next door? You’ll have sympathy with struggling prog-rock musician William (Jonah Ray) in an exuberant Gumtree-sploitation horror-comedy that plays like Pacific Heights on peyote. That neighbour from hell comes in the truly memorable form of Vlad, an indestructible goblin-y character, played beneath layers of latex by Alex Winter, who drags William to hell. A blast, not least for the cameo by Kumail Nanjiani as ‘Smelting Refinery Guard’.

Irish director Damian Mc Carthy’s tale of ghostly revenge is the sum of many creepy parts: a low-lit, stone-walled country house; a blind medium with a dead twin sister; a jittery mental patient with a glass eye; an odd asylum orderly who’s definitely hiding something; a random cannibal; and the scene-stealer, a wooden mannequin that looks like an embalmed Freddy Krueger. In less assured hands, it might come off silly, like an extended Tales From the Crypt episode – and in some ways, that’s exactly the kind of old-school spookiness it’s aspiring to. But Mc Carthy sustains a high level of nerve-shredding tension that jolts at all the right moments, right up to a final jump scare that’d have the Crypt Keeper himself cackling with glee.

A first-of-three remake of a 2008 Liv Tyler slasher flick might not sound promising, but director Renny Harlin is absolutely determined to scare the hell out of us. Troy Gutierrez and Riverdale’s Madelaine Petsch are the sweet but dim roadtrippers who have to survive the night in a remote cabin –though it looks like somebody else already has the key. Along with a bunch of creepy masks. And an axe. Make sure to stay through the credits, so you’re ready for Chapter 2.

Writer-director Ti West concludes his Mia Goth horror trilogy (following X and Pearl) with a fond neon tribute to the genre’s ’80s gory heyday and a smart look at the role of women in Hollywood. A soundtrack full of ’80s faves like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and ZZ Top alongside outsized supporting performances from Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Debecki make for a killer thriller.

The Blair Witch Project set the bar for what a low-budget horror movie could achieve when it came to scaring the living crap out of us in a forested setting. This sparse, atmospheric and smartly staged Stone Age horror is working with a slightly bigger wallet, and Scottish director Andrew Cumming gives it all a nice sense of scale, but the same principles still apply: don’t go down to the woods without an excellent exit strategy. A small band of Stone Age-rs reconnoitre a foreign landscape that turns out to be haunted by some form of ultra-violent beast. Their gory fates are left to the imagination, with the unsettling sound design doing most of the heavy lifting, until Out of Darkness shows its hand in a final act twist that lands with the force of a Neanderthal’s club.—Phil de Semlyen

If you’re looking for an enjoyably crazy horror movie that prioritises weird goings on over easily traceable logic, then German filmmaker’s Tilman Singer’s exhilaratingly out-there Alpine hotel-set trip is just the ticket. Featuring Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer, she plays an emo teen hung up on the death of her mum who has been dragged on holiday only to stumble upon a baby-stealing splinter species from the human race and the feverish cult that hopes to harness its mind-controlling, timey-wimey bird call-like powers. Bonkers, in the best way.