25 pieces
John Carpenter's The Thing earned back its budget and was savaged anyway. The record says the film was not the problem. The poster, the tagline and the weekend it opened were.
Zach Cregger spent a decade writing sketch comedy and then applied the sketch runner's structure to a film about seventeen missing children. It made $270 million on $38 million.
Eighteen months after Coralie Fargeat's prosthetic-heavy fable drew both Oscar nominations and walkouts, the strange alchemy of The Substance has only clarified. The film is less about Hollywood than it looks, and more about what we're allowed to say with bodies on screen.
Eggers' remake was received with admiration rather than fervour, a proper film from a proper filmmaker. Sixteen months later, it looks like the serious piece the year needed, and the one we were too cool to love properly at the time.
Ten months on, Ryan Coogler's 1930s Mississippi vampire film doesn't just still hold up, it looks like the clearest sign in years that the studio auteur movie is not dead. A field report from inside the juke joint.
Chris Nash's debut takes the slasher apart from the killer's point of view, and the radical formal choice is also the reason the film divides its audience. I want to argue for it.
A year and a bit on, Hugh Grant's turn in Heretic has been canonised as the late-career reinvention of the decade. The interesting question is what reinvention actually means when the performance is, in truth, an intensification of what he was always doing.
Damian McCarthy's second feature is the best pure-horror indie of 2024, and the clearest argument going for what micro-budget Irish genre cinema can do when it commits to a single effect and doesn't blink.
There was a specific mid-budget horror economy that functioned across the 2010s. It does not function anymore. An essay on what was lost.
Osgood Perkins' follow-up to Longlegs is a better film than the hype-fatigue has let on. An argument for the adaptation that does not care about the source material.
Colin and Cameron Cairnes's Australian indie horror, shot as a 1977 late-night TV broadcast gone wrong, is the rare genre exercise whose formal commitment pays off at every level.
Ti West closed his X/Pearl/MaXXXine trilogy in July 2024 with a film that tries to be several kinds of movie at once. A year later, only some of them worked.
Michael Sarnoski's Quiet Place prequel is a studio horror release built to break the franchise's scale rules, and the smaller it stays, the better it works.
A year after Longlegs' extraordinary marketing run turned into an extraordinary opening weekend, the film looks smaller than the hype suggested and stranger than the backlash allowed.
M. Night Shyamalan's August 2024 thriller had a genuinely great first act and two acts that could not sustain the premise. A year later, the unevenness is worth thinking about.
Steven Soderbergh shot a haunted house film entirely from the ghost's point of view. The formal constraint should not work. It does, and the reasons are technical.
Jane Schoenbrun's sophomore feature played small in theatres, spoke loudly to the audience it was made for, and kept speaking afterwards. A year later, it is still teaching viewers how to be seen.
Parker Finn's follow-up to his 2022 hit arrived through Paramount in October. It takes the original's thin premise and pushes it into something stranger, harder, and more formally specific.
Drew Hancock's debut strips its premise to a weekend-house structure and one central idea. The discipline is the film's argument, and the argument lands cleanly.
Tim Burton returns to Beetlejuice after 36 years and makes a legacy sequel that actually works, mostly because he refused to make a serious one.
Blumhouse built its reputation on low-budget original horror. Its 2024 slate tells a different story. The pivot is rational and also a loss.
The Crow remake, after two decades of failed attempts, finally arrived in August and confirmed every reason the attempts should have stayed failed.
Tilman Singer's second feature is one of the weirdest mid-budget horror films of the year, and one of the least bothered about making sense. An argument for the horror film that works on dream logic.
JT Mollner's non-linear indie thriller has a gimmick and knows it. A case for the film that uses its structural trick as an actual argument.
Fede Álvarez's Alien entry is a competent piece of horror filmmaking that wants, urgently, to remind you of other films. The reminders are where it falters.