Okay so my girlfriend officially refuses to watch anything I pick now. This started after I put on Hereditary — which honestly belongs on any best horror movies list ever made — and told her it was “basically a family drama.” Which, look, it IS a family drama. There’s grief, there’s generational trauma, there’s Toni Collette absolutely destroying herself emotionally in every scene. I just left out the part about the… everything else. She didn’t talk to me for like two hours after that movie ended.
Worth it though? Yeah. Definitely worth it.
I don’t totally know why horror does it for me. I’ve read all the theories — adrenaline addiction, controlled fear response, confronting mortality in a safe environment, whatever. The psychology people have a million explanations. Honestly I think most of us just like getting scared. That’s it. Same reason kids dare each other to go into dark basements. Same reason haunted houses make money every October. We’re wired kind of weird as a species and horror movies figured that out early.
Old movies that still absolutely wreck people
My cousin — he’s like nineteen, watches nothing but new stuff, very confident that old movies can’t scare him — I put on The Exorcist at Thanksgiving and by the midway point he had gone real quiet. Wasn’t talking trash anymore. That movie is from 1973 and it STILL does that to people. The effects look rough by today’s standards sure but there’s something about the rawness of it. Everything feels too real. Too physical. Modern horror is slick and polished and The Exorcist is neither of those things and that’s exactly why it works.
The Shining I could write about forever but I’ll keep it short. Kubrick was a perfectionist lunatic who shot some scenes literally hundreds of times until the actors were mentally exhausted, and you can feel that exhaustion on screen. The Overlook Hotel doesn’t feel like a set. It feels like somewhere that shouldn’t exist. And Nicholson going slowly insane — or maybe he was always insane and the hotel just gave him permission — is still the gold standard for that kind of performance. King hated the adaptation by the way. Like genuinely hated it. He’s said so multiple times in interviews. I think the book is scarier but the movie is better art, if that makes sense. Probably doesn’t. Moving on.
Psycho. 1960. Black and white. I know I know I know. But Hitchcock basically wrote the playbook every horror director has been copying since. That first act twist? Movies didn’t DO that back then. You didn’t kill your main character forty minutes in. It broke rules that audiences didn’t even know existed yet. The shower scene gets all the attention but the real scary part is Norman Bates sitting in that parlor talking about his mother with those bird silhouettes behind him. That scene is where you feel it in your stomach for the first time. There’s a similar kind of worldbuilding ambition in the Star Wars franchise — totally different genre obviously but that same commitment to making you feel like you’ve stepped into a fully realized universe that operates on its own rules.
The 2000s were mostly rough and then things got good again
I’m not going to pretend the 2000s were great for horror because they mostly weren’t. Saw was cool the first time and then they made nine hundred of them. Same with Hostel and all the other torture stuff — it was shocking at first and then just boring. Like okay you can show me gross things, but can you actually make me FEEL something? Usually the answer was no.
There were exceptions. 28 Days Later was incredible. The Descent is maybe the most claustrophobic movie ever made — if you’ve ever been in a tight space and panicked, do not watch this film, you will have a bad time. The Ring had that tape and that well and that girl and I literally slept with my TV unplugged for a week in middle school.
But the real shift happened around 2013-ish. James Wan dropped The Conjuring and reminded everybody that you don’t need to reinvent anything. Haunted house. Family in trouble. Demon or ghost or whatever. Just do it WELL. Focus on the pacing, make the characters feel like actual people with actual marriages and actual kids you’d worry about, and build your scares slow so when they hit they actually mean something. There’s a scene where Vera Farmiga is playing a clapping game with one of the kids and it goes somewhere bad and the entire theater I was in just… seized up. Collectively. Everyone at once. That’s craft. That’s not an accident.
Around that same period The Babadook showed up from Australia and did something totally different. Forget the monster for a second. That movie is about a woman who is raising her dead husband’s kid alone and she’s exhausted and resentful and depressed and the kid is DIFFICULT and she’s losing her grip. The monster stuff is almost secondary. What scares you is watching a mother who doesn’t want to be a mother anymore and can’t admit it. That’s real horror. That’s the kind of scary that no demon can compete with because it’s something that actually happens to people. Australia’s been putting out really interesting screen work lately actually — if you’re curious there’s a solid list of Australian TV shows worth checking out too. The country’s having a creative moment.
Then 2018 hits and Ari Aster makes Hereditary and suddenly everyone’s talking about “elevated horror” which is a term I hate but I get why it caught on. That movie takes its time. It really takes its time. First hour feels like an indie family tragedy — you’re watching these people grieve and argue and fall apart and it’s painful in a very grounded non-horror way. And then. AND THEN. I can’t even describe what happens without ruining it. Just know that the last thirty minutes sent me into some kind of fugue state where I was gripping the armrest so hard my fingers were sore afterward. No exaggeration.
Jordan Peele also needs to be here. Get Out came out and it was scary AND funny AND had genuine things to say about race in America AND was a first-time director’s debut AND made a quarter billion dollars. That’s absurd. That shouldn’t be possible. But he pulled it off and now every studio wants their own version of that which means we get a lot of mediocre imitations but also occasionally something great.
Streaming stuff that’s actually worth your time
Gerald’s Game — Stephen King adaptation, supposed to be unfilmable because it’s one woman handcuffed to a bed for the whole book. Mike Flanagan filmed it and Carla Gugino is SO good in it. There’s a scene involving a degloving (don’t google that) that made me physically recoil. Like my body rejected what my eyes were seeing. I’ve never had that reaction to a movie before or since.
Flanagan also made Hush which I actually liked even more. Tiny movie. Deaf writer in a glass house in the woods. Guy shows up with a crossbow. Go. That’s the whole pitch. Ninety minutes, no wasted scenes, no pointless flashbacks to explain why she moved to the woods. It trusts you to figure things out and to care without being told to care.
The Ritual. British folk horror. Four guys hiking in Sweden. This one does atmosphere better than almost anything I’ve seen recently. The forest in this movie — I’m not being dramatic — the forest feels HOSTILE. Like the trees don’t want you there. And there’s a creature near the end that I’m not going to describe because I went in blind and it was so much better that way. If you like movies where the setting itself is the threat, this is your movie.
Bird Box got turned into memes which kind of buried the actual film underneath all the blindfold challenge stuff on social media — which, side note, the whole conversation around social media regulation in Australia makes you wonder how platforms handle viral trends that literally put people in danger. Anyway. Bird Box itself is not perfect. The ending feels rushed and some of the side characters are thin. But the core idea — there’s something outside and seeing it makes you kill yourself so everyone has to live blindfolded — that’s a GREAT concept for a horror movie. The scenes with Sandra Bullock on the river are legitimately tense. Give it another shot if you wrote it off because of the memes.
If you’re looking for more horror picks beyond what I’ve listed here, I put together a broader rundown of what to watch on Netflix right now that covers a few more genres too.
Why some horror works and most of it doesn’t
After watching hundreds of these things I’ve landed on a pretty simple theory. The monster doesn’t matter. The jump scares don’t matter. The blood definitely doesn’t matter. What matters is do you care whether these people survive.
That’s literally it.
Because a jump scare — and I’m sorry but this is just true — a jump scare is just a loud noise. Your body flinches because of the noise. It’s a reflex. It’s not fear. Fear is knowing something bad is about to happen to someone you’ve been watching for an hour and being unable to do anything about it. Fear is that gap between “she’s going to open that door” and the door actually opening. THAT’S the stuff that stays with you in bed later when you’re staring at your ceiling at 2am.
Directors who get this spend their time on character work and atmosphere instead of makeup effects. They’ll let a scene go quiet for an uncomfortable amount of time because silence is scary in a way that orchestral stings will never be. They know that what you imagine behind the closed door is always worse than what they could actually show you.
Psychological horror gets this better than any other subgenre right now and I think that’s why it’s dominating. You don’t need a budget. You barely need effects. You just need a script that finds something people are already scared of — loneliness, grief, losing your mind, your family not being who you think they are — and builds a story around it.
What’s next
I’m not going to list release dates because they change constantly and half the movies that get announced never come out anyway. But broadly? Horror’s in a really strong spot. A Quiet Place keeps making solid entries. The franchise stuff (Conjuring universe, whatever Blumhouse has cooking) will keep rolling out and some of it will be good and some won’t.
The ones I pay attention to are the small ones nobody’s heard of yet. Every single year there’s some movie with no marketing budget that comes out of a festival and just destroys people. Talk to Me did that recently — Australian movie, first-time directors, absolute gut punch. Before that it was It Follows, or The Witch, or Midsommar. There’s always another one coming. You just have to be paying attention.
The way streaming services have changed the game is a big part of this too. Studios are spending real money on horror now because the platform economics actually work — a mid-budget horror film that would’ve died in theaters ten years ago can find a massive audience on streaming overnight. Serious actors want in. Directors who could be making Oscar bait are choosing to make scary movies instead because the genre lets them do things that “respectable” filmmaking doesn’t. That’s new. That wasn’t happening twenty years ago.
And audiences — this is the big one — audiences are smarter about it now. People don’t just want to be startled. They want to walk out of the theater feeling like something shifted in their chest. They want the movie to follow them home.
Anyway. My girlfriend still won’t let me pick movie night anymore. But I’m working on her. I’m thinking Midsommar next. It’s technically a breakup movie right? I’ll lead with that.
