David Dastmalchian in “Late Night With the Devil.”
I’m making a list and checking it twice.
It’s that time when critics start looking back over the year and drawing up their Top 10 honor rolls (or, if they’re in a mood, their Top 10 hall of shame). I’ve already got a first draft of about three dozen “possibles.”
I don’t know what my final list is going to look like yet, although it usually includes a documentary, an international film, and sometimes a horror movie. This year, however, it wouldn’t be impossible for it to include nothing but horror movies, which have dominated big screens in a way only comic-book pictures can rival.
Horror has almost always been a popular genre, but lately it has been a deluge — and of quality films, too. In fact, when I think back over 2024, many of the theatrical features that truly engaged me were horror pictures: “The Substance” and “Heretic,” “MaXXXine” and “Late Night With the Devil,” “I Saw the TV Glow” and “Nosferatu.”
So what is behind this gruesome renaissance?
The first thing, of course — this is the movie business, after all — is the genre’s fearsome return on investment.
Demi Moore in “The Substance.”
Horror movies do not, generally, cost a lot to make. They are often cast with young, inexpensive talent (the only real “names” in the titles I listed above are Demi Moore and Hugh Grant — neither of them particularly budget-busting casting choices). They also often rely on shadowy suggestion instead of expensive effects.
Look at the first “Paranormal Activity” and “The Blair Witch Project.” The first was shot in a nondescript tract house, the second in the Maryland woods. Neither had big budgets (the original cost for “Paranormal Activity,” before the studio bought it and polished it in post-production, was $15,000). And both made hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sci-fi epics, spy thrillers and action comedies all require expensive technology, exotic locales and teams of stunt players. All you really need for a great horror movie is a great idea. The rest of it can be made with cheap video cameras, hungry actors, and your own bare-bones apartment, or an indulgent relative’s hunting cabin.
Giancarlo Esposito and Mia Goth in “MaXXXine.”
Yet while they are not expensive to make, horror movies still draw a lot of fans. And those fans want to see them in theaters. That’s because, although there is nothing about “Heretic” or “MaXXXine” that cries out for the big screen, shockers thrive as a communal experience. Jump scares don’t make you jump nearly as high if you’re watching the film in your well-lit living room instead of in a dark theater full of strangers.
Another reason why horror movies are booming is the talent they attract, and nurture.
The genre got a bad name in the ’70s, when exploitation filmmakers — some of them fresh out of the porn industry — decided to switch to slasher movies. Like the genre they had trained on, their pictures were full of bad acting, ludicrous plots, and close-ups that often showed us far more than we needed to see. But eventually other filmmakers realized that the fact that horror movies weren’t taken seriously allowed their creators all sorts of freedoms a more “respectable” genre wouldn’t.
Surreal images, dissonant soundtracks, deliberately disorienting narratives — the much-reviled horror films had room for all of any young auteur’s avant-garde impulses. New artists like David Cronenberg got their real start in horror films; old masters like Pedro Almodóvar found fresh and exciting playgrounds to experiment in.
Lines began to blur. Is Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” a monster movie or a meditation on prejudice? Is “Hereditary” about witchcraft or family trauma? (The answer, in both cases, is “both.”)
The increasingly arty shockers even gave rise over the last few years to a new phrase: “elevated horror.” It’s one I avoid. What exactly have new horror films like “Midsommar” and “The Lighthouse” risen above? Monsters have always been metaphors, and anyone who thinks it took a new generation to bring politics or poetry to the horror film needs to see 1956’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” or 1960’s “Eyes Without a Face.”
What isn’t debatable, though, is that the genre has definitely left the Freddys and Jasons behind to explore new nightmares — and new ways of experiencing them.
Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in “I Saw the TV Glow.”
Just this year, “I Saw the TV Glow” delved into loneliness, subcultures and the world of the other. “Heretic” stared down fundamentalism; “The Substance” confronted ageism. And while some of these films eventually left me wanting less — chiefly, less gore — all of them left me thinking.
And all drew audiences several times larger than the crowds that turn out for movies featuring oh-so-serious character studies, and unsatisfying endings.
I don’t know if next year will see me actually compiling a Top 10 list of horror films, but there is no argument there are more good ones out there than ever. (Wikipedia lists more than 140 international releases from this year that qualify as examples of the genre, and some of them were very good examples indeed.) Try one tonight. It may not ensure happy dreams. But it may leave you feeling a little more optimistic about cinema’s future.
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