10 great horror films of the decade so far

The decade began with a pandemic. A few smaller, socially distanced productions, like Rob Savage’s Host and Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, were able to get made, but much of 2020 and early 2021 consisted of horror from 2019, watched at home. Of course plague, claustrophobia and home invasion have long been staple themes of horror, to the degree that Iuli Gerbase’s The Pink Cloud (A Nubem Rosa), released in 2021, seemed entirely of its moment, despite being both written and shot before anyone had even heard of Covid-19. Still, the impact of the virus left its anxious traces in many excellent subsequent films like Andy Mitton’s The Harbinger (2022), John Rosman’s New Life (2023) and Thibault Emin’s Else (2024).

This has been a decade of returns and legacies. Crimes of the Future (2022) brought David Cronenberg back to the body horror that he helped invent, while his son Brandon keeps a similar flame alive with Possessor (2020) and Infinity Pool (2023), and now even daughter Caitlin is at it with Humane (2024) – while Coralie Fargeat has shown the subgenre’s feminine side with The Substance (2024). 

‘Requels’ for Scream, Halloween, Candyman and The Exorcist have also dominated – although singularities too, like Jacob Gentry’s Broadcast Signal Intrusion (2021), Natalie Erika James’s Relic (2020), Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me (2023), Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms (2023) and Raymond Wood’s Faceless After Dark (2023) brought new life to horror while looking back respectfully to its history.

Here are 10 outstanding, original horror titles from 2020 to 2024.

Director: Rob Savage

With the rapid, often fatal spread of the Coronavirus, 2020 was a year of intense real-life anxiety on a global scale – but the social distancing and lockdowns that it imposed meant that relatively few films, horror or otherwise, were released in cinemas during that year. Yet Rob Savage seized the mood of the moment, first making a cheap short film that went viral, and then expanding that into a feature-length home-streaming release whose unnerving effect was only enhanced by being watched online.

This ‘screenlife’ feature is both shot and set through the medium of Zoom, which had become the videoconferencing service of choice for professional and social interactions during quarantine. As six geographically separated friends engage in an online seance over the ‘medium’ for some mildly transgressive fun together, they conjure an all-too-real entity from the ether and bring deadly evil to the one place where they – and viewers – feel safe.

Director: David Prior

“I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no solving crimes like these,” says Detective Villiers (Ron Canada) to ex-cop James Lasombra (James Badge Dale). “It’s inexplicable, It’s too big, we can’t indict the cosmos.”  

Investigating the disappearance of his teenaged neighbour Amanda (Sasha Frolova), grieving, guilt-ridden James uncovers a trail of bizarre suicides pointing all at once to a local urban myth, a global cultic conspiracy, an ancient demonic entity and his own spiralling psyche. There are explanations on offer, but also ambiguities aplenty, as the boundaries between mental breakdown and cosmic horror collapse.

David Prior’s directorial debut was also arguably the 2020s’ first true cult feature, initially received with indifference by audiences and critics alike during its mid-pandemic theatrical run, but gradually acquiring a considerable fanbase online for its weird narrative swerves. It is an unnerving, paranoid noir, where the real horror is its protagonist’s alienation and existential emptiness.

Director: Prano Bailey-Bond

The scissors of censorship do not so much rid the world of the unspeakable, as merely ensure its continued repression. Accordingly the buttoned-up BBFC film examiner Enid Baines (Niamh Algar) who is the (anti)heroine of Prano Bailey-Bond’s 1980s-set debut feature is herself a model of prim, prissy repression. Maintaining an aloof air of professional perfectionism, she literally sees the world and its horrors through Mary Whitehouse-style spectacles while being completely in denial of her own considerable imperfections.

Triggered by a video nasty into a confused confrontation with buried guilt and past trauma, Enid, it will emerge, is an adept censor of her own personal history, editing unpleasant truths from her memories as much as from movies, even as she becomes all at once final girl and slasher in a film of her own deluded fancy. Bailey-Bond’s stylised, self-examining neo-giallo suggests that the horror in movies is really in us.

Director: Eskil Vogt

Released in the same year as The Worst Person in the World, the adult coming-of-age drama that he co-wrote with Joachim Trier, Eskil Vogt’s The Innocents is in many ways its opposite and complement. For it focuses on pre-adolescent children testing their singular empowerment and communal play on a summery housing estate – and one of them, a murderous psychopath in the making, really is a contender for the title of worst person in the world.

A group of kids, otherwise marginalised by race or disability, discover not only that they have different psionic powers, but that those powers are amplified when they come together. As an allegory for individual vulnerability and collective strength in the face of tyrannical bullying, Vogt’s film assumes the status of a political parable, even as it places very young people in absolutely harrowing situations. It ultimately interrogates its own title as it catches everyone in an act of callous, corporate scapegoating.

Director: Jordan Peele

It promises to be like Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), but ends up as much like Jaws (1975) or Poltergeist (1982). It opens with an animal going ape on the live set of a 1990s sitcom, before following the sibling heirs to a Hollywood horse-wrangling business in the present day, while it takes in a history of cinematography going right back to its late-19th-century origins, with its characters – including an Ahab-like cinematographer – abandoning digicams for the much older tech of hand-cranked cameras and even plate photography. It plays with the notion of capturing on film an ‘impossible’ shot of a spectacle that cannot safely be looked at, even as it exposes the invisible, erased contributions made by African Americans to Hollywood cinema.

In other words, Jordan Peele’s intricate, elusive UFO of a film, part creature feature, part modern western, requires a lot of unpacking – which is why it hovers in the mind.

Director: Kyle Edward Ball

In the mid-90s, preschooler Kevin (Lucas Paul) and his similarly aged sister Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) move at night through the interiors of a house whose spaces seem to shift and alter as time too becomes discontinuous, and something sinister, heard but not seen, circles in with unnerving demands.

Kyle Edward Ball’s micro-budget ‘analogue horror’ is more concerned with establishing its own weird vibe than with providing anything like conventional plotting or simple narrative rewards. Shot in the director’s family home in Edmonton, it resurrects half-remembered nightmares from Ball’s boyhood – and recreates a child’s perspective with low-angle shots, while focusing on objects, toys and the CRT television (often the only source of lighting) rather than on any human face, as though realising a small child’s animistic sense of the world. Audiences were divided between enraptured terror and bewildered boredom, but this feels refreshing in its intimate engagement with primal incomprehension and dread.

Director: Evan Marlowe

After suddenly giving up alcohol despite claiming that it was the only thing that “shuts up all the voices” in his head, schlubby office drone Les (James Marsters) is informed that he must execute various missions of murder and atrocity as instructed or an explosive device in his neck will be set off. So begins Les’s dark descent into killing sprees, body disposals and alien encounters, where there is always someone else pulling his strings and rewarding him for his outrages with what he has always wanted.

Evan Marlowe’s disorienting psychodrama uses life-size puppets in real locations to catch viewers in the uncanny valley between Les’s wish-fulfilment fantasies and guiltily insistent reality. From the start Les is clearly hiding something which keeps gnawing at his consciousness, but here the road to revelation is rough and wrong, as one man’s psychogenic fugue takes him – and us – on a Kafka-esque journey towards truth.

Director: Demián Rugna

In the backwoods of a quietly post-apocalyptic, post-religious Argentina, two brothers (Ezequiel Rodriguez, Demián Salomon) find everything that they hold dear succumbing to a rot as much internal as external. From the camera’s framing to the increasingly surreal incidents, everything here feels alarmingly wrong, yet dread and despair also emerge from the way we are plunged into a world broadly like our own, yet different in certain respects, without the reassurance of exposition or even narrative coherence.

Like his own previous feature Terrified (Aterrados, 2017), and a little like Bryan Bertino’s The Dark and the Wicked (2020), F. Javier Gutiérrez’s The Wait (2023) and Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs (2024) from this decade, Demián Rugna’s latest shows the incursion of something demonically irrational upon the ordinary and the domestic. Yet it stands out from other films about the devil and possession by paradoxically reimagining the theological question of evil within an avowedly godless universe.  

 Directors: John Adams, Zelda Adams and Toby Poser

During the Great Depression, a shell-shocked surgeon (John Adams), his serial-killing wife (Toby Poser) and their adolescent doll-mangling daughter (Zelda Adams) travel the Catskills’ carnival circuit, performing their musical act and murdering mean-spirited folk along the way. When these already damaged souls become broken beyond normal repair, the daughter steals the magical Heart of Abaddon, which a colleague uses in his own grand guignol performance, and which allows her to stitch back together what has fallen apart into a new showstopper.

The aptly named Adams family is a close clan of outsider filmmakers (a husband and wife and their two daughters) who use horror to stage their own nightmares of domestic dysfunction. The travelling ensemble of loving if vulnerable artists in this feature is clearly a fictive foil for the (non-homicidal, 21st-century) Adamses, even as both families collaborate on a genuinely transgressive freakshow in which deep trauma is reconfigured as uncomfortable entertainment.

Director: Jane Schoenbrun

In the 90s, two marginalised kids, Owen (Ian Foreman) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), both lost in the conservative conformity of American suburbia, momentarily find themselves in the Buffy-esque TV series The Pink Opaque, which pits a pair of girls with a psychic bond against the evil Mr Melancholy (Emma Portner). As time passes, lesbian Maddy invites Owen to run away with her, but the meek, apologetic boy (now played by Justice Smith) chooses not to leave his community’s narrow horizons. Years later, after a Lynchian reunion with Maddy, Owen makes the same choice against his better nature, and commits to suffocating reality over liberating fantasy.

Jane Schoenbrun’s moody, melancholic follow-up to We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) is a tragedy of buried identities and lived lies. Here the true horror is the crushing values of cis, heteronormative patriarchy, and one person’s serial, submissive self-betrayal in the face of them.