The best horror movies of 2023 so far (Halloween edition)

You could make the case that The Wrath Of Becky, the sequel to 2020's Becky, is actually more of a revenge thriller than a horror film, but there’s no denying the visceral power that comes from watching Lulu Wilson come back and brutally kill white supremacists all over again. Even beyond the gore, though, there’s a primal fear at work here, an attempt to make sense of the inhuman cruelty that comes from very human characters. And if that doesn’t do it for you, it’s just plain fun to watch Becky cut through it all.

If you’re looking for a journey into pure, human darkness with a supernatural edge, Shudder’s April original release From Black is your kind of movie. Starring Anna Camp and John Ales as two people grieving the loss of separate children, director Thomas Marchese’s film begins with a focus on that primal, unshakeable sense of despair, then offers its main characters a chance to change everything. What happens next, and how far they’re willing to go, pushes the film into occult horror with intensity, heart, and some great horror moments.

A guy reeling from a bad breakup moves into a too-good-to-be-true house, unaware that its owners are trying to set him up as a vessel for a demon who won’t leave the property. Hilarity and horror ensue. Full of wonderful character moments, relatable themes, and horror elements that really shine, Emily Hagins’ Sorry About The Demon is the kind of horror-comedy that wins you over right away, then leaves you itching to watch it again once the credits start rolling.

Would The Pope’s Exorcist be half as entertaining if it weren’t for Russell Crowe giving everything he’s got in the title role of the Vatican’s chief demon fighter? We don’t know, but after seeing Overlord director Julius Avery’s latest horror effort, we also don’t care. Crowe makes the film interesting even when it starts to fall into old exorcism movie clichés, and when Avery gets the chance to cut loose and really dig into demon lore, The Pope’s Exorcist positively shines with pulpy energy.

An influencer (Emily Tennant) heads to Thailand and, while carefully crafting the perfect vacation for her followers, meets another young woman (Cassandra Naud) who offers to show her more of what the country has to offer. What she finds instead is a dark game, brimming with twists, turns, and delicious tension. Featuring a fearless central performance by Naud and steady, precise direction from Kurtis David Harder, Influencer is the kind of film that keeps you guessing—and keeps you hooked—until the very end.

Anthony DiBlasi adapts his own film Last Shift into something both satisfying and terrifying. Named for the cult leader at the heart of its mystery, Malum follows a young police officer who voluntarily takes the final shift at a soon-to-be-closed police station. She’s there to learn more about her father’s violent demise, and the other cops aren’t shy about ribbing her over what he did before he died. But what begins as a layered exploration of past traumas soon kicks into high gear as old monsters resurface and DiBlasi brings the blood.

A wayward teenager (Kiah McKirnan) moves in with her eccentric aunt (Alicia Silverstone) in a town where young girls keep going missing, and unlocks her true potential in Jennifer Reeder’s Perpetrator. Full of dark humor and brimming with metaphor in its exploration of the way our world chews up girls and women and spits them out expecting perfection, it’s a film that manages to say quite a lot while retaining a certain intimate tension that makes it both frightening and strangely warm.

Set in a Jewish funeral home, Oliver Park’s The Offering begins by teasing out the roots of something ancient and evil, then plunging us into a taut family situation involving an estranged father and son, a new family dynamic, and lots of unresolved issues. It’s all so believably uncomfortable that throwing an ancient demon from Jewish folklore into the mix might seem like overkill, but that’s exactly what The Offering does, and it works. Part family drama, part supernatural folk-horror journey, it’s a grim trip worth taking.

M. Night Shyamalan’s adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s novel The Cabin At The End Of The World launches with a premise you simply can’t resist: What if someone told you to kill a person you love in order to save the entire world? With that meaty question in place, Shyamalan’s Knock At The Cabin becomes an engrossing, tense human drama featuring a great cast led by a heartbreaking Dave Bautista, with wonderful work by Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, and a fierce young Kristen Cui. It might not rank among Shyamalan’s very best, but there’s still enough ambition and earnest fear baked in to make Knock At The Cabin a very watchable journey.

A woman goes out to a deserted coastal cliff every day, studies the same patch of flowers, drops a stone down the same hole, and then returns home. That’s the mesmeric, eerie repetition that forms the backbone of Enys Men, Mark Jenkin’s folk-horror tone poem that paints in darker and darker colors as it goes along. Shot on film and layered with beautiful, heartbreaking images, it’s a film that invites you to look closer and closer with each passing frame, and while you may come away not sure of what you just saw, the film’s dread-inducing vision will insure you also never forget it.

Ari Aster’s third feature is perhaps his most challenging for general audiences, and while it never leans into the more overt horror elements of Hereditary and Midsommar, it’s in that central challenge that Beau Is Afraid finds its core as a scary movie. Starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man beset on all sides by anxiety, Beau Is Afraid is a three-hour panic attack of a movie, a journey to the center of everything that scares and overwhelms a single person, and an exploration of how Beau’s fears mirror our own. You’ll leave the theater deeply uncomfortable, and that’s exactly the point.

Buoyed by wonderful work from its stars, Bobbi Salvor Menuez and Amandla Stenberg, Jacqueline Castel’s My Animal is a bittersweet and immediately endearing queer werewolf retro romance that will sweep you away with raw emotional power. The more monstrous elements of the horror are always there, but the film wisely lets them bubble under the surface in favor of more human, universal fears, and it’s there that the film finds something profound, beautiful, and achingly real.

There’s Something Wrong With The Children, director Roxanne Benjamin’s twist on the creepy kids subgenre, begins as the story of two couples, one married with kids and one still contemplating making the leap to parenthood. This clash of personalities and ways of life forms the anchor of the narrative, which kicks into high gear when a hike to an old abandoned building brings out something different in both children. What follows is a twisty, brutal journey toward understanding for some characters and death for others. What makes the film especially memorable is how tightly Benjamin focuses on its key themes while never giving away all of its mysteries.

If you’re looking for the Feel Bad Horror Movie of the Year, look no further. Based on a real serial killer cold case and dripping with uncomfortable atmosphere, Karim Ouelhaj’s Megalomaniac follows the children of a legendary murderer as they try to make their way in the world in the shadow of their father’s brutality. Eline Schumacher and Benjamin Ramon turn in remarkable performances within the dark world Ouelhaj has built, and the film’s unrelenting, vicious tone casts a strange, unbreakable spell. It’s a gem, even if it does leave you feeling like you need a shower.

Emily (Midori Francis) is a scared woman on the run from her violent ex-boyfriend. She’s lost her eyeglasses and her cellphone is broken. Sam (Jolene Purdy) is a convenience store clerk halfway across the country who accidentally dials her. When a desperate Emily calls back, Sam finds herself with no choice but to navigate the near-blind Emily through miles of wilderness with few resources and even less time, or the other woman might end up dead. Dark, funny, and edge-of-your-seat tense, Unseen fulfills all of the wonderful potential of its premise, and then some.

Part folk horror film, part possession narrative, part incisive probing of the immigrant experience through a horror lens, Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside is smart, stylish, and full of memorable images. The film’s scares are plentiful, atmospheric, and rich with detail, but it’s the human story, led by Megan Suri as an Indian-American girl just trying to find her way, that really makes the film shine.

Much of Swallowed plays like a straightforward crime thriller. It’s the story of a drug deal gone bad and the consequences for the two young people (Cooper Koch and Jose Colon) who were looking to make some easy money. Where Carter Smith’s film veers into pure horror territory is in the way it unpacks the implications of the deal, the drugs involved, and the sheer bodily terror that comes from what has to happen next. Throw in a towering performance by the legendary Mark Patton and you’ve got one of the year’s most intimate experiences in terror.

A horror anthology steeped in Central and South American traditions, creatures, and fears, Satanic Hispanics brings together some of the best Latinx filmmakers working today to create something special. Whether the film is exploring the dark comedy of an aging vampire trying to get through Halloween or unleashing a demonic presence on an unsuspecting police department, it’s addictive horror fun, and leaves you eager for more films just like it.

Though its story expands in many ways from its Stephen King source material, The Boogeyman retains something essential and deeply frightening about the short story which inspired its dark tale. Director Rob Savage and star Sophie Thatcher, along with the rest of the cast and crew, weave an immediately eerie and captivating spell as they depict a family trying to hold together under the dual weights of grief and an unseen, unspeakable presence that’s hungry for them all. It’s one of the most impressive Stephen King short fiction adaptations, and it boasts a truly unforgettable title monster.

Co-written by Scream mastermind Kevin Williamson, Sick emerged early in 2023 as a pandemic-themed horror movie that reminded us of the anxiety of those early lockdown days while never coasting on that feeling to get its story across. The film follows two friends who head to a secluded lake house for quarantine, only to find that they’re not alone, and from there the home invasion thriller vibes take over. Williamson’s slasher gifts are on full display—as are director John Hyams’ action instincts—and the film absolutely flies over the course of its 83-minute runtime. By the end, it brings you right back to those original pandemic fears, having taken you on a brutal journey to get there.

Kaitlyn Dever is a force of nature, and she proves it through all 90 minutes of Brian Duffield’s sci-fi-horror showdown, No One Will Save You. Dever is not only asked to deliver an almost wordless performance, but to spend much of the film as the only human onscreen while aliens ransack her idyllic farmhouse. She doesn’t just pull it off; she knocks it out of the park, and Duffield’s tight, tense direction does the rest, delivering a horror ride that’ll keep you hooked right up until the unnerving final minutes.

The Ghostface survivors of Scream 2022 return for the next installment, with the entire Radio Silence filmmaking team once again in their corner, and the results are predictably fun and sometimes surprisingly ambitious. Billed as a Ghostface Takes Manhattan-type New York City adventure, Scream VI boasts some of the franchise’s most memorable kills, and builds on the previous installment to deliver a Ghostface unlike any other in the series. We might never recapture the magic of the original Scream, but it’s clear that this franchise still has plenty of stabbing left to do.

Though somewhat more impenetrable than his previous sci-fi horror efforts, there’s no doubting the pure intensity and dread-inducing atmosphere laced all through Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool. Set at a mysterious resort in an unnamed country, the film follows a writer (Alexander Skarsgård) whose encounter with a passionate fan (Mia Goth) sends him down a wormhole of doppelgangers, drugs, sex, and the promise of a transformative experience that could remake him or rip him apart. It’s the most ambitious movie yet from director David Cronenberg’s son, and through that ambition we get some of the most memorable horror imagery of the year.

It might take you a moment or two to find the very particular vibe that Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb is going for, but once you find it, you’ll be on one of the most delightfully chilling rides of the year. A folk horror film that plays like a dark suburban fairy tale with moments of pure terror blended seamlessly into its magical world, it’s one of those movies that lulls you into a kind of trance, then drops plenty of scares that’ll leave your jaw on the floor.

A young woman with a past named Valeria (Natalia Solián) gets pregnant with her husband, launching what feels like a new era of joy and fulfillment in their lives. But something is shifting within Valeria’s mind, egged on by her family’s comments that she never seemed like the motherly type, something that has her seeing terrible things in the middle of the night. But is it all in her head, or is it the start of something darker? Rich in the cultural, familial, and historical consequences of pregnancy, Michelle Garze Cervera’s Huesera: The Bone Woman is a haunting work of folk-horror that also excels as an intimate piece of character dread.

The overbearing mother is a classic horror villain for a reason, but that particular trope takes a refreshing new spin in Attachment while never losing its potency. Gabriel Bier Gislason’s film follows two young lovers (Josephine Park and Ellie Kendrick) who are forced into a new level of intimacy by a sudden injury. It’s here that one of the women’s mothers (an incredible Sofie Gråbøl) gets involved, and the film starts to peel back layers of secrets and dangers rooted in a very dark corner of Jewish folklore. Come for the horror, stay for the incisive exploration of how codependency shapes and changes us.

A group of Black friends head out to a cabin in the woods for a reunion and find that a mysterious killer is playing a dark game with all of them. That’s the setup for director Tim Story’s darkly comic dive into the kind of horror tropes that supplied The Blackening with its “We Can’t All Die First” tagline, and it works from the start. But The Blackening is more than a slasher movie spoof. It’s a showcase for a tremendous ensemble of actors, and a comedy that’s willing to interrogate not just horror, but cultural tropes and stereotypes centered on blackness itself. That makes it funny as well as wickedly incisive.

Simultaneously a riff on Frankenstein and a dark journey into the depths of parental grief, Laura Moss’ Birth/Rebirth is an unnerving and hypnotic storm of emotion and primal terror. Driven by the dueling lead performances of Marin Ireland and Judy Reyes, and anchored by Moss’ wonderfully restrained direction, it’s a film that touches on deep universal anxieties, then begins to twist them into something new, sending us to places we can imagine ourselves going, even if we don’t want to.

The found footage subgenre is so packed with entries at this point that it’s hard to imagine another film that will deliver the kind of absolute terror brought on by the found footage classics. The Outwaters, from writer/director Robbie Banfitch, is one of those movies. The story of four friends who head into the desert to shoot a music video and find something horrifying along the way, it’s a nightmarish, relentless journey that will leave you shaken.

A group of friends, all haunted by the unspeakable horrors of the Second World War, gather for a seance just months after the war ended, and find so much more than guilt is haunting them. Rich with great performances by the likes of Larry Fessenden, Anne Ramsay, and Jeremy Holm, Brooklyn 45 is an intimate, deeply chilling tale of the horrors we carry with us, the ones we can’t escape no matter how much the glory of victory might shroud them for a little while. It’s one of the most effective indie releases of the year, and a wonderful companion to director Ted Geoghegan’s previous horror hit We Are Still Here.

Kyle Edward Ball’s low-budget chiller plays like an experimental film that tinkers with perspective, time, and reality, and in the process becomes one of the scariest movies of the 2020s so far. The story of two children trapped alone in a house with a mysterious entity, Skinamarink keeps building new layers of dread and unpredictable, ominous atmosphere into its bare bones narrative. And the tension keeps climbing and climbing until you’re hiding behind your hands. Skinamarink is an unforgettable meditation on childhood fears that’ll also make sure you never look at a vintage toy telephone the same way again.

A riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that’s compelling from its very first words, The Angry Black Girl And Her Monster is a remarkably confident, beautiful, and heartbreaking film from writer/director Bomani J. Story. Laya DeLeon Hayes stars as a teenage girl who sets out to cure death by resurrecting her brother after his gang-related murder. It’s a film that will break your heart and then stitch it back together a second later, a spellbinding exploration of how death haunts some families, and how far some people will go for a measure of control in a world that never offers them room to breathe.

We’ve seen killer dolls in movies before, and we’ve seen killer robots in movies before. But right away something felt different about M3GAN. One of the most memed movies of the year even before it hit theaters, this film about an artificially intelligent companion toy and how far she’ll go to “protect” her favorite little girl walked an impressive tonal and narrative tightrope. Simultaneously campy and scary, timely and oddly universal, Akela Cooper’s script is witty, horror-comedy fun, and the entire cast is game for the kind of film M3GAN became: A rewatchable thrill ride with an unforgettable villain.

A rundown apartment building becomes a playground for demonic monsters in Lee Cronin’s take on Sam Raimi’s classic horror mythos, and we reap the benefits. Featuring a cast led by a ferocious Lily Sullivan and Alyssa Sutherland, beautifully executed gore effects, and a conclusion unlike any other Evil Dead film so far, Evil Dead Rise is exactly the kind of horror fun we want at the movies. It’s got a maelstrom of screaming Deadites, cheese graters, and gallons of blood. It’s a viscerally entertaining movie that plays by Evil Dead rules while opening a few new cursed doors of its own.

Talk To Me, Danny and Michael Philippou’s feature directorial debut starts with a simple hook; A severed hand that can communicate with the dead. What happens next—a mixture of wild parties, teenage abandon, and meditations on grief and trauma—is what sets the film apart, a heady blend of heart, humor, and horror that wins you over and then devastates you in equal measure. It’s not just the horror film of the moment, but a horror film we’ll be revisiting and talking about for years to come.