Horror movies have been haunting us for more than a hundred years, and that’s just the way we like it.
While it’s fair to say that cinema’s most hair-raising offerings aims to hit us right where it hurts, just how they do so is a little trickier to figure out. Over the past decade, a lot of filmmakers have trended towards slow-burning “elevated horror,” where an unnerving ambiance is often just as terrifying as the monster of the week. Then again, we might be heading back towards a pulpy, gore-dripping slasher renaissance, where violence is being served up in previously unseen, ludicrous extremes.
With that in mind, we asked Revolver readers to fill us in on which film from the past 10 years frightened them the most. These are the creepy nu-classics that scared up the most votes.
The Substance
Both aesthetically and story-wise, 2024’s most talked-about body-horror opus starts with something old, but turns it into something freakishly fresh and new.
Director Coralie Fargea’s stylistically absurd entertainment-industry satire — where an aging TV fitness instructor starts taking a black-market drug to rejuvenate her career — features cringe-inducing images of post-Cronenberg grotesquerie and a vicious riff on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-like dynamics. Demi Moore puts on a tour-de-force performance as her character plummets toward intense levels desperation and mania, ultimately losing her sense of self to the Substance.
Injected with bleak, bitter humor and uncomfortably visceral horror, The Substance is a memorable takedown of society’s brutally unforgiving beauty standards.
Terrifier 3
Freddy. Jason. Michael. Art the Clown.
The horror world has been dying for an iconic 21st-century villain to rip us a new one like the greats did back in the Eighties. Three films into the Terrifier series, it’s clear that director and franchise creator Damien Leone and elastic-faced actor David Howard Thornton created a monster for the ages with their Art the Clown.
The third and latest Terrifier ups the ante for the independent splatter franchise with a deeper plot, whimsically sinister emoting from the clown world’s most menacing mime, no-holds-barred gore, and the most shocking shower scene since Psycho. Terrifier 3’s blunt and hyper-bloody approach isn’t for everyone, but horror fans — including Ice Nine Kills‘ Spencer Charnas — will tell you it’s “A Work of Art.”
Midsommar
Director Ari Aster’s filmography often cycles around themes of extreme grief and how folks attempt to move on. 2019’s Midsommar hits this doubly, with Florence Pugh’s Dani character working through multiple family deaths, as well as the ongoing decay of her romantic relationship with her boyfriend. And what better way to push yourself through the pain than by accidentally landing yourself the top spot in a Scandinavian cult?
Midsommar is a deceptively gorgeous-looking folk-horror instant classic where the bright floral crowns, psychedelic trips and genial Swedish vibes blot out the sketchy things continuously playing out in the background. Eventually, you’re forced to dive headfirst into its mania.
Midsommar may well be the most chilling breakup movie of all time — or, alternately, the most cathartic. Consider it a bone-chilling litmus test, in that regard.
The VVitch
The VVitch is a pitch-black period piece that served as both a star-making role for central actor Anya Taylor-Joy (Last Night in Soho, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga) and a major tentpole in director Robert Eggers’ developing body of elevated horror must-sees (The Lighthouse, the upcoming Nosferatu remake).
There’s significant unease building throughout this tale of a mid-17th-century New England family, who were banished from their Puritan community and began building a new life for themselves deeper in the woods. From its conflicting views of religious devotion, to the increasingly bizarre depictions of farm life, to the magnetic draw of a particularly devilish goat, The VVitch is a film that welcomes you to the Sabbath like no other. And it’s VVery, VVery scary.
Hereditary
No surprise here —Aster’s chilling directorial debut still sends us into a state of shock. The 2017 feature is a psychologically-fractured look at an unexpected death in the family, and the guilt, paranoia, blame and shame that comes through the grieving process.
Watching the Graham’s family dynamic erode is a gutting visceral experience, but it may be the big third-act swerve — where the film’s supernatural subtext erupts towards an incendiary body-horror finale — that lands the biggest scares.
This is all to say, Hereditary still knocks our blocks off.