2024 Horror Movies Were Angry And You Should Be, Too
This year has been exhausting. That sentiment could reasonably apply to any of the past several years, but there was something about 2024 that felt never-ending. The year, broadly, felt like a series of stressors that simply piled up, one after another, until we were collectively worn down, beaten, and more drained than ever before. Since 2020, I’ve been privileged enough to reflect on the state of horror for the year. You can check out the four previous reflections for 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. Horror has always been political, an interrogation of the present moment, and when assessing 2024 horror’s breakout theme, I couldn’t escape just how angry the genre has been this year. Not just any anger, but a righteous kind of anger, an anger that gave voice to the persons and communities who so desperately needed it.
Bryce McGuire’s Night Swim, despite being a Stephen King favorite, was an undeniable critical flop (despite commercial success). Ostensibly nothing more than a Blumhouse throwaway, Night Swim is an affecting and earnest portrayal of chronic illness in a decade contextualized by frustrating individualism, an inability to care for the wellbeing of others. Clare Cooney’s Departing Seniors, missed by most audiences when it arrived On Demand in February, was a refreshingly crabby depiction of latent homophobia in American high schools. Departing Seniors was pissed off, and rightfully so.
Longlegs was tragic and pointed. Indie sensation Your Monster was fittingly, rightfully angry. That film’s finale is among the most cathartic of the year. South Korean hit Exhuma was a tragic, timely foray into historical sins and the reverberations of colonial violence for decades to come. Giant Oni are terrifying—Japan’s colonization of Korea even more so. There are parallels, broadly, to the late aughts’ wave of New French Extremism and so-called “torture porn,” violent exhibitions of the genre where nihilism and rage were the point.
Anger serves many roles. It’s a social and personal value indicator, our way of demonstrating our personal lines in the sand. Cross those boundaries, endure wrath. Simultaneously, anger is an effective emotional regulator. If we reasonably reduce all emotions to a baseline neutrality, considering that there are no innately bad emotions, just bad ways of expressing them, we can better understand and appreciate why the horror genre refracted the year with so much strife and so much anger.
This anger instills a motivation to act and a capacity to care for ourselves and others. Social change is incited via anger, despite modern hegemonic ideals that dissuade it—be better, be above it. The Substance certainly wasn’t above anger. While that film was very French (and very funny), there was an undercurrent of rage that elevated it to one of the best of the year. Coralie Fargeat, in her distinct way, channeled the visceral anger of Revenge into something more mainstream yet no less urgently strident. Demi Moore is generating earnest (and deserved) awards talk. The Substance is her best role in decades. Why is that? The Substance knows, and The Substance is going to scream about it until it’s red in the face.
Bodily autonomy was everywhere in the genre space this year. The First Omen and Immaculate weren’t happenstance, especially not either film’s incendiary, terrifying endings. Immaculate is a fine movie with a wallop of a finale. Some of the conservative outrage was no doubt embellished as part of a marketing technique (see the tweet below), but when was the last time a wide-release horror movie ended with its protagonist crushing her baby to death with a rock? This past election cycle, states continued to roll back abortion access in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s overturning two years ago. There’s a clear throughline from that judicial decision to The First Omen’s literal jackal emerging from a woman’s vagina. It’s not even subtext at this point. It’s just text.
Christian Twitter has spoken. pic.twitter.com/1LKeJuBdRa
— Immaculate (@ImmaculateMovie) March 23, 2024
Anger was no less present in the year’s quieter horror offerings. I Saw The TV Glow isn’t quite as conspicuous, though co-star Brigette Lundy-Paine’s Maddy Wilson is consistently and appropriately frustrated throughout. Lundy-Paine no doubt channeled their own grief and lived experience into the role, and augmented by Jane Schoenbrun’s script, I Saw the TV Glow is rendered as curative as it is angry. There is still time, though that time seems more constrained than ever with 669 anti-trans bills proposed in 2024, 48 of which have successfully passed their respective legislature. The Devil’s Bath hurts not just because of its fascinating, tragic subject matter but because its narrative undercurrent of misogyny is no less pronounced today than it was in 18th-century Austria.
Hear me out. Even Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, ostensibly a throwaway blockbuster from a once reliable genre master (Adam Wingard), certainly had more on its mind than just big monsters duking it out. Hollow Earth might seem like a hollow metaphor, but in a year replete with catastrophic extreme weather events on track for the warmest year on record, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is as much an interrogation of climate change and the anger innate in wanting to combat it but regularly failing to do so as it is a monster brawl. Even the kaiju are angry (and they always have been).
Smile 2, problematic as it might be, no doubt reflects 2024’s American Psychiatric Association’s annual mental health poll. Up considerably from the previous year, American adults report feeling more anxious than ever. The economy, the election, and gun violence are among their chief concerns. Alien: Romulus, MaXXXine, and In a Violent Nature contend capitalism kills, power corrupts, and senseless violence is rampant respectively. French killer spider flick Infested doesn’t blow up an entire apartment building for nothing.
It’s okay to feel angry. Connect with your body, feel what needs to be felt, and hopefully channel that into something good. I can’t promise things are going to be okay. Longlegs, Terrifier 3, MadS, and Apartment 7A among so many others didn’t end on optimistic, cheery notes. They were bleak conclusions in an already bleak year. Okay or not, that anger is still valid, and it can still serve a function. A function of community care and camaraderie, a function of action and change, however small a measurement it might be. If you’re feeling angry, just know you’re not there alone. The entire genre is feeling it, too, and it’s squared up for the fight.
Categorized:Editorials
