Dread Central’s 10 Favorite Horror Movies of 2024
Welcome to Dread Central Unearthed 2024, where we’re sharing our favorite films, moments, kills, scares, and more from this year in horror. Today, we have our site’s official list of the ten best horror movies of 2024!
2024 has been quite a year, to say the least. Ignoring the hellish socio-political landscape that only seems to get worse with each passing day, this was a magnificent year for the horror genre. While we saw plenty of sequels and franchise reboots, we also got a plethora of weird, wild, and wholly unique genre films, especially when it came to telling queer stories that go against the societal grain. The genre continues to flourish in the face of growing cultural anxieties, with these films only getting meaner. We can’t wait to see what cinematic nastiness awaits in 2025.
As 2024 rapidly approaches its end, here are the top ten horror films from this year, at least according to all of us here at Dread Central.
10. Sleep (dir. Jason Yu)
A happy young couple are preparing for their first child. However, as they get closer to the due date, the husband begins having terrifying sleepwalking incidents. Can his wife get to the root of his issues before he becomes a danger to their small family? Sleep is creepy and engaging, and packs a few sinister surprises. It’s also, sadly, one of the final films featuring the late Lee Sun-kyun (Parasite).
Jason Yu captures the unsettling vibes of this world and gives us a great depiction of a woman battling sleep deprivation while still being the only voice of reason. So, it’s unsurprising that I related to Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi). While I hope to never be a mom, I know what it’s like to constantly fix everything while running on empty. She is a sleepy badass, and I adore her. —Sharai Bohannon
9. The Coffee Table (dir. Caye Casas)
New parents experiencing a difficult time in their relationship buy a coffee table without knowing it will drastically change their lives. This upsetting little gem is the bleakest horror comedy I’ve ever seen. While I found this movie funny, it also stressed me out and shaved five years off my lifespan. Cristina Borobia and Caye Casas’ script is unrelenting, dreadful, and deliciously comedic. Casas’ direction underscores the macabre vibe that makes you feel like you might go to hell for laughing. He expertly navigates this claustrophobic nightmare, dragging us through every corner of this cinematic anxiety attack.
The Coffee Table is a film for people with a dark sense of humor who aren’t rattled easily. Even then, those viewers may still audibly gasp a few times like I did. This movie is too sick and twisted to not be one of my favorite things to come out of 2024. — Sharai Bohannon
8. Longlegs (dir. Osgood Perkins)
This chilling cinematic effort sees a young FBI agent (Maika Monroe) forced to confront her own past as she works to catch a prolific serial killer (Nicolas Cage).
I had really high expectations going into Longlegs. The hype around this picture was nearly impossible to live up to. Yet, somehow it rises to the occasion. Writer/director Oz Perkins has really outdone himself. This chilling horror effort is steeped in atmosphere and the story is imaginative and unexpected, while simultaneously paying homage to classic genre pictures like The Silence of the Lambs. Not to mention, Nicolas Cage takes a character that could easily be a punchline and makes him terrifying. —Tyler Doupé
7. The First Omen (dir. Arkasha Stevenson)
Like many others, I had reservations about Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen, not because of Stevenson, but because of this obsession with reviving old franchises as a way to generate revenue. I couldn’t be more pleased to be proven wrong as Stevenson, who co-wrote the film with her partner Tim Smith, crafts a rape-revenge tale of sorts that points a finger directly at the Catholic Church for their continued allowance of abuse. Nell Tiger-Free’s performance has drawn well-deserved comparisons to Isabelle Adjani’s feral showing in the iconic Possession. That comparison alone speaks to the tone Stevenson strikes here—it’s bubbling with anger, but the kind of anger with no place to go.
The portrayal of PTSD and the confusion that arises in the wake of sexual trauma feels authentic and never exploitative, always toeing that line but never crossing it. While a reboot of sorts, Stevenson’s voice is still loud and clear in one of the biggest surprises of the year. —Mary Beth McAndrews
6. Nosferatu (dir. Robert Eggers)
Decades after the opulent gothic spectacles of the ’90s, like Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, Robert Eggers resurrects such sensibilities with his chilling new rendering of Nosferatu. Lily-Rose Depp delivers one of the standout performances of the entire year, embodying her tragic character with eerie grace and emotional depth—like a macabre ballerina spinning through webs of trauma and dread. What could have easily been a fragile, stereotypically waifish role is instead transformed into a magnetic force, eclipsing all of the seasoned talents who surround her. With his reimagining of cinema’s most enduring Dracula hijacking, Eggers has once again proven his mastery of atmospheric storytelling. Combined with its meticulous craftsmanship and hypnotic unease, Nosferatu is a genre triumph worthy of serious awards consideration. —Josh Korngut
5. Smile 2 (dir. Parker Finn)
I enjoyed Smile far more than I expected. It’s not overly original, with a core conceit effectively lifted from The Ring (but I actually think Smile is even scarier). The bar was set pretty high by the first chapter. So, I wasn’t expecting much out of the sequel. But I was pleasantly surprised as Finn crafts a story about a global pop sensation trying to make her comeback after a very public breakdown and a deadly car crash.
I like the way writer/director Parker Finn opted to explore the fragility of mental health through the lens of a musician at the peak of her fame. Our society has been historically unkind to pop starlets who deal with mental health struggles in the public eye. I think Naomi Scott’s turn as Skye Riley humanizes what public figures like Britney Spears and Amanda Bynes went through and gives the viewer cause to empathize, rather than judge. Moreover, the scares are on point. And Scott’s performance is fully committed. —Tyler Doupé
4. I Saw The TV Glow (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
The liminal generation, aka millennials, is the only group that existed both before and after the advent of ubiquitous personal technology. Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow taps into this explicable feeling. The gaze of this experimental horror-drama is squarely centered on Owen (played by Justice Smith), a surprisingly successful median representation of the generation at hand. Owen’s inexplicable sadness and lack of direction, coupled with his inability to be compartmentalized by any of the important late-90s goalposts—such as sexual orientation and gender—makes him especially vulnerable to becoming lost in the freakish void of this Frutopia nostalgia-fantasia.
Part of what makes I Saw the TV Glow so fascinating is how Schoenbrung works with a very specific type of trope-y ’90s YA genre TV series that all 30-somethings will immediately recognize. Then, once it’s hooked us, it binds us all together by the ankles and tosses us over the side of its dock.
Schoenbrun gives both direct and indirect nods to Buffy the Vampire Slayer here, but any millennial will be able to identify and remember their own cerebral ’90s YA series—the ones we turned to for brief, blissful moments of escapism before the invention of high-speed internet, ever-present portable technology, and the gift of permanent dissociation that followed. —Josh Korngut
3. Red Rooms (dir. Pascal Plante)
Red Rooms has the juice. Pascal Plante’s interrogation of true crime culture and obsession is visceral and staggering, and Plante doesn’t even need to show a single act of violence for it to work. The audio design, augmented by Dominique Plante’s chilling score, is terrifying in its suggestive power. You’ll hear about the grisly crimes, and you’ll hear clipped audio from several, though Red Rooms wisely never veers into firm exploitation territory. The horror is all in the mind, anchored by a spiraling Juliette Gariépy as Kelly-Anne, a Montreal-based fashion model obsessed with the trial of killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos).
Kelly-Anne stalks the trial, going so far as to spend her evenings outside the courthouse, nestled in a little nook to be among the first ones there. During the trial, she meets Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a young Chevalier acolyte, and their relationship defies explanation. Red Rooms gets stranger, more dangerous, more daring, as it goes on, culminating in a finale that will leave you breathless. There’s a lot of true crime content out there, and if there’s any justice in this world, Red Rooms will have the subgenre’s superfans questioning whether it’s all gone too far. —Chad Collins
2. The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat)
Coralie Fargeat, my muse. Since the release of her 2018 rape-revenge film aptly titled Revenge, I’ve been beating the drum about her singular artistic vision that takes the shape of a sledgehammer, ready to shatter viewer expectations and preconceived notions about genre and the female body. With her sophomore feature The Substance, Fargeat still wields that sledgehammer but with even more deadly precision in her satirical examination of the beauty industry and how women view themselves in a world controlled by the lecherous male gaze.
Her camera once again shoves shards of glass into the metaphorical eyes of the male gaze, obviously mocking the fetishization of young bodies while also creating a gaze that mimics how women view their own bodies when locked in the bathroom, alone with their thoughts. Demi Moore’s performance as Elisabeth Sparkle embodies that ethos through her largely silent performance, letting her body and face tell an agonizing tale of exploitation, sacrifice, and rage.
Yes, the third act is a fantastical blood bath of epic proportions that perfectly punctuates The Substance and provides a fitting conclusion to Fargeat’s cinematic vision. But the preceding acts are just as shocking as Fargeat takes female insecurity, particularly around aging, and makes it into a body horror nightmare that would make Brian Yuzna proud. Plus, the fact that a film like this can receive nominations at award shows like the Golden Globes is inspiring to a new filmmaker like myself. Yes, award shows aren’t indicative of a film’s quality, but in terms of bringing a film like this into the cultural conversation, it helps it breech containment and spread like electric green wildfire. —Mary Beth McAndrews
1. Oddity (dir. Damian Mc Carthy)
Oddity is very scary. Everything on this list is. But, when I say Oddity is scary, I mean really, really scary. The kind of traditional, throwback scary that will have you yelping, jumping from your seat, covering your eyes because you’re too afraid to see what happens next. It’s as pitch-perfect a ghost story as any, distilling decades of tropes and scare tactics into the perfect powder keg of a midnight horror show. Damian Mc Carthy’s sophomore feature is even scarier than Caveat, and that’s saying something.
His tale of blind psychics, unsolved murders, and terrifying wooden mannequins doesn’t have much to say, and it doesn’t need to. Mc Carthy’s film simply wants to scare the willies out of the audience, and on that level, it succeeds in the purest form possible. It takes a lot to scare me nowadays, and Oddity is a testament to how some filmmaking prowess, strong performances, and a classic haunting can still do that more successfully than most. This is the 2024 horror template. —Chad Collins
Read more of our Best of 2024 coverage here.
Categorized:Editorials
