Horror will never go out of style, we can say that with confidence. The excellent box office receipts and the ever-growing number of thrilling releases that attract hordes of genre lovers to cinemas every year prove that everyone likes a little fear, especially when you can experience it in the warm safety of a cinema or on the sofa of own house.
Lately, then, we have witnessed a real renaissance of horror movies, which are appreciated not only by the public, but also by critics (think, for example, of Get Out, which in 2018 even won an Oscar for best screenplay original). For this reason we decided to write this article, which in fortunate times like these (if you are a fan of on-screen terror) is almost necessary. Read down below and find out which are the best horror movies.
Best horror movies
Goodnight Mommy
The Austrian production was catapulted onto English-speaking soil and took Naomi Watts as its protagonist, a name that seeks to draw the public’s attention to this story of a mother with her two twin sons (Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti), the only protagonists of a psychological thriller all wrapped up in one house. The plot is little changed compared to the previous version of the European filmmakers.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
In the late 90sthe idea of a lethal virus that spreads across an entire city and turns its inhabitants into zombies sounded like the plot of a video game or a movie. Today, after almost two years of the pandemic, it is an anguish that we all carry within us, we have become accustomed to living with fear. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City itself was filmed following safety protocols. Director Johannes Roberts had the good intuition of transforming this fear into a visual form, partly by taking up the game’s blind spots, partly drawing inspiration from 70s horror. In this reboot of Resident Evil there is not the adrenaline-pumping action of the films with Milla Jovovich, but a rotten, dark, putrid atmosphere. The specter of John Carpenter hangs over Raccoon City, which is dirty, rain-swept, hopeless.
The Conjuring 3
The paranormal horror saga that began in 2013 and based on the cases treated by demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren has borne new fruit, this time steeped in witchcraft and directed by Michael Chaves ( La Llorona – Tears of Evil ) who, reclining on the screenplay by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, wedges the viewer into a cinematic hole with an already tested and technically faultless formula, this time disturbing one of the most sensational cases in the legal history of the United States, namely the trial of Arne Johnson, dated 1981, which in The Conjuring 3 is distorted and amplified in order to return to the vision a horror in which the interpretation of Vera Farmiga is as always central, supported by the inclusion of jumpscare that is never trivial or annoying and by meticulous changes of register thanks to which the troupe manages to adhere to the canons of the saga created by James Wan, fading towards hitherto unexplored terrains and giving an overall pleasant vision and flowing smooth, like a sharp blade in the flesh!
Annabelle Comes Home
California, early 70s. Occult experts and psychics Ed ( Wilson ) and Lorraine Warren ( Farmiga ) take delivery of the Annabelle doll and, while taking her home, an accident forces them to take a detour, their car suddenly breaks down one foggy night, disturbing minks threaten Lorraine, while her husband, who was repairing the breakdown, is almost run over by an out-of-control truck. Once they arrive at her house, they have Father Gordon ( Steve Culter ) bless her and lock her in a display case in the room in which they keep her most dangerous finds. They have to leave for a new mission and entrust their eleven-year-old daughter Judy ( Grace ) to the babysitter Mary Ellen ( Iseman).
Best horror movies on Netflix
No One Gets Out Alive
Ambar ( Cristina Rodlo ) is an undocumented Mexican-American woman struggling to make ends meet after the death of her long-ill mother. Working odd jobs around Cleveland to finance a fake ID and a small room in a boarding house run by the cold-hearted Red ( Marc Menchaca ), Ambar begins experiencing vivid hallucinations of her mother and the spirits of that boarding house’s previous tenants. Without family, friends or money, she must find a way out of her new nightmare when things with Red and her brother Becker ( David Figlioli ) escalate, revealing things far beyond her worst fears.
Wounds
Film adaptation of the novel The Visible Filth by Nathan Ballingrud, this film has the arduous task of staging a real descent into hell (as defined by Anvari himself), the seizure of power by a growing darkness, as well as the miserable weakness of human nature. Not simple themes which, combined with the dutiful horror component, make the making of a film like this anything but a walk. The story at the heart of Wounds has a rather simple incipit: Will, played by Armie Hammer, is a bartender who often finds himself working the night shift to scrape together some extra money, living life from day to day and avoiding creating high expectations.
The Ritual
The Ritual revolves around a group of friends who meet to plan a trip abroad. After various proposals they choose to go to Sweden for a free excursion, away from the chaos of the city. The same night, one of them, Rob, is killed during a supermarket robbery. Rob wasn’t alone though: he was accompanied by Luke who, scared and immobilized, was hiding without knowing what to do to save him. Despite all the journey proceeds, and the four friends decide to commemorate Rob in the desolate Swedish mountains, trying to make peace with what happened.
Hypnotic
In the first minutes Hypnotic presents itself as a quality product, with an interesting story that captures the attention, but it only takes a few minutes to drastically change your mind. Those that take the form of twists are not at all, and the narrative ends up flowing in a trivial and almost predictable way. The screenplay does not shine for originality, and ends up settling on already written paths. The characterization of the characters is not thorough and often falls into the obvious. This script weakness, together with an unattractive direction drags dangerously to the conclusion.
Horror movies 2021
Malignant
Madison is pregnant and worried: she has already had other abortions not of her choice. Her relationship with her husband Derek is tense and Madison is beaten in an altercation. Over the course of the night Derek is brutally killed by a mysterious assassin. Police Detective Shaw investigates with a colleague. Another brutal murder, that of an elderly female doctor, appears to be connected to Derek’s. Madison perceives a relationship between her and her murderer: she even “sees” her crimes. You therefore direct the police to the scene of a third crime. Madison feels that the culprit is Gabriel, who as a child seemed to be her imaginary friend. Madison explains to her unsuspecting sister Sidney that she was adopted.
The Unholy
Disgraced reporter Gerry Fenn ( Jeffrey Dean Morgan ) stumbles upon what could be the scoop of a lifetime in the rural community of Banfield, Massachusetts. A deaf teenager, Alice ( Cricket Brown ) experiences Mary’s ‘touch’, recovers from her hearing loss and begins to perform miracles on the orders of the Holy Virgin. Father Hagan ( William Sadler ) wants to protect Alice, his nephew, from the hordes thirsty for veneration, while Fenn is in charge of organizing exclusive interviews by relying on the duty of information.
Things Heard & Seen
Catherine and George, she a restorer, he a professor of art history, move with their daughter from Manhattan to a small town in upstate New York, where he obtained a professorship in a private college. Convinced by her husband to move, Catherine does not adapt to life in the countryside and gradually begins to perceive strange presences in the large nineteenth-century house where they have moved. Determined to discover the terrible secrets nestled within the walls of the house, Catherine will not notice the lies of her husband, who hides another truth behind the charm of the charming and successful man.
Don’t Breathe 2
Briefly the plot. After the events of the first film, a few years later we find the good Norman Nordstrom looking after his young “daughter” Phoenix with military discipline , in a large villa far from the city. But one day, a group of thugs breaks into the property, to reclaim what they claim belongs to them. Needless to hide that they will be volatile for diabetics (a bit for everyone). The decision to direct the film along the lines of the first (both in terms of technical and directorial choices and as a general trend of the matter) was clearly the first (and most important) winning move, especially since it was the first (and who knows if last) sequel.
New horror movies
The Devil’s Light
The film follows the events of an exorcism school, secretly reopened by the Vatican, after the increase in cases of demonic possession. The Church has decided to resume training priests, convinced that it is the only way to defend itself against rampant evil. But only priests are allowed to perform exorcisms, to the detriment of Sister Ann (Jacqueline Byers), a young 25-year-old nun who is convinced she has a vocation for performing exorcisms. The only one who sees this special gift in her is a professor, who decides to mentor her, allowing her to attend classes and study how to perform the ritual. When Sister Ann comes across one of the school’s patients, she will come face to face with a powerful demonic force, which will infest the entire institution.
Smile
Inside Smile there is a lot of horror from the last twenty years: there is the question of the death curse that is passed on to the protagonist, who has only a few days left to save himself, and which comes from Ringu -style J-Horror , but also from It Follows which is implicitly and explicitly mentioned by Finn, especially when it comes to putting the protagonist in comparison with something that only she, and no one else, sees. David Robert Mitchell ‘s film also seems to have been a formal reference, mediated however by the desire to also go in the direction of the glossy cinema of James Wan , where the most mechanical effects and jump scares are the masters, which are also present in Smile and work well (especially once, unexpectedly, I jumped on the seat of the cinema).
Halloween Ends
Ready to go and it’s Halloween Contagion : the thirteenth film in the series, the one that closes the new trilogy by David Gordon Green, opens by proposing Michael Myers as a virus. The idea is wildly current after the Covid apocalypse: while Michael has been missing for a few years following Halloween Kills, the city of Haddonfield is affected by it, or rather it is haunted by it as homicides, suicides, bloody events multiply, in short, a generalized slaughter which is the legacy left by the murderer. This premise raises two questions: on the one hand it tries to introduce something new in the saga, on the other it “normalises” the figure of Michael. In fact, as everyone knows Michael Myers represents metaphysical Evil, the one with a capital M, the one who is shot, stabbed, impaled and yet always gets back up. He can’t die. Gordon Green’s big gamble is to take this Evil and reduce it to a lowercase letter, that is to understand it as a concentrate of the bad thoughts of an entire community.
The Invitation
There is, at the beginning of The Invitation, a scene that seems to have nothing to do with what follows, but which, in reality, can and should be read as a subtle anticipation, a prediction of what we are about to see. It is an original sequence, in other ways, as it is the only one in the whole film to be contextualized outside the closed space of the villa which will then be the exclusive theater of the events. Logan Marshall-Green and Emayatzy Corinealdi, aka Will and Kira, run over a coyote while driving down a deserted road to their destination. The animal, which ended up under the wheels, is dying but still alive. And Will, with an iron tool from the machine, puts an end to his agony, with an act that is both ferocious and compassionate. Mercy and ferocity are the two pillars that hold up the portal through which director Karyn Kusama introduces the viewer into her film, which from this moment contracts the space and the action in the beautiful home of Will’s ex-wife, Eden ( Tammy Blanchard), in the Hollywood hills, where all the characters in the story converge. The villa is a muffled and closed world, fortified and isolated from the outside, a shell (or belly) where not even the telephone signal can reach. And basically, it represents the physical extroversion of a calm and purified universe that should be that of the mind of Eden and her new companion, David ( Michiel Huisman ), who have reached a kind of nirvana following the teachings of a guru mystical.
Good horror movies
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Starting from Ian Reid’s novel of the same name, the basic idea is strongly Strindbergian : man’s quest to represent human existence, in all its cynicism and in all its brutality. The starting point is the journey of a woman to visit the elderly and sick parents of her boyfriend, whom she no longer loves more than her. A journey that she opens up to various discourses on painting, poetry, literature, physics, photography, theatre, etc. All discourses that Kaufman skilfully mediates towards a dissertation on the ontology of cinema itself, which, within the screenplay, acts several times as a pincer, or rather as an element which, while appearing to be irrelevant, turns out to be essential.
Choose or Die
Kayla (Iola Evans) is a young woman with a traumatic past behind her: after the death of her little brother she had to abandon her studies and start working during the night. Her only friend is Isaac (Asa Butterfield), a game programmer of the same age who is passionate about 1980s culture. One day Kayla comes into possession of an old video game, CURS>R (which in the original version is also the title of the film, playing on the assonance between “cursor” and curse, “curse”), a survival gamefor computer, which apparently could give him access to an unclaimed $ 125,000 prize (a recorded voice, that of Robert Englund, tells her and Isaac that it is still possible to grab the prize). Kayla decides to participate, but what awaits her at every level of the game (which takes place every night at two) is far more terrifying than she could have ever imagined.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
David Blue Garcia is a Texan director who in recent years has explored splatter-oriented horror cinema that is linked to more conventional forms of horror. In his latest effort, the director works with Netflix for yet another reinterpretation of one of the most recognizable horror sagas in the popular imagination. Do not open that door tells the story of a group of young people oriented towards rebuilding the area where the massacre shown by the very first cult film of 1974 had taken place several decades earlier. The film tells the crazy Texan family headed by Leatherface in a partial and less identity-based way. The arid and endless setting that characterized several films in the saga, the intrinsic violence of one of the most conservative states in the United States that gave the first chapters a basis from which to justify the brutal acts to which the unfortunate were subjected, here comes left aside in favor of an environment devoid of cues to more appropriately frame the film. This wouldn’t be a problem if the saga didn’t leave much of its charm behind without its typical Texan setting. In fact, if it weren’t for Texas, the first films would be slasher horror films that are not very distinctive in the mass.
The Nun
The Nun, the fifth film in the popular Conjuring Universe, focuses on one of the main antagonists who appeared in the second chapter of the James Wan saga. Set in the mid-1950s, the film’s plot details an encounter with the aforementioned demonic entity, Valek, in a monastery deep in the woods. To be precise, in the abbey of S. Carta in Romania a young nun takes her own life to escape a terrible fate.
The Vatican sends Father Burke, an enigmatic priest with a troubled past, to investigate. Sister Irene, a novice chosen by the Vatican for this special mission, was immediately joined by him. Father Burke and Sister Irene will be assisted in part by a young French-Canadian, the one who found the nun’s lifeless body. However, the two will soon discover the existence of a terrible demonic entity with the features of a nun, which the nuns of the convent try to keep imprisoned in those walls.
Scariest horror movies
Cadaver
Cadaver’s production design becomes ‘inviting’ once cinematographer Jallo Faber decides to abandon the dark, cold blue filter that paints the sadness of this future world before entering Mathias’ estate. The transition from a fallen civilization to refined waiters dishing out steaks on trays with silver lids is an early warning sign , but it does introduce a great deal of decorative sophistication. The tuxedos of the hosts, the red carpets like rivers flowing through the corridors, the cruel paintings of lambs that foreshadow the imminent experience of each non-paying ‘spectator’.
The Conjuring
Here we go again. Country house for sale: completely secluded and away from noise, bright interiors, spacious bedrooms overlooking the ever-present pond with jetty and skeletal tree as a backdrop. Inside, all the standard furnishings and accessories for a stay of the most classic terror: patio with rocking chair and wind chimes, solid wardrobes with squeaky doors, wooden stairs that creak just when you look at them and, included in the price, off-plan secret subterranean basement filled with junk, ideal receptacle for the house’s intense paranormal activity.
The Conjuring 2: The Enfield Poltergeist
Sequel to the 2013 film ( The Conjuring, which had already spawned the prologue/spin-off Annabelle ), The Conjuring shows occult research couple Ed and Lorraine Warren (real life and still portrayed by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) engaged in a new case, the one linked to an alleged haunted house in the London borough of the title. Also inspired by events reported by the real Warrens, James Wan ‘s film is interesting more than for its artistic qualities – even if it is predictably well-set up and does not lack sequences of elementary effectiveness – for the ingenious strategy with which it claims tocontaminating horror with the structure and mice of the most profitable and fashionable trends in Hollywood today, those of cinecomics and transpositions from video games.
Annabelle
Annabelle is a 2014 horror film directed by John R. Leonetti, starring Annabelle Wallis and Alfre Woodard. It all begins with a young nurse who tells Messrs. Warren ( Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson ) about her gift from her mother: the Annabelle doll. Let’s jump back in time to 1967, when Annabelle’s evil power was first unleashed. In California lives a married couple, Mia ( Annabelle Wallis ) and John ( Ward Horton ) Gordon, who are expecting their first child. Mia loves to collect dolls and, on the occasion of the future birth, John gives her a new one. One night their neighbors, the Higgins ( Brian Howe and Kerry O’Malley ), are murdered in their flat. The attackers also attack the Gordons, who are saved by a miracle. One of the assailants turns out to be Annabelle, the Higgins’ fugitive daughter, who during the terrifying night commits suicide in the girl’s future bedroom, holding Mia’s doll in her hand, while an “A” is imprinted in blood on the wall. Following this gruesome event Mia wants to get rid of the puppet, but a fire breaks out in her house and the woman ends up in the hospital, where she gives birth to Leah.
