Year-end roundtable: 2022 was scary good for horror movies
Thanks to films like Barbarian, Pearl, and Terrifier 2, as well as stars like Jenna Ortega and Mia Goth, the horror genre flat-out slayed this year
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In a series of special year-end roundtable discussions, The A.V. Club looks back at the stories that made the biggest impact on pop culture in 2022.
Horror, as a genre, has enjoyed a strong run recently, and 2022 continued that trend in a big way. Between legacy franchises like Scream and Halloween adding new chapters, directors like Ti West making their mark, and creative endeavors like Terrifier 2 breaking through to mainstream audiences, there was plenty to talk about across the genre. Below, three A.V. Club staffers talk through their thoughts on the year in horror.
Drew Gillis: Over the past five or so years, as studios have embraced the concept of “elevated horror,” horror has become increasingly successful, both with fans and with critics. What has been interesting to me this year, though, is the stuff like Terrifier 2 or the upcoming Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey that are almost anti-elevated horror; they’re classic B-movies, and Terrifier 2 found pretty astounding word-of-mouth success, even beyond the regular horror fandom.
Hattie Lindert: Vive la B-movie! I’m so glad to see it back, and John Carpenter really said it best in his interview with our own Will Hughes this year: What even is elevated horror? I love a good art-house horror psycho-drama as much as the next girl, but it feels like the genre has really opened up space for some fan-fueled levity this year. I covered Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey a lot and it was genuinely a joy to watch the film grow from a viral Twitter meme with just two set images to its name into one of the fewer and fewer films that actually get in-theater releases. In a year that was so heavy with adaptations of previously used material or well-established characters, Blood And Honey was definitely a unique inroad to jumping on that trend!
Saloni Gajjar: I loved the variety of horror we got this year. I also think that word-of-mouth was so crucial, even for movies like Smile and Barbarian, which wouldn’t have been as big without it. So I love that while we got Scream, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Men, Halloween Ends, etc., these movies also got time to shine, especially stuff like Terrifier 2. The fact that Terrifier 2 did so well in theaters is a sign that horror is genuinely a top genre now, and I love that creators are experimenting so much within it.
DG: Honestly, I found Scream to be one of the most disappointing movies I saw this year. I’m a huge fan of the franchise, but this was the first time I saw one of the movies and it felt immediately dated. Having the central topic for parody be the concept of “elevated horror” could have worked, but it felt like they had only a passing interest in exploring it—it was still very much only the bones of a Scream movie. I rewatched Scream 4 after, and that felt mostly like it could have been released in 2022 as much as in 2011. I’m still very excited to see Scream: Ghostface Takes Manhattan but in a year that had plenty to offer, the warmed-over classic becomes much less appealing. I think the same is true for Halloween Ends.
SG: I think that’s fair and accurate. I’m personally devoted to the Scream franchise, unfortunately, so I still enjoyed most of it, even if the lack of Neve Campbell was infuriating. The next one’s going to be worse in that regard, obviously. But even I thought the “requel-prequel-sequel” ideas in Scream 5—courtesy of Mindy Meeks’ speech—that they tried to bank on didn’t work well. Or, as you said, they had a passing interest in exploring it properly.
Halloween Ends was on another level. It was divisive because I think people either loved what they tried to do, or hated that they didn’t get enough Laurie vs. Michael Myers action in apparently Jamie Lee Curtis’ final turn with these movies. I’m somewhere in the middle.
HL: As far as the requel-prequel-sequel complex goes, I think Pearl is an interesting example, and maybe even an antidote. Although it’s a direct prequel to X, the film really stands on its own aesthetically, and it felt like Ti West really gave Mia Goth the opportunity to expand on the character beyond the confines of a standard prequel. Not to mention that, even though Pearl had A24 star-power behind it, the way it resonated with viewers, especially on social, was huge. I think that has given the movie serious staying power, and like Saloni said, really proves that horror is a top genre that breeds bonafide stars, diverse subcategories, and serious cultural relevance.
DG: Okay yes I was hoping we could talk about Pearl. I was talking to a friend the other night about how I really believe that Mia Goth as Pearl is the most iconic pop culture image of the year, horror or otherwise. That damn red dress has really burrowed itself into everyone’s brain already—whether they’ve seen the movie or not.
And sure, this year we had a Top Gun and an Avatar, but those are pre-existing IP. Seeing a totally original character take off in this way makes me super optimistic that we will get more movies like this, and that studios will be willing to take risks on new ideas… I know Pearl is kind of a sequel, kind of a prequel, but I saw it before X and still enjoyed it on its own merits.
SG: Yup it still stands on its own. And Mia Goth’s performance was absolutely incredible. It’s honestly impressive that we got X and Pearl in the same year, and I’m elated that another sequel is coming.
My favorite element of Pearl is how twisted the homages to American classics were, and I did not expect that. They really did such a good job playing around with the same idea Scream has in looking at how movies impact the audience.
Speaking of X and Scream, can we talk about how Jenna Ortega is emerging as a total star here?
HL: Yes, we finally made it to Jenna Ortega! I’ve absolutely loved watching her blossom in the horror realm, and her performance in X has to be a highlight. She’s also one where, when I read interviews with her, I’m really curious what her slate will start to look like when she becomes more established and has more creative control over her projects. Now that Wednesday is out in the world, I definitely look forward to what’s next.
SG: That’s so true. I was relieved that Melissa Barrera wasn’t the only final girl in Scream, because Jenna Ortega deserves it. Plus, that’s the other thing about this year’s slate of horror movies: we got so many formidable performances.
DG: There have been plenty of scream queens over the years, but I can’t recall a time when it felt like one was positioned for such a mainstream blowup as Jenna Ortega. More than a typical scream queen, it almost reminds me of Emma Stone around 2010 when she was making Easy A and Zombieland—good movies that were hardly prestige but set her on a path to win an Oscar within a few years. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jenna Ortega spring from Wednesday and Scream and X into more awards-y movies very soon.
Mia Goth is another person who has been around for a minute but this year feels like her real breakthrough. She always seemed to play the sidekick—roles like Pearl don’t come around often (plus the dual role in X) and she proved she could really sink her teeth into something.
SG: Correct! I also feel like so many of these movies should be frontrunners for various awards in general. The Academy keeps snubbing horror (shoutout to Toni Collette who deserved a win for Hereditary) but this year has some amazing choices. So hopefully you’re right about Jenna and Mia breaking out in a big way.
HL: I would love to see Mia Goth receive a Best Actress nomination—Pearl’s credits scene alone could warrant that.
Looking towards next year, what catches your respective eyes most in upcoming horror? On the campy side, I can’t wait for M3GAN’s January 6 release— Allison Williams was pitch-perfect in Get Out and I’m excited to see her back in the horror space (especially opposite an evil doll with a perfect blowout). There’s no official release date, but I’m also keeping an eye out for Jane Schoenbrun’s latest I Saw The TV Glow, which wrapped principal photography in August 2022. Her debut We’re All Going To The World’s Fair was one of the most unique and memorable horror movies of 2021, and I think Schoenbrun’s voice stands to become even more significant to the genre next year.
SG: I fear M3GAN and Cocaine Bear will become my entire personality once they release, although I know the latter is not strictly horror at all.
But in general, I’m now waiting with bated breath to see what else Mia Goth and Ti West get up to in MaXXXine. Plus, we get Nic Cage as Dracula, and the Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey movie. I know we sort of touched on this, but that last one has the potential to be another Terrifier 2.
I also can’t forget the new Scream. Like I said, I’m a franchise devotee, so I will be seated on day 1 to watch Ghostface take on NYC’s subway system.
HL: Ultimately, as long as more weird movies get made and get to theaters in 2023, I’m happy. We can definitely hit Scream together.
SG: That’s so true. I do think we should brace ourselves for more bizarre horror movies. Not that they didn’t exist or thrive before, but the last few years have kind of put them on a mainstream map again. You know I’m curious to see Winnie the Pooh and Bambi slasher movies just as much as I’m excited for Scream 6 or Knock At The Cabin or whatever Jordan Peele and Ari Aster get up to next.
DG: I think the gulf between the so-called elevated horror and the bizarre, B-movie horror right now is super interesting. It feels like more and more are falling into one category or another, and there’s less room for something like a Scream or a Halloween. I guess even the original Scream would have been considered elevated when it first came out, and then it kind of reset everything to become the norm. But it doesn’t feel like we’re getting things like Paranormal Activity anymore, which I think reflects a broader trend in film—we have our Marvels and our Avatars and we have indie films that get made for a couple million dollars, but the middle-tier movie is largely gone. The horror genre is kind of just a microcosm of that right now.
Not that Hereditary is a Marvel movie by any means, but there’s the stuff that studios are willing to pump money into and there’s the stuff like Terrifier 2 that exists thanks to a Kickstarter.
SG: That makes me think of how production companies like Blumhouse and A24 made horror their niche, even though they do other stuff too, and I’m so thankful for that.
But yes, I still don’t think that’s led to a Terrifier 2. I don’t think anyone saw the success of that coming, which points to how much viral conversations and word-of-mouth also matter I guess.
HL: Blumhouse feels like such an interesting divining rod for the industry as a whole right now as well. Jason Blum has really tapped into a way to make mid-budget horror commercially profitable without, to put it bluntly, fucking over creators and performers in the process. In a guest essay for The New York Times earlier this year, Blum cited Blumhouse’s success as a result of the company’s decision to “give artists a lot of creative freedom and a little money upfront but a big stake in the movie’s or TV show’s commercial success.” If that can work in horror, who’s to say it can’t work elsewhere—Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are certainly trying!
I guess the beauty of another Terrifier 2 really is that, like the original, it could come from anywhere, as long as the virality and fan excitement is there.
[This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
41 Comments
Those horror movies aren’t getting Oscar nominations. X didn’t make the shortlist for makeup & hairstyling, even though it deserved to.I didn’t think anyone liked Halloween Ends. I’d heard nothing but bad things about it (though I still plan on watching it when it comes to Redbox since so many horror podcasts I listen to have covered it).I can’t share any enthusiasm for Blood & Honey. Merely ironically using an IP children love for horror does not make for a good movie. The Mean One was just released to lousy reviews (I think the Banana Splits movie bombed as well), and I can attest that everything in Willy’s Wonderland other than Nic Cage playing pinball and refusing to talk was awful.I’m surprised there was no mention of Nope above. It was a decent riff on Jaws, even if it wasn’t as entertaining as Get Out.
I unironically like Halloween Ends. by no means a great movie, but it’s bold as fuck for a Halloween flick and I love that. it’s got one of the best kills of the year tooalso surprised about the lack of Nope discussion, as well as some of my favourites of this year that went unmentioned (Deadstream, Prey and Incantation to name a few)
Really? But they do the whole Michael’s successor story in an earlier film.
which one is that? only one coming to mind is 4, which sets up Jamie to be the new Michael only for 5 to undo the reveal in the laziest way possible (and kickstart the worst run of movies in the franchise I might add)look, Ends is dumb as hell and very silly for sure. but it’s well-directed, well-acted and makes some choices you’d never expect from the franchise, that alone puts it above a solid 4-5 Halloween films in existence imo
So, I skipped both Halloween and Halloween Kills and went straight into Halloween Ends completely new. I was into it! But I don’t fault any of the criticisms from long-time fans. Even for me it felt “off” from what should have been expected.
for what it’s worth, 2018 is a genuinely great and entertaining film (Kills is uhh not either of those things). I think your approach is probably the best way though as Ends feels more like a standalone thing than the end of a trilogy
Didn’t Judas betray The Lord for blood honey?
I think Samson is the one whose story involves honey & blood.
I love Halloween Ends. If you want it to adhere to the beats or tone of a typical Halloween film, or even a normal slasher, it’s gonna be a letdown. But I don’t know. I love how strange and final it is.
No mention of the new Hellraiser? It was actually pretty damn good- definitely better than some of the films listed in this article.
Also, Nope should be on this list. Despite audiences not digging a wierd creature feature, again, it was better than a lot of the films on this list.
I really enjoyed the new Hellraiser, easily one of, if not the best in the series.
The new one is a little too… “safe” isn’t the wrong word… to be the best in the series, but it’s easily third best. That’s not saying much, considering what follows Hell on Earth, but the new one isn’t far behind the first two either. It’s a pretty good horror flick
Fair enough, and I agree with it being a little to “Safe” but it was pretty darn good. And much like Prey much better than I had expected it would be.
The new Hellraiser was great, and it should be mentioned here, if only for the impressive feat of resurrecting a franchise where most entries are nigh-on unwatchable.Nope, on the other hand, was a big mess. Cool looking movie, and I love how they did all the night stuff, but not really rewarding for me. I know people loved it, but between Us, whose big reveal was so obvious I sat through the whole movie expecting it to be a red herring (because… c’mon, you’re not really going to act like that’s a surprise, are you???) and Nope, which had a lot more ideas than it did interest in developing them, I feel like Peele is at a point where he needs someone telling him to put a little more time in on the scripts.
yes and yes. Both quite excellent films
“Clockwork from Bottom left”“[This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.]”Oh AV Club, never change (or proofread).
Barbarian is the best horror movie since The VVitch.
It was fun while I was watching it (the audience was having a blast) but it seemed that the writers thought that simply setting it in Detroit and having a throwaway reference to white flight would do all the heavy lifting vis-à-vis race and class. That combined with the Justin Long storyline made it feel like a movie that never really rose above the level of trying to say something. I’m glad I went in completely blind, though.
Barbarian was a steaming pile of shit. I honestly have no idea how anyone could find anything remotely valuable in that film, let alone how it seems to be on so many “best of” lists.
Sounds like you have bad taste in movies. Bet you like boring shit like Marvel movies and are excited to see the Mario movie.
Ya know, I’m actually excited to see Mario now. Wasn’t stoked about Pratt’s casting (still iffy on it) but after seeing the trailers, it looks like a fun ode to Mario, so I might actually see it. Not a fan of Marvel movies myself. Personally I think the best horror film since The VVitch is probably either It Follows or The Void, though I also really liked Midsommar and The Lighthouse (if you consider it a horror film).
I wouldn’t go as far as “steaming pile of shit”, but Barbarian definitely doesn’t stick its landing. It’s a great, tense first hour followed by 30 minutes of having no goddamn clue what to do with everything it sets up.
idk the scene at the end where she rips the guys arm off and beats him to death with it was the funniest thing i’ve seen all year
The first bit of the film when they’re in the house with the two main actors (the whole premise of which the film is sold on) is honestly great. Pretty tense and interesting and you wanna see where it’s gonna go, and then…it just cuts. Grinds momentum to a halt to focus on a different storyline, which sure, eventually interweaves with the other storyline, but retreads much of the ground, while also offering flimsy commentary on the MeToo movement. Then, the movie has the audacity to do it again with a jump into another storyline that you think might payoff in some meaningful way, but really is just worthless backstory that we don’t need, and cheapens the overall effect of the mystery of it all.When all the storylines converge, we basically just end up back where we started, and it’s a totally jumbled mess that turns silly rather than horrifying. There’s moments towards the end where I just laughed-out-loud at how preposterous and dumb it was, wondering how we got here from the great opening. I have no idea why we needed any of the social commentary (maybe in better hands it would’ve actually mattered, like the stuff about gentrification and class dynamics) and most of the “scares” were kinda rote stuff, though effective at the beginning, they lost their impact towards the end. The tone is just all over the place, too, in a way that you can almost feel the creators smirking like, “heheh, that’s the point” but in reality it’s just not effective and kinda disorienting.It felt like a low-rung 6-issue Image comic in movie form: just a bunch of half-baked ideas wrapped in a convoluted package to appear smarter than it actually is, when in reality it would’ve succeeded more if it had said less, and had more focus. But, hey: this is all my two cents.
I’m in total agreement with you about pretty much all of that. It’s part of what confuses me about people that love it. I feel like they must have watched a movie that ends very differently from the one I saw.
I liked Barbarian well enough, it was just pretty standard.They updated Justin Long’s form of douchebaggery, and the technology that booked the haunted house, and they teased not having horror movie characters making poor decisions with a hilarious “Nope”, but then it quickly turned into a standard “trapped by mutant” movie I’ve seen 100 times, with me yelling “Why???” at the screen while characters repeatedly made standard horror movie trope stupid decisions, including “unknowingly trying to rescue the ringleader”.Like I said, I liked it, and I was avoiding spoilers before I saw it, so I haven’t read much about it yet, but I just didn’t see anything really new in it.
2022 is absolutely going on my list for all-timer years in horror. Terrifier 2 in particular captured my imagination in a way no burgeoning slasher franchise has in a very long time, and I couldn’t be happier that it was such a runaway success. I still can’t wrap my head around just how well it did, either. An intensely graphic sequel to a movie almost nobody saw outside of genre nerd circles, with a runtime that is entirely incompatible with slashers, telling a story that ostensibly won’t make sense until the next movie, and functions as a love letter to an era that the viral crowds are largely unfamiliar with, all because of an old marketing gimmick that sprung up entirely by happenstance (I believe Leone when he says he had nothing to do with that). Fucking amazing.And man… Hellraiser. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but I had so much fun watching it, and I very much hope that Jamie Clayton gets another turn as Pinhead, because she did an excellent job.
Do I have to watch the first Terrifier to appreciate the sequel? It looks bad and I remember it getting bad reviews…
I love the first one, but it does feel worse in light of the sequel being so much better. I’d say give it a shot, it explains some of the things that come up in 2 (sort of) and will no doubt come up again in 3, and it has a few great scenes worth seeing. However, you can absolutely skip it if you want. There’s also All Hallows’ Eve which introduces the character of Art, but that’s definitely an “only for completionists” movie and entirely inessential.
Terrifier is essentially “Edgelord: The Movie”. It features no discernible character development, a plot that can be said to exist only inasmuch as it has moments that are designed to piss someone off strung together in a vaugely chronological fashion, and heaping amounts of graphic gore and nudity.
“But it doesn’t feel like we’re getting things like Paranormal Activity anymore, which I think reflects a broader trend in film—we have our Marvels and our Avatars and we have indie films that get made for a couple million dollars, but the middle-tier movie is largely gone.”I get the point that’s being made, but you guys would seem like you know what you’re talking about a lot more if you didn’t pick the absolute worst examples to shore up your idea. Paranormal Activity had a budget of like 15K. We haven’t had true middle-tier horror movies in like a decade or more. Even something like The Invisible Man had a budget of only 7M, whereas in the 90s or early 2000s it would have probably been a 30-40M movie akin to Final Destination.
“Jason Blum has really tapped into a way to make mid-budget horror commercially profitable”Blumhouse is successful because they’re doing what studios used to do before corporate mergers turned them into short-sighted morons that can’t see past the end of the following quarter: they make ten cheap movies on the theory that at least one of them will be a decent- not massive, but decent- hit.You make ten 1 million dollar movies, and one of them pulls in even mediocre money, you’ll have a hit. In the horror space, that might as well be printing money, since horror fans will go see pretty much anything that looks remotely interesting. And if you start pulling in the general public too, it’s pretty likely you end up with a monster hit like Get Out or the latest Scream.
I found myself having a version of this discussion in some thread about Star Wars movies – I was pointing out that the newer Star Wars movies made billions of dollars, but Disney probably sunk a billion dollars into them – those are absurdly high stakes, and that might be why there aren’t any new Star Wars movies in production. It’s the same with superhero movies – sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into each production is working for now, but once a couple of movies underperform the whole thing will be untenable. But people take the blockbuster economy for granted.
Exactly. Just look at the new Avatar. Yeah, it’s going to make an absolutely mind-boggling amount of money, but an awful lot of money went into it too.I really do chalk it up to corporate thinking- they’re always chasing home run profit statements and massive growth reports to make the idiot shareholders happy (a fool’s errand anyway). They can settle for big losses because those can be tax writeoffs. Somehow the worst option became just making “small” but consistent profits overall. I keep thinking this house of cards can’t keep going on (it’s hardly isolated to the entertainment industry, after all), but somehow we keep propping it back up.
See, Avatar is in the same bizarro category as the Star Wars prequels (or Megalopolis) – a rich weirdo financing a personal vision, at a large personal expense. I don’t want to fall into the trap of viewing personal vision as separate from economics, but there are differences between Disney commissioning sequels/remakes of popular IPs to meet market demand and a filmmaker using a massive budget to satisfy their passion for congressional politics or glowing blue cats. Star Wars is just a particularly naked recent example, where they churned out a Star Wars movie every year until they started to underperform at the box office, and then pivoted to franchise to streaming.
I really loved Pearl. Easily my fav horror of the past few years. I think Mia’s performance will grow to be one of the great ones in the genre. Made me appreciate X more after only thinking it was ok. I really didn’t think anything else was better than average. Still stuck on comparing everything to 70s and 80s stuff though, I know it’s an unfair bias.
Please stop with the Bodies, Bodies, Bodies being a horror movie. It’s not and why you insist on continuing to classify it as one is seriously annoying. It’s a dark comedy. Just because some deaths happen in it it doesn’t automatically qualify as a horror movie. It’s an embarrassment to horror movies to classify it as such. But I’m not surprised with the quality of writing that we get here.
Saloni you have to be one of the most inept writers on this blog. Because Terrifier 2 did well you think “That’s proof that horror is genuinely a top genre now.” In what universe do you think that horror wasn’t a top genre? Good to great horror films consistently perform well at the box office. And hint, Terrier 2 did well for how much it cost, but there are great horror films each year that blow that dumbass movie out of the water from a box office standpoint. It’s always nice reading articles from writers who clearly have no idea about the genre they are writing about.
Adult Swim Yule Log
Way too much misguided gushing praise for actresses like Aubrey Plaza , Mia Goth, Florence Pugh and Ana de Armas. There are actresses like Kate Winslet, Kate Beckinsale, Charlize Theron, and Bryce Dallas Howard who’s levels they haven’t begun to touch yet, and may not.