Halfway to Halloween: The 13 best horror films of the year (so far)
From Arcadian to Abigail, we're taking a look at the best horror cinema of 2024
Film Features halloween
We’ve officially reached the magical point in the year where Halloween is finally just six months away. We’re now heading downhill towards Spooky Season, and since “Halfway to Halloween” has become an unofficial holiday among the horror faithful, it seems like a perfect time to take stock of how the genre has treated us so far this year.
In just the first four months of 2024, we’ve seen more than a dozen fantastic horror releases on both big and small screens, from stories of stop-motion (or Stopmotion, if you will) animation gone horribly wrong to Nicolas Cage battling apocalypse monsters. Each film offers something different, but together they make one thing very clear: It’s going to be another great year for horror.
So, in honor of Halfway to Halloween, here are our picks for the best horror movies to get a wide release so far this year.
23 Comments
Thanks for the list! I love horror movies and I’ve only seen “Late night with the devil” from this list. I will check a couple of these out.Late Night with the Devil was the best horror movie I’ve seen in a couple years.
I’ve only seen Immaculate and Late Night with the Devil so far out of these, and while I enjoyed them overall I was still a bit disappointed. Especially regarding Late Night with the Devil, I thought a lot more would be done with that interesting premise.
Yeah, I thought Late Night was fine, a B, but so many websites including this one gave it such glowing reviews I was a little underwhelmed.
I liked Late Night a lot, but thought Immaculate was pretty by the numbers.
Same with LNwtD (haven’t seen Immaculate yet). Mainly the obviously-not-found-footage stuff, and I would’ve toned down their Amazing Randi stand-in’s archness by about 30%. He kept pulling me out of the tv footage conceit. Still, lots to recommend it. That creepy girl’s incessant eye contact stayed with me for days.
Sort of felt like something where they wrote the ending first and then worked backwards from there. I mostly liked it, but felt like there could’ve been a bit more to it. Maybe if it leaned a bit more on the quasi-documentary idea, which often came off like something added later to fill in holes.
If Lisa Frankenstein has no fans,I’m dead. I LOVED this movie!!!!
You ARE dead, but it looks great on you. The bride and I loved it. It felt very akin to the black humor of Heathers, which probably doesn’t play as well today as it did then. Which is fucking sad. Fecklessness is a lost joy in a lot of today’s cinema.
Just saw Abigail last night and found the plot pretty sloppy. Usually I really like the Radio Silence guys’ movies. Late Night with the Devil was good; Immaculate was not.
It wasn’t the plotting in Abigail, it was the characters. They were all dumb as rocks.
Giving the twist away in the trailer was dumb as rocks as well.
Agreed, but I don’t know how you market this movie without it. If you try and hold back the twist, you make the movie seem like its a totally non-supernatural crime thriller, which attracts a largely different audience than the horror “comedy” crowd they were aiming for with this script. (Comedy in quotes because I heard literally not a single laugh during the screening I was at- granted, it was a weekday matinee, so far from a full crowd… but not even a chuckle.)
That’s what made it fun, though. The movie makes it pretty clear that most of the kidnappers are complete idiots. SPOILER-esque, they weren’t selected for their abilities. My only issue is the ending. I don’t think the relationship between Abigail and that one character (making it vague) was strong enough to have them team up. The relationship started off strong, but that one character spent most of the movie also trying to kill her or lock her up.
YMMV, I suppose, but I get no satisfaction out of spending two hours with stupid people (give or take Coen Bros. movies).
If you’re going to make your characters dumb intentionally, they have to be phenomenally dumb, and it has to be across the board (again, see the Coen Brothers— Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou). Abigail wanted to play it both ways (Melissa Barrera’s whole “read the room” scene, for example), giving them all a sliding scale of intelligence as the scene warranted. It’s lazy.Your beef about the team-up at the end is exactly the same thing. The relationship isn’t developed (IIRC, they barely talk after the first 30 minutes or so of the film), but that’s what the plot needs, so they do it anyway.
I think it would have been more fun if they’d gotten to where we knew they were going a lot faster. Trying to build character is fine, but those guys had no character, though I was glad they gave Dan Stevens something to do before it was over.
Agreed. That was apparently a marketing issue, though. The marketing was not supposed to reveal the main twist. There are some other twists along the way, like why they are actually at the mansion. But it really positions itself as an Agatha Christie-esque horror story about strangers in a remote location (like And Then There Were None, which gets a funny easter egg) before unveiling Abigail is a vampire.
Dan Stevens chews some mean scenery, btw.
Yeah I dug it overall since the last 30-minutes were balls to the wall, and had the kind of twisty-turny stuff I was expecting a little earlier. “Twists” might be too strong….”unexpected story turns” is a little closer, but still, it was juuust enough. I don’t see myself rewatching this one like I do “Ready or Not” or even “You’re Next” though.
The only thing Stopmotion had going for it was the actual stopmotion. The rest of the movie was so bland and undercooked. All You Need is Death had potential but was so confusing in the second half to the point that I don’t even think the filmmakers knew what they wanted out of it. I really enjoyed Late Night with the Devil.
Abigail and Destroy All Neighbors were fun. I’m sure Alien: Romulus is going to make this list by the end of the year.The previews for I Saw the TV Glow are confusing. It doesn’t look like horror but rather some coming-of-age fantasy film. I’m guessing it’s just hard to market.
yeah this is the first I’ve seen to suggest TV Glow is a horror. I mean, I sort of get that with certain scenes in the trailer, but that didn’t seem to be the primary focus.Looking forward to it either way.
I seriously don’t get the overhyped love for First Omen. It certainly had a LOT of potential and some great gags. SPOILERS(the birth scene and Jacob’s Ladder bonkersness was incredible, but the schlocky cg for the call back to it’s all for you and the avengers style end scene were pretty goddamn funny)
Hoping Maxxxine will be the top of this end of year list. Man am I excited to see that. I’ve seen five of these and haven’t heard of the rest. Definitely going to look a few of them up. I think this is the thing that bugs me about the ‘decline of theaters’ the most—it’s hard to even find trailers for new horror movies (that aren’t one of those weird fake trailers that seem to plague youtube) and even if you do find a new movie that looks interesting, figuring out how and where to watch it is even harder.
I just watched Infestation and for a spider movie it really delivers. Can’t have cost too much to make, but still looked impressive enough with clean effects. Spiders don’t usually bother me, but there are a LOT of spiders in this movie.