This hasn’t been a great movie year — so far at least. From January to now, only a few truly incredible movies, like George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Alex Garland’s Civil War, have been released. A majority of the year’s releases have, in fact, turned out to be either good or mediocre, and there have been more than a few outright terrible ones, too. That’s to say nothing of how uneven 2024’s box office numbers have been, with films like Civil War and The Beekeeper overperforming, while seemingly obvious hits like The Fall Guy and Furiosa have fallen short of financial expectations for them.
Some of the problems with this year’s movie slate can, of course, be attributed to last year’s writers’ and actors’strikes, which will continue to have a prolonged impact on Hollywood’s offerings. Certain issues could also just be the natural result of studios and filmmakers trying desperately to adapt to audiences’ interests, which seem to be evolving on a more seismic scale than they, perhaps, ever have before.
As collectively disappointing as 2024’s feature lineup has been, though, it hasn’t been a lackluster year for the horror genre. From The First Omen to Longlegs, this year has already delivered a number of truly striking, memorable horror movies, and there are plenty more still to come.
Spring saw the horror genre flourish
The year got off to a slow start for horror fans with fun but forgettable releases like Night Swim and Lisa Frankenstein in January and February. Things began to pick up in late March and April, which brought films like Immaculate, Late Night with the Devil, The First Omen, and Abigail. Of those movies, director Arkasha Stevenson’s First Omen is arguably the strongest, but almost all of them managed to shock both critics and casual viewers alike by going much further than anyone expected them to go. Since then, 2024’s horror slate has only gotten better.
That’s thanks, in no small part, to genre-bending experiments like I Saw the TV Glow, Handling the Undead, and In a Violent Nature, all of which boldly presented new twists on stories and tropes that audiences have otherwise seen before. In addition to the aforementioned films, the past few months have also delivered widely known, acclaimed horror efforts like A Quiet Place: Day One, MaXXXine, and now Longlegs, as well as a number of other worthwhile international releases, including You’ll Never Find Me and Stopmotion.
The future looks bright for horror
Just in case this year hasn’t already impressed horror aficionados enough, the coming months promise to bring with them a slew of even more immensely promising additions to the genre. August’s slate includes M. Night Shyamalan‘s Trap and Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice, both of which are shaping up to be entertaining and notably modern thrillers. Then there’s Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, which looks like it’ll bring back the unnerving body horror and suffocating claustrophobia that originally defined the sci-fi horror franchise. On top of Alien: Romulus, we’ve also got Luz director Tilman Singer’s intriguing new Dan Stevens and Hunter Schafer-led supernatural thriller Cuckoo, coming in August.
This fall’s horror slate, meanwhile, includes Heretic, the exciting new A24 thriller that stars Hugh Grant as a madman who traps a pair of young Mormon missionaries and decides to put their faith to the test, and James Watkins’ remake of the 2022 Danish breakout hit Speak No Evil. Parker Finn’s Smile 2 is coming a month later in October, and it already somehow looks even more playfully disturbed than its predecessor.
Lest we forget, The Witch and The Northman director Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu remake is also coming in late December, and it promises to send the year out on quite the terrifying bang. If the finished film turns out to be even half as gripping and effective as its startling teaser trailer, then it has a good chance of being an instant classic.
Diversity + quality = success
Several of this year’s horror features have performed surprisingly well at the box office, and most of them have found their own audiences in the horror community in the days, weeks, and months since their respective debuts. Even more importantly, when you combine the films that have already been released with those that are coming out over the next few months, you get an assortment of horror movies that are wildly different from each other. It has, quite simply, been a long time since we’ve gotten such a diverse slate of both mainstream and obscure horror exercises.
Whether you’ve been in the mood for a blockbuster spectacle, a brutal slasher flick, or a less conventional, disorienting thriller, 2024 has so far had a little bit of everything. If the films coming out in the second half of the year turn out to be either just as or more successful than those that have already been released, then it seems safe to say that 2024 will likely go down as one of the best years for the horror genre of this decade.
