Forever the redheaded stepchild of Hollywood, the horror genre has long been underestimated and overlooked come awards season. But 2023 was the year that all changed. Horror absolutely killed it at the box office, with fright flicks like M3GAN, Scream VI, and Cocaine Bear slashing their way to profitability. And critics finally started taking notice, lauding innovative films like Skinamarink and The Zone of Interest as some of the year’s most impactful cinematic achievements – genre notwithstanding.
So how did horror shake off the chains and break free from the dungeon it’s been trapped in since the dawn of cinema? For starters, emerging voices like Kyle Edward Ball brought fresh perspective and vitality to tired formulas. Established masters like Ari Aster and Eli Roth also returned with bold new visions. And diverse young filmmakers reinvigorated classic franchises for the TikTok generation. But maybe we all just needed a bit of escapism and catharsis from the real-world horrors of late.
Whatever the reason, there’s no denying 2023 was the moment horror stepped out of the shadows and into the limelight. And we horror nerds couldn’t be more thrilled. To celebrate the genre’s big year, we’ve compiled this list of the 10 best horror movies that made us shriek in theaters over the last 12 months. From familiar faces to dazzling newcomers, these were the films that had us sleeping with one eye open. Turn on all the lights, bolt the doors, and let’s revisit 2023’s most nightmare-inducing movies.
10. M3GAN
Killer doll movies have always had a special place in horror fans’ hearts, from Child’s Play to Annabelle. But no murderous plaything captured our imagination quite like M3GAN in 2023. This A.I. companion doll went viral for her creepy yet catchy dance moves, even before the film hit theaters in January. But thanks to slick direction from Gerard Johnstone and a memorable voice performance from Amie Donald, M3GAN was more than just an internet meme. She was a fully-formed horror icon for the digital age.
As young orphan Cady’s new robot protector and BFF, M3GAN charms both her and audiences at first. But when the doll’s attachment goes from cute to completely psychotic, this Toy Story takes a demented turn down murder lane. M3GAN’s increasingly unhinged behavior provides laughs and scares in equal measure. And her freakish, contorted movements when chasing victims are genuinely unsettling thanks to a blended combo of animatronics and CG.
Ultimately, M3GAN works because she represents both our hope and caution when it comes to A.I. We want to create the perfect nurturing companion that will always care for our kids. Yet there’s an underlying fear that we may have unintentionally designed the world’s most effective serial killer instead. It’s a theme that clearly resonated, making M3GAN’s inevitable path to further sequels and spinoffs as predictable as this toy’s twisted tricks.
9. Thanksgiving
After getting his start with gore-fests like Hostel and The Green Inferno, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving felt like the slasher he was born make. A tribute to holiday horror classics like Halloween and My Bloody Valentine, Thanksgiving delivered a cornucopia of carnage with Roth’s signature sadistic wit.
The concept is familiar: a costumed maniac starts carving up the unlikeable citizens of a sleepy Massachusetts town each November as revenge for the Pilgrim’s slaughter of his people. What sets Thanksgiving apart is both the visually stunning gore and our rooting interest in the killer. Because let’s face it, even though the Native American butcher carves these idiots like turkeys, it’s hard not feel they have it coming.
Roth clearly channeled his inner John Carpenter, filling the film with stunning tracking shots and expertly-timed jump scares. The kills also display Roth’s torture porn pedigree, like a cringeworthy trampoline murder involving a certain part of the female anatomy. Ouch! Fans of 80s horror will also delight in spotting legacy genre actors like Eli’s dad Howard Popper in fun cameos.
While critics carped that the film lacks sympathetic characters, that misses the point. Thanksgiving is intended as the ultimate crowd-pleasing schlockfest, delivered with infectious enthusiasm from a filmmaker reveling in a return to his gory roots. Here’s hoping Roth makes this wickedly entertaining yarn as perennial a franchise as the holiday it so gleefully skewers.
8. Scream VI
Just when we thought Sidney Prescott had seen the last of Ghostface, the iconic slasher franchise roared back to life once again with Scream VI. Moving the action to New York City for the first time, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett build upon their fresh revamp in 2022’s Scream with another winning meta-horror sequel.
While franchise star Neve Campbell’s absence stings, Hayden Panettiere’s return as Kirby Reed helps fill that final girl void. The creators also craft a twisted new central mystery, with influencers being targeted by a killer in a creepy Chucky mask. Per tradition, Scream VI dissects tired tropes even as it gleefully deploys them, calling out the gentrification of NYC neighborhoods in between chases through graffitied subways.
The social media-obsessed characters allow for clever commentary on internet fame. But the directors smartly balance the new blood with integral legacy players like Courteney Cox as dogged reporter Gale Weathers. And the Ghostface reveals and motives are among the best since the original film, anchored by an unsettling performance from Henry Czerny’s horror auteur character.
Scream has endured for 25+ years by both winking at slasher conventions and finding novel ways to stab audiences where they least expect it. Part 6 shows this franchise still has surprises up its bloody sleeve, while making a strong case that Ghostface and company feel just as at home haunting the Big Apple as Woodsboro.
7. Cocaine Bear
On paper, the idea of basing a horror movie around the true story of a bear high on cocaine sounds like the kind of high concept destined for the discard pile. Yet director Elizabeth Banks took that preposterous premise and turned Cocaine Bear into an audaciously entertaining gore fest in 2023.
With a gleeful sense of humor, Banks uses the bizarre tale of a 175-pound black bear ingesting a duffle bag full of blow in the Georgia mountains as the launching pad for an adrenalized creature feature. Ray Liotta hams it up in one of his final roles as the drug smuggler whose stash turns Yogi into Scarface. And Margo Martindale classes up the proceedings as a pine-scented drug lord hot on his trail.
But once that coked-up bear starts racking up a body count, the movie shifts into deliriously fun grindhouse gear. Taking inspiration from shark attack films and holiday slashers, Banks serves up inventive maulings courtesy of her animatronic ursine assassin. There’s also great character work from the film’s hapless band of hikers and cops, who all get memorably grisly sendoffs. And it builds to an uproarious showdown between Keri Russell’s park ranger and that bear that gives new meaning to the term tree hugger.
Somehow, Banks strikes the ideal balance between tension and laughs, never allowing the film’s inherent silliness undermine the stakes. Thanks to its director’s horror instincts, Cocaine Bear manages to not only meet its outrageous promise but blow away all expectations by sniffing out strange new ways to thrill.
6. When Evil Lurks
Pandemic thrillers like Contagion have chilled audiences by exploiting our fears of rapidly spreading disease. But leave it to horror maestro Demián Rugna to put a diabolical spin on that concept with the ingenious When Evil Lurks. This Argentine production grafts demonic possession onto virus outbreak tropes to create an insidiously frightening blend.
Things kick off when two brothers accidentally release an ancient evil presence that can body-hop between human hosts. What follows is a breakneck game of supernatural hot potato, as that demonic spirit passes from person to person like a mutated strain of influenza. Friends, family, even livestock become vectors of transmission as this invisible pathogen runs rampant.
Rugna masterfully elevates the tension with not knowing who might suddenly succumb to malevolent forces. Is that harmless old lady now a vessel of Satan? What about the family pet? By weaponizing anyone and anything, When Evil Lurks keeps audiences guessing where the next attack will emerge from.
And once the mayhem kicks in, Rugna doesn’t flinch from moments of shocking gore either – including distressing violence against both children and animals that ratchet up the horror. Propelled by an ominous score straight from a pandemic thriller, When Evil Lurks makes us fear both human contact and solitude in equal measure during this brilliant malignant spin on infection films.
5. Talk to Me
After achieving internet fame for their gonzo YouTube stunts, Aussie daredevils Danny and Michael Philippou took Tinseltown by storm with their harrowing directorial debut Talk to Me. Expanding on themes explored in their viral shorts, this supernatural shocker announced the bootstrap filmmaking duo as major new voices in horror.
Talk to Me centers on a dried, skeletal hand dug out of a grave that allows communication with spirits. When a group of Gen Z friends start exploiting the hand for social media clout, they unwittingly open a doorway to malevolent forces beyond their comprehension.
It’s a clever concept that the brothers use to explore issues of grief, trauma, and the addictive nature of online influence. But they also craft an increasingly terrifying slow-burn tale, where the rules of reality grow more asynchronous with each ghostly encounter.
While the Philippous stuff the film with distinctive shock moments, it’s the mood and mythos around that eerie hand that lingers. Is it actually allowing conversations across the mortal veil or just driving people insane? Australian newcomer Sophie Wilde delivers an empathetic turn as the lonely outcast who ignites this nightmare by trying to connect with her late mother. And the directors constantly pull the rug out from under the audience right up until the unnerving finale.
With its emotional resonance and otherworldly atmosphere, Talk to Me suggests a bright future for the filmmaking duo. One hopes the Philippous have many more morbid stories to share direct from the other side.
4. Beau Is Afraid
After terrorizing audiences with hereditary cults (Midsommar) and demonic possession (Hereditary), indie auteur Ari Aster took an artful pivot into surreal comedy with Beau Is Afraid. More a Kafkaesque head trip than straightforward horror, this epic odyssey finds Joaquin Phoenix playing the titular anxious hypochondriac unable to reach his domineering mother.
Over an impossibly strange 24 hours, Beau encounters cryptic omens, Doppelgängers, and a succession of eccentric characters that seem to merge with his own fractured psyche. Oscar-winner Phoenix carries the film with a virtuoso physical performance, contorting his face and body into Grotesque expressions of discomfort in his surroundings.
Aster employs dream logic and intricate symbolism, drawing viewers into Beau’s unraveling point of view. Buildings and businesses seem to vanish and reappear. Time becomes elastic. And an impending sense of dread haunts Beau’s every failure to accomplish his goal, which takes on near mythic importance.
Some have criticized the film’s punishing three hour run time and lack of scares. But fans of daring arthouse fare will be richly rewarded by leaning into Beau’s subjective headspace for this hypnotic descent into one man’s personal hell… where the true villain is his own distorted self-perception.
3. No One Will Save You
In an era where bloated runtimes have become normalized, No One Will Save You director Brian Duffield displays the lost art of concise storytelling with his sci-fi survival thriller. Clocking in at a lean 95 minutes, this alien invasion tale drops viewers into the perspective of Kaitlyn Dever’s isolated outcast as she confronts extraterrestrial attackers infiltrating her rural town.
Dever owns the physically demanding lead role, outrunning Grays and their human drones through remote farmland and decrepit barns straight from Nighthawks. But what really makes the film pop is Duffield’s bold (and polarizing) choice to craft his invasion story without a lick of spoken dialogue.
Relying solely on visuals, clever sound design, and his lead’s emotive reactions, Duffield’s deliberately paced game of cat-and-mouse may frustrate some. But this Kubrick-esque approach to showing over telling immerses us fully into Dever’s peril, creating white knuckle set-pieces through music and action choreography alone. A clicking alien tongue or revving engine cuts through silence and immediately triggers our nerves.
No One Will Save You represents independent genre filmmaking at its most daring and minimalist. Throwing out the dialogue handbook, Duffield forces us to read his characters through unspoken cues and glances. And Dever rises to the narrative challenge with a magnetic, physical performance that pulls us in even when we crave exposition. Lean, mean, and profoundly cinematic, here is an alien thriller as silent and mysterious as the cosmos themselves.
2. The Zone of Interest
Over 75 years removed from the Holocaust, most might assume there are no more fresh angles left to explore regarding humanity’s darkest chapter. Yet visionary filmmaker Jonathan Glazer proves that axiom devastatingly wrong with The Zone of Interest – an astonishing dramatization of Nazi atrocities without ever depicting them directly onscreen.
Set just on the other side of the fence from a concentration camp, Glazer’s film takes place in the bourgeois German neighborhood which houses SS officers and their families. Despite the ongoing screams and plumes of smoke wafting overhead, this community carries on obliviously with cocktail parties, affairs, and raising their Aryan children. Their concern extends only as far as complaining about the constant wails disrupting their sleep.
We view the Final Solution happening just over the wall through the perspective of camp commander Von Wangenheim, portrayed with blood-curdling banality by Tom Mercier in a star-making turn. Other than the uniform and swastika armband, he resembles any bureaucrat clocking in for work and returning home to his wife each evening. By limiting our viewpoint to Von Wangenheim’s detached observations, Glazer pointedly avoids depicting gratuitous violence while still conveying the profound horror and inhumanity transpiring next door.
The director rains down ash like snowflakes and intersperses smoke over this suburban idyll, serving as ominous reminders of the crematoriums’ endless output. Over time, The Zone of Interest compresses audience empathy into emotional claustrophobia, as we share in Von Wangenheim’s growing paranoia of knowing genocide continues behind that wall daily while others blissfully ignore it.
Without a single scene of explicit victimization, Glazer has crafted the most painful and disquieting film about the Holocaust since Schindler’s List. The Zone Of Interest serves as an eerie testament to both human complicity in the face of evil and the power of showing vs. telling… even when what’s implied is almost too terrible to bear.
1. Skinamarink
Of all the emerging voices in horror this past year, perhaps none left a more disorienting – or divisive – first impression than Kyle Edward Ball. His microbudget debut Skinamarink became both a critical darling and object of audience bewilderment upon release. Yet it’s hard to deny this surreal, anxiety-inducing experiment in DIY filmmaking heralds an important new talent, even if you leave the theater checking your own reality.
Ostensibly a haunted house tale, Skinamarink strands 4-year-old Kevin (Lucas Paul) alone in his family home, abandoned by his father, older sister, and seemingly his mother as well. At first, Kevin delights in unattended freedom, gorging on ice cream and dancing to music videos until odd events create a creeping sense of abandonment. Strange voices whisper offscreen. Doors vanish, trapping Kevin inside. And eerie images offer clues about this home’s dark history.
Ball submerges the audience into Kevin’s distorted juvenile perspective, blurring the line between surreal fantasy and paranormal threat. Are those ominous Lynchian set pieces real or just a fearful child’s imagination? Ball deliberately obscures, steepingSkinamarink in ambiguity right through its unnerving finale.
While some viewers demanded unambiguous explanations, the film’s nightmarish ambiguity around what transpired proves fundamental to its appeal. It captures a childlike awareness where magical thinking intermingles seamlessly with reality. And by rejecting hand holding, it allows audiences to project their own fears onto Ball’s meticulously constructed environment.
Ultimately, Skinamarink exemplifies how stylistic daring on no budget can birth something unprecedented and divisive. As the rare critics’ darling equally reviled by many, it’s sure to be debated for years. But Ball’s arrival opens exciting new territory if Hollywood trusts youthful visionaries willing to throw out conventional rules. Nightmares can’t be created by committee or algorithm. And with his tale of childhood anxiety invading an empty home, this singular director follows proudly in the tradition of outcast art inspiring outrage on first sight. Wherever Ball voyages next, one thing seems certain – it won’t look or feel like anything else out there.
