To the outside observer it may seem like every single year is called “one of the best years for horror ever,” but I’m going to let you in on a little secret: It’s never a bad year for horror. The entertainment industry damn near runs on scary movies, which are cheap to produce and able to take artistic risks that bigger budget genre films — the ones that have to sell tickets to everybody just to break in — are too timid to even consider. You can always find great horror movies. The trick is knowing where to look.
And that right there is the trick, because smaller movies don’t have huge advertising budgets, and they don’t drive traffic so publications can’t always allocate the resources to cover them. Great horror movies fall through the cracks all the time. Heck, even major theatrical releases don’t get their just desserts a lot of the time, vanishing from theaters if they’re not hits right away, and getting a bad reputation just because some critics just didn’t get it.
So let’s take a moment to look back at the best horror movies that 2024 has already had to offer, that weren’t huge hits. They may be obscure, they may just be underrated, but one thing’s for sure: They aren’t “Longlegs.” You already know about “Longlegs” — and probably “Immaculate” and “Late Night with the Devil.”
Let’s give these other scary movies some (digital) ink, shall we?
“Abigail”
“Arcadian”
“Cuckoo”
“The Devil’s Bath”
“Exhuma”
“The Front Room”
“I Saw the TV Glow”
“In a Violent Nature”
“Infested”
“Lisa Frankenstein”
“Oddity”
“Red Rooms”
“Stopmotion”
“Strange Darling”
“Under Paris”
The Demon Disorder has some fun bits, though it requires When Evil Lurks levels of tolerance for nonsensical authorial hand puppeteering. Once you get past that characters just can't do anything that makes sense, it's a trip.