The best horror movies and shows of 2024 (so far) for a truly scary watch

British horror is in a happy place – well, as happy as horror gets – with fast-rising filmmakers like Rose Glass, Claire Oakley, Prano Bailey-Bond and Remi Weekes marrying frights with real craft. To those bloody ranks add animator-filmmaker Robert Morgan. He brings his stop-motion skills to bear in a story of an unravelling director (Aisling Franciosi) that plays like a Ray Harryhausen fever dream. The Nightingale actress is magnificently intense, creating a stop-motion horror short that slowly takes over her life. Expect to hear a lot more about her monstrous creation, the relentless, bloody-eyed Ashman.

A baseball player forced into early retirement (Wyatt Russell) moves into a new family home with a water therapy-friendly pool. All goes swimmingly until, inevitably, the pool turns out to be knee-deep in ghosts. Bryce McGuire (Unfollowed) turns his own short into an effective feature-length horror that taps into our primeval fear of and attraction to water. He gets great performances from Russell and The Banshees of Inisherin’s Kerry Condon, as the partner who prays it’s not her turn to check the chlorine levels.

Immaculate might have beaten it to the nun-in-peril punch but Arkasha Stevenson’s Damien origin story is a surprisingly smart and insidious paranoid thriller. Backed by a strong supporting cast (Ralph Ineson, Bill Nighy, Sonia Braga, Charles Dance), an intense Nell Tiger Free is a revelation as the American novitiate in Rome who is drawn into a Vatican conspiracy of biblical proportions. Full of ’70s vibes, unsettling imagery, unexpected jolts and interesting things to say about the hypocrisy of organised religion, the result has a strong claim to be the best Omen film since the ‘76 original.

There’s been a legion of riffs on The Exorcist down the years, but few have transplanted its brooding Satanic menace with as much vividness or smarts as Aussie siblings Colin and Cameron Cairnes. Their slowburn possession horror has David Dastmalchian’s ’70s chat show host making a craven bid for ratings that invites the devil onto his TV set – quite literally. The splurge of gore in the final act is foreshadowed by some smart character work and a terrific performance from the still underappreciated Dastmalchian as man whose ego has long since vanquished his wisdom.

What would you give – and what would you risk – for two minutes with a dead loved one? That’s the question under the hood of this fiendish (fingers crossed) franchise-starter about a basement-dwelling monster with a burlap bonnet, offering an audience with the dead. The Witcher’s Freya Allen is terrific as the cash-strapped Gen Z-er who inherits the basement/monster combo, with horrifying consequences.

Regardless of whatever series creator Nic Pizzolatto has been posting on his socials, this fourth run of the HBO procedural is as good as the show has been since Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey were trading philosophical barbs back in season one. Showrunner Issa López applies the unsettling mood of a horror film, plus some outstanding gore, to its case of dead scientists in an Alaskan mining town. Evidence-led policing – okay, with the odd outbreak of brute force from Jodie Foster and Kali Reis’s cops – butts into indigenous folklore scares in a freezing, permanently dark landscape. Everything is scary in this show, even when it’s not.

Horror by dint of its striking neon images, nightmarish foes, occasional shocks and unsuual tackling of adolescent traumas, trans writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a strange, compelling feature. An allegory about ‘the egg crack’ when a person realises they are trans, Schoenbrun’s second feature looks at the strange friendship and lives of teens Owen and Maddy, avid fans of Buffy-ish horror TV show The Pink Opaque. Fans of unusual coming-of-age stories, Twin Peaks and 90s/noughties pop-culture nostalgia will all get a lot from this fascinating and original tale.

There is no horror pleasure like a ‘nothing is sacred’ gorefest with its tongue in its cheek and its teeth at your throat. Everyone involved in Ready or Not pair Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s vampiric ballet, Abigail, is in playful harmony. Blood and laughs are spilled in equal measure as Melissa Barrera’s final girl tries to outwit Dracula’s daughter while trapped in a mansion with a deranged killer and Dan Stevens in a silly earring.

Sydney Sweeney’s overnight enshrining as a bona fide scream queen has been a decade in the making. She auditioned to play Immaculate’s tormented nun back in 2014, but the project went away – until, thanks to her new star-power, she resurrected it as producer-star. Unsurprisingly, she brings absolutely everything to the role of Sister Celicia, an innocent outsider in a walled-off religious community that harbours something dark and cultish within its cloisters. Jump scares, giallo shocks and a truly batshit ending, combined with some of the most gutteral screams ever to blast out in ear-piercing Dolby Atmos, make Michael Mohan’s (The Voyeurs) horror a whale of a time at the movies. It may not be immaculate, but thanks to Sweeney, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. 

Someone annoying moved in next door? You’ll have sympathy with struggling prog-rock musician William (Jonah Ray) in an exuberant Gumtree-sploitation horror-comedy that plays like Pacific Heights on peyote. That neighbour from hell comes in the truly memorable form of Vlad, an indestructible goblin-y character, played beneath layers of latex by Alex Winter, who drags William to hell. A blast, not least for the cameo by Kumail Nanjiani as ‘Smelting Refinery Guard’.

The Blair Witch Project set the bar for what a low-budget horror movie could achieve when it came to scaring the living crap out of us in a forested setting. This sparse, atmospheric and smartly staged Stone Age horror is working with a slightly bigger wallet, and Scottish director Andrew Cumming gives it all a nice sense of scale, but the same principles still apply: don’t go down to the woods without an excellent exit strategy. A small band of Stone Age-rs reconnoitre a foreign landscape that turns out to be haunted by some form of ultra-violent beast. Their gory fates are left to the imagination, with the unsettling sound design doing most of the heavy lifting, until Out of Darkness shows its hand in a final act twist that lands with the force of a Neanderthal’s club.—Phil de Semlyen

If you’re looking for an enjoyably crazy horror movie that prioritises weird goings on over easily traceable logic, then German filmmaker’s Tilman Singer’s exhilaratingly out-there Alpine hotel-set trip is just the ticket. Featuring Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer, she plays an emo teen hung up on the death of her mum who has been dragged on holiday only to stumble upon a baby-stealing splinter species from the human race and the feverish cult that hopes to harness its mind-controlling, timey-wimey bird call-like powers. Bonkers, in the best way.