Sean McGeady

2023 was a big year for little horror movies. Sure, the most dominant films of the year were full of vibrant colours, cheery vibes and decades-old IP. But if the talk around the popcorn machine wasn’t about Barbie or The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it was often about some small, freaky nightmare whose budget wouldn’t cover the catering on those other blockbusters. Like M3GAN, the year’s first mega-memed movie about a doll come to life. Or Skinamarink, another viral phenomenon borne from the world’s shared childhood nightmares. Or Evil Dead Rise, the latest reboot of the splatstick franchise that somehow manages to be bloodier and more straight-up terrifying than the original. No true horror movie made much of a dent in the box office – unless you count Oppenheimer, which is certainly horrifying, but doesn’t exactly fit under the umbrella. But several scary movies insinuated themselves into the cultural conversation, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see them make their way into the regular Halloween rotation, if nothing else. Here are the 16 horror movies of last year that left us the most shaken.  RECOMMENDED:  🔪 The best horror movies and shows of 2024 (so far)💀 The 100 greatest horror films of all time🔥 The best movies of 2023 (so far)📺 The best TV shows of 2023 you need to stream

Movie monsters are a many-splendored thing, with a strong emphasis on ‘thing’. Some may take the form of giant irradiated lizards or skyscraper-sized apes, others amphibious swamp creatures or slow-creeping mounds of gelatin. Some represent the biggest fears of society at large, others are manifestations of their creators’ personal hang-ups. Others, meanwhile, are more instinctual, killing either for food or just for the sheer fun of it. If you’ve read this far, you may be experiencing some déjà vu. Didn’t we already write a list of the best monster movies of all-time? Indeed we did. But not all of cinema’s greatest monsters inhabit great movies. Sure, there’s a good deal of crossover. But as with actual human actors, some of the most memorable creatures in film history can be found slumming it in subpar productions – and they deserve to have their moment in the spotlight. A few caveats: this list largely follows the same parameters as our monster movies list, meaning that it steers away from non-mutated animals – sorry, Bruce the Shark and the spiders from Arachnophobia – as well as slasher villains such as Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers. But zombies? Trolls? Brundlefly? You’ll find them all below. Recommended: 👹 The 50 best monster movies ever made💀 The 100 best horror movies of all-time🧟 The best zombie movies of all-time👹 Cinema’s creepiest anthology horror movies🩸 The 15 scariest horror movies based on true stories

In real life, violence is never the answer. In the movies, though, it’s very often the solution – and done right, it can be seriously awesome. Whole careers, and even entire film genres, are built off hand-to-hand combat. Think the balletic brutality of Bruce Lee, or Jackie Chan’s blur of motion. But the best movie fights truly run the gamut. Sure, some are so graceful and bloodless they almost count as dancing. Others are as sloppy and ugly as a bar brawl. Both have their place, and both can get audiences leaping out of their seats, for entirely different reasons. On this list of the greatest movie scenes ever filmed, we celebrate them all – with a few caveats. First off, no gunplay allowed, at least not where a firearm is the primary weapon; well-orchestrated shootouts are a whole other category, and probably deserve a list of their own. For similar reasons, we’ve also omitted boxing matches, wrestling bouts or MMA fights, though we did allow an underground kumite tournament to make the cut. Even with those restrictions, though, this list is absolutely bursting with hard-hitting dust-ups, elegant martial arts mastery and the occasional goofy grapple that puts the slap in ‘slapstick’. RECOMMENDED:  🥋 The 25 best martials arts movies ever made.🧨 The 101 greatest action movies ever made.🪂 The 18 greatest stunts in cinema (picked by the greatest stunt professionals)

Nobody sets out to make a bad movie. But strange things can happen between the thwack of the clapperboard and a film’s release date: ever so slowly, they mutate, swelling and splitting until they ooze onto screens as malformed beings far removed from their authors’ intentions. ‘No, this is a serious movie…’. ‘Actually that’s not meant to be funny…’. ‘Audiences just didn’t get it…’. Oh, we got it alright. The thing is, it’s ours now – and we can do what we want with it. It’s the audience’s job to decide what’s good, what’s bad, and what occupies that genre Elysian in between. We’ve been doing it for decades, though bad films are by no means a thing of the past. It’s unwise to look at a 1950s sci-fi and deem it poor on the basis of dated effects and performances alone, just as it’s foolish to assume that modern blockbusters can’t be every bit as shambolic as the works of Ed Wood. Sometimes it’s studio interference, sometimes it’s the wrong actor in the wrong role, sometimes it’s the director’s bone-deep (and bone-headed) misunderstanding of the material – the hurdles are legion. You’ll notice recurrent hurdles throughout this list too, small details that inexorably lead to dodgy movies: directors for whom English was far from a first language; excessively horny children’s characters that’ll have you reconsidering your views on childcare; the presence of John Travolta – the list goes on. Yes, there are infinite flavours of bad film. Here we present 40 of the most palatable (most

Beneath the boring blockbusters and passé multiplex programming, there lie the sewers of independent film exhibition, a kind of nether realm where Thunderstorm: The Return of Thor is more popular than Thor: Love and Thunder.  Yes, bad movies are big business too. Whether presenting on pub projectors or 50-foot screens, the underworld is awash with independent exhibitors for whom low-budget genre fare is infinitely more interesting than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. ‘Bad’, ‘cult’, ‘trash’, whatever you call it, it’s all out there: slapdash 1950s sci-fi, trashy 1960s and 1970s exploitation, 1980s cop schlock, 1990s direct-to-video martial arts movies. You’ve just got to know where to find it. Welcome to the gutters of cinema, where good taste goes to die.  ‘You’re at the bottom end of the cinephile gene pool when you like these kinds of movies,’ says Richard Clark, who operates as Token Homo and hosts Bar Trash at London’s Genesis Cinema. Here, fans converge to devour such demented delights as 1955’s Creature with the Atom Brain and 1973’s wickedly weird Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood. Tickets cost £1, there are competitions and prizes, and themed cocktails during the intermissions. Sure, sometimes they’re one star movies – but they’re always five star experiences Each Bar Trash screening is a celebration of an extinct kind of cinema. Many of these movies were put together by inexperienced, underfunded idealists whose, let’s say, ‘unique’ approach to problem-solving resulted i

There’s a rowdy revival underway in London. Usually, when a film begins, the room is gripped by hushed anticipation. Not here. At the Genesis Cinema in Mile End, as the lights go down the gloves come off. This is Kung Fu Cinema – and there’s only one rule: make some noise. The bimonthly event kicks off with casual drinks in the bar, soundtracked by hip-hop tracks and the thwack of arcade touchstones such as Tekken 3, before culminating in a raucous 10pm screening of a Hong Kong classic, MCed by a man for whom martial arts is a lifelong love. Marlon Palmer has been an exhibitor and distributor of Black cinema for more than 20 years and a kung fu fan for even longer. As a kid, he was introduced to martial arts by his older stepbrother. Soon he came to idolise Bruce Lee. Later, he found cinema.  Photograph: CHANNEL 5 BROADCASTINGKung Fu Cinema founder Marlon Palmer grew up idolising Bruce Lee In the 1980s, Palmer was a regular at renowned late-night London picturehouses like the Rio in Dalston, the Curzon Turnpike Lane and the Odeons in Wood Green and Holloway. Back then, there were few opportunities to see non-white heroes on the big screen and, against a backdrop of racism and riots sparked by the National Front and Metropolitan Police, the genre’s themes of resistance against injustice, as well as the sheer flip-kicking cool of its protagonists, proved popular with Black audiences.  Kung fu films resonate with the Black community. We’re looking for those heroes – the guy th