Best Horror Movies Of 2024 (So Far) – Time Out

Awesome, you're subscribed!
Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon!
The best things in life are free.
Sign up for our email to enjoy your city without spending a thing (as well as some options when you’re feeling flush).
Déjà vu! We already have this email. Try another?
By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions.
Awesome, you're subscribed!
Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon!
Love the mag?
Our newsletter hand-delivers the best bits to your inbox. Sign up to unlock our digital magazines and also receive the latest news, events, offers and partner promotions.
Déjà vu! We already have this email. Try another?
By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions.
Get us in your inbox
Déjà vu! We already have this email. Try another?
By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions.
🙌 Awesome, you're subscribed!
Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon!
The big-screen chillers that have scared us senseless this year
Last year, a genre usually filled with shambling zombies and sentient mounds of carnivorous goo birthed leftfield successes like M3GAN and Skinamarink, low-budget horror hits that elbowed their way to viral status, even amid the giddy fluorescence of Barbie and prestige awardsiness of Oppenheimer. 
By contrast, this year’s slate of scares probably won’t catch too many people sleeping. 2024 is loaded with genre prequels, sequels and spin-offs, from MaXXXine, the third instalment of Ti West’s cult-fave franchise, to the alien-invasion terror of A Quiet Place: Day One, to the extremely-long-awaited Beetlejuice 2. But given that horror is historically a genre of small expectations and big surprises, there’s bound to be something that pops up to frighten the bejeepers out of us when we least expect it. Here’s the best of what’s freaked us out so far. 
🎃 The 100 best horror films ever made
😱 The scariest movies based on a true story 
💀 The best horror movies of 2023

An email you’ll actually love
By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions.
🙌 Awesome, you're subscribed!
Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon!
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.—Helen O’Hara
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.—David Hughes
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.—Phil de Semlyen 
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.—Lou Thomas
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.—Stephen A Russell
An email you’ll actually love
By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions.
🙌 Awesome, you're subscribed!
Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon!
An email you’ll actually love
By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions.
🙌 Awesome, you're subscribed!
Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon!
Latest from the world of film
[title]
Discover Time Out original video
 
By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions.
🙌 Awesome, you're subscribed!
Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon!
Get us in your inbox
By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions.
🙌 Awesome, you're subscribed!
Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon!
About us
Contact us
Time Out Worldwide

source