Here's the best new horror movies of 2023, so far.
1. Evil Dead Rise
‘Mommy’s with the maggots now.’ Director Lee Cronin keeps it
in the family in this franchise revival, as he relocates the torment from a
blood-spattered shack in the woods to a dilapidated LA high-rise. But Dead
Heads need not worry: Rise captures the spirit of the series – and then some.
Cronin forces the best of Sam Raimi and Fede Álvarez’s movies into a
wood-chipper, scoops up the resulting viscera and reassembles it as his own
marauding modern remix, packed with as many fresh ideas as it has gory
callbacks.
2. Infinity Pool
It’s a case of ‘like father, like son’ in Brandon ‘son of
David’ Cronenberg’s ingenious and disturbing sci-fi, a movie that enshrines Mia
Goth as the year’s undisputed queen of horror (and everything else, tbh). Goth
plays the kind of femme fatale who always seems to lead innocents like
Alexander Skarsgård’s holidaying novelist into deep bother in movies – and so
it proves, although in even more dark and demented ways than you might expect.
The fusion of Philip K Dick-adjacent social satire with Cronenbergian body
horror makes for a deliciously compelling and icky watch.
3. Skinamarink
Story is secondary to feel in this suffocating nano-budget
hell experiment. Skinamarink invites you to spend a night on the carpet with
Kevin and Kaylee, whose parents are missing and whose house has its own ideas
of playtime. The film’s swirling artificial grain conceals threats and gives
rise to new ones – stare at Skinamarink long enough and you’ll start seeing
things that aren’t there. Scarier still, director Kyle Edward Ball says there’s
something buried in the background that no audience has ever noticed. Slow
cinema has never been more unsettling.
4. M3GAN
Freaky dolls never fail on screen, especially when they’re
as inventively designed and hilariously malevolent as the psychotic A.I. in
this wildly entertaining Blumhouse ride. For a brief moment at the beginning of
the year, the usually unnervingly statuesque M3GAN danced across our timelines
as a viral sensation. But the movie, starring Get Out’s Allison Williams as a
self-absorbed toy designer who creates an indestructible but, well, totes
adorbs monster, is far more than just a fleeting social media phenomenon. With
modern horror master James Wan behind the story, it plays on our fears of
sentient tech in a way that had us pining for Alien’s milk-spewing corporate
droid Ash. A sequel is already on its
way – and probably more than one.
5. Talk To Me
Best known for their YouTube channel RackaRacka, twin
brothers Danny and Michael Philippou have a sick sense of humour. Their
A24-approved debut feature concerns an embalmed hand that grants its teen users
a reception with the dead. Let the idle spirits in for longer than 90 seconds,
though, and they might decide to stay. Thankfully for fans of destabilising
dread, savage gore and cameras panning slowly across dark rooms, the teens’
timekeeping is a little sloppy. Standby for some of the grisliest possession
scenes you’ll see all year.
6. Pearl
Whether she’s fraternising with an alligator or dry-humping
a scarecrow, Mia Goth always commits to the bit. She plays Pearl with unhinged
glee in this dusty prequel to Ti West’s X and the upcoming MaXXXine. Set on a
Texas farmstead in 1918, the film glides from the glorious to the gross-out –
tipping its cap to Golden Age Hollywood musicals en route – as Pearl is
corrupted on her quest to become a chorus girl. Stick around for the most
unnerving end credits you’ve ever seen.
7. Knock at the Cabin
M Night Shyamalan’s best film since Signs skips shocks and
dials down the twists in favour of atmospherics and slow-building dread.
Essentially a one-set chamber piece, it has four mysterious strangers intruding
on a couple’s rural retreat demanding a human sacrifice in order to stave off
the Apocalypse. It’s the kind of Book-of-Revelation-level craziness they don’t
tell you about on Airbnb. Knock at the Cabin sees a talented filmmaker
stripping things back to their essence: mood, blocking, acting and sound
design, as he keeps you firmly in the shoes of the frazzled pair at its heart
and wondering why Dave Bautista is standing in their front room with a halberd.
8. Enys Men
This anti-idyll set on a Cornish island is a folk
horror-inspired mystery that’s hypnotically unsettling. It follows Mary
Woodvine’s wildlife volunteer as she gets to grips with an bizarre flower and
life in isolation, and comes veiled in a fog of Tarkovsky-esque enigma and
reverberates with the threat of something truly terrible unfolding – much in
the spirit of The Wicker Man. In short: it could only be the handiwork of Mark
Jenkin, a director capable of putting his own unique spin on influences that
would overwhelm less assured filmmakers. Shot on 16mm film and full of
handcrafted ’70s aesthetics, the mystical vibes are powerful enough to turn us
all into druids.
9. Huesera: The Bone Woman
A big hit in its homeland last year, this debut horror film
from Mexico City-based director Michelle Garza Cervera is built around a
chilling but universal story of motherhood and femininity. Valeria (Natalia
Solián) is a woman trying to fit in and hide her past, but her pregnancy awaken
something sinister that won’t leave her at peace. And before you can say
‘Rosemary’s Baby’, her life has spiralled into demonic chaos. The sound design
is impeccable – the cracking of bones will haunt your nightmares – and there’s
barely a moment when you don’t feel bodily chills. The scares are never cheap,
though – there’s real elegance in its use of horror tropes to unpick the grim
judgment of society.
10. Renfield
It’s no shock that, after decades of callbacks to German
Expressionism and silent cinema, Nicolas Cage was finally cast as the Prince of
Darkness. But this ain’t your daddy’s Dracula. Instead, Renfield focuses more
on the Count’s bug-eating familiar, with Nicolas Hoult’s gaslit servant
attending group therapy sessions and trying to shake off his narcissistic boss.
The schlock-comedy action is toothless but Renfield is worth watching just to
see Cage vamp – what better way to chew the scenery than with a mouth full of
Nosferatu-style fangs?
11. The Strays
‘I’m a proud Black woman,’ says Neve (Ashley Madekwe). Her
actions say otherwise. Low-key dread gives way to a riveting home invasion
thriller in this stylish exploration of class betrayal and the British POC
experience from first-time writer-director Nat Martello-White. Having fled a
difficult life in London years earlier, Neve has ensconced herself in an
all-white Wiltshire village, where she stifles her identity for the sake of
socialites that will never truly accept her. That is, until her past crashes
the party.
12. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
Our undying fascination with vampire mythos across
continents and millennia is undeniable. So it is that screenwriter Zsak
Olkewicz and Bragi F Schut spun a short newspaper clipping and a captain’s log
from Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel Dracula into an Alien-alike, two-hour
haunted house at sea movie helmed by Troll Hunter director André Øvredal. If
it’s not quite as fun as his grim fable, there are still thrills to be had as
the prince of darkness – Javier Botet, part-Nosferatu, part-bat Gary Oldman in
design, way too much CGI – picks off the crew led by Game of Thrones actor Liam
Cunningham’s captain one-by-one. Could be bloodier, but still has bite.
13. We Have a Ghost
Christopher Landon helped resuscitate the slasher genre with
2017’s Happy Death Day and 2020’s Freaky. Here, the writer-director puts down
the knives and dials up the whimsy for an Amblin-style adventure in which a
teenager must defend a mute ghost, Ernest, from the CIA, as well as a dad with
dollar signs in his eyes. The highlight comes as the internet learns about the
spirit in the attic and we get a montage of rib-ticklingly accurate
Ernie-related TikTok memes.
Comments
Post a Comment