By this time, last year, Splitand Get Outhad already stomped through the box office and become two of the year’s top earners in the horror category. This year, John Krasinski and his monsters have made A Quiet Place this year’s spring surprise at the box office. But crowded around that populist blockbuster is a field of sci-fi thrillers, genre-bending mysteries, social commentary, and exuberantly nihilistic violence that will make you weep for the future — but also stand up and cheer for the present in horror cinema. Here are the best movies in the genre so far in 2018.
Annihilation
If you weren’t sure Annihilation was going to be a horror movie, the human bear scream should have dismissed all your uncertainty. The most visually arresting film of the year — about a team of scientists who cross into a self-contained, Earth-bound alternate dimension to unpack the mysteries within — is also, as Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién put it, “a masterwork I felt in my nerve endings, a brutal, gorgeous meditation on the rigors of depression and the human impulse toward self-destruction.” The set-piece scares in Annihilation are practically avante-garde in their execution (crawling eel intestines, the exploded Technicolor body, that bear), but the movie’s true weight comes from its unflinching look into existential terror.
A Quiet Place
Writer, director, and star John Krasinski dropped this horror bomb at SXSW and it’s been lighting up the box office since its early April premiere. Krasinski co-stars alongside his wife, Emily Blunt, as a married couple trying to keep their children safe from sound-sensitive monsters that seem to have wiped out a significant chunk of the human population. It’s been the horror surprise of the year, generating high critical praise and making a play to become this year’s first $200 million scary movie. Run, don’t walk to the theater — but make sure to wear socks if you’ve got heavy feet.
Cold Hell (Die Hölle)
It’s a big year for heavy-handed female vengeance (Red Sparrow, the upcoming Revenge), and the German Cold Hell is a bloody knuckles story for your simmering feminine rage. Violetta Schurawlow plays Özge Dogruol, a taxi cabdriver who spends her nights weathering racist and misogynist slurs from her fares, and also casually trains as a mixed martial arts fighter. One night, Özge witnesses a grotesque murder, and both she and the killer resolve to eliminate each other, kicking off a feature-length pursuit in which both parties are hunting each other down with extreme prejudice. Along the way, details about Özge’s past emerge that clarify why her motives for vigilante justice are so powerful.
The Endless
The third feature from directing duo Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson stars the pair as brothers who have struggled to assimilate into society after fleeing a strange death cult ten years prior. When the story picks up, Aaron and Justin (yes, played by Aaron and Justin) receive a cryptic message from their old commune, which baits them back in hopes of getting closure on their previous lives. But what they find in the desert defies explanation, and makes the whole cult seem less crazy after all. Fans of Moorhead and Benson’s earlier films, Resolution and Spring (all of which were written by Benson), will be rewarded for their viewing loyalty.
Ghost Stories
Ghost Storiesis a wonderful time, and it delivers on the promise of its title with gusto. Adapted from a stage play of the same name by creators Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson, the movie revolves around a professor and paranormal investigator whose life’s work is debunking the supernatural. But when he gets handed three unsolved mysteries — each of which plays out in flashback vignettes — his ability to rationalize every single inch of the world is severely compromised. It’s darkly funny, and excellent performances from the three haunted men (played by Martin Freeman, Alex Lawther, and Paul Whitehouse) ensure the movie’s in-world ghost tales are filled with classic thrills and chills.
Mohawk
Mohawk is established as a historical drama set near the end of the War of 1812, but the added mysticism and horrifying implications of watching America’s original sin unfold make this a truly chilling scary movie. Ted Geohagan (We Are Still Here) directed and co-wrote this story of two Mohawk tribe members (Justin Rain and Kaniehtiio Horn) and their companion, a British soldier (Eamon Farren), who are relentlessly pursued by a group of American soldiers through a forest on their tribal lands. The violence is hard to watch, and it’s made even more repellent by the abhorrent racism of the American commanding officer, Hezekiah Holt (Ezra Buzzington). In the role of Oak, Horn turns in a moving and raw performance as she turns from prey to predator.
Mom and Dad
What if the whole world snapped and every parent in the world became possessed by the singular urge to kill their offspring? That’s the premise of Mom and Dad, which, with its sledgehammer of a premise, is somehow one of the most quietly crazy movies of early 2018. Selma Blair and Nicolas Cage star as Kendall and Brent, a pair of parents at the end of their rope who get swept up in a global pandemic that compels parents to eliminate their children. And that’s it. That’s the movie. It’s brought to you by writer-director Brian Taylor, making his first solo feature after teaming up with Mark Nevaldine for wild outings like the Crank movies. It’s pure fun crazy, and features a harrowing scene with an infant that blowsMother! out of the water.
Mon Mon Mon Monsters
Horror movies have all the subtlety of a thunderstorm suddenly splitting open the sky on a calm summer day, which makes them great for delivering social messages. And the message of Mon Monsters is: People are completely terrible. Well, that’s reductive, but this Taiwanese feature from Giddens Ko, which centers on a group of high-school bullies who chain up a human-eating monster and torture it with great glee, shows that heroes are even fewer and farther between than you thought. Also, that teenagers are completely terrifying.
Ravenous (Les Affamés)
Femme revenge tales might be getting more intense, but zombie stories are getting softer. Ravenous is a French-Canadian production, and while the undead are still flesh-eating, the core of the story is one of quiet survival, centering on an impromptu band of survivors searching for connection in a dying world. If you’re tired of everyone trying to kill each other in The Walking Dead, this will be a nice, if still sad, respite.
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