Halloween falls on a Tuesday this year—which is a total bummer, since 2023’s horror movie slate is full of terrifiers best seen with a big crowd of weirdly-dressed, drunken friends.
Whenever you choose to celebrate the spooky szn, these 13 recent horror films will be ready to scare your socks off. We’ve ranked them roughly from least to most scary, ramping up to the blood-curdling stuff of nightmares: scroll and shiver.
El Conde
Who knew that celebrated biopic director Pablo Larraín had this grisly Gothic satire in him? It’s a biting (literally) alternate history that imagines Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as an actual hellion of the undead. We get some early gore, a hilarious third-act reveal of who our narrator’s been this whole time, and genuinely stirring black-and-white scenes of a new vampire taking flight. A pick for horror haters this Halloween, who can deal with creepiness as long as it’s both political and poetic.
Cobweb
At its best, this freaky little domestic horror reminded me of the awesome 80s film Parents: Lizzy Caplan and Homelander himself Antony Starr have a ball playing a scaredy-cat kid’s controlling mum and dad, who refuse to acknowledge that there may be something terrible within the walls of their home. The film doesn’t quite pull off its big, CGI reveal, but the path there is paved with self-consciously corny Halloween imagery. The family has a massive pumpkin patch in their backyard, for instance.
Influencer
Shudder rarely misses with their original horror movies, and this one succeeds by exploding our preconceptions very early on. It’s not a gimmicky piss-take of millenial Insta-culture, either, honing in on the loneliness and lust for escapism that both the killer and their victims suffer. Influencer is well-crafted and nicely acted, with Cassandra Naud becoming a hypnotic, mysterious figure that we’re still trying to understand as that spicy little twist ending arrives.
M3GAN
Do we wish Blumhouse’s much-memed evil doll movie could’ve dodged that PG rating and went for full kindergarten gore? Ehhh, maybe. But back in January, our critic Dan Rutledge hit the nail on the head when he called it “a smartly-made serving of campy fun” that was “a great way to cinematically kick off the year.” If there aren’t enough Tik-Tok dancing, babydoll-dress-wearing M3GAN clones at Halloween parties this week, we riot.
Saw X
I was proud as punch to see this unkillable torture-porn franchise get back to its roots, featuring more of Tobin Bell’s gaunt gamemaster John Kramer than ever before—Jigsaw has never let go of a grudge in his life, of course. The eyeball-sucking, limb-slicing new traps are inventive and hard-to-watch as ever, but the film’s renewed focus on Jigsaw as a near-heroic vigilante is what should make Saw skeptics give it a try.
Late Night with the Devil
With retro style and big, theatrical scares, Aussie brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes plunged us back into the 1970s via this horror festival fave. David Dastmalchian stars as a troubled talk show host whose Halloween broadcast is only going to make things worse, when his guests—magicians, skeptics, and an exorcised young girl—get too wild for TV. Editor Steve Newall is a fan, too: “Rarely do movies nail shows-within-films as seen here, his TV show feeling legitimately staged throughout—which helps markedly with the sense of growing dread.”
No One Will Save You
This alien invasion horror from screenwriter Brian Duffield gets bonus points for added creative difficulty: only one full sentence is spoken by our harangued hero Kaitlyn Dever, who mostly grunts and screams at the big-eyed baddies trying to take her to their leader. If you’re more spooked by unfriendly extra-terrestrial visitors than ghosts or demons, this sleeper hit will have you sleeping with the light on, pumping fresh blood into our archetypal image of the classic ol’ grey alien.
Beau Is Afraid
Anyone who got subjected to Ari Aster’s latest extended panic attack will tell you that it’s a scary experience: tattooed strangers barrelling into Joaquin Phoenix’s house, a teen girl committing suicide by chugging pink paint, a bizarre phallic reveal in the attic, etc. etc. To me, there was more going on in this puzzling film than mere random XD horror shenanigans—but it’s worthy of a Halloween watch in any case, even if it’s not easily classifiable as horror.
Huesera: The Bone Woman
Sound design reigns supreme in this haunting Mexican-Peruvian ad for birth control. The directorial debut of Michelle Garza Cervera, it follows a newly pregnant woman whose symptoms go from tricky to terrifying, devolving into feminist body horror as some form of black magic threatens those who love her, too. A sickening slow burn rather than a jumpscare-fest (although it has a few of those, too).
Talk To Me
Flicks has been all over this Aussie horror phenomenon from the get go, with Steve Newall chatting to directors Danny and Michael Philippou and the “hugely promising, punchy debut” getting two thumbs up from yours truly. It might be too soon to tell if it’ll remain a national treasure of Australia’s horror scene, but for an inexpensively-made yarn of sad teens communing with spirits, it’s already had a massive impact: it’s A24’s highest-grossing horror film ever.
Evil Dead Rise
This fresh entry into a classic horror franchise decided to go big rather than going home, mostly avoiding the classic cabin-in-the-woods setup in favour of a female-led apartment building of horrors. Alyssa Sutherland has immediately cemented herself into genre history with probably one of the best “possessed” performances we’ve ever seen, and that cheese grater moment might be one of the year’s most unforgettable bits of gore, too. Not perfect, but pretty damn disturbing.
When Evil Lurks
Do you want to feel like absolute crap this Halloween?! Why not check out the buzzed-about Argentine terror When Evil Lurks, which Steve Newall has already gone ahead and called the year’s best horror film? With murky world-building and graphic scenes that feel as though they spring madly out of nowhere, it’s the definition of a good bad time, tracking brothers as they foolishly set off and then suffer from a viral spread of demonic destruction.
Skinamarink
Nothing’s going to top Kyle Edward Ball’s bone-chilling, experimental horror vision for me this year. The horror community was divided by its abstract narrative and patience-testing monotony—but, watched in the dark with the sound way up, you won’t find another movie out there that’ll transport you back to the vulnerable terrors of childhood like Skinamarink can. Don’t watch this at a Halloween event with booze and loud conversations goin’ on. Save it for when the party’s over, and you’re alone, and you’re seeking a true, visceral communion with evil. Fun!!!
