World’s Worst Movie Dads of 2024
The year in bad fathering, featuring Love Lies Bleeding, Cuckoo, Trap, and Abigail.
Anna and the Apocalypse
“Horror” and “musical” are two terms that don’t exactly go hand in hand. Aside from the everlasting midnight phenomenon The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the growing cult-favorite Phantom of the Paradise, there aren’t many movies mixing those genres to speak of.
The Legend of Hell House
Four brave souls accept the offer (and sizable amounts of cash) from its new owner to spend one week at Belasco House, the “Mount Everest” of haunted houses, in this “Mount Everest” of haunted-house movies.
You Are Not Me
General, rather mundane anxieties (and some more alarming pitfalls) that can accompany travel—luggage lost in transit, exhaustion, impending long-distance jet lag, a car colliding with a surprise creature on the road—set a mood of slow dread that grows increasingly sinister throughout You Are Not Me, writer/directors Marisa Crespo and Moisés Romera’s intriguing contribution to the terror-within-the-home and holiday-frights subgenres.
Murders in the Rue Morgue
One of the most unheralded of Universal’s 1930s horror films, though perhaps the purest example of the form during that era, Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) comes off as early-Hollywood torture porn by way of German Expressionism.
The Reincarnation of Peter Proud
Sometimes, when feelings of déjà vu extend beyond a fleeting moment, it’s enough to make a nonbeliever consider the possibilities of other, more metaphysical powers at play.
Nightmare Scenarios
Longlegs carries forward Osgood Perkins’s ethereal cinema of dark isolation.
Femme
Done right, a movie can conjure feelings you typically wouldn’t have—or, in the case of many dark genre works, ones you absolutely don’t want. The powerhouse Femme brings out the whole artillery of emotions.
The Animal Kingdom
With their numbing sameness, dystopian or end-of-world movie scenarios tend to grow tiresome, and even intolerable now that we have a four-year reference point for how true to life that stasis can be. Pre-COVID, French writer/director Thomas Cailley had been developing a premise involving the spread of a new kind of virus, and as fate would have it, world events gave his ideas new relevancy.
Overlooked Genre Films of 2023
The first edition of a reanimated column rounds up the best in this year’s horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and bloody action.