A word on the list: this is not strictly a “Best Of 2019,” though you could use it that way if you’d like. It’s more like a list of the films of the genre that I found the most noteworthy. A graduating class, if you will (with a minimum GPA requirement). As a whole, it represents the year in horror: where the genre is now, and where it might be heading. If I’ve missed something conspicuous, feel free to leave a comment.
MIDSOMMAR (Ari Aster)
Ari Aster’s debut feature film Hereditary hit like a telephone pole at 80 MPH. It was emotionally and thematically uncompromising, brutally undermining audience expectations while patiently unraveling an occult story that was, at its heart, a movie about how we live with those closest to us, and the darkness that can take root in our own family trees. Midsommar dares to bring the horror out into broad daylight.
The film is about many things—cultural relativism, the power and importance of ritual, sensory nonfluency, and why and how relationships break apart, often slowly and sometimes violently. At its heart, Midsommar is perhaps the most harrowing breakup movie of all time. Florence Pugh is remarkable in the lead role, and it is her grief and frustration and strength that provide the essential human element at the center of so much unfamiliarity. It is gorgeous, upsetting, and eventually strangely cathartic. There is striking beauty in the heart of such madness, and an unlikely purification that happens not despite brutal ritual, but because of it.
US (Jordan Peele)
The debut films of Jordan Peele and Ari Aster both came out within a year of each other, and with each one (Get Out and Hereditary, respectively) there was a sense that we were witnessing something important. They were so well-conceived and executed, and so startlingly fresh, that it felt as if the horror landscape had transformed overnight. 2019 saw the release of sophomore efforts from each director, and in both cases they proved to be more ambitious in scope—not as airtight, but nevertheless proving that the debuts were no fluke.
Us is a genre-bending thriller with grand ambitions, beginning as a home invasion slasher with a psychological twist, and mutating, in unpredictably violent and funny ways, into something wholly deeper and more mind-bending. Us may not be as compact as Get Out, but it proved that Peele has something to say—and he possesses the wit, humor and timing to say it like no one else.
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers)
Not many people knew the name Robert Eggers before his 2015 feature debut The Witch. Its suffocating mood, punctilious attention to period detail, and confidently conceived story of witchcraft in 19th century New England belied his previous lack of directorial experience. The Lighthouse, though with a limited release and not necessarily “mainstream” in attention or box office, was anticipated by a newly realized Eggers fan club. The Lighthouse shows, in new ways, the kinds of hell that people create for themselves, in grainy, 35 mm, black and white, claustrophobic 1.19:1 aspect ratio.
The plot is simply that of two lighthouse keepers, trapped by a storm in a lighthouse on the rain-drenched New England coastline. Robert Pattinson fully and convincingly sheds whatever husk he may have had left lingering from his Twilight legacy, and Dafoe puts on a ground-shaking, Shakespearean performance as the salty keeper of the light in a role that Eggers has compared to Proteus, or the “old man of the sea.” Even more insular than the plight of the family in The Witch, the tragic story of these two wickies unfolds like an absurd and unrelenting stage play about the nature of man, and of madness itself. This one takes a while to digest, but its effects are lasting.
CLIMAX (Gaspar Noé)
The opening shots of Gaspar Noé’s hallucinatory thriller Climax are literally framed by its inspirations. Interviews with the film’s ensemble cast play on a small analog television, surrounded by the works of Fritz Lang, David Lynch, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Pierre Molinier, and many others. This passive exposition does little to prepare us emotionally for the events of the film, but it does provide some explanation for the disruptive darkness that forms Noé’s worldview and body of work.
I had a curious thought while watching Climax, which is based on a French urban legend about a dance troupe’s weekend retreat from hell: what if, for some hypothetical reason, this one film was encapsulated and sent into space to be seen by an extraterrestrial intelligence? What would they think of the creatures that made it? I think they would see that we are beautiful and depraved, lonely and scared, inspiring in our ingenuity, and tragic in our meanness and fear. Noé’s latest film is lurid and hypnotic, and sees us through a glass darkly. The hope is that he’s wrong; the fear is that he’s not.
CRAWL (Alexandre Aja)
Of all the films on this list, the Sam Raimi-produced Crawl feels the most like a horror throwback. If you want to look for it, there might be a thin layer of subtext about humans surviving in an increasingly violent world thrown into an imbalance of our own making. But mostly this is a straightforward thriller: a father and daughter surviving the rising waters of a hurricane, and the hungry gators that come with it.
Director Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, High Tension) is part of the “Splat Pack” that helped define horror in the mid-2000s: he and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre deftly guide the building action, while allowing the strengths of the script to shine. The pacing is tense, the runtime is efficient, and there is just enough familial sentiment between Scodelario and Pepper to give significance to the violence. It’s not trying to be anything more than it is, and there’s something refreshing about that.
HAGAZUSSA (Lukas Feigelfeld)
Now where in the hell did Lukas Feigelfeld come from? This Austrian-born director used crowdsourced funding to write, direct, and co-produce this movie as a film school graduation project. That’s like being called up from Triple-A baseball to the major leagues and hitting a home run at your first at-bat. Hagazussa takes its influence from old pagan folk tales to tell the 15th century story of a woman making a humble life as an orphaned goat-herder, isolated and ostracized from the small community occupying the vast and wooded Austrian Alps. The film utilizes this monolithic landscape to great effect: the stupefying vastness of the mountains and the dense woods covering them are enough to impose a morbid and unknowable promise to the slow burning tale, enhanced even further by a stygian and tectonic score by MMMD.
There is such little dialogue or exposition that the experience of watching Hagazussa is somewhat meditative. Is Albrun a witch? In the end, it might not matter. This is a film that works best when not analyzing, but experiencing as a passive bystander, or as one of the watching trees. Be as silent as the hills, and let the story wash over you. It will take you to strange places.
READY OR NOT (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett)
When you marry someone, you marry their family. Surely this is something that the beautiful yet unaffected Grace (Samara Weaving) understands, as she steels herself to become part of the eccentric and ultra-wealthy Le Domas family for the love of her sweet groom Alex (Mark O’Brien). What she doesn’t know, unfortunately, might kill her. The family dynasty made their money from games, and they like to play one with every new addition to the family. Sometimes it’s checkers. Sometimes, it’s a deadly game of hide and seek.
Ready or Not’s full and uncompromising commitment to its darkly absurd premise is key to its success, along with its cast and execution of tone. Class warfare has seldom been so exuberantly and delightfully violent, and Australian-born Samara Weaving hits all the right notes of empathy and comedic timing. Filmmaking team Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have worked together before on both V/H/S and Southbound, but this is their most polished effort so far. Quite possibly the most brutally silly fun I’ve had with this genre since The Cabin in the Woods.
PIERCING (Nicolas Pesce)
A man stands over the crib of a sleeping infant, with a kitchen knife in his hands. Semiotics would call this the denotative, or literal, situation in the opening moments of Nicolas Pesce’s Piercing. Technically speaking, nothing bad has happened. But it is the awful suggestion conjured by that scene which makes us squirm. The first half of Pesce’s follow-up to his disquieting debut The Eyes of my Mother relies on such grisly connotation: tension is created through expectation and dramatic irony, as Reed (Christopher Abbott) leaves his wife and child at home for the weekend, with plans to murder a sex worker.
The miniatures built to recreate the high rise apartments of a city, along with the almost gently demonic voice urging on Reed’s actions, impart a subtle gauze of surreality to the setting. And it is the manipulation of expectations, including the gleeful upending of them, that makes Piercing so enjoyably unpredictable and darkly funny. The performances of Abbott and Mia Wasikowska do a lot to carry a project that draws us in by showing more than it tells, despite the fact that it feels a tad incomplete. The ending is shocking not only because of how we got there, but because it happens just as we prepare for a third act. Pesce has shown that he is not lacking in panache or technical competence, even if we are still waiting to connect more deeply to the characters in his world.
PARASITE (Bong Joon Ho)
Early on in Parasite, the Kim family receives the gift of a decorative suseok as a token of wealth and prosperity. It’s not something that they have much of, hunting for WiFi signals in their submerged apartment and chasing off drunks pissing mere feet from their door. The bright teenage son Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi) proclaims of the rock: “It’s so metaphorical!” Time will prove it to be that and more.
Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite shifts genres like a chameleon; he calls it an “unstoppably fierce tragicomedy,” and it figures that the guy who wrote and directed it describes it best. It is irrepressibly funny, heartfelt and shrewdly satirical, yet there is grief and anger here too, which comes pouring out before the laughter is even dead on our lips. In the end there is no redemption but that which exists within the system which precipitated the tragedy in the first place. Bong has delivered what feels like a modern masterpiece: it communicates the simmering anger of class division in a way that never sacrifices the humanity of its participants, and indeed relies upon it. It gets us laughing before sending us reeling down the stairs—which are, it turns out, both literal and metaphorical.
IN FABRIC (Peter Strickland)
English filmmaker Peter Strickland used an inheritance to fund his first feature film, despite the sound advice of others in his life. Now, four films into a critically lauded career, he seems more than willing to follow his artistic impulses into places not bound by convention or narrative safety. In Fabric is the story of a killer dress, set in a hypnagogic version of London even stranger than the real thing. Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is getting back into the dating scene, and she is convinced by a curiously vampiric clerk to splurge on a stunning red dress—but after a less-than-successful first date, a strange mark appears on her chest. We learn, as if through a wandering and slowly unfolding nightmare, that she is not the first victim (and won’t be the last).
In Fabric combines the dream-like unreality of David Lynch with the sensibilities and color palette of a fetishistic giallo thriller, while circling around a particular obsession with fashion and retail consumerism. It is simultaneously funny and unsettling—it perfectly captures the mundane atrocities of corporate culture and its empty, cunning niceties, which in turn only serves to feed the hard-earned money of its victims back into the retail outlets and their hilariously villainous clerks. It feels the whole time like it shouldn’t work—its characters are mostly impenetrable, and its tone somehow both highbrow and lowbrow—but it manages to elevate a seemingly silly high concept premise into a waking dream that feels if not profound, then at least frightening, sensuous, funny and captivating all at once.
TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID (Issa López)
This genre so often seeks to process the world around us; to heal the wounds we cannot see. For the orphans of Mexico’s drug war, those wounds are too many to count. Mexican writer and filmmaker Issa López wrote, directed and produced this grim fairy tale that debuted at Austin’s Fantastic Fest back in 2017, and finally got a digital release this year in the USA. The film follows a group of orphaned children in Mexico City who begrudgingly accept the young Estrella (Paola Lara) after her mother is abducted by one of the city’s many gangs. They treasure whatever small joys they can find or make for themselves in a world marked by violence and hunger.
And there is something else, flitting through the shadows and crouching in corners and doorways and alleys—the spectral creatures and innumerable ghosts of the city are born out of death, sprung to life in the minds of its most haunted children. But in this place, it is not the ghosts we are afraid of: it is the living who must be feared. López tells a story of those who cannot tell us themselves, with a touch of fantasy not unlike the gothic fables of Guillermo del Toro (who listed this in his Top 10 movies of 2017). What it left me with was a profound sadness … for innocence lost, for lives lost. For large scale tragedy, still making ghosts today.
DOCTOR SLEEP (Mike Flanagan)
Making a direct sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s all-time horror classic The Shining nearly 40 years after the release of the original is an idea so audacious, so laughably Quixotic that no one in their right mind would even attempt it. Right? Well pull on the galoshes, because director Mike Flanagan (Oculus, The Haunting of Hill House) is taking us back to the Overlook Hotel in a follow-up based on Stephen King’s own literary sequel.
Ewan McGregor plays a now-grown Danny Torrance, who has spent the better part of his adult years coping with his childhood trauma, and attempting to dull his “shine” with plenty of booze and hard living. Doctor Sleep spends a lot of its time expanding on the idea of that mysterious sixth sense dubbed the shine, and how that power might turn people into either heroes or villains. Unsurprisingly, Flanagan’s sequel does not match The Shining in its vision or sheer ferocity, but it pulls off the not unremarkable feat of providing an intriguing and well-built companion piece to a bona fide classic.
IT CHAPTER TWO (Andy Muschietti)
Andy Muschietti’s It is the highest-grossing domestic horror movie of all time, and second only to The Exorcist if you include the international market. It’s no wonder that the inevitable follow-up came with some weighty expectations. Since it took me a couple weeks to get to the theater, I’ll admit my expectations had already been unavoidably adjusted: “It sucked,” said a couple friends. There are some valid reasons for its tepid reviews; the film is nearly 3 hours long, and its bloated midsection sends its characters off on separate fetch quests in order to service the mythology of the source material. This throws off the pacing and detracts from the stronger-together chemistry of the ensemble of damaged adults, even if it does allow for some of the more genuinely creepy sequences of the film. Perhaps the film’s biggest misstep is one that seems the most avoidable: not enough Pennywise! Bill Skarsgård’s endlessly watchable performance of fear personified finds that precarious balance between chilling and disarmingly silly, but he’s just not around enough in a follow-up that attempts to explain his origins.
So I did find myself forgiving a lot, but I largely did so because of the strengths: the film thrives, like the original, on the chaotic chemistry of the Losers Club, and their caroming, antagonistically affectionate dialogue. Bill Hader alone does wonders for a film in need of balancing some flaws, and he does his absolute best to make the casting director look like a genius. And in a film that struggles to find structural cohesion, there are a few standout scenes, both eerie and hilarious, that will stick around in my memory for a long while. In its finer moments it manages to capture that heady emotional tone of its predecessor—one where, for at least a brief moment, the fears of childhood (and worries of adulthood) are forgotten and nostalgia reigns supreme, like those dusks spent on bicycles when it felt like you were riding a wave through the summer night with the only people that mattered right then and there. It Chapter Two is the most flawed movie on this list, but it still manages to belong here.