I will say this right at the top: I’m not going to get overly precious about our “unprecedented year,” and I will not say that I hope this list finds you well. If you’re reading this you lived through the year (congratulations!) and surely you’ve had your fill of platitudes.
These are the horror movies that defined the landscape of a pandemic year. They are, in my estimation, the most important films of the year for genre fans. Feel free to comment with any that I missed. You will find that many of them, in addition to tapping into something innate, reflect the unique traumas of modern existence. In the years ahead we will need the processing power of horror more than ever, and we will need it from the widest range of voices possible.
Here’s to 2021—may we all survive it.
Note: All of the films on this list were widely released in the US in 2020, although they may have run the festival circuit before then.
Possessor
Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Availability: VOD
There is a lot of talk about Brandon Cronenberg filling the rather large shoes of his father: David Cronenberg, king of body horror. But Possessor proves that Cronenberg (Junior) is growing into his own shoes just fine, thank you very much. His sophomore effort shows noticeable strides in his confidence as a filmmaker, and he might have just fucked around and made the best horror film of the year.
The doom-soaked sci-fi thriller Possessor takes a vaguely familiar sci-fi premise and executes it with startling confidence, style and brutality. Many of the literally mind-bending effects are practical, and the story depicts various forms of deformity and identity confusion with harrowing violence and discomfiting emotional potency. It made me think about how we define ourselves and others, and what it is exactly that makes us us. Possessor is a savage, take-no-prisoners tug of war between body and mind, host and parasite—a scorching effort from Cronenberg & Co., and one of the finest films of the year. In case it wasn’t already clear, this film comes with a trigger warning for extreme violence.
Host
Director: Rob Savage
Availability: Shudder
No film on this list represents the bizarre zeitgeist of 2020 quite like the Shudder-exclusive Host, not just capturing the enclosed paranoia of a pandemic year but literally being born out of its restrictions. The ability of humans to pull inspiration from constraint is one of our finest traits, not just admirable but at times necessary.
This entire 57-minute film takes place on a Zoom call between six friends under UK lockdown; as a way of making their own fun during a pandemic, they invite a mystic to lead a seance. I think you can see where this is going. Host takes a well-worn premise and updates its format, without ever feeling like a gimmick. The smart execution of its paranormal scares and the conciseness of its scope make it a tense, efficient and downright scary exercise in the horror of modern isolation—and one of the only films I can think of that plays best on a laptop screen with headphones.
Relic
Director: Natalie Erika James
Availability: VOD
The loss of a parent, in whatever form that takes, is a rite of passage—one that can dramatically shift the feeling of our place in the world. Relic is not the first horror film to grapple with the pain and confusion (and yes, horror) that can accompany such an event, but it does so with such grace and confidence that it deserves a spot on every year end list, regardless of genre.
Natalie Erika James directed and co-wrote this family mystery about the deteriorating state of the widow Edna (Robyn Nevin), and its profound impact on her daughter (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter (Bella Heathcote). There are no tricks here: this slow burn drama requires patience and active thoughtfulness, and its violence is mostly emotional. The final tumultuous act reminds me of the terrifying disorientation of Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves, and its elegant metaphor for a fractured mind is resolved not with cheap cynicism but with disarming tenderness, tinged with a deep sorrow for the inevitability of loss.
The Invisible Man
Director: Leigh Whannell
Availability: HBO Max, VOD
The Invisible Man was the last movie I saw in theaters before Covid-19 turned theater-going from inadvisable to actually impossible; thinking about it now makes me realize how much I took for granted. My vague apathy towards another remake of H.G. Wells’ classic sci-fi story thawed as the positive buzz started spreading, and I was delighted to find a powerful and spellbinding thriller that takes the fear and trauma of the #MeToo movement and dramatizes it in a way that is not reductive or ham-fisted.
Elisabeth Moss reminds us yet again that she is one of the hardest-working and most hypnotizing actors working today, and Leigh Whannell (Saw, Upgrade) proves that he can slickly handle a big production film that blends action with sci-fi horror (thematically in his wheelhouse). The choice to focus not directly on the invisible man himself but the victims of his cruel belligerence is a welcome update to a story that we’ve undoubtedly not seen the last of.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Availability: Netflix
Charlie Kaufman’s most recent head trip is one of the few “horror-adjacent films” on this list, and it is categorically messy. It is often terrifying, even as it is whimsical, curious, elusive and inescapably melancholy (the dull ache of existence compounded by loss). In my October Streaming write-up I equated it to a house with impossible geography, one that draws you in and then removes all the exit markers.
It invokes a kind of dream state that explores the peculiar and painfully human experiences of love, death and family, and how we can trust neither memory nor time to protect us from these things. It made me think that we are unable (at least in our present form) to escape the uniqueness of our mortal existence, governed as it is by a sensual interaction that is as impressive as it is fallible. One of the most strange, obstinate and thought-provoking films of the year.
The Platform
Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
Availability: Netflix
This grim Spanish-language thriller capitalized on the early days of quarantine for its impressive streaming numbers, but it has appeared on lists like this one for the relevance and impact of its message.
The Platform depicts an experimental sci-fi prison which hits shuffle on the crucial social hierarchy that governs resource allocation: the titular platform holds enough food for everyone, but there are no restrictions on consumption. As the platform descends, the greed of those at the top means dehumanizing starvation for those below. The socio-political agenda isn’t exactly difficult to parse, but its point is well taken and the plot clings to a hope for human civilization that lives outside the mean and self-serving systems currently in place.
La Llorona
Director: Jayro Bustamente
Availability: Shudder
The legend of La Llorona is most closely associated with Hispanic and Latin American culture, although it bears some resemblance to stories in Greek and Aztec mythology. Jayro Bustamente’s version is just the newest filmic adaptation of the myth (and not even the only one of 2020), the earliest being Ramón Peón’s 1933 film of the same name.
Bustamente spins the legend into a tale of genocide and political injustice, with the murder of a mother’s children coming at the hands of a monstrous Guatemalan leader later absolved of legal responsibility. It’s certainly not the scariest film on this list, as it is driven primarily by feelings of grief and anger. La Llorona is a patient, beautiful and multi-generational haunting that rages against the injustice of psychopathic patriarchy and state-protected murder.
His House
Director: Remi Weekes
Availability: Netflix
What a timely debut for UK filmmaker Remi Weekes.
The film depicts a pair of Sudanese refugees after a harrowing journey across the Mediterranean, placed in London tenement housing under strict probational restrictions. Despite their new setting, the trauma of genocide and violent loss follows them to their new life and manifests in terrifying ways. The gendered pronoun in the title references the divide between the two leads: Rial (Wunmi Mosaku), willing to gaze unflinchingly into the realities of trauma while holding onto the culture of South Sudan. Bol (Sope Dirisu), attempting to culturally assimilate and push the painful past behind him. His House positions itself amidst the xenophobic fears of Brexit-era Britain and tells a beautifully intersectional story about migration, pain, and reconciliation.
Horse Girl
Director: Jeff Baena
Availability: Netflix
Mental illness is a common theme in horror, but the genre has a long history of misrepresenting those who suffer under it as dangerous or pathetic. I personally cannot speak to the accuracy of every representation of mental disease, but I can tell when a story is written with empathy. In this case, Alison Brie is phenomenal in a performance based on her own grandmother’s struggle with depression and paranoid schizophrenia.
Jeff Baena’s genre-hopping dark comedy (executive produced by the Duplass brothers) depicts the sweet but peculiar Sarah unraveling in front of our eyes. This is another horror-adjacent film, but it inspires enough tension and unease to feel at home in the genre. The line between science fiction and mental breakdown becomes horribly and hilariously blurred, and Alison Brie’s fearless commitment to a personal story makes for one of the most memorable performances of the entire year.
The Wolf of Snow Hollow
Director: Jim Cummings
Availability: VOD
This is just Jim Cummings’ second feature film, but he’s been quite busy for the last decade at least, doing everything from editing to on-set photography. Despite the dated and somewhat controversial status of auteur theory, it seems fair to say that The Wolf of Snow Hollow wouldn’t exist if not for the unique vision and effort of Jim Cummings, who wrote, directed, and stars in the lead role.
The plot of this small town mystery sprints along a tightrope between comedy and horror, sometimes flailing but always barreling forward with such confidence and humor as to be undeniably and infectiously entertaining. The emotional drama of its story hinges on the fraught dynamics between parents and children, and how we are all just trying to live the best we can while shouldering the “sins of the fathers” (and trying desperately not to pass them down).
She Dies Tomorrow
Director: Amy Seimetz
Availability: VOD
What would you do if you knew you would die tomorrow? Where would you go? Who would you reach out to? How would you feel about the life you led? She Dies Tomorrow ruminates, quietly and with surprising fey humor, on the answers to these questions, while letting us decide how literal they are.
Writer/director/producer Amy Seimetz used her salary from the 2019 Pet Sematary to fund this strange and darkly funny film, which means that at least one good thing came out of that needless remake. This is probably filed somewhere under the amorphous label of “drama,” and I deliberated on whether or not to include it here. But its tone and theme fit in comfortably with the horror genre, even if its non-traditional storytelling will undoubtedly leave some viewers befuddled. Seimetz & Co. harness the slow motion anxiety of our time and turn it into something beautiful.
Zombie for Sale
Director: Lee Min-jae
Availability: Amazon Prime Video, Shudder, AMC+
Lee Min-jae’s sweet zombie romance was a pleasant comedic surprise discovered during this year’s 31 Days of Horror, my personal October horror marathon which featured a handful of South Korean films. Zombie for Sale (released in the US as The Odd Family: Zombie for Sale) doesn’t shatter any genre conventions but it has a heck of a good time riffing on the already-established rules of the genre, à la Shaun of the Dead, Warm Bodies and Zombieland.
Zombie for Sale continues a trend in South Korean horror that is intensely fascinated with the realities and repercussions of capitalism on modern daily life; the Park family’s instinct to turn a zombie apocalypse into a windfall gain for their family business shows the absurdity of capitalism, and the depths to which it rewires our values and priorities. U
ltimately it is the film’s good-natured sentimentality which keeps the blood pumping through the limbs of a film that finds optimism in the midst of disaster—a vital theme this year more than ever.
#Alive
Director: Cho Il-hyung
Availability: Netflix
If Rob Savage’s Zoom-inspired Host is the representative horror film of 2020, it must share that title with Cho Il-hyung’s pandemic-appropriate #Alive, a decidedly modern argument for the innate value of life and human survival.
A mysterious and apocalyptic outbreak in Seoul forces the remaining survivors to hunker down in their high rise apartments, and the pleasantly clueless Oh Joon-Woo (Yoo Ah-in) must fend for himself until he discovers his neighbor (Park Shin-hye) who is able to help even when divided by distance. This reciprocal compassion and ingenuity, along with the frightful isolation that necessitates it, makes this zombie thriller eminently relatable as the pandemic extends into the new year.
The Beach House
Director: Jeffrey A. Brown
Availability: Shudder
We spend some time in the early part of Brown’s feature debut The Beach House waiting for the other shoe to drop, as a young couple visiting a family beach house are surprised by the presence of old family friends. Early conversations about organic chemistry foreshadow the type of disaster that hangs over the mostly abandoned vacation town, and when things do finally go awry they do it horribly and all at once.
The Beach House makes the most of its modest budget, and like several other films on this list it explicitly reflects anxieties that are very much relevant to modern existence. Fears of climate disaster and biological annihilation fuel the nightmare eco-horror that sweeps across the quiet coastal town, and the truly scary part is that this is looking less and less like fiction.
Underwater
Director: William Eubank
Availability: HBO Max, VOD
While many films on this list reflect on the uniquely modern fears of the 21st century, Underwater (which I wrote about last summer) reaches back to something more elemental—namely, the suffocating dread of the dark unknown and the place that might represent it best: the uncharted ocean floor.
Underwater is not a pioneer of aquatic horror so much as it is a competent and action-packed update on one of my favorite niche subgenres. It combines the cosmic fear of Lovecraft with an inherently unsettling deep sea setting, while infusing honorific allusions to Alien and Alice in Wonderland. Kristen Stewart is quietly badass in a physical leading role, and the grandiose climax should be viewed on the largest screen possible.
Come to Daddy
Director: Ant Timpson
Availability: Amazon Prime Video, VOD
Australian director Ant Timpson has been producing in the industry for years (and presiding over the 48Hours film festival) but this is his first time directing a feature film. Come to Daddy was inspired by the death of Timpson’s own father, and the week-long care-taking of his embalmed corpse.
Elijah Wood plays Norval, an aspiring LA musician with some serious baggage, traveling to the coast of Oregon to reunite with his estranged father (played with relish by a thorny Stephen McHattie). The beautifully rugged remoteness of the setting lends an uncomfortable isolation to their unsteady reunion, and the second half packs some seriously gut-wrenching surprises. The black humor, unpredictable plotting and jarring violence of Timpson’s debut land it on this list.
The Rental
Director: Dave Franco
Availability: VOD
First-time director Dave Franco teamed up with writer/actor Joe Swanberg to pen the script of his directorial debut The Rental, which inverts the home invasion subgenre while playing with the uneasy chemistry of two couples escaping to a beautiful coastal rental for a weekend retreat.
The Rental might not be purposefully anti-capitalist in its subtext, but its rental-gone-wrong premise does rely on the anonymous conveniences of a gig economy that exists in the widening cracks of malfunctioning corporate capitalism. But this is all post-watch analysis; the enjoyment of The Rental lies in the steamy infidelity and inevitable breakdown of its central couples (themes not unfamiliar to co-writer Swanberg) and the pervading mystery of their unknown tormentor.
Swallow
Director: Carlo Mirabella-Davis
Availability: FuboTV, Showtime
The past two years have been the most important of Haley Bennett’s career since she broke out in 2007, and she’s come a long way from Music & Lyrics. Here she plays Hunter, a terminally bored housewife trying to wrestle some small fraction of power back in a prison of domestic languor. This tiny spark of agency finds her in the form of pica, a disorder that causes her to obsessively ingest small household items—her explorative consumption of a thumb tack is one of the most agonizing scenes of 2020.
The film’s greatest flaw is in Mirabella-Davis’ writing, which lacks the complexity of real life; Hunter’s in-laws are so cartoonishly vile as to be basically one dimensional. Thankfully there is enough redemption in the gorgeous art design and Bennett’s affecting performance, and the film’s message is welcome even though it lands a bit ungracefully. Swallow is fundamentally about control, and the empty violence of a sexist consumer dystopia filled with rich assholes.
Bad Hair
Director: Justin Simien
Availability: Hulu
Writer/director Justin Simien (Dear White People) understands that everything in today’s world is political, and for Black women specifically that includes hair. The debate over natural vs relaxed hair has been a point of controversy for a long time, often pushing African American women into a no-win situation—judged for their choice no matter what.
Elle Loraine (Insecure, Dear White People) plays a young VJ at a music entertainment channel in 1989, but an ultimatum threatens her upward trajectory: get a weave or languish in industry obscurity. She gives in, but finds that the cost of accommodation is dangerously (even violently) high. The satirical premise proves yet again horror’s capability as a vehicle for decolonization and cultural awareness, even if its tone and over-the-top third act land it firmly in B-movie absurdity.
VFW
Director: Joe Begos
Availability: Shudder, VOD
The way that I think about VFW has changed since I first saw it, and for all the wrong reasons. Its production company Cinestate has become embroiled in controversy with the arrest of producer Adam Donaghey for sexual assault of a minor, and the story has had profound repercussions for the Dallas film industry and horror culture as a whole. VFW’s place in this type of scandal is not just tangential: it was during production that multiple cast members accused actor Fred Williamson of sexual harassment, and rumors leaked about a toxic and underpaid work environment.
Why am I talking about this instead of the film itself? For one, I already reviewed VFW earlier this year. Secondly, this story dovetails with larger societal conversations regarding #MeToo, the ethical quandary of separating art from artist, and the detrimental “grind culture” that persists in American work culture. Does this mean the film isn’t a bloody good time? No, and I kept it on this list for a reason. VFW is part hangout movie, part gritty siege film, and 100% satisfying as a rough-around-the-edges grindhouse feature. But art as an ideal should not supersede the health of those making it, and the kind of exploitative “macho” environment that exists on many indie sets is problematic. If 2021 brings more of anything, I hope it is justice.
The Dark and the Wicked
Director: Bryan Bertino
Availability: VOD
Writer/director Bryan Bertino amassed a cult following with his 2008 home invasion thriller The Strangers, and we’re beginning to see now a pattern of genre-hopping. 2016’s The Monster was a promising but underdeveloped creature feature, and now we have The Dark and the Wicked, a supernatural drama about the family of a dying man being visited by a sinister presence in rural America.
There’s a thought exercise in horror writing that asks both the writer and the audience to mentally subtract the scary elements of a story and imagine what is left. The point is that the story should still hold up, even without the overt horror sequences. Truthfully there’s not a lot to chew on symbolically when you take away the horror of TDATW, but that doesn’t mean it’s not eerily effective in the moment. The production design is impressive, and it’s one of the most frightening films of the year. Its onerous atmosphere recalls other evil-steeped films like Hereditary, Pyewacket and The Lodge; Bryan Bertino’s arrow is trending up.
We Summon the Darkness
Director: Marc Meyers
Availability: Netflix
This Satanic romp is like cotton candy for the horror fan. Sweet and satisfying, but without the nutritional value of a full meal. The fact that its pleasures feel somewhat fleeting is OK: you don’t want to walk around the state fair with a plate full of vegetables. One of the many lessons of 2020 is a mind’s need for uncomplicated brain candy when the realities of life become too unbearable.
We Summon the Darkness (shot in just 16 days) throws us back to the late ‘80s, and a heavy metal show which takes place against a backdrop of Satanic paranoia and an over-the-top news story about a string of ritualistic murders. A house party following the show upends all of our expectations and marks a delightfully gory descent into murder and hilariously disastrous ritual.