Horror has always been the genre that holds a mirror up to society and dares you not to look away. But something shifted in the last ten years. The cheap jumpscares and slasher retreads gave way to something altogether more unsettling — horror that gets under your skin and stays there. We’re living through a genuine golden age of fear, one where the monsters are often the least scary thing on screen. Here are the ten films that defined horror’s new era.
- Get Out (2017)
Jordan Peele’s debut is the rare horror film that gets funnier and more terrifying the more you think about it. What starts as a disquieting social drama about a Black man meeting his white girlfriend’s family metastasizes into something genuinely nightmarish. The Sunken Place is one of cinema’s great visual metaphors. Peele didn’t just make a horror movie — he made a horror movie that had something to say, loudly.
- Hereditary (2018)
Ari Aster arrived fully formed with this devastating portrait of grief and family trauma masquerading as supernatural horror. Toni Collette gives perhaps the most underrated Oscar-snubbed performance of the decade. The dinner table scene. The attic. The telephone pole. If you’ve seen it, you know. If you haven’t, prepare yourself.
- Midsommar (2019)
What if a horror movie took place entirely in broad daylight? Aster’s follow-up is hypnotic, deeply weird, and perversely beautiful. A grieving woman accompanies her boyfriend and his friends to a midsummer festival in rural Sweden. Things go sideways in the most visually stunning ways imaginable. The floral finale is unforgettable.
- The Witch (2015/wide release 2016)
Robert Eggers reconstructed 17th-century Puritan New England with such authenticity that the horror feels earned from the very first frame. Black Phillip remains one of cinema’s great villains despite barely appearing on screen. This is slow-burn horror at its most patient and most rewarding.
- His House (2020)
Remi Weekes’ Netflix debut is a genuinely brilliant piece of work about South Sudanese refugees haunted — literally and figuratively — by the traumas they fled. It uses horror tropes to explore survivor’s guilt, displacement, and identity in ways mainstream cinema rarely attempts. Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku are extraordinary.
- The Invisible Man (2020)
Leigh Whannell reimagined H.G. Wells’ classic as a film about intimate partner abuse and gaslighting, and the result is one of the most legitimately tense horror films of recent memory. Elisabeth Moss does career-best work. The horror of not knowing where the threat is coming from is deployed brilliantly.
- Nope (2022)
Jordan Peele’s third film is the most ambitious and divisive of the three, a meditation on spectacle, exploitation, and the gaze itself. It’s also just a beautifully strange UFO movie with one of cinema’s great set pieces in the Gordy flashback. It rewards patience and repeated viewings enormously.
- Talk to Me (2022)
The A24-distributed Australian debut from the Philippou brothers is the kind of possession horror that actually feels dangerous. Teenagers use a severed, embalmed hand to make contact with spirits — briefly, until the contact stops being brief. Visceral, emotionally grounded, and genuinely scary.
- Barbarian (2022)
The year 2022 was quietly excellent for horror. Zach Cregger’s debut works partly because of how effectively it weaponises genre expectations. You think you know what kind of film it is in the first act. You don’t. Don’t look up spoilers. Just watch it.
- Pearl (2022)
Ti West and Mia Goth’s prequel to X is a grand guignol character study set in 1918 and shot like a Technicolour melodrama gone horribly wrong. Goth’s performance is legitimately unhinged in the best possible way. The final monologue is the kind of thing that makes you remember why you love movies.
What unites these films is a commitment to horror as a meaningful genre — one that doesn’t just want to make you jump, but wants to make you feel and think. The new guard has inherited a genre and expanded it beyond recognition. Long may they continue to disturb us.
