A24 has a reputation as one of the coolest indie movie “brands” today.
Through dozens of films, they have established themselves as arbiters of good taste, maintaining relationships with their favorite filmmakers while taking big swings on new talent. Younger filmgoers know an A24 movie when they see them; and they go see movies because the studio is behind them. This knowingness, a contract between the studio and the audience, extends to A24’s horror output, which is even more easily identifiable. “It’s an A24 horror movie,” you’ll say. And whoever you’re talking to will know exactly what you mean. Maybe it’s a little folksy, maybe it’s a little techy, but it’ll always be cutting edge and probably deeply disturbing.
With “Bodies Bodies Bodies” hitting theaters this week and the company's first bonafide horror franchise expanding with "X" prequel "Pearl" in September, we figured it would be a good time to rank every A24 horror movie. The results are pretty scary.
23. “Tusk” (2014)
Maybe the most bizarre movie A24 has ever released (which is saying something), “Tusk” hails from writer/director Kevin Smith, who was going through an uneasy horror phase at the time. (Don’t worry, “Clerks III” comes out this year.) Justin Long plays a loudmouth podcaster who travels to Canada to meet a man full of unbelievable stories (the late, great Michael Parks). One thing leads to another and Long gets turned into a walrus. What do you want me to say? It’s called “Tusk.”
Overlong and intoxicated by its own oddness (we haven’t even mentioned an uncredited, unrecognizable Johnny Depp showing up in full Clouseau mode), at the very least “Tusk” looks more like a movie than almost all of Smith’s films (cinematographer James Laxton shot “Moonlight” two years later). Maybe craziest of all was that “Tusk” was the start of a loose, still-unfinished trilogy of horror films for Smith, the follow-up (“Yoga Hosers”) viewed by many as the nadir of his entire career.
22. “Life After Beth” (2014)
Great cast (including Aubrey Plaza, John C. Reilly, Dane DeHaan, Molly Shannon and the last screen appearance from Gary Marshall), a somewhat fun premise (a man’s dead girlfriend comes back from the dead in the early days of a burgeoning apocalypse) and some bursts of extreme gore, aren’t enough to overcome a sensation of been-there, eaten-that. (Keep in mind that “Shaun of the Dead” opened in theaters ten years earlier.) There is some mild fun to be had (it was the directorial debut of Jeff Baena, who co-wrote “I Heart Hackabees”) and any movie under 90 minutes already gets a half-star bump but it ultimately doesn’t add up to much.
21. “The Hole in the Ground” (2019)
Folk horror doesn’t get folksier than “The Hole in the Ground,” an Irish film about a woman named Sarah (Seána Kerslake) who moves to the countryside with her young son, only to discover a mysterious sinkhole in the nearby woods. Of course, that mysterious hole leads to trouble, especially when Sarah starts to believe that her son was replaced with an evil doppelgänger (or changeling if you’d like).
Co-writer/director Lee Cronin lets the dread and doubt mount masterfully and the movie does a great job of making the story feel like some ageless fairy tale that just happens to take place in modern day. The oppressively dreary nature of the story (and the equally dreary visuals) does take its toll, though.
20. “False Positive” (2021)
“Broad City” mastermind Ilana Glazer and “Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday” director John Lee attempt to update “Rosemary’s Baby” occult spookiness for the infertility age. And the results are mixed. Glazer does an admirable job in the lead role as a woman going through the agonizing process of trying to get pregnant and Justin Theroux and Pierce Brosnan are appropriately creepy as her pushy husband and mysterious gynecologist. But the details of the conspiracy are a little fuzzy and too often Lee cuts back to some kind of surreal dream sequence that usually involves Glazer naked and covered in streaks of gooey blood. But to what end? “False Positive” never specifies. It’s still fun but with a slightly sharper script, they could have made something truly contemporary.
19. “Slice” (2018)
Sort of underrated! Writer/director Austin Vesely’s “Slice” takes place in a richly imagined world where ghosts occupy a specific part of town (and still order pizzas), witches conspire behind-the-scenes and werewolves are easy scapegoats when it comes to crimes (like a series of pizza deliverymen murders). The different communities in the fictional town in “Slice” don’t have much subtextual weight (this won’t be mistaken for a Jordan Peele chiller), but it doesn’t really matter when the cast, led by Chance the Rapper, Zazie Beetz and Joe Keery, are clearly having this much fun? (Also, the movie’s bouncy electronic score, co-composed by Ludwig Göransson, genuinely rules.) Adding “Slice” to your horror movie rotation his Halloween isn’t the worst idea.
18. “It Comes At Night” (2017)
Trey Edward Shults is damn near A24 royalty at this point; all three of his features have been distributed by the company (and he’s only 33). The middle film, “It Comes At Night,” is a claustrophobic horror movie about a mysterious virus that is sweeping the world and the family that tries to keep it at bay. (While not explicitly a zombie movie, that is heavily implied. And if you get the virus, you’re killed by those who love you.) Joel Edgerton and Carmen Ejogo play a couple who capture an intruder (played by Christopher Abbott), who claims to be looking for food for his own family. Shults does a great job of establishing and maintaining tension, but the movie is oppressively bleak to the point of near monotony. (Does the end of the world also mean the end of jokes?) Critically acclaimed upon its release, “It Comes At Night” has mostly faded into obscurity in the few years since.
17. “In Fabric” (2018)
Yes, “In Fabric” is “the killer dress movie,” but it’s also so much more than that. British filmmaker Peter Strickland, who is behind some of the most unforgettably odd movies in recent memory (like “Barbarian Sound System” and “The Duke of Burgundy”), takes the basic premise of a haunted dress and turns it into a pseudo-horror anthology, indebted equally to the Amicus package movies, 1970s department stores and pulp magazines. Perched right at the edge of absurdity, the movie is sexy and strange, with a cast of wonderfully game performers (among them Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Gwendoline Christie and Julian Barrett) that populate the heightened world to the point of believability. If the movie had been 20 minutes shorter and slightly more straightforward, this could have been an all-timer. As it stands, it’s easier to appreciate than outright love.
16. “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017)
Some would argue this is a dark fable (or something, it is based on an ancient Greek tragedy “Iphigenia in Aulis” by Euripides) but this is horror through-and-through. It involves a largely unexplained, definitely supernatural curse and mysterious illnesses. Plus a bloody climax. So, yes, horror. Colin Farrell plays a surgeon whose family (including Nicole Kidman and the great young actress Raffey Cassidy from “Tomorrowland”) comes under attack after a strange kid (future Joker Barry Keoghan) shows up at their door. It turns out that the kid’s father was a patient Farrell had let die; in return Farrell has to kill one member of his own family. Otherwise, they’ll all die – first by paralysis and finally after bleeding from the eyes. You know, cheery stuff.
Yorgos Lanthimos shoots Cincinnati and its various homes and hospitals like it’s all a part of the Overlook Hotel, and a pervasive sense of impending doom permeates and punctuates every scene. And like any good horror movie, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” lingers long after it’s over. Try as you might, you just can’t shake it.
15. “Lamb” (2021)
There was much tut-tutting when the trailer for “Lamb” dropped last year; was this A24 releasing a parody of what people thought an A24 horror movie was? Or were they for real? As it turns out, it was the latter. And “Lamb” stands as one of the studios' more underrated scary movies – a meditation on love and loss that is also super creepy. Noomi Rapace plays a woman who discovers, with her husband, a baby with a lamb’s head in their family stable. They instantly accept the strange baby, as it fills the void left behind by their child who died. But of course, more horrific events start to befall the farm as the couple (and the audience) wonder what kind of thing could give birth to the child?
First-time director Valdimar Jóhannsson creates a singular mood that oscillates between earthen beauty and out-and-out terror (the screenplay was co-written by Sjón, the Icelandic poet and novelist who recently co-authored the script for “The Northman”). If you slept on “Lamb,” time to catch up.
14. “The Monster” (2016)
One of the more underrated A24 horror movies, “The Monster” comes courtesy of “The Strangers” writer/director Bryan Bertino, who crafts a sleek, straightforward monster movie that is absolutely brutal in its efficiency and terror. Zoe Kazan, in a role originally earmarked for Elisabeth Moss, is in the process of taking her daughter to her ex-husband’s house. That’s when they hit … something … on a country backroad and spend the rest of the movie running, hiding and generally being absolutely scared to death.
The monster is clever and no-frills, enhanced by its rubbery, man-in-suit aesthetic. But it’s Kazan’s performance, as a mother who just can’t get it together, that is the movie’s most special effect. Kazan crafts a character deeply damaged and just as deeply human; her fight with the otherworldly beast isn’t just a quest for survival, it’s a profound act of redemption.
13. “Men” (2022)
The latest A24 horror film is also one of its most elliptical. Writer/director Alex Garland, who has never met an isolated location, limited cast and supernatural oddity that he hasn’t lovingly embraced, this time sends Jessie Buckley to a remote English manor following the suicide (or was it?) of her longtime boyfriend (Paapa Essiedu from “I May Destroy You”). While at the manor, she starts encountering pushy, perverted or indifferent men, all with the face of British character actor Rory Kinnear. What “Men” is getting at remains damnably opaque (yes, men are terrible, ground Garland has covered before) but it is one of the most visually stunning movies on this list, Buckley and Kinnear are incredible and the movie’s climax, a body-horror blow-out on par with the psychedelic ending of Garland’s grander “Annihilation,” is one of the most puzzling and perverse conclusions to any modern horror film. Go with somebody you don’t mind discussing things with afterwards; you’ll want to grab a slice of (apple?) pie and talk this thing through.
12. “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (2022)
In many ways this is the movie that the new “Scream” should have been – it’s a joyously self-aware slasher/whodunnit and follows a bunch of pretty/vacuous (and pretty vacuous) young people who are trapped in a house, with no power, no lights and no moral compass. Based on a story by Kristen Roupenian (who wrote the infamous New Yorker short story “Cat People”), it is at times almost uncomfortably hip (yes, that’s a new Charli XCX song on the soundtrack) but the deeply committed performances from breakout young stars like Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Myha'la Herrold and Rachel Sennott ground it in a real, occasionally quite frightening place. (Also, we must stan the 95-minute runtime.) The filmmaking is occasionally too messy, even for its John Cassavetes-directs-a-Dimension-movie vibe, but it’s hard not to applaud the movie’s wild, unhinged spirit.
11. “Saint Maud” (2019)
Its release was perpetually screwed up by the pandemic, which is a shame because “Saint Maud” is the real deal. The feature debut of writer/director Rose Glass, “Saint Maud” concerns Katie (Morfydd Clark), a nurse whose relationship with her patient, a former dancer (Jennifer Ehle) becomes more complex and unglued as her relationship with her own Catholicism intensifies as her grasp on reality loosens. The less you know about “Saint Maud” before watching, the better, but Clark gives a truly dazzling performance, one that is both heightened to the point of near-surrealism and also believably naturalistic (to an unsettling degree). By the time “Saint Maud” reaches its brilliant, beautiful, brutal climax, you’ll understand that you are in the hands of a new filmmaking visionary. One that isn’t afraid to scare you witless.
10. “Hereditary” (2018)
Still the most successful A24 movie ever (“Everything Everywhere All at Once” could overtake it soon), Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” is arguably what solidified the company as not just an indie safe haven but a commercially viable genre machine. It also generated the discussion around “elevated horror,” an extremely obnoxious conversation that is somehow still ongoing. “Hereditary,” any way you slice it, is genuinely unnerving, using the psychic trauma of a family dealing with an unexpected loss and turning that trauma into the stuff of nightmares. Toni Collette, in an Oscar-worthy performance that wasn’t even nominated due to the Academy’s longstanding anti-genre bias, plays the matriarch of the family who takes this trauma on most directly (Gabriel Byrne is her husband and Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro are her children). “Hereditary” has one of the most shocking moments in horror cinema (ever), but that’s not what makes the movie so powerful – it’s watching this nice, middle-class American family become catastrophically unglued.
9. “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” (2015)
Only nominally released two years after its debut at the Toronto Film Festival, Osgood Perkins’ meditative, time-shifting chiller concerns the stories of three young women – Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton), who stay at their stuffy Catholic school over winter break, dealing with a possible unforeseen pregnancy and the specter of otherworldly evil; and Joan (Emma Roberts), an escapee from a mental institution who takes a ride with an unsuspecting older couple (Lauren Holly and genre legend James Remar). How these stories intersect is part of the fun of “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” since they do so in such surprising, emotionally resonant ways, but it’s Perkins’ direction that feels like the real revelation (and with his debut feature, no less).
Perkins, the son of “Psycho” icon Anthony Perkins, isn’t afraid of taking his time, building tension and establishing tone in all the pauses and unseen spaces. You can tell that he really cares about the characters and feels bad about putting them all in such doom-laced genre trappings. But he does it anyway. In the years since “The Blackcoat’s Daughters,” Perkins has made a pair of equally wonderful horror films that have gone just as unseen (“I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House” for Netflix and “Gretel & Hansel” for Orion) – time to correct that.
8. “Enemy” (2014)
Before Denis Villeneuve entered the mainstream, he made one last low-budget curio, “Enemy.” And what a curio it is. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a stuffy college professor who, after renting a low budget movie, identifies a man in the film as being his exact double. He tracks down the man and they swap places, with typically disastrous results. Based on the novel “The Double” by José Saramago, Villeneuve doubles down on the weirdness, envisioning a world full of underground sex clubs and skyscraper-sized spiders roaming downtown Toronto, and Gyllenhaal (who had already been cast in Villeneuve’s next film, “Prisoners”) performs beautifully as both the nebbish nobody and the egotistical actor, never veering into camp or self-awareness. And while “Enemy” might not be most obviously a horror film, it’s truly terrifying, with one of the most shocking final shots in cinema history. That’s about all you need to know, since the less you know about “Enemy” beforehand, the better; just let it cast its spell over you.
7. “The Lighthouse” (2019)
For his follow-up to “The Witch” (see below), director Robert Eggers made something even more contained, claustrophobic and crazy. “The Lighthouse” stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as a couple of lighthouse keepers who go mad (the film takes place sometime in the 1890s somewhere on the American East Coast). Filmed in inky black-and-white in a nearly square aspect ratio, with Dafoe and Pattinson speaking in period-appropriate dialogue, “The Lighthouse” veers from laugh-out-loud comedy (including a sequence where Dafoe and Pattinson just say “What?” to each other for 30 seconds) to Lovecraftian horror and back again. The true mastery of Eggers’ stylization and Pattinson and Dafoe’s performances means that these shifts in mood or feeling never feel like tonal whiplash; it’s all of a piece. And that piece is absolutely insane and brilliant and terrifying.
6. “Green Room” (2016)
Not all horrors are unearthly. “Green Room” is weirdly even more prescient than it was in 2016. It’s the story of a group of punk rockers who are playing a gig in a backwater club in the Pacific Northwest. Oh, it should be noted that the club is run by a bunch of neo-Nazis who trap the band and start to systematically slaughter them (this, because they played an anti-fascist song onstage … and then witnessed one of the Nazis murdering someone). “Green Room” is unrelentingly hardcore, as suspenseful as it is bloody, a story of a group of characters trying to survive a night in a single location story that rivals the very best of them. (And, really, unlike some movies with a similar set up, you’re genuinely worried that anybody will make it out alive.)
Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier turns every moment into a little suspense set piece and keeps upping the stakes and adding in complications. One of Anton Yelchin’s very last performances, it’s also one of his best, and he shares great chemistry with Imogen Poots as one of the clubgoers who gets roped into their terror. But it’s Patrick Stewart, grandfatherly Professor X, who plays the leader of the Nazis with a matter-of-fact ferocity that is absolutely chilling. There are many reasons to watch “Green Room.” But to see a performer who has embodied, for so many years on television and in film, as a symbol for regal goodness, so thoroughly corrupted, might be the very best reason to view it (again and again). It’s the rare punk rock movie that actually feels punk rock.
5. “Climax” (2018)
Another movie that should have been a sensation (and it is utterly baffling that it’s not). After years of making beautiful, ponderous movies like “Enter the Void” and the X-rated 3D sex movie “Love,” French provocateur Gaspar Noé made a tight, 96-mintue horror movie with a propulsive narrative that maintained all of his usual visual and thematic flourishes. Supposedly based on a true story, “Climax” follows a Parisian dance troupe (led by the incomparable Sofia Boutella) in 1996 who, after rehearsing in a rural schoolhouse, all drink sangria laced with LSD. The rest of the movie is a hellish descent into chaos, inspired in part by Dario Argento’s witchy “Suspiria” and probably the closest thing to a filmed version of Chuck Palahniuk’s outré novel “Haunted” as we’re ever going to get. As each member of the troupe starts to feel the effects differently, the horror manifests itself in a myriad way – and Noé does not hold back. (It’s one of the rare movies that includes a child’s death. It happens off-screen, but still.)
There’s so much about “Climax” to enjoy, beyond the absolute madness, from the incredible, unbroken dance sequence that starts the film (set to Cerrone’s timeless banger “Supernature”) to cinematographer Benoît Debie’s hallucinogenic camerawork to the flashes of musical score from Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter to the fact that, amidst the carnage, there’s a compelling mystery (which one of the dancers spiked the punch?). Watching on the small screen lessens the impact slightly, but it's still very much worth it. Grab yourself a sangria (that you’ve made yourself), turn up your home theater’s sound system and be transported.
4. “Midsommar” (2019)
A year after A24 unleashed “Hereditary,” they terrorized the world with another Ari Aster horror favorite, one that was even more visually rich and thematically resonant. Originally hired to make a slasher film set at a Scandinavian festival, Aster turned in something much stranger and more extreme. Florence Pugh plays a graduate student who loses her sister and parents in a horrible tragedy and winds up accompanying her dickish boyfriend (Jack Reynor) and his equally dickish buddies to a festival in the Swedish highlands. Once they get there, the students start to get the impression that the community is not as idyllic as it appears – they sacrifice their elders, there’s an inbred kid who serves as their prophet, and is anybody going to talk about the bear in the cage? Much like “Hereditary,” Aster mixes existential dread (he says the script was partially inspired by a difficult break-up) with occult strangeness, and like “Hereditary” he uses a true awe-inspiring lead performance (this time by Pugh) as the movie’s emotional centerpiece. Pugh’s transformation from vulnerable survivor to steely May Queen is truly impressive; you root for her not only because of everything she’s gone through (and because Reynor sucks so much) but unlike every other character in the movie, she’s the only one willing to change.
Sometimes change means learning to say you’re sorry. Other times it means embracing tradition and ascending to the throne of an ancient death cult. Also worth noting that the director’s cut version of the film, available on the A24 website, is a significant improvement over the theatrical cut. At nearly 3 hours long, it adds additional detail and context and is a masterful achievement. As someone who was lukewarm on the theatrical cut, it feels positively revelatory.
3. “Under the Skin” (2014)
There’s just nothing like “Under the Skin.” Jonathan Glazer’s third feature took inspiration from satirical sci-fi horror novel by Michel Faber, but instead of the replicating complex narrative and embroidering the story with elaborate special effects, Glazer stripped it all away. Scarlett Johansson plays an otherworldly visitor in modern day Scotland. She abducts local men, seduces them and eats them. When she consumes them, it is visualized by a blank void, imagery that has been shamelessly ripped off by countless television shows and movies in the years since. (Season 1 of “Stranger Things” borrowed extensively from these sequences.) Everything climaxes in a disturbing, deeply sad finale that is confounding and conversation-starting in equal measure. Watching “Under the Skin” is scary and unnerving but learning about how they made “Under the Skin” makes the entire thing even scarier and more unnerving; much of the movie was captured with hidden cameras, with Johansson giving new meaning to the words “fearless performance” – she was actually picking these guys up, not knowing who they were. (She’s transformative in the role.)
Glazer, an auteur who proved himself in a series of cutting-edge music videos and whose feature film output has been damnably infrequent, has made a heady film that you also feel quite deeply. It’s Kubrickian but with a bottomless pit of sorrow and mournfulness. (Also, Mica Levi’s dissonant electronic score is an all-timer.) “Under the Skin” was one of A24’s very first releases and it helped establish the studio as a company willing to push the envelope. How else are you going to make a movie as singularly brilliant and visionary?
2. “X” (2022)
“X” is a new horror classic. Independent horror filmmaker Ti West, who had previously made films like “The Innkeepers” and “The House of the Devil,” returns to horror filmmaking after a stint in episodic television (and before that a poorly received but still underrated Western), significantly upping his game in the process. The results are genuinely stunning. “X” follows a group of oddball pornographers (among them: Mia Goth, Brittany Snow, Kid Cudi and Martin Henderson) who rent out a barn in an elderly evangelical couple’s Texas to make a dirty movie called “The Farmer’s Daughter.” Soon enough, they are picked off, one by one, in classic slasher movie fashion. What makes “X” different and what gives it an extra dimension that borders on poignancy, is that the killers are the elderly evangelical couple themselves (Goth also plays the old woman, Pearl). What could have just been an excellent exploitation film, riffing on West’s favorite films of the 1970s (and not just the horror movies, either) becomes something much more. You not only understand Pearl’s motivations, her frustration with her body failing her while her mind still races, but you might even root for her. It’s an uncomfortable position to put an audience in, especially one that asks to be delighted by all the bloodshed and nude bodies (both of which are plentiful).
What’s even better is that A24, sensing the potential for a new horror franchise, okayed West to secretly shoot a prequel film, called “Pearl” and set during World War I, which will release soon (our bet is Halloween 2022). Honestly, a whole fleet of films would be welcome, the world of “X” is so rich.
1.“The Witch” (2015)
The alpha and the omega of A24 horror. Robert Eggers’ brilliant period horror film, which follows a group of pilgrims who are cast out their community for being a bit too zealous, finding even more hardships on the edge of the frontier (next to some haunted woods, of course), is beautifully composed, thoughtfully performed and scary as hell. Anya Taylor-Joy, who nobody had ever seen before, is the film’s nucleus, a teenage girl who goes through several hardships (including the mysterious abduction of her infant sibling). She pleads with her parents that she has nothing to do with the strange circumstances befalling he family. They blame her anyway. It’s sort of the ultimate coming-of-age story. Every teenager wants to get rid of their siblings and kill their parents; what if that actually happens to you?
Part of what makes “The Witch” so fun is that it isn’t draped in metaphor or allusion. There really is a witch in the woods. We see her grinding the bones of an infant into a gloopy sludge. This is happening for real. And, of course, at the end of the film we are introduced into one of the most iconic screen villains in horror cinema: Black Philip, the family’s weirdo goat who, improbably, actually is Satan himself. “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” he asks Taylor-Joy. As if there was any doubt. “The Witch” is a movie that rewards repeated viewings, a movie that you just can’t help but luxuriate in. It established Eggers as one of the most exciting filmmakers working today (if you’ve seen “The Nortman” you know that this is still very much true) and, with the movie making more than $40 million on a budget of $4 million, taught A24 that there’s a way of doing arty horror that still appeals to mass audiences. Elevated indeed.
