It has been a hell of a year, huh? Just when we thought we were out of the throes of the pandemic, they pull us back in. Political unrest, social division… sounds like a great recipe for horror movies! If art is a reflection of its time, horror movies stand as a reflection of the dark id of that time, and boy did they ever. Stories of isolation, stories of madness, stories of the evils we visit upon one another, they’re all here. And so, without further ado, let’s count down the Top 10 Horror Movies of 2021!
You can find last year’s list right here.
10. Censor
Anchored by a terrific central performance from Niamh Algar, Censor tells the story of a woman working on the UK’s film board in charge of determining which movies will be labeled video nasties. These movies were deemed too extreme or so lacking in artistic merit, they should be kept from the gentile eyes of proper British citizens. Not only is our heroine, Enid, charged with such a moral responsibility, but she also lives in the wake of her missing sister, lost in the woods so many years ago. When she sees a potential video nasty featuring a girl who looks suspiciously like her missing sister, Enid is sent down a rabbit hole of paranoia and murder. It’s a dense and visually lush movie that pairs its gorgeous visuals with explosions of violence.
9. The Medium
The director of Shutter, Banjong Pisantanakun, returns to the horror genre to reclaim his title as king of Thai horror cinema. A documentary crew is following a woman from a rural village who claims to be a shaman, enabled and inhabited by a spirit who aids her in healing and blessing the people of the town. As we follow our shaman, Nim, we learn of her family discord, of a sister who denied the spirit Nim now traffics with, and of a niece named Ming who may be next in line to be inhabited by this spirit. Only Ming’s behavior suggests that something darker is at work, and perhaps only Nim can save her. Employing a found footage style, Pisantanakun turns the screw slowly at first, but the final minutes of this movie are pure nightmare. It’s mean-spirited, occasionally shocking, and wonderfully scary. On one level, it’s about how the secret sins of a family can destroy it. On another, it’s about scaring the pants of its viewers, and it succeeds at both.
8. The Vigil
The fact that the remake of Firestarter is in the hands of writer-director Keith Thomas has me all kinds of excited to see what he comes up with. After seeing his horror feature debut, The Vigil, Thomas is firmly cemented as a talent to watch. Without an ounce of unnecessary exposition, Thomas portrays the plight of a young man named Yakov, played with subtlety and power by Dave Davis. Yakov struggles after leaving his orthodox Jewish community and is drawn into playing shomer for a family for the financial gain of it. A shomer for the uninitiated (like myself) is someone who stands over the body, reading Psalms and protecting the dead from evil spirits. But there is something waiting for Yakov in the home where he is to stand watch over the body, something that feeds on the pain and guilt he carries with him. Every element of The Vigil works in concert to support its themes of moving beyond the pain of the past and finding healing in the future. It is a confident piece of filmmaking which also manages to harbor some genuine scares. The nature of the demon haunting this house is perfectly aligned with Thomas’ cinematic argument. Much like many films of the past few years, The Vigil stands as a metaphor for the kind of pain we all carry and lets us know that we can be free of it if only we are willing to face it.
7. The Night House
The Night House is a terrific mystery made all the better by Rebecca Hall’s lead performance. Following her husband’s suicide, Beth discovers that the man she married may have been involved in sinister behavior. As she investigates her husband’s secret life, she is plagued by apparent supernatural happenings in the lake house her husband built for them. This is a striking film from David Bruckner, whose anthology Southbound I liked quite a lot, too. To say any more about the plot of the movie would be unfair to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. Suffice to say, it kept me engaged the whole way, and Rebecca Hall is stunning as the grieving, wounded wife. The resolution left me wanting some, but the ride to that conclusion is so good, I don’t fault the conclusion so much. It felt a little obvious in a movie that offers so much nuance. Nonetheless, this look at depression and loss has me excited to see what Bruckner will bring to the Hellraiser remake.
6. PG: Psycho Goreman
While a lot of people went gaga for Steven Kostanski’s recent Carpenter homage The Void, it wasn’t until Psycho Goreman came along that my socks were truly knocked off. I have described it to people as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers on LSD, or maybe an old Super Sentai series on 80s levels of cocaine. No matter how you describe it, Psycho Goreman is a singular vision, a work of imagination, hilarity, and over-the-top nonsense. And, as such, it is very particular. Those who have told me that they simply couldn’t get into the vibe of this movie are just as correct as someone like me, for whom the movie was a minor miracle. It is so specific in its irreverent use of puppets and thoroughly unlikeable characters, it is a movie that almost dares you not to like it. Yet there is an undeniable charm about all of it, and a fantastic creation in Psycho Goreman himself, a vicious ruler of the galaxy forced to serve at the whim of a precocious and selfish pre-teen girl. I love this movie for all its goofiness and gore. While I am sure a sequel would be fun, I hope they never make one and allow this to stand on its own as an odd, misshapen gem. You can read more of my thoughts on this one here.
5. Saint Maud
Here we are, in the top five, and things are getting serious. Saint Maud finally found its U.S. release this year, and it was worth the wait. It’s a small and quiet movie that reveals itself slowly. Superficially, it is the story of Maud, played by the wonderful Morfydd Clark, who is taking over hospice care of a dying dancer, Amanda. Maud is not only interested in caring for the physical needs of her terminal patient, but in saving her soul, as well. As the movie winds insidiously on, we discover the source of Maud’s religious fervor and understand that the wages of grief and guilt are sometimes more than anyone can bear alone. The movie hardly rises above a whisper, save for a few barbs thrown by Amanda, the terrific Jennifer Ehle. And then it explodes. It is a tragic tale and one that plumbs the depths of depression and sorrow and the ways we seek comfort from the loneliness of those awful feelings. You can read more of my thoughts on this one here.
4. Candyman
It’s a tall order to remake a 1990s classic like Candyman, much less to do it with such grace and poignancy. While the original film tackled the ideas of gentrification and classism in its look at race, Nia DaCosta’s new film goes beyond that to ask how long a community can be demonized before it becomes monstrous. It takes a deft hand to examine race in America today without getting didactic, but DaCosta manages to make an elegant statement about how these cycles of violence self-perpetuate, and how we have to take action to stop them before they consume us all. And also, it’s just a damn fine movie. Good scares, some laugh-out-loud moments, good characters given emotional weight by performances from Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Anthony and Teyonah Parris as Brianna. While you might think for a moment the movie is going to ignore what came before, it manages to tie in the original film in a way that feels inevitable and perfect. Sure, you can ignore the politics of the movie and enjoy it as a straight-ahead supernatural tale of vengeance, but why on Earth would you? This is a movie that has something to say, and I believe will be heard for years to come. You can read more of my thoughts on this one here.
3. In the Earth
Ben Wheatley is an interesting guy. He has a penchant for the surreal and the vague, preferring to leave much of the film’s narrative particulars to the individual imagination. His most mainstream horror film to date might be Kill List, but In the Earth is the first movie of his that I fell madly and deeply in love with. A movie that acknowledges COVID-19 only in passing, it is wholly a movie about what happens to us in isolation when the mind is left a little too long on its own. Does that make us more in tune with the divine, or does it simply make us mad as hatters? Add to that the question of whether there really is something out in the woods calling to us, and a dose of science versus folklore, and you get a tangled web of weirdness that culminates in what can only be described as 2001: A Spore Odyssey. Reese Shearsmith continues to be menacing as hell, even while very calmly explaining how it’s your fault that he only cut some of your toes off with an ax on account of all the talking. Am I absolutely certain what the end of this movie means? Nope. But I loved the journey and I love plucking at these webs of narrative and theme to try to suss out more of its meaning. Some things are made to be mysterious, and In the Earth is one of those. Tense and satisfying while never explaining itself as well as some might like – I get those who might toss this one aside as pretentious filmmaking, but I adored every frame of this bizarre concoction.
2. My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell it To
Like Relic, which topped my list last year, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To is a movie all about family. In Relic, it was the horrors of dealing with a family member suffering from dementia, and the horror of that time bomb living in the genes inherited from that family member. Here, the matter at hand is a chronically ill relative, one so sick that your every waking moment is devoted to the care of and worry for that relative. How do you have your own life when your soul is so tethered to a loved one who needs near-constant attention through no fault of their own? What resentments build between brothers and sisters saddled with such care? And how long can it possibly last when that care means doing the unthinkable? These are the questions nested in My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To. While dressed in the trappings of a vampiric tale, the real horror here is how compassion and devotion can rot a family. It’s a short film, but a powerhouse in its brevity. Patrick Fugit and Ingrid Sophie Schram are great as the put-upon siblings, and Owen Campbell will make your heart ache as the sickly Thomas, who desires normalcy amidst the horrors of his existence. I was bowled over by how dense the movie is, a haunting examination of the responsibilities that come along with loving someone who may never be well again. This is a raw and honest movie, and not to be missed.
- Midnight Mass
You might make the argument that Midnight Mass isn’t a movie, it’s a television show, and I would kindly invite you to go suck eggs if that is your position on this one. I think of it as a horror movie in seven parts, a whole piece of entertainment that is deserving of inclusion as a single thing. That out of the way, I believe Midnight Mass is Mike Flanagan’s magnum opus, a work that feels like the best Stephen King novel Stephen King never wrote. The reason it tops the list, however, is the ambition of the project as a whole. Not only is it a sprawling tale of a small town, abandoned by progress and home only to those who stay because of momentum or family or deep roots, it is the finest examination of religion I’ve seen put to film. And not just one religion, or one perspective on religion. It dares ask the question that haunts us all – what happens when we die? And after asking the most fundamental question of existence, the movie then has the audacity to answer it in three different ways! I can call out individual performances, and will note the fine work of Kate Siegel and Hamish Linklater as Erin and Father Paul, respectively, but it is the deft hand of writer and director Mike Flanagan who deserves the greatest praise. It tackles issues of sobriety, and the difficulty in getting and staying sober, the consequences of fate and bad decisions, the weight of aging, and, as mentioned, the role of faith and religion in our lives. It is creepy, if not outright scary, but uses the horror to illuminate a common humanity we share, and a common anxiety. It is simply the finest thing Flanagan has done in a long list of good work, and may be the best thing he’ll ever do, which is fine with me. This stands as a novel painted across the screen, with great characters, a good story, and a satisfying conclusion to a massive tale. With so many balls in the air, there are one or two that might drop, but picking nits can’t undermine the success of this piece of fiction. One of the best things I’ve ever seen, hands down. You can hear me gush more about it here.
And that’ll do it for 2021! Shout-outs to also-rans like Vicious Fun, and The Queen of Black Magic, and The Columnist for narrowly missing this list. Last year was a great one for horror. I eagerly await what’s next. I hope you’ll join me on that strange trip.
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