The best horror movies of the year, ranked by scariness

Dread is foundational to horror, so it’s no surprise that the genre’s slate of movies would be replete with the feeling. But in 2024, horror movies seemed particularly preoccupied with the concept. It’s not that the movies simply featured tense scenes that drew us in with the promise of a scare, or set up future terror with a brief glimpse of a monster. Instead, 2024 was full of movies that bided their time, building tension slowly through their run time only to reveal their truest aim in the closing minutes.

This horror calendar’s impending dread could be ascribed to any number of broader forces swirling in the air from the last few years, be it war, elections, politics more broadly, illness, inflation, or just a good old sense of societal pessimism. But while all these forces may have mingled together to give us the fog of dread that hung over horror in 2024, the real place they seem to have converged is inside us, resulting in a body horror renaissance that was impossible to miss.

Twisted masses of flesh were the result of perversions of life in movies like Exhuma and The Substance, but it was childbirth and pregnancy horror that marked this year most clearly. What more perfect way to illustrate something strange and foreign and unknown encroaching on life than the unwanted pregnancies we saw in The First Omen and Immaculate? Each movie was after something very different in its presentation and story, one a bastardization of science bent to belief and the other a straightforward story of what happens when religion becomes an end instead of a means, but their themes couldn’t have harmonized more perfectly. Add to this the parallel idea we see in Azrael, of an unwilling demon born to a willing host, and we have a tangle of movies distinctly interested in the things that change our bodies but lie beyond our control.

In this way, it seems so perfectly fitting that the year will end with Nosferatu. A second horror masterpiece by director Robert Eggers, this new version of Nosferatu is also about the creeping imminence of an unholy presence that is coming that can’t be stopped. But where so many of the other movies this year hide their monsters, Nosferatu shows us the vampire’s terrible form early enough to let his shadow grow in our minds. Eggers replaces the ambiguity that this year’s other movies have employed so effectively over the nature of what’s to come, with a definitive sense of evil that seeps from everything Nosferatu touches. And rather than a cast that fears his looming presence, Eggers gives us characters who long to feel Nosferatu’s control instead. It is deliberately inescapable, suffocating, and encroaching in a way few movies can be.

It’s impossible to watch Eggers’ film and not feel something old at play inside it. It’s simpler than almost any other horror movie this year, but in that way, it also feels more honest. Each of the movies on this list suggests that evil lurks somewhere in the world, and that what should scare us is how and when that evil will find us. What makes Nosferatu such a perfect finale to this feeling is how well it literalizes it. The movie gives evil teeth and claws, it gives evil a voice that feels like it originates in your skull and emanates out horrible and booming from your own brain, and most importantly, it gives evil servants who praise it and clamor for it. And like all the movies in 2024, it suggests to us that the evil we’re afraid of is coming; it’s just the only movie honest enough to admit that we know the evil by heart before it even arrives.

Below, Polygon has created a list of the best horror movies of the year and given an idea of just how scary they are. The list was created early in the year and updated with releases throughout. This version represents the final and complete list.

Run time: 1h 40m
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Cast: Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman
Where to watch: Max

I Saw the TV Glow follows Owen, a slightly social outcast living in a rundown suburb who one day discovers a TV show called The Pink Opaque. The show draws him into a friendship with an older girl named Maddy, who knows she needs to escape their town if she’s going to have a future at all. The two bond over their love of The Pink Opaque, but as they grow older and life gets stranger, the events of the show seem to be quickly crossing into reality.

But really, I Saw the TV Glow is a movie about loving television. Or more specifically, it’s about the gulf that can arise in your life when the characters you see every day on the screen feel like a truer version of yourself than the one that’s sitting on the couch watching them. It might be the most uniquely haunting movie of the year, which is what earns it a place on this list, crawling under your skin the way The Pink Opaque seeps into the movie’s characters. Despite that, the movie isn’t particularly big on actual scares, and is more interested in the delicate balance between drama and horror than it is in falling too far to either side of that line. —Austen Goslin

Total scariness score: 3/10

Run time: 1h 38m
Director: Bryce McGuire
Cast: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle
Where to watch: Peacock, or for digital purchase on Amazon and Apple TV

Night Swim is a movie about a killer pool, and it’s both better, funnier, and scarier than you might expect. With an fantastically goofy performance by Wyatt Russell as an ex-baseball player moving his family into a new house with an ancient and malevolent wish-granting pool in the backyard, the movie has a very specific tone that snaps back and forth from silly to creepy without a moment’s notice.

Night Swim is for the die-hard horror fans. Not because it’s especially scary (it isn’t) but because its scariness is limited to a few great ideas and specific moments, and otherwise the movie is a self-aware and silly blast. It’s a movie perfectly built for anyone that loves to scroll a streaming service and throw on nice little horror movie at 11:30 p.m. In other words, Night Swim is a pretty good time, but one you might not remember much about a week later. —AG

Total scariness score: 3/10

Run time: 1h 44m
Director: Xavier Gens
Cast: Bérénice Bejo, Nassim Lyes, Léa Léviant
Where to watch: Netflix

Under Paris is way better than a movie about sharks taking over the City of Light has any right to be. If the premise sounds ridiculous to you, good — you’re in the perfect headspace for this movie.

Under Paris, from the team behind 2024 action standout Mayhem!, follows a shark scientist and a member of Paris’ water-based police (I will not verify if this is real or not) as they investigate the possible arrival of a shark in the Seine. Of course, since this is a shark horror movie, the shark doesn’t just show up in Paris; he also immediately starts eating people. From there, things escalate accordingly, leaving more and more people victims to a vicious shark. The attacks themselves aren’t too scary, but they’re plenty bloody and they have enough suspense to keep this horror-thriller exciting, especially when it cuts to underwater shots in the polluted Seine.

Under Paris is a brazenly unserious movie whose principle charm lies in the fact that it refuses to wink at the audience or turn itself into purely a joke. It’s fun and ridiculous, but it isn’t a full-on campy parody in the vein of Piranha movies. Instead, it’s a straight-faced romp through the silliest thing you could possibly imagine, which is a pretty great way to spend an afternoon. —AG

Total scariness score: 4/10

Run time: 1h 39m
Director: Michael Sarnoski
Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff
Where to watch: Paramount Plus

We probably didn’t really need a prequel to the A Quiet Place franchise. So what a surprise when A Quiet Place: Day One turned out to be the best entry in the series so far.

The first two films in John Krasinski’s blockbuster horror series are fine enough for what they are, but they never quite manage the human drama they’re aiming for, and the monsters themselves mostly feel like they shift in and out of existence whenever a jump scare is needed. But Day One, written and directed by Pig’s Michael Sarnoski, tells a genuinely affecting story about human connection in the midst of tragedy that’s too big to comprehend. Sure, the monsters are still a little too convenient, but the brilliant central performance by Lupita Nyong’o adds enough to the series to more than make up for that.

Like the previous movies in the series, Day One is only rated PG-13. That means there’s little to no gore in the movie, and while Sarnoski manages to create a more tension rich atmosphere than Krasinski ever managed, the horror is still largely limited to momentary jump scares, fueled by quick bursts of loud in an otherwise quiet movie. —AG

Total scariness score: 5/10

Run time: 1h 35m
Director: Jason Yu
Cast: Jung Yu-mi, Lee Sun-kyun, Kim Gook-hee
Where to watch: For digital rental or purchase on Apple TV

Now here’s one that will keep you up at night.

In Jason Yu’s feature debut, a newlywed couple (Jung Yu-mi and the late Lee Sun-kyun, in one of his final roles) struggles when one of them suddenly starts sleepwalking, leading to bizarre and increasingly violent behavior. As the pair try to figure out what’s going on, they turn to both scientific and spiritual experts in desperate hope for a solution that can keep their family together and their newborn baby safe from harm.

Yu was an assistant director on Okja and has been mentored by Bong Joon-ho. Like much of director Bong’s work, Sleep is able to combine deft characterization with moments of extreme tension and dark humor for one of the most impressive debuts of the year. —Pete Volk

Total scariness score: 5/10

Run time: 1h 33m
Directors: Cameron Cairnes, Colin Cairnes
Cast: David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss
Where to watch: Shudder

In this terrific faux-documentary, we follow the behind-the-scenes story of a struggling ’70s talk show’s final episode, in which the host and producers attempt to communicate with a demon in a bid for show-saving ratings. Things don’t go well.

What makes Late Night with the Devil work so well is how completely it captures the vibe of its subject matter. Everything from the set to the studio audience is pitch-perfect, and it’s all held together by the desperate host, Jack Delroy, played with nervous energy and Carson-esque charm by the singular David Dastmalchian. Beyond just being an impressive feat, this loving re-creation also gives the movie a true sense of being some kind of illicit live TV broadcast that would thoroughly creep out those unlucky enough to be watching and inspire urban legends for years to come. —AG

Total scariness score: 5/10

Run time: 1h 33m
Director: Steven Kostanski
Cast: Kristy Wordsworth, Colin Cunningham, Rob Schrab
Where to watch: For rent on Prime Video

Admittedly, any horror comedy will have a tough time competing on a scale of scariness, but I would argue Frankie Freako, the latest throwback romp from director Steven Kostanski (Manborg, PG: Psycho Goreman) still delivers on our key metrics.

A love letter to oddities like Ghoulies and Garbage Pail Kids — and the grotesque practical effects that made critter horror come alive in the 1980s and ’90s — Frankie Freako sees three party-hearty imp-like creatures hailing from the alternate dimension known as Freakworld descend upon the home of a buttoned-up yuppie. Though prone to destruction, it soon becomes clear that Frankie and his cohorts hope to improve the life of the conservative bore whose home they’ve invaded (imagine if Hitch was a li’l hobgoblin who loved to guzzle Fart soda), giving Frankie Freako the weirdo pivot it needs to become more than one-note pastiche. Kostanski delivers plenty of other tricks and twists before Frankie’s work is done, and the practical effects required to land all the punchlines are genuinely masterful. —Matt Patches

Total scariness score: 5/10

Run time: 1h 49m
Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Cast: Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Alisha Weir
Where to watch: Prime Video

What comes after is 110 minutes of vampiric antics as the criminals are chased around a giant mansion by a vampire that loves to play with her food. The movie’s script hangs together pretty well, but the biggest key to its success is the stellar, hilarious cast, with Kathryn Newton and Dan Stevens as particular standouts.

Abigail is much funnier than it is scary, but it’s got more than enough gore to make up for that fact and to keep it pretty high on our scariness list. —AG

Total scariness score: 6/10

Run time: 1h 42m
Director: Tilman Singer
Cast: Hunter Schafer, Dan Stevens, Jan Bluthardt
Where to watch: For rent on Prime Video

Nailing strangeness in a horror movie is an art. Everything about the film has to be just right: unsettling in all the perfect ways for the otherworldliness to take full effect. And few movies recently have nailed that alchemy as well as Cuckoo. The movie follows Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) a sullen teenager, forced to move with her dad, stepmom, and their daughter to a remote mountain town run by the obviously sinister Herr König (Dan Stevens).

What’s most immediately unsettling about Cuckoo’s bizarre setting is how utterly out of time it feels. Cars from the 90s and even earlier zip by on tiny mountain roads while characters listen to music on iPhones. Most of the technology in the buildings feels culled from the 70s, but the setting is still unmistakably modern. It all serves to balance the movie’s tone perfectly on the knife’s edge of weirdness so that when the third act arrives it can finally throw you in the deep end.
Cuckoo is far from the scariest or bloodiest horror movie of the year, but it’s got its fair share of scares and a few images that might gross out a more squeamish viewer. But what it lacks in those departments it makes up for in exceedingly cool vibes and good times. It may not be the creepiest movie of the year, but it’s certainly one of the most enjoyable. —AG

Total scariness score: 6/10

Run time: 1h 51m
Directors: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
Cast: Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East
Where to watch: Theaters

Heretic follows two missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, played by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, as they visit the home of a kind-seeming older gentleman played by Hugh Grant. The girls start their usual spiel about Joseph Smith and the church, when it suddenly becomes clear that he might know a whole lot more about the Book of Mormon than they do, and his intentions in inviting them to his home may not be simple curiosity about their faith.

Maybe the most tense movie on this entire list, Heretic finds its scares in the steady calmness of Grant’s unnerving performance, and the absolute terror of his captives. While he grills them about the merits of world religion and the facts or myths behind them, East and Thatcher get progressively more horrified until things really go off the rails, and the movie’s little moments of gore start to arrive. —AG

Total scariness score: 6/10

Run time: 2h 14m
Director: Jang Jae-hyun
Cast: Choi Min-sik, Kim Go-eun, Yoo Hae-jin
Where to watch: Shudder, AMC Plus, or for digital rental or purchase on Apple TV

This supernatural demon-bustin’ movie just barely beat Ma Dong-seok’s The Roundup: Punishment (the latest installment in a series that has consistently been box-office gold) to be the highest-grossing movie in South Korea this year so far.

Exhuma stars Choi Min-sik (Oldboy) as a feng shui master recruited by a shaman (Kim Go-eun, Guardian: The Lonely and Great God) to help relocate a haunted grave. That sets up a showdown between a ragtag group of exorcists and a terrifying demon, a hulking mass of flesh that is equal parts intimidating and gross.
Director Jang Jae-hyun, whose specialty is supernatural movies that focus on the occult, has said he emphasized real props and locations for filming, avoiding not just CG, but building sets whenever possible. That really shows up in the final product, where the movie’s haunted objects really do feel cursed and ancient. —PV

Total scariness score: 7/10

Run time: 1h 29m
Director: Michael Mohan
Cast: Sydney Sweeney, Álvaro Morte, Simona Tabasco
Where to watch: Hulu

Immaculate tells the story of a devout American nun who falls mysteriously pregnant shortly after transferring to a convent in Italy. Her seemingly immaculate conception leads to instant fervor from her fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, but she suspects something much darker than a miracle is at play.

Beautifully shot and led by a fantastic performance from Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney, Immaculate is more creepy and haunting than it is actually scary, but the shower of gore — both pregnancy-related and not — still makes it one of the year’s best and most harrowing horror offerings. —AG

Total scariness score: 7/10

Run time: 45m
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cast: Mutsuo Yoshioka, Seiichi Kohinata, Hana Amano
Where to watch: For rent on Roadstead.io

At only 45 minutes long, and only released as an NFT, horror master Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime could have been nothing more than a strange curiosity. But the Japanese horror master instead created a terrifying, strange little movie that’s right in line with his previous films Cure and Pulse as one of the bleakest movies you’ll ever see.

Chime follows a burnt-out cooking teacher who suddenly gets a new student, a young man who’s only there to block out a deafening sound he can’t get out of his brain. The sound itself seems to be spreading from person to person at random, causing violent outbursts for no reason at all. The movie cleverly never plays the sound for us, but Kurosawa makes sure we feel it anyway. Lights flash, casting long shadows on the characters; faces change almost imperceptibly from passive to a zombie-like malaise to suddenly ferocious with violence with no warning at all.

The movie has a little bit of blood, and certainly some violence, but on the whole it’s more about the kind of scare that’s going to stick with you long after the movie ends than the kind that’s going to terrify you while you’re watching. All of this makes for an absolutely haunting premise that Kurosawa explores right up to the breaking point in this short little masterpiece. —AG

Total scariness score: 7/10

Run time: 2h 21m
Director: Coralie Fargeat
Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Where to watch: Mubi

The Substance follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a TV aerobics mogul who used to be one of the biggest stars in the world, but the network has decided she needs to be replaced by someone younger. At the same time, Elisabeth gets introduced to a product called The Substance, which promises to make her into her best self. After a disgusting and incredible bit of body horror, Elisabeth’s old body lies still on the bathroom floor and Sue (Margaret Qualley) emerges, a younger, more energetic version of Elisabeth. The only catch is that the two versions must swap each week, which turns out to be harder than it sounds.

The Substance is a nightmare dressed as a fairy tale. It’s a gross-out story about the dangers of coveting youth, the horrible way that the entertainment industry’s unreal standards can warp a person’s mind, and a good old-fashioned story about not being too greedy when you have something good. As you might imagine from a movie that’s this focused on a character’s relationship to her body and her age, The Substance is absolutely full of body horror, and some of the most gruesome effects work you’ll see all year. The movie on the whole is a little bit more funny and grotesque than it is terrifying, but the gore more than makes up for that as far as our scale is concerned. —AG

Total scariness score: 7/10

Run time: 2h 13m
Director: Robert Eggers
Cast: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård
Where to watch: In theaters Dec. 25

This is technically the third remake of Nosferatu, but when you consider the fact that F.W. Murnau’s 1922 “original” was already an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this movie’s lineage becomes almost too complicated to catalog. What’s so impressive, then, about this iteration of the story of a vampire from Transylvania isn’t so much how it has updated the story, but rather how much it hasn’t. This Nosferatu feels deeply old, traditional, and scary in ways few modern movies do.

In traditional Robert Eggers (The Northman, The Witch) fashion, Nosferatu is impressively bleak. Its steadfast re-creation of 17th-century Germany is impressive, but it’s the vampire’s castle where the dinginess and emptiness start to reach truly terrifying levels. It’s excellent world-building, but it’s also a kind of environmental horror that few filmmakers have even attempted in recent memory. The buildings themselves seem imbued with menace, glowering at the characters as they pass through their halls, made even more creepy by the jittering elongated shadows that are thrown everywhere by the copious candles Eggers used to light his sets.

All of this makes for a deeply scary movie, but one that’s reserved and constrained enough to never go full horror show. Eggers keeps the gore mostly in the vampiric variety, and aside from a whole heap of tension there aren’t many jump scares to speak of. But none of that distracts from just how elegantly haunting Nosferatu is. —AG

Total scariness score: 7/10

Run time: 2h 7m
Director: Parker Finn
Cast: Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage
Where to watch: Paramount Plus

Smile 2 is better than the original in every single way. It takes the maniacal grin from the original movie, and the curse behind it, but upgrades everything else for the sequel. This movie centers on a pop star (Naomi Scott) who’s turned her life around and is ready to go back on tour after battling through a debilitating drug addiction and car accident. Unfortunately for her, that’s about the time she gets cursed by the grinning demon at the center of the Smile series.

Smile 2 should be the new gold standard for horror movie sequels. Writer-director Parker Finn took the original movie and stripped it to the studs, getting rid of everything but the premise, and rebuilt something bigger, funnier, scarier, and better in its place.

This movie is heavy on both scares and gore, but it’s not quite as severe as the movies at the top of this list. That being said, it’s certainly still not for the faint of heart. —AG

Total scariness score: 8/10

Run time: 1h 34m
Director: Chris Nash
Cast: Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love
Where to watch: Shudder

In a Violent Nature is easily the most unique horror movie of the year, taking a typical “teens in the woods” premise and following it from the killer’s point of view. The movie is light on details of the killer’s backstory, but in a further fun twist, they’re also mostly gleaned from snippets of teen campfire stories the killer overhears.

Surprisingly, for a movie about a supernatural murder monster, this is also one of the most quiet horror movies of the year, cleverly and beautifully passing its time with long, unbroken stretches of its monster just walking through nature, waiting for his next encounter with the teens who disturbed his slumber. Once he gets to them, though, In a Violent Nature transforms into one of the year’s most gruesome movies too, finding new and inventive ways to disembowel people that will make even the most hardened horror vets squirm. —AG

Total scariness score: 8/10

Run time: 1h 26m
Director: E.L. Katz
Cast: Samara Weaving, Vic Carmen Sonne, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett
Where to watch: Shudder

Azrael practically made this list on the strength of its premise alone: Years after an apparent biblical rapture, a young woman (Samara Weaving) attempts to survive after she’s excommunicated from a cult that has taken a vow of silence, believing the sin of speech to be the reason they weren’t saved. But Azrael’s virtues don’t stop there. Rather than merely living up to its plot description, it exceeds it, building one of the most unique horror movies of the year in the process.

As the silent cult might imply, Azrael is a movie almost entirely without dialogue, a fact that it uses to tremendous effect. As it turns out, the world after the rapture is teeming with strange, burnt-looking zombies who come running at the scent of blood and will devour any living creature they can find. Our hero has to hide from them frequently, but their moans being some of the few uttered sounds in the movie creates a haunting effect in the sparse woods of the setting. This is just one of the dozens of examples of Azrael’s excellent technical and production design, each detail of which adds to a fascinating and complete-feeling world.

But for all of the movie’s fantastic world-building, it’s Samara Weaving’s incredible central performance that really sets the film apart. Her wide-eyed expressions and game physicality communicate everything you need to know about her character, and make her one of the year’s most compelling horror movie protagonists, all without having her say a single word.

As far as scariness goes, Azrael is pretty tense throughout, but it’s the few extremely gory scenes that really set it up as one of the most disturbing horror movies of the year so far. —AG

Total scariness score: 8/10

Run time: 1h 59m
Director: Arkasha Stevenson
Cast: Nell Tiger Free, Ralph Ineson, Sonia Braga
Where to watch: Hulu

Considering the disasters some horror sequels and prequels for long-dormant franchises can be, it was awfully tough to believe that a prequel for The Omen could be good, but The First Omen proved its doubters very wrong. This excellent and extremely creepy movie follows Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), a young nun brought to Rome who uncovers a terrifying plot to resurrect the Antichrist.

The First Omen is impressively scary, with dread seeping into every frame of its Catholic conspiracy. Ralph Ineson uses his excellent voice to great effect here as a priest who has been excommunicated after finding out the Church’s secrets, but it’s Free who winds up the standout, as her character slowly spirals as the plot gets thicker and more confounding.

Gory, brutal, and terrifying, The First Omen is already a strong contender for the scariest movie of the year, particularly if pregnancy horror is extra upsetting for you. —AG

Total scariness score: 9/10