A guy reeling from a bad breakup moves into a too-good-to-be-true house, unaware that its owners are trying to set him up as a vessel for a demon who won’t leave the property. Hilarity and horror ensue. Full of wonderful character moments, relatable themes, and horror elements that really shine, Emily Hagins’ Sorry About The Demon is the kind of horror-comedy that wins you over right away, then leaves you itching to watch it again once the credits start rolling.

Would The Pope’s Exorcist be half as entertaining if it weren’t for Russell Crowe giving everything he’s got in the title role of the Vatican’s chief demon fighter? We don’t know, but after seeing Overlord director Julius Avery’s latest horror effort, we also don’t care. Crowe makes the film interesting even when it starts to fall into old exorcism movie clichés, and when Avery gets the chance to cut loose and really dig into demon lore, The Pope’s Exorcist positively shines with pulpy energy.

Anthony DiBlasi adapts his own film Last Shift into something both satisfying and terrifying. Named for the cult leader at the heart of its mystery, Malum follows a young police officer who voluntarily takes the final shift at a soon-to-be-closed police station. She’s there to learn more about her father’s violent demise, and the other cops aren’t shy about ribbing her over what he did before he died. But what begins as a layered exploration of past traumas soon kicks into high gear as old monsters resurface and DiBlasi brings the blood.

Set in a Jewish funeral home, Oliver Park’s The Offering begins by teasing out the roots of something ancient and evil, then plunging us into a taut family situation involving an estranged father and son, a new family dynamic, and lots of unresolved issues. It’s all so believably uncomfortable that throwing an ancient demon from Jewish folklore into the mix might seem like overkill, but that’s exactly what The Offering does, and it works. Part family drama, part supernatural folk-horror journey, it’s a grim trip worth taking.

M. Night Shyamalan’s adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s novel The Cabin At The End Of The World launches with a premise you simply can’t resist: What if someone told you to kill a person you love in order to save the entire world? With that meaty question in place, Shyamalan’s Knock At The Cabin becomes an engrossing, tense human drama featuring a great cast led by a heartbreaking Dave Bautista, with wonderful work by Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, and a fierce young Kristen Cui. It might not rank among Shyamalan’s very best, but there’s still enough ambition and earnest fear baked in to make Knock At The Cabin a very watchable journey.

A woman goes out to a deserted coastal cliff every day, studies the same patch of flowers, drops a stone down the same hole, and then returns home. That’s the mesmeric, eerie repetition that forms the backbone of Enys Men, Mark Jenkin’s folk-horror tone poem that paints in darker and darker colors as it goes along. Shot on film and layered with beautiful, heartbreaking images, it’s a film that invites you to look closer and closer with each passing frame, and while you may come away not sure of what you just saw, the film’s dread-inducing vision will insure you also never forget it.

Ari Aster’s third feature is perhaps his most challenging for general audiences, and while it never leans into the more overt horror elements of Hereditary and Midsommar, it’s in that central challenge that Beau Is Afraid finds its core as a scary movie. Starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man beset on all sides by anxiety, Beau Is Afraid is a three-hour panic attack of a movie, a journey to the center of everything that scares and overwhelms a single person, and an exploration of how Beau’s fears mirror our own. You’ll leave the theater deeply uncomfortable, and that’s exactly the point.

There’s Something Wrong With The Children, director Roxanne Benjamin’s twist on the creepy kids subgenre, begins as the story of two couples, one married with kids and one still contemplating making the leap to parenthood. This clash of personalities and ways of life forms the anchor of the narrative, which kicks into high gear when a hike to an old abandoned building brings out something different in both children. What follows is a twisty, brutal journey toward understanding for some characters and death for others. What makes the film especially memorable is how tightly Benjamin focuses on its key themes while never giving away all of its mysteries.

Emily (Midori Francis) is a scared woman on the run from her violent ex-boyfriend. She’s lost her eyeglasses and her cellphone is broken. Sam (Jolene Purdy) is a convenience store clerk halfway across the country who accidentally dials her. When a desperate Emily calls back, Sam finds herself with no choice but to navigate the near-blind Emily through miles of wilderness with few resources and even less time, or the other woman might end up dead. Dark, funny, and edge-of-your-seat tense, Unseen fulfills all of the wonderful potential of its premise, and then some.

Much of Swallowed plays like a straightforward crime thriller. It’s the story of a drug deal gone bad and the consequences for the two young people (Cooper Koch and Jose Colon) who were looking to make some easy money. Where Carter Smith’s film veers into pure horror territory is in the way it unpacks the implications of the deal, the drugs involved, and the sheer bodily terror that comes from what has to happen next. Throw in a towering performance by the legendary Mark Patton and you’ve got one of the year’s most intimate experiences in terror.

Co-written by Scream mastermind Kevin Williamson, Sick emerged early in 2023 as a pandemic-themed horror movie that reminded us of the anxiety of those early lockdown days while never coasting on that feeling to get its story across. The film follows two friends who head to a secluded lake house for quarantine, only to find that they’re not alone, and from there the home invasion thriller vibes take over. Williamson’s slasher gifts are on full display—as are director John Hyams’ action instincts—and the film absolutely flies over the course of its 83-minute runtime. By the end, it brings you right back to those original pandemic fears, having taken you on a brutal journey to get there.

The Ghostface survivors of Scream 2022 return for the next installment, with the entire Radio Silence filmmaking team once again in their corner, and the results are predictably fun and sometimes surprisingly ambitious. Billed as a Ghostface Takes Manhattan-type New York City adventure, Scream VI boasts some of the franchise’s most memorable kills, and builds on the previous installment to deliver a Ghostface unlike any other in the series. We might never recapture the magic of the original Scream, but it’s clear that this franchise still has plenty of stabbing left to do.

Though somewhat more impenetrable than his previous sci-fi horror efforts, there’s no doubting the pure intensity and dread-inducing atmosphere laced all through Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool. Set at a mysterious resort in an unnamed country, the film follows a writer (Alexander Skarsgård) whose encounter with a passionate fan (Mia Goth) sends him down a wormhole of doppelgangers, drugs, sex, and the promise of a transformative experience that could remake him or rip him apart. It’s the most ambitious movie yet from director David Cronenberg’s son, and through that ambition we get some of the most memorable horror imagery of the year.

A young woman with a past named Valeria (Natalia Solián) gets pregnant with her husband, launching what feels like a new era of joy and fulfillment in their lives. But something is shifting within Valeria’s mind, egged on by her family’s comments that she never seemed like the motherly type, something that has her seeing terrible things in the middle of the night. But is it all in her head, or is it the start of something darker? Rich in the cultural, familial, and historical consequences of pregnancy, Michelle Garze Cervera’s Huesera: The Bone Woman is a haunting work of folk-horror that also excels as an intimate piece of character dread.

The overbearing mother is a classic horror villain for a reason, but that particular trope takes a refreshing new spin in Attachment while never losing its potency. Gabriel Bier Gislason’s film follows two young lovers (Josephine Park and Ellie Kendrick) who are forced into a new level of intimacy by a sudden injury. It’s here that one of the women’s mothers (an incredible Sofie Gråbøl) gets involved, and the film starts to peel back layers of secrets and dangers rooted in a very dark corner of Jewish folklore. Come for the horror, stay for the incisive exploration of how codependency shapes and changes us.

The found footage subgenre is so packed with entries at this point that it’s hard to imagine another film that will deliver the kind of absolute terror brought on by the found footage classics. The Outwaters, from writer/director Robbie Banfitch, is one of those movies. The story of four friends who head into the desert to shoot a music video and find something horrifying along the way, it’s a nightmarish, relentless journey that will leave you shaken.

Kyle Edward Ball’s low-budget chiller plays like an experimental film that tinkers with perspective, time, and reality, and in the process becomes one of the scariest movies of the 2020s so far. The story of two children trapped alone in a house with a mysterious entity, Skinamarink keeps building new layers of dread and unpredictable, ominous atmosphere into its bare bones narrative. And the tension keeps climbing and climbing until you’re hiding behind your hands. Skinamarink is an unforgettable meditation on childhood fears that’ll also make sure you never look at a vintage toy telephone the same way again.

We’ve seen killer dolls in movies before, and we’ve seen killer robots in movies before. But right away something felt different about M3GAN. One of the most memed movies of the year even before it hit theaters, this film about an artificially intelligent companion toy and how far she’ll go to “protect” her favorite little girl walked an impressive tonal and narrative tightrope. Simultaneously campy and scary, timely and oddly universal, Akela Cooper’s script is witty, horror-comedy fun, and the entire cast is game for the kind of film M3GAN became: A rewatchable thrill ride with an unforgettable villain.

A rundown apartment building becomes a playground for demonic monsters in Lee Cronin’s take on Sam Raimi’s classic horror mythos, and we reap the benefits. Featuring a cast led by a ferocious Lily Sullivan and Alyssa Sutherland, beautifully executed gore effects, and a conclusion unlike any other Evil Dead film so far, Evil Dead Rise is exactly the kind of horror fun we want at the movies. It’s got a maelstrom of screaming Deadites, cheese graters, and gallons of blood. It’s a viscerally entertaining movie that plays by Evil Dead rules while opening a few new cursed doors of its own.