What a great year for the genre. It feels like both the studios and the indies have hit full stride again, and there were a bunch of really original and entertaining horror movies to watch this year. Eric picks his top 10 and had room for probably 10 more that could have made it.
SO. MANY. GREAT. HORROR. FILMS. THIS. YEAR! Really. Our cups runneth over with gallons of blood, guts, and scares. Interestingly, 2022 also had some really awful films. Truly awful. But we're not here to talk about crappy films you don't want to see. Au contraire. We're here to tell YOU about the films that you'll be gabbing about well in to 2024 -- and beyond.
Another year and another dollar! Once again Hollyweird cranked up the hype machine and had us parking our collective butts back in the theaters. What got your butt back in the theater? What got you to risk exposure to another Covid variant? What got you to shell out $14 bones for a mountain of greasy popcorn? The POSTER! That’s what did it.
What's the scariest setting in a horror movie? A graveyard? A dungeon? A basement? Nah. Try gas station. The gas station is a favorite point of conflict in a horror movie. If it shows up in your favorite horror film, you know something really bad is going to happen. Check out our dead list of how awful gas stations really are in horror movies.
It's hard enough being an older actor in the movies. In horror movies, it can be exponentially harder to make an impact, but there is a new and growing trend to feature older performers in horror movies. Is it a change in the movie culture? Is the audience growing older? The truth is probably that Horror films are casting a wider demographic net than ever, and Hollywood may now recognize that audiences who grew up as teens loving their '70s cult films and '80s slasher flicks are now in their 50s and 60s... and we still love our horror!
Best Horror Posters of 2021
We warned you that we’d be back in the theaters in 2021 and we were! The Scariest Things Podcast, spread all across the globe, represented well in theaters far and wide. We were up close and personal for Conjuring III, Halloween Kills, Malignant, Candyman, and many, many others. 
In 2020, the global pandemic gave us an interesting dynamic in film. Stripped down productions. The re-rise of independent horror. Big budget films either shelved, delayed, or cancelled all together. Last year’s horror scene definitely had a peculiar and, well, dystopian quality.  Enter 2021! The big budget films that coldly sat on the shelves for the last year, or in some cases years, or in other cases almost a half century, are now out in the theaters for us all to enjoy. And enjoy them we did! It shouldn’t be a terrible surprise that (often) the more money, time, energy, and talent you ply to your project the better quality you’ll receive in return. Mostly.  Here's some of the best from another spooky year...
Chalk 2021 into the history books! And, every year that I do this, I find it hard to separate my favorite films, and this year was no different. There were really good films from both the festival side and the studio wide release efforts from the past year.
Care to do the Time Warp (again)? We have researched and ranked the rarest of the sub-genre, the oddball unicorn film that is the Horror Musical. Stylized, emotionally amplified, and often bafflingly strange, we have rounded (almost) all of the available horror musical titles we could find and ranked them! Sing for me! Sing my Angel of music!
Giallo is known for many things. The flash of a killer's knife blade. Black gloves. Gordian knot mysteries and plot twists. Sexy women in lurid, compromising, and let's be fair- misogynistic situations. Salacious eye catching posters. Blood. So much blood. And, crazily evocative bordering on non-sensical titles. The Scariest Things dove deep into the Giallo well to find the best titles in the genre.
If you listen to our podcast or read our posts, you are already somebody looking to know more about horror. If you really have an appetite for horror knowledge, check out these documentaries, all of them hugely entertaining. Welcome to the world where all the movies have a colon in the title: Horror Documentaries.
There's obviously no reason to re-hash 2020 and the fact that we haven't physically been to a movie theater -- FOR NEARLY A YEAR! But, sadly, we haven't. We haven't had chance to stare lovingly at the marquee, the pamphlet with the coming features, and most importantly, the poster.
When the great 2020 pandemic got its hooks into the world in April, and the Cinemas across the country were shuttering their doors, I was guessing that we were going to have really slim pickings for great horror films this past year. I'm so happy to be wrong! There were some absolutely fantastic horror films released, but you had to get to most of them via streaming festivals.
Well, that was a year, wasn't it? True life horror didn't need much help, but independent horror came to the rescue. Many of the most anticipated studio productions like A Quiet Place 2, Spiral, Halloween Kills, and Antlers never made it to the big screen this year, but thanks to streaming Festivals, there were some great offerings to be had this year if you knew where to look.
2020 sucked but these films did not! Check out Liz's Top 10 Horror Films of 2020 year end list! Good riddance 2020! Hey 2021, I am ready to get off the couch and back into the theaters!
So many great intentions. This here podcaster was going to smash, crash, and rush to the theater to see all the latest spooky offerings Hollyweird had to offer. I "intended" to give a careful and thoughtful look at Halloween Kills (delayed to 2021), Antebellum (not willing to throw down for its initial asking price), St. Maude (weirdly delayed a bunch of times, but available for streaming overseas), and I'm Thinking of Ending Things (I saw this! But it was pretty so/so). 2020 was far from perfect, but despite all its real-world horrors, it brought a respite in the form of gaggle of scares, shrieks, and ghouls.
Cinematic horror for most its history has been a story almost exclusively told by men. After miniscule progress from 1980 to 2010, the door has opened and a stream of great women directors has been arriving on the horror scene. Partly due to social change, partly due to networking and contacts, but this movement is mostly due to pure talent and merit. These ladies are very good at what they do. And with each success story, another door opens. Here are terrific 30 distaff directors you should know about.
Let's get into the WAY WAY back machine. We're talking back to the dawn of Cinema. For many of our fans, old horror movies mean movies from the 1970s. We'd like you to consider going back a little further. Back to the early ages of the silver screen and give some of these all-time classics a watch. Films you might not be aware of, or ones that you know but haven't actually watched. Don't worry, we were in the same boat as you! No shame in that.
Can music make a film? Break a film? Raise the hairs on the back of your head? Make you curl up in a ball and weep? You bet your bottom dollar! Open you ears and tune in to the ten most evil soundtracks your little ears ever did hear!
"Something's wrong with Cujo, Mom!" I guess you can call that an understatement. Dogs have a proud history in horror movies as both monsters and heroes. Here are some of the most notable pooches in the genre. WOOF!

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