If "meh" was a year...it'd be 2024. Post pandemic, political strife, the lingering effects of the writer and director's strikes, the rise of AI, and the violation of the most sacrosanct American icon -- Mickey Mouse.
While there was a lot of great genre content being churned out in 2024, the highs weren't really high and the lows weren't terrible low. This year sat right in the middle of a rather tepid bell curve.
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While there’s a surprising lack of Rottweilers, The First Omen is chock full of reproductive rights, secularism, mental health, religious repression, and a gang of scares — most of them well deserved. Most importantly, The First Omen is a GREAT horror film that will make even the most hardened horror heart thump.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
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As we’ve said before, pulling off a horror comedy is one of the most precarious feats a director can attempt. The feat is made all the more difficult when it’s done on a micro-budget with limited to no resources. Easter Bloody Easter manages to walk this tight rope with aplomb, while pulling in one of the coolest Black Sabbath horror references since the semi-eponymous Black Sabbath in 1963.
Going back to where it all started, director Lorenzo P. Adams takes some very fun liberties and a poke a the Michael Myers mythos. Make no mistake Halloween '63 is not a comedy, but a bone chilling black and white adaptation of the night where it all began.
While last year’s the Black Phone brought vans fully back into our collective psyche’s focus, vans and their association to serial killers have been around forever. Sometimes the fears are warranted and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes the fears are a highly inflated statistical figment of our imagination and sometimes they’re rooted firmly in…the truth.
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Frogman injects some fresh air into the somewhat stale shaky cam horror sub-genre. A trio of friends go in search of the elusive cryptid, the Frogman of Loveland Colorado, and manage to uncover something sinister. Well drawn characters and properly edited shaky cam standards combine for one of the best found footage films in years.
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
What’s the scariest thing you can include in a horror film? Why the unknown and the unfamiliar, of course. What’s more unknown and unfamiliar than the darkest musical art form, Black Metal? Well, really nothing. That is as scary as music gets.
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
We know them. We love them. They’re little rapscallions, religious zealots, and outcasts. But that’s why we love them! That said, the question is not whether we love them, but rather do we need to go back to the exact same Children of the Corn story 11 times. Really, it’s been 11 times and we’re not even counting the TV series.
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Imagine if Terrance Malik directed a horror film. This isn’t the start of a bad joke with an equally bad punchline. Would it have gore? Chainsaws? Over the top supernatural happenings? Or would it be a somber and contemplative affair? If you know the films of Terrance Malik then you know the answer.
What do we now know? Well, we now know we have a trailer and we have three pretty decent, if not a little odd, posters. The other thing we know is that Pazuzu is back to inhabit the bodies of not one, but two little girls. Take that Regan MacNeil!
★★★ out of ★★★★★
Do weird-looking albino kids give you the chills? What about oddball kids that have been indoctrinated into a religious fervor? What about strange kids set in a 1980s Giallo-esque Spanish village? Well, Tin and Tina has all this and more.
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This is a film that is definitely on the right side of history. It also contains a sharp and laser-focused social commentary around LGBTQ+ justice. T Blockers also puts forth a poignant and editorialized storyline that sadly is undone by a wild lack of focus. Even at an hour and 14 minute run time, and with a varied series of storylines, the film still felt long.
The Scariest Things Podcast had the honor of sitting down with one of the most inventive voices in horror today, Bomani J. Story, to talk about his new film the Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. The film had its premiere at SXSW and the Scariest Things Podcast was there to take it all in!
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
Part hucksterism. Part faux science. Part Unsolved Mysteries. All exploitation. This film is a sad commentary on many levels, but it’s also a fascinating peek into horror history that’s impossible to turn away from.
Do you know everything there is to know about the Boston Strangler? Really?!?! The Boston Strangler is an incredibly complicated tapestry of lies, mistruths, deception, greed, murder, and avarice. Using beautiful early 1960s Boston as its backdrop, this story is the pure embodiment of truth always being weirder than fiction.
To celebrate this year’s most recent take on the Boston Strangler, aptly titled the Boston Strangler, the Scariest Things went back and looked at each and every film adaptation of the Boston Strangler story and ranked ‘em all!
★★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
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Be. Careful. What. You. Wish. For. The most quaint and playful of all the horror tropes is on full display in this masterful piece of body horror. Not your run of the mill body horror either. This is capital “B” body horror that would even make David Cronenberg blush.
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Is it a thriller? A sci-fi abomination? A psychedelic mishmash? A video game? An affront to Toho’s original vision? A horror film? Seriously, what the hell is this? Truth be told, it’s really of all these things crammed together in a gargantuan hodgepodge of CGI lunacy. Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire is a wildly chaotic film with an equally wild plot that makes little to no sense. Scratch that…no sense.
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Films like Scream and its ilk are self-referential in a coy way that employ a major wink of the eye towards the audience. They’re cute and bashful about their oblique references to horror films of the 1970s and 80s. When a film names itself Bad CGI Gator it’s anything but coy, and instead opts for brash aesthetic that screams “I DON’T REALLY CARE WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THE TITLE OF MY FILM!”
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
An exceptionally silly film that breathes some new life into a rather (un)dead horror sub-genre — zombies. As We Know It takes a couple interesting pokes at horror comedy, zombies, and the process of getting to know people that you might really hate.
Cosmic Horror screenwriting legend Dennis Paoli joined Eric Li to discuss his collaborations with Stuart Gordon, Barbara Crampton, and the new film Suitable Flesh. The master storyteller is not surprisingly a real fun interview. Enjoy this special Podcast Extra!
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You know the story. You’ve got the gist of the Catholic Church’s involvement in exorcisms. Little kids probably freak you out. You either terrified of demonic possession or you’re not. Point is, you probably have a well-defined idea of what the Exorcist: Believer is going offer.
It's been 16 long years, but the wait is over! Eli Roth teased us with some exceptional grindhouse glee in 2007 when he cobbled together a faux trailer for Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse.
★★.5 out of ★★★★★
In the latest installment to the cringe-inducing horror sub-genre, Home Invasion Horror, we get a fair-to-midland entry with a little heart. Think Funny Games, but less terror, suspense, and sadism. Just some light torture and some fun cameos.
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Skinamarink with real scares! Found footage follies! The year of Australian horror! Puzzle Box is the complete horror spook show!
If you haven’t been paying attention 2023 really is the year of Australian horror.
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It’s not a sharksploitation film unless someone yells “get out of the water!"
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As uber-auteur Stanley Kubrick once famously opined “Everything has already been done. Every story has been told. Every scene has been shot. It’s our job to do it one better.” Christmas horror has been done. Space alien zombies have been done. Christmas and zombies have been done. Have they been done together under the banner of the worst holiday there is? May be not.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
Influencer is the newest, hottest, and most hyped term of the last several years. Meaning many things to many people, including those that self-identify as influencers. For the rest of us it’s met with derision, disgust, and discounted as a cynical millennial side-hustle. All these things, and more, are modern truisms that we've all unwittingly had to learn about.
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Hard to believe that a 25-page story could be turned into a feature length film, but it has! The Boogeyman, originally released in 1978, was a taut and rather dark affair that explored the most corrupt fears in parenting. Fast forward 45 years and the Boogeyman is back as a full-on fright-fest.
★★★ out of ★★★★★
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Make no mistake, 2023’s Enys Men will fall into the annals of polemic filmmaking. Much like its recent brethren, Skinamarink, this film will have people talking, shouting, and even throwing a couple haymakers. Truly a "love it or hate it" outing at the movies.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
By taping into today’s horrifying zeitgeist, drug addiction, Clay McLeod Chapman give us a terrifying dose of what ails us all. Ghost Eaters is the perfectly flawed mirror image of our collective societal faults. But don’t fret, McLeod Chapman sprinkles in a little bit of hope too!






























