The number of great horror movies coming out every year just gets bigger and bigger. Ten years ago, compiling a list of great scary movies over a 12-month period would have been nearly impossible. Now, it's hard to decide on a Top 10 ranking in the middle of August. Here are the best horror movies we've seen in 2019 so far, plus a few honorable mentions if you need to scratch that itch even more. These are the 10 Best Horror Movies of 2019 so far.
Disturbing, gory, and gleefully unpretentious, this is trash exploitation horror at its most uninhibited. Your respect for its unrepentant tastelessness will vary, but for horror fans who like their films dark, quick, and nasty, this Netflix offering is a can't-miss.
One of the best films out of Fantasia this year, Harpoon is a modern-day fable about lies, friendship, and betrayal. Three friends take to the sea on a luxury yacht for a fun day out, only for things to turn south real fast. That harpoon the title warns you about comes into play sooner rather than later, and the blood only ramps up from there. Good performances all-round, but Brett Gelman's detached, snarky narration really sells this one.
This moody Irish folk tale neither reinvents the wheel, nor does it offer many shocking twists, but a brilliant performance by Seána Kerslake anchors this grim fairytale. Kerslake is Sarah, whose son Chris one day goes missing in the woods behind their home, then comes back... different than before.
If HBO's Euphoria and Twin Peaks had a baby, it might very well look something like Knives and Skin, which tells the story of a small town reeling over the disappearance of a popular high school girl with inventive storytelling, a great central mystery, and some really well-written characters.
Claire Denis and Robert Pattinson collaborate to make one of the most unique and discomforting space movies since Alien. Pattinson plays Monte, a man raising his infant daughter in a now-abandoned prison ship, haunted by his memories of his former fellow prisoners and the doctor who experimented on them. This one's gonna mess you up.
Jordan Peele follows up his Oscar-winner Get Out with another, more deeply-layered social allegory, which can be viewed from a few different angles . Whichever way you spin it, this is a Peele movie in all the right ways: Scary, funny, and full to the brim of images you won't get out of your mind for weeks.
The first half of this movie is, pretty much, a bunch of French kids dancing and having the time of their lives. Turn off your phone, turn up the volume, and let the joyous choreography intoxicate you before the night slowly morphs into an inescapable nightmare. That's all I'm going to reveal about this one.
This might be the best "night out at the movies" movie we're going to get all year. It's bloody, good, and fun. Bloody good fun, basically.
Has someone checked to make sure Ari Aster is doing ok? In the span of a year and a half, he's gone from being an unknown to basically "the guy" when it comes to psychologically torturous horror movies. Midsommar takes the confidence Aster obviously earned from Hereditary and spins an even more ambitious, less accessible film about grief, trauma, and cruelty, peppered with plenty of vile body horror.
Is it a spoiler to call Bong Joon-ho's Cannes masterpiece a horror? I suppose not, as long as I also establish it's a comedy, a domestic drama, a fable about class and the fallacy of fulfillment, a satire, and a rom-com. Among other things. Like Bong, Parasite does not like to stay in any one lane, and the name fits the way this movie will bury itself inside your head.
Honorable mentions: Starfish, Head Count, Braid, Depraved, The Wind
There's no guilt in this nonstop, bloody pleasure of a film.
