To the outside observer it may seem like every single year is called ā€œone of the best years for horror ever,ā€ but Iā€™m going to let you in on a little secret: Itā€™s never a bad year for horror. The entertainment industry damn near runs on scary movies, which are cheap to produce and able to take artistic risks that bigger budget genre films ā€” the ones that have to sell tickets to everybody just to break in ā€” are too timid to even consider. You can always find great horror movies. The trick is knowing where to look.

And that right there is the trick, because smaller movies donā€™t have huge advertising budgets, and they donā€™t drive traffic so publications canā€™t always allocate the resources to cover them. Great horror movies fall through the cracks all the time. Heck, even major theatrical releases donā€™t get their just desserts a lot of the time, vanishing from theaters if theyā€™re not hits right away, and getting a bad reputation just because some critics just didnā€™t get it.

So letā€™s take a moment to look back at the best horror movies that 2024 has already had to offer, that werenā€™t huge hits. They may be obscure, they may just be underrated, but one thingā€™s for sure: They arenā€™t ā€œLonglegs.ā€ You already know about ā€œLonglegsā€ ā€” and probably ā€œImmaculateā€ and ā€œLate Night with the Devil.ā€

Letā€™s give these other scary movies some (digital) ink, shall we?

ā€œAbigailā€

ā€œArcadianā€

ā€œCuckooā€

ā€œThe Devilā€™s Bathā€

ā€œExhumaā€

ā€œThe Front Roomā€

ā€œI Saw the TV Glowā€

ā€œIn a Violent Natureā€

ā€œInfestedā€

ā€œLisa Frankensteinā€

ā€œOddityā€

ā€œRed Roomsā€

ā€œStopmotionā€

ā€œStrange Darlingā€

ā€œUnder Parisā€

  • TyrianMollusk@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    The Demon Disorder has some fun bits, though it requires When Evil Lurks levels of tolerance for nonsensical authorial hand puppeteering. Once you get past that characters just canā€™t do anything that makes sense, itā€™s a trip.

  • TyrianMollusk@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    My partner and I found Beezel better than we were expecting based on reviews, so that was nice.

    Itā€™s Whatā€™s Inside was a lot of fun.

    Aberrance says 2022 or 2024, so maybe itā€™s new somewhere. It was a decent twisty horror attempt from Mongolia, so if you like the off the beaten path, check it out.