Maybe a coming-of-age horror based around a haunting viral video challenge. It captures, perhaps better than any film before it, the unmooring isolation one can feel while living so thoroughly online. Or take Mad God—an experimental and technical marvel executed entirely through stop-motion. (For the kiddos, stop-motion genius Henry Selick also delivered Wendell and Wild.)
Film festivals have also been rife with a diverse array of horrifying options. At Sundance, Goran Stolveski’s You Won’t Be Alone—a sensitive, bloody fable about a body-snatching witch—was among the most poetic entries. On the other end of the spectrum, there was Fresh, a loudly stylized cannibal horror starring Sebastian Stan. Part psychological thriller and part horror, Resurrection—starring Rebecca Hall—is a traumatizing tale about the aftereffects of emotional abuse. And Hatching, another Sundance pick, a gorgeous and gruesome psychological horror from Hanna Bergholm, distills the bile of adolescent fury into an excellently executed creature feature. Carlota Pereda made the brutality of bullying viscerally undeniable in Piggy, and with Watcher, from director Chloe Okuno, star Maika Monroe solidified her reputation as one of this generation’s foremost scream queens.
Then came South by Southwest, where horror entries like Ti West’s X and Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies seemed to dominate (or at least came in second to the stunning Everything Everywhere All at Once). And let us not forget Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal romance, Bones and All, which made its premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
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More exciting than the array of options, however, has been seeing which of these movies actually took off. In many cases, it was the smaller productions that generated the most conversation—films like Smile, a low-budget production that seemed to come out of nowhere and became one of the year’s highest grossing horror films. Terrifier 2, shot on a micro-budget of $250,000, has grossed more than $12 million worldwide. And X, which came preloaded with two planned sequels, has managed to stay in the conversation seemingly in perpetuity, thanks in part to its ambitious sequel, Pearl—shot simultaneously with the original.
With M3GAN on the horizon, and fresh on the heels of an instantly viral trailer (and reportedly already sparking sequel conversations at Universal), it looks like 2023 might just keep us all screaming.
