Adam Wingard
This Tennessee-born filmmaker, who has consistently partnered with screenwriter Simon Barrett, has more mainstream leanings than some of his cohort, but there’s a grimy, mean edge to his work that sets him apart from studio toilers. His features conjoin impulses from Sam Raimi and Tobe Hooper, and Wingard attracts more recognizable talent with each new project. The director’s career also highlights the uneasy relationship between art-house horror and the mainstream film business, as “You’re Next” fell into a slow distribution plan after being acquired by Lionsgate. A brutal, vivid home-invasion thriller oriented around a compelling lead performance from Sharni Vinson, “You’re Next” builds on the promise of Wingard’s early work (such as feature “A Horrible Way to Die“) and positioned his work with Barrett at the forefront of the independent horror scene. Early word suggests that Wingard’s new film “The Woods” is a deeply disturbing take on the “lost in the forest” horror trope, and he’s set to direct the manga adaptation “Death Note” for Netflix.
Babak Anvari
The debut feature from Anvari, the freshest face on this list, hasn’t yet been widely seen —“Under The Shadow” was snapped up by Netflix after picking up “Babadook”-sized buzz at Sundance this year, and the streaming giant will release it later this year. But if you’ve seen the film, you know that Anvari is going places. Born in Iran but based in the U.K., Anvari was BAFTA nominated in 2012 for his short film “Two & Two,” and he draws on both his heritage and the that film’s allegorical power for “Under The Shadow,” about a young woman and her son being tormented by a djinn during the Iran/Iraq war of the early 1980s. Influenced by Roman Polanski and leaving what our review called “a lingering aftertaste,” the film was arguably the buzziest genre breakout of this year’s Sundance, showing a filmmaker with a commanding skill set. Big things should be coming for Anvari as a result: along with the Netflix release, there’s an English-language remake of the “Under The Shadow” coming, as well as a new original movie, and that’s even before Hollywood comes calling.
Justin Benson & Aaron Scott Moorhead
It went woefully underseen in theaters, but Benson and Moorhead’s “Spring” is one of the most interesting of this most recent wave of horror, and it thoroughly cements the pair as bright new voices in the genre. They met while working as interns at RSA, Ridley Scott’s commercials company, and within a few years had made their micro-budget debut “Resolution,” a clever, resourceful meta-horror that won fans when it premiered at Tribeca in 2012. Two years later, “Spring” hit Toronto, and it built on everything that was good about the preceding film: an absolute reluctance to be boxed into a genre, a character-first approach and a level of ambition that’s rare among filmmakers on this scale. Starring Lou Taylor Pucci as an American man on holiday in Italy who falls for a local (Nadia Hilker) who happens to secretly be a thousand-year monster, it’s a soulful, atmospheric, beautifully made picture that never quite goes where you’re expecting it to go. If their next project —potentially a biopic of legendary British occultist Aleister Crowley— shows the kind of improvement that transpired between their first and second features, they’ll be unstoppable.
Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala
Making waves in both genre and arthouse circles since premiering at Venice in 2014, “Goodnight Mommy” proved to be a rare foreign-language horror to make a real splash in the U.S., setting its directors up for an unlikely studio debut. Though they’ve known each other for nearly two decades (Fiala would babysit Franz’s children when he was a film student), the Austrian pair only worked together for the first time on 2012’s “Kern,” a documentary about an Austrian actor-director. They made their fiction feature debut with the chilling “Goodnight Mommy,” about two young boys who aren’t sure if their bandaged mother is the same after she returns home from plastic surgery. Comparisons to fellow Austrians Michael Haneke and Franz’s husband Ulrich Seidl have abounded, but Fiala and Franz have their own thing going on, pulling off a tricky narrative twist while keeping your nerves thoroughly jangled throughout. Their ambitions are clearly larger than sticking to the Euro-arthouse circuit: they’ll next direct horror “The Fortress” for Universal; the movie that should be a significant step up in scope and scale.