Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: this was a really good year for horror movies. In an industry that often takes an all-or-nothing-at-all approach to film financing, horror remains the little engine that could, and plenty of smaller horror films outperformed both critically and at the box office.
READ MORE: The 25 Best Films of 2022
Then again, that’s a true statement for pretty much every year. What makes 2022 such a fascinating year for horror is the sheer breadth of titles that were released to audiences. This was a year with several standout wide-release films and several high-profile franchise reboots. That, when mixed with an abnormally good collection of independent and low-budget horror, makes this one for the record books.
READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2023
So whether you want to laugh, cry, or just tense yourself up into a little fist and refuse to move for the better part of two hours – well, we’ve got a title for you. With apologies to some of the standout titles that didn’t quite make the final cut, here is our list of the best horror films of 2022. – Matthew Monagle
Follow along with all our Best Of 2022 coverage here.
20. “You Won’t Be Alone”
The knock on Macedonian Australian film director/writer Goran Stolevski’s “You Won’t Be Alone” is that it’s a shameless rip on Terrence Malick movies, even co-opting some of the music used in his films like “The Tree Of Life.” That’s not an unfair criticism; it does feel very Malick-ian, spiritual in nature, poetic, seemingly consumed with the beauty of nature, seemingly sunkissed, bathed in the warmth of the sky that gives us life, etc., etc. But there’s a point to all of it and one of deep, poignant longing. An oblique take on witchcraft, the film is about a little girl in the early 19th century who is turned into a shapeshifter by a witch, then abandoned—a grand curse on her life. She is played in various forms by Sara Klimoska, Anamaria Marinca, Alice Englert, Félix Maritaud, Carloto Cotta, and Noomi Rapace, but by every measure, is some form of scared, lonely, exiled, and outcast. As she learns about love, loss, and humanity, the witch —seemingly ever-present and jealous of her growing empathy—taunts her and threatens to expose her whenever she finds fleeting moments of connection and happiness. You can certainly argue it takes all its cues from Malick’s form, but its wicked horror vs. existential beauty struggle is fascinating and full of tender compassion, asking the question, can even the most disfigured, forgotten, and discarded monsters of the world also find and understand love? This horror subversion of it all is profoundly transcendent in a way that would make Malick proud, tbh. – Rodrigo Perez
(Read Robert Daniels’ review of “You Won’t Be Alone” here)
19. “Bodies Bodies Bodies”
Of all the horror films of 2022, the discourse around “Bodies Bodies Bodies” might be the most confusing. At its core, the film is a delightful modernization of classic locked-room thrillers, with a group of strangers navigating betrayals and murders when the lights go down. But to hear the hype, you would think that “Bodies Bodies Bodies” was bending over backward to label itself the ultimate Gen Z horror film. Since the film is based on a script by Kristen Roupenian — author of the much-discussed “Cat Person” short story published in “The New Yorker” — it is easy to go into the film with clear expectations. But while the characters may speak in the half-friendly, half-cruel manner familiar to teenage coming-of-age films, much of what happens in the film is actually quite conventional. In the best possible way. Secret resentments bubble to the surface with little provocation. Characters turn on each other on a dime. There are gunshots and stabbings, and much of the cast of “Bodies Bodies Bodies”— spoiler alert — does not make it out alive. Halina Reijn has made an Agatha Christie novel for the twentysomething crowd, and the sooner we recognize how damn fun that entire sendup is, the better off we’ll all be. – Matthew Monagle
(Read Marya E. Gates’s review of “Bodies Bodies Bodies” here)
18. “Hatching”
A Finnish psychological body horror film directed by Hanna Bergholm and debuted earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, “Hatching” is wild and grotesque but filled with little emotional micro-traumas. The film centers on Tinja, an innocent 12-year-old girl who is desperate to please her image-obsessed mother, who is cheating on her dad but presents a superficial image of the perfect family on her blog. The little girl finds an egg one day, nurtures it, and it hatches and grows into her doppelgänger. But it’s basically the cursed version of Tinja, evil and representing all of the little girl’s repressed emotions of anger, resentment, bitterness, and fury at her mother. Soon, what was briefly a fun little secret between Tinja and her double becomes a living nightmare, gruesome, gross, and kind of awesome in the way it acts as an entertaining skewering of familial narcissism (it’s not without a dark sense of humor). That might also be the joy of “Hatching,” how it makes us delight in horrific revenge on the shallow and vacuous. – RP
(Read Robert Daniels’ review of “Hatching” here).
17. “Crimes of The Future”
Some may argue that David Cronenberg’s body horror thriller “Crimes Of The Future” is not much of a traditional horror film, but maybe that’s why we like it. Creepy, unnerving, and subversively funny, Cronenberg’s latest oddity is set in a future where humanity is evolving, and people adapt to a synthetic environment with new organs, transformations, and mutations that are changing the nature of the human body. This trend, unsanctioned and illegal, is exploited by celebrity performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) as they publicly showcase the metamorphosis of his organs in underground avant-garde performances. Investigators in the National Organ Registry (represented by Don McKellar and Kristen Stewart, in what can only be described as the best anxious insect performance of 2022) start sniffing around, and the tensions of their artistic endeavors (that have a clandestine side nature for Tenser) clash. More important than the plot, of course, is the “erotic violence and violent eroticism” of it all that Charles Bramesco so eloquently put in our review. While Cronenberg is interested in exploring how the human form can advance, he’s also interested in the unsettling, unnatural intersectional collision of sex, evolution, art, humanity, technology, and eroticism. Can these things, mashed together, create an ungodly, unholy, monstrous thing of beauty in the next age of society? In Cronenberg’s hands, it sure can.
(Read Charles Bramesco’s review of “Crimes Of The Future” here)
16. “Smile”
Two horror films broke $100 million at the box office in 2022. The first was “Nope,” but the second was “Smile,” the horror film by director Parker Finn. The story of a young therapist who is “gifted” with an unwelcome spirit that may lead to her death, “Smile” draws on horror as wide-ranging as “The Ring” and “It Follows.” Finn’s willingness to straddle the worlds of arthouse and multiplex horror is what makes it such an interesting debut. Fans of films like “Hereditary” will appreciate the explorations of trauma and violence on screen. Those who prefer a good, old-fashioned monster movie will find a few tendrils of DNA connected “Smile” to early-2000s horror movies — only of an infinitely higher quality. What fascinates about “Smile” is how it inverts the standard formula for trauma-informed horror films. Granted, its own treatment of mental illness can often be clumsy – some writers have called it out for some of its more frustrating missteps – but many films about grief begin in a place of happiness and unravel from there. For “Smile,” there never was healing, and the actions each character takes are a testament to the utter failure of their safety net – MM
(Read Nick Allen’s review of “Smile” here)