A quick overview of the high highs and middling disappointments in horror this year.

With the social media app formerly known as Twitter now a shell of its former self, horror fans have been forced to return to Facebook to continue such interminable debates as “What does or doesn’t qualify something as ‘horror’?” “What the hell is ‘elevated horror,’ anyway?” “Are remakes inherently bad?” “Have horror movies gotten too ‘woke’?” “Were we wrong for letting women make horror?”

In a year when both David Gordon Green and M. Night Shyamalan released new movies, the horror discourse was especially spicy, and that’s before we get to the really interesting stories, like the surprise viral success of Skinamarink, which, with the way time seems to be passing nowadays, feels like it was released five years ago. Both indie and mainstream horror made daring choices, not looking to appeal to as broad a range of audiences as possible, and treating the genre as a serious art form, as opposed to just a machine that prints money. But the biggest surprise came in October, with the release of Saw X, the tenth film in a seemingly unkillable franchise, which ended up being one of the best, most coherent entries in the entire series.

Here now are a few highlights from a fresh and exciting year for horror fans:

A pair of very low-fi, baffling movies ended up among the most talked about horror films of the year.

I still don’t know what happens in Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink. On its surface, nothing happens. It’s a little over an hour of static shots of a suburban home in the middle of the night, where two young children are menaced (or so it seems) by a sinister presence we never see. There’s no conflict, and no resolution. There’s barely even any dialogue. It’s all just spooky vibes, as Ball (using his parents’ home as the setting) plays into childhood fears of normally benign things suddenly becoming monstrous in the dark 

There were exactly two reactions to Skinamarink: you either found it deeply creepy in a way you couldn’t quite articulate, or you felt ripped off by someone’s pretentious film school project. Either way, it got a lot of eyes on it, which is more than can be said for a lot of more standard fare this year.

Robbie Banfitch’s The Outwaters is also incomprehensible, but no one can claim that nothing happens in it. In fact, so much happens in it that, like a David Lynch movie, you’re better off just trying not to figure any of it out. Let it wash over you, just like the gallons of blood that wash over the characters in this exceedingly gruesome film about a tiny film crew who travels into the Mojave Desert for a video shoot and…something happens. Not anything good, I can tell you that. Despite its coins-found-in-couch-cushions budget, the sound design in The Outwaters is particularly effective, as a series of thunderous sonic booms in the distance portent the Lovecraftian nightmare that’s about to come.

Comedy-horror hit it big.

Whether it was the classic animal attack horror of Cocaine Bear, the kitschy pleasures of M3GAN, or the three-hour-long existential crisis of Beau is Afraid, movies that merged laughs with cringes all landed well with audiences and critics alike. Both Cocaine Bear and M3GAN were gleefully silly, while making sure to keep their viewers on their toes with gore and memorable kills, such as the sentient doll villain of M3GAN doing a TikTok dance before chasing after a victim with an industrial paper cutter blade.

As for Beau is Afraid, if you’re questioning whether or not it qualifies as horror, perhaps you need an anxiety disorder to appreciate how accurately writer/director Ari Aster depicts the growing visceral terror Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) experiences when he imagines (or not, the movie never makes it entirely clear) his apartment filling with every dreg of society hanging around his neighborhood, all while he scrambles around to find change to pay for a bottle of water. It’s a ludicrous and laugh-out-loud funny moment, while at the same time it makes you squirm in your seat with discomfort.

M. Night Shyamalan is doing just fine.

Like an assassin’s code word, merely mentioning the name M. Night Shyamalan seems to trigger a chorus of exasperated sighs and “Ugh, this guy again.” Which guy? The guy who funds his own projects (which usually make a significant profit), and has a pristine reputation in the film industry? That guy? I’m not entirely sure what it is that people dislike about Shyamalan, or why they continue to point to The Last Airbender (a movie released more than a decade ago) as proof that his earlier success was a fluke.

Nevertheless, his most recent release, Knock at the Cabin, was the first movie to end Avatar: The Way of Water’s three month run at the top of the box office. While Shyamalan’s adaptation softened the bleak ending of the novel it was based on, the end result was still both sinister, and deeply sad, featuring an excellent Dave Bautista as a conflicted, almost tragic villain.

Audiences said “hell yes” to an Evil Dead reboot, and “no, thank you” to a revival of The Exorcist.

In keeping with the unpredictable nature of the film industry this year, which seemed to represent that audiences’ tastes are gradually shifting, while Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise proved to be a huge hit, David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer made barely a blip at the box office, lingering in theaters for only a couple weeks before quietly moving to streaming.

Predominantly it was a matter of quality: Evil Dead Rise leaned into the most gruesome aspects of the beloved franchise, hitting the ground running within the first five minutes and barely giving the audience any time to breathe. The Exorcist: Believer, on the other hand, was exasperatingly by-the-numbers, its solid cast mostly wasted on a lazy, indifferent script.

Undoubtedly, the film’s disappointing performance came as a surprise to both Green and Blumhouse, as horror fans aren’t generally known for being discernible with their tastes. But perhaps that assumption is the problem: as horror continues to cross over into different genres, and opens itself up to different, marginalized perspectives, viewers are expecting more now than just dull winks at legacy films. More effort is required, and with that…

Horror filmmakers are not playing it safe anymore.

Some of the best horror films of the year are among the weirdest, including the previously mentioned Skinamarink, The Outwaters, and Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool. Touched off by 2022’s Terrifier 2, we also saw a return to old-fashioned gore in Evil Dead Rise and Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving. Finally, as illustrated by Argentina’s When Evil Lurks and Australia’s Talk to Me, all expectations of either a happy ending or that children wouldn’t be put in danger are completely off the table.

Much of the horror movies offered in the early 2000s were clearly written by people who didn’t have much love for the genre (let alone its fans), and that cynical low-effort came through in every frame. Now, we’re in an exciting renaissance period, where filmmakers aren’t afraid to take big, reckless swings, to wonderfully nightmarish results.