12 Horror Films That Prove We're In A New Golden Age of Horror
A Screen Reflections Halloween Special
Earlier this year, while walking out of a theatre and into the midnight darkness of New York City, it dawned on me that horror fans have been eating well. So well, in fact, that it must mean we’re somewhere at or near the peak of a new golden age of the genre.
Nothing will likely touch the definitive, auteur-driven golden era of horror that was the 70s and early 80s. I mean, we’re talking The Exorcist (1973), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Jaws (1975), Halloween (1975), Alien (1979), The Shining (1980), The Thing (1982). As high as that bar is, it feels like we’re in new, unchartered, psychologically terrifying territory of the so-called elevated or arthouse horror.
Perhaps this new era doesn’t externalise the fears as well as those iconic 70s and 80s films, but it does tap into something bending inward in all of us in a far more visceral way. The best of them are cracked mirrors in some shape or form, reflecting our deepest, darkest anxieties, insecurities and traumas. Our own moral and mental demons, wrestling in perpetual struggle, come to life through the power of story.
Asking when an age starts is like asking how long a piece of string is, but hindsight is 20/20 and mine tells me this one begins in 2014. To celebrate this modern golden age of horror, in honour of Halloween, I’ve selected one film from each year since that beginning, up to and including 2025, that best reflect our collective psyche in this modern, anxiety-riddled, age.
Of course, 12 films are only 12 films and cannot, by themselves, define an entire era. That’s why there are honourable mentions of films that are worthy of being in the conversation, and add some shine to the gold.
1. The Babadook (2014) - dir. Jennifer Kent
Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook gets first dibs. I still recall the waves it made when it premiered, 11 years ago. A masterpiece horror film that deserved a Best Picture nomination and a Best Actress win for Essie Davies, who delivers one of the genre’s greatest ever performances as Amelia, a widow crushed by the weight of being a single mom and dealing with a difficult kid (Noah Wiseman, also excellent).
Themes of depression, unprocessed loss and motherhood are beautifully baked into an otherwise frightening film, with blood-curdling moments of the creature that lurks in the shadows. The Babadook is a modern classic that stands the test of time as the genesis of this new golden age of artistic horror.
Honourable Horrors from 2014: It Follows, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
2. The Witch (2015) - dir. Robert Eggers
Robert Eggers announced himself to the world with The Witch, a horror film that uses the myth of religious hysteria to explore the fears people have of God, of nature and even womanhood itself. Set on the edge of a puritan wilderness, the film follows a family exiled from their colony and undone by their own faith. Their crops rot, their baby vanishes, and paranoia starts to slowly creep in. Anya Taylor-Joy, in her breakout role, is extraordinary as Thomasin, the teenage girl blamed for it all and declared a witch.
Eggers became an instant director-to-watch with the way he obsessively recreated 17th-century New England. His use of elemental cinema, the silence, the candlelight, the repressed atmosphere, all build up towards an unsettling sense of liberation.
Honourable Horrors from 2015: Crimson Peak, The Gift, The Visit
3. The Wailing (2016) - dir. Na Hong-jin
Religion, folklore, disease and paranoia are the centrifugal forces in Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing, a masterpiece that’s like a juggernaut of cinematic delights. What starts off as a small-town murder mystery, with a police officer investigating a string of bizarre deaths in a remote Korean village, ends as a full-blown spiritual war zone, filled with superstition, shamanism, and biblical dread. The horror sinks its teeth in slowly and, before you know it, you’re already way passed the first circle of hell. Jun Kunimura’s nameless Japanese man has haunted me ever since I saw this film when it premiered at Cannes.
It’s the ambiguity that makes The Wailing so unnerving; there has rarely been a film that uses morbid curiosity to its advantage as well as this one.
Honourable Horrors from 2016: Raw, Don’t Breathe, Train to Busan, Terrifier
4. mother! (2017) - dir. Darren Aronofsky
Some films were destined to be misunderstood upon their initial release, only to thrive on re-examination as they mould their way into cult status. Darren Aronofsky’s mother! - an allegorical nightmare about the corruption of Mother Nature by a narcissistic Artist/God, with a brilliant cast led by a towering Jennifer Lawrence - is a claustrophobic fever dream that will leave you gasping for air by the end.
It’s experimental, it’s visionary, and it’s certifiably fucking insane. It also holds up really well as a mirror to our anxieties and polluting ways, better than the critical darling Get Out, which cleverly uses racism to tap into the Zeitgeist but isn’t as cinematically bold and impressive.
Honourable Horrors from 2017: Get Out, It Comes At Night, It, The Killing of a Sacred Deer
5. Hereditary (2018) - dir. Ari Aster
Ari Aster is, like Eggers, an essential new voice for the golden age of horror. His debut Hereditary is, scream for scream, the scariest film on this list and maybe even the scariest of the century. It’s disguised as a family drama, but very quickly descends into shock, horror and pagan madness, with the domestic space - family home, the dinner table, bonds between mother and child and wife and husband - all twisted into a demonic knot. A tragic scene that happens fairly early in the film, let’s call it a road accident, is one of the most heart-stopping shocking moments I’ve ever seen on film.
Toni Collette gives a career-defining performance as Annie Graham (another running theme in this golden age: insanely strong lead female performances) a woman who resists, and ultimately succumbs, to madness. Aster directs his feature film like a veteran who’s been at it for years; redefining fright and tapping into the psychology of trauma and guilt unlike anything before it or after.
Honourable Horrors from 2018: A Quiet Place, Mandy, Upgrade, The Nightingale, The House That Jack Built
6. Doctor Sleep (2019) - dir. Mike Flanagan
2019 was one of the best years for the genre in the past decade, with Aster, Eggers and Jordan Peele all releasing excellent golden-age-worthy horror films, but it’s Mike Flanagan’s overlooked Doctor Sleep that gets the honours here. More precisely, the 3-hour Director’s Cut version of this direct sequel to The Shining, which flies by as a labor of love that doubles as faithful to the spirit of its horror-master Stephen King’s source material, and spine-tingling homage to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece. It hits all the right notes, from True Blood-style camp to genuine, psychologically deep chills. I’m convinced that the bathroom lady is still one of the most frighting images every put on screen.
Ewan McGregor is perfect as the adult, traumatised Danny Torrence, as is Rebecca Ferguson as the film’s charismatic villanelle, but it’s the Overlook Hotel that ends up being the MVP. Again.
Honourable Horrors from 2019: Midsommar, Us, The Lighthouse, Saint Maud
7. The Night House (2020) dir. David Bruckner
Grief is the canvass used to paint the horror that unfolds, from the point of view of Beth (a transcendent Rebecca Hall) who is looking for answers about her dead husband. David Bruckner’s The Night House is a ghost story unlike any other, with an ingenious approach to how interior space can be used to create the sense of another presence. What makes the whole affair especially unsettling is Beth’s unravelling realisation that she didn’t really know the one person she thought she knew the most. Piecing her husband’s secret life after his death, wading through nightmares and some seriously bone-chilling moments that live in the in-between world of reality and dark imagination, she confronts the void of the afterlife head on.
Incidentally, for a film that premiered at Sundance in 2020, and was delayed for a whole year due to COVID, The Night House also perfectly captures the psychological milieu of early pandemic uncertainty and isolation.
Honourable Horrors from 2020: Possessor, The Dark and the Wicked, His House, The Wolf of Snow Hollow
8. The Innocents (2021) dir. Eskil Vogt
Children are a big theme in this new golden age of horror, and the biggest in Eskil Vogt’s The Innocents, a film about the horrors that lurk when adults aren’t around. Vogt brings his dramatic writing sensibilities from his collaborations with Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value) to full effect here, and puts the kids centre stage in a chilling tale about that prepubescent gap where impulse and reason get blurred, and where empathy and morality still hasn’t quite developed in little boys as it has in little girls. All wrapped around a brilliant twist on the otherwise grossly overused concept of superpowers.
Ben (Sam Ashraf) is one of the scariest villains on this list and he’s only 9, while little Ida’s (Rakel Lenora Petersen Fløttum) character arc is a visceral rollercoaster for any parent. Titane shockingly won the Palme D’Or in 2021, marking a new milestone for the genre, but that film is a pretentious mess that will only go down as one of the worst Cannes winners of all time. The Innocents, on the other hand, is timeless.
Honourable Horrors from 2021: Lamb, The Medium, The Black Phone, Malignant
9. Speak No Evil (2022) dir. Christian Tafdrup
The horrors of complacency, of “going with the flow”, of ignoring blood-red flags, of parental powerlessness. That is the meat of Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil, a film that gradually crawls under your skin, burrows deep into your bone marrow, and in its final 15 minutes, squeezes the essence out of your sharking core. A horror film so good, Hollywood instantly remade it, releasing its own version a few years later. Stick with the original on this one.
What starts off as an innocent invitation to a country house turns into an unspeakable nightmare. It’s impossible not to feel for Bjorn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), as the nice Danish couple try to navigate their way through the unpleasantness of their strange Dutch hosts Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders). Tafdrup turns the banalities of the everyday into ingredients of one of the most unsettling horrors I have ever seen.
Honourable Horrors from 2022: Barbarian, Smile, Talk To Me, Enys Men, X, Pearl, Crimes of the Future, Terrifier 2
10. Late Night with the Devil (2023) dir. Cameron and Colin Cairnes
Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ Late Night with the Devil is where The Exorcist meets Network (1976), an unlikely pairing that’s as inventive in execution as it is on paper. A deliciously clever blend of found footage and talk show reality TV, the film playfully toys with nostalgia as it recalls that defining age of horror, the 1970s. Desperate TV host Jack Delroy (a superb David Dastmalchian) takes desperate measures for his late-night broadcast, and welcomes the literal devil onto the stage, in the form of an innocent, but possessed, young girl. The warm hues and lights of broadcast TV create the most demented setting for the evil that emerges, which is scary as fuck all the way through to the absolutely brutal ending.
The film works as both a satire about the media industry’s obsession with sensationalism (how topical!) and a meta examination of our own inability to unglue ourselves from the screen, the soul sucker that possesses us all.
Honourable Horrors from 2023: Infinity Pool, Scream VI, Evil Dead Rise, Beau is Afraid,
11. Longlegs (2024)
Osgood Perkins' Longlegs is the stuff nightmares are made of, giving Hereditary a run for its money in the scare department. It features on my Best-of-2024 list at No. 11 and, together with the previous entry and the next one, solidified my opinion that we are witnessing an absolute tear in terms of elevated horror films.
As a spiritual cousin to The Wailing, this also begins as a detective story that quickly spirals into a biblical abyss of evil, where the mystery keeps tearing down all logical barriers and keeps you guessing until the final frames. Nicolas Cage got his make up done in Hell for this role, he is unrecognisable and so unfathomably chilling as the killer being chased by Maika Monroe’s FBI agent.
Perkins joins the ranks of Eggers, Aster and Kent as a fresh new voice for the horror genre that demands our attention. Longlegs redefines existential dread, as all mental faculties of an analytical mind are torn to shreds.
Honourable Horrors from 2024: The Substance, Nosferatu, Oddity, Smile 2, Terrifier 3
12. Weapons (2025)
Zach Cregger’s Weapons, the follow up to his brilliant Barbarian which was very close to making the cut for 2022, cements the idea that we are experiencing the peak of a new golden age of elevated horror. As I walked out of the theatre, still shaking from a mixture of ecstasy and fright after what I had just witnessed, I wondered if I had ever seen anything like this. A story told from multiple perspectives, balancing dark humour, jump-scare horror and psychological nightmare in such a sophisticated, compelling way. It features incredible performances from the entire ensemble but especially Amy Madigan, whose career has been deservedly reignited thanks to her Oscar-worthy portrayal of Aunt Gladys.
Not to mention the story itself - a whole classroom of kids mysteriously disappearing in the middle of the night, leaving the powerless adults to figure it all out by themselves. The film taps into a real 21st century fear of our society today - what happens when our kids get weaponised by some foreign evil entity we can’t even begin to understand.
The cherry on the cake is that Weapons is one of the biggest financial success stories of 2025. A film that has grossed $268 million on a $38 million budget at a time when so many other big movies led by A-list stars are struggling in theatres. The other big financial success story of the year? Ryan Coogler’s excellent Sinners, another horror film.
Here’s hoping this golden age of horror keeps on shining.
Honourable Horrors from 2025: Bring Her Back, Sinners, Good Boy, The Black Phone 2