With Halloween approaching, I have compiled a list of all the horror movies I watched this past year, old and new, good and bad, and everything in between. I began separating them from my other lists because I watch so many horror movies, especially in October. The films are sorted into tiers based on quality and listed alphabetically within each tier. As streaming rights are always changing, check JustWatch.com to see where they are currently available to watch.
Tier 1: Cinematic Masterpieces
Hokum (2026) directed by Damian McCarthy
Another great Irish folk horror movie from Damian McCarthy. This one is about an American author (Adam Scott) visiting a hotel in the countryside of Ireland, where his parents had vacationed once, to scatter their ashes. But one of the rooms is locked up because it is supposedly haunted by a witch. There is also a murder mystery, and the film is bookended with a story within a story (the book he is writing, about a conquistador). McCarthy’s style of horror really gets to me. It is slow burn with a gradual build-up of tension and dread, before getting to the visceral horror. To me that is so much more effective, as it heightens the impact of the horror. Like Paul Tremblay’s novels, there is some ambiguity whether there was actually any supernatural element or not. McCarthy has gotten incrementally better with each movie, from Caveat to Oddity and now Hokum, his best. At this rate, I can’t wait to see what he does next.
The VVitch: A New-England Folktale (2015) directed by Robert Eggers
I saw this once before when it first came out, but it had been a while, and since becoming a larger fan of Eggers, I wanted to revisit his first film. The Witch is a folk horror masterpiece, much scarier than mainstream horror movies with jump-scares and visceral gore. The type of horror in this film is more subtle and cerebral, which I prefer. As with all of Eggers’ films, there is great effort and care put into historical accuracy. The story follows a family of New England Puritans in the 1630s as they struggle to survive alone on their homestead farm, which may be haunted by a witch in the woods. It felt so realistic, like this is what life was actually like for the early American colonists. Such realism and verisimilitude makes the horror elements all the more chilling. Just as his film The Northman assumed the supernatural beliefs of the Vikings to be true, this film assumes the supernatural beliefs of the Puritans to be true. If you asked actual Puritans in the 1630s to make the scariest movie they could imagine (and if you explained to them what a movie was), The VVitch is precisely what they would create.
