The Best A24 Horror Movie According To Rotten Tomatoes

Any mention of Rotten Tomatoes scores must include a brief explanation of how the scores work. First, a critic or outlet needs to be approved by Rotten Tomatoes before they are permitted to submit a review. Approval is based mostly on career longevity, volume of readership, or both. When a critic submits their review to Rotten Tomatoes, they choose for themselves whether the review counts as positive or negative ("fresh" or "rotten" by RT's gauge). Different critics have different criteria as to what counts as positive or negative. Some, for instance, count a two-and-a-half star review as positive, and others count that as negative.

Rotten Tomatoes then calculates the percentage of positive reviews vs. negative reviews, coming up with an "approval rating." If at least 60% of the reviews are positive, the film is declared "fresh." 59% and below counts as "rotten."

If a film has an RT approval rating of, say 95%, it doesn't mean every critic gave it a 95 out of 100. It means that 95 out of 100 critics gave it a "pass." Five didn't. The average star rating of a film's reviews aren't considered in the aggregate. Weirdly, some of the better, more challenging films in the world may not have high approval scores merely because they are oblique, tragic, or difficult.

That said, when a film does have an approval rating in the 90% range, it's a pretty good sign that it is, at the very least, broadly appealing to a wide swath of critics. And when one of the horror films distributed by A24 gets a high approval rating, one might understand that it's certainly worth looking up.

Attaining an enviable 94% approval rating, the 2023 Australian ghost story "Talk to Me" has the highest RT score of any A24 horror movie.

"Talk to Me" was the feature debut of directors Danny and Michael Philippou. It was about a young woman named Mia (Sophia Wilde) whose mother took her own life two years earlier. Mia lives with her father, but spends many nights with her best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen), adrift and still in pain.

One night at a party, she is introduced to a truly surreal party game. One of the guests has brought a ceramic hand, bent into a handshake position. The actual origins of the hand are obscure, but it's said to be cursed or haunted. When one lights a candle, takes the hand, and whispers "Talk to me," the ghost of a random dead person will appear in front of them. If they also add "I let you in," the ghost possesses them, allowing them to go wild for a few moments. If the candle is blown out before 90 seconds elapse, the ghost exits their body, and they fall into a state of exhilarated euphoria. Mia and her friends take turns getting possessed as casually as one might take bong rips.

Mia is eager to talk to her deceased mother, of course, but we learn over the course of "Talk to Me" that the ghosts that appear to you aren't always honest, often causing hallucinations and delusions. Naturally, one of the party guests hangs onto their ghost a little too long and Mia enters a spiral of depression and misery that she may not be able to escape from.

It's a scary premise, but it's also realistic and honest about trauma, desperate sadness, and financial hardship. "Talk to Me" was reviewed by 294 critics and received positive review from the L.A. Times, The Observer, RogerEbert.com, and The Wrap.

A24 has had a good track record with horror, releasing numerous notable fright flicks from talented filmmakers, many of them when they were on the rise. 2024 saw the release of "MaXXXine," the third part in a slasher trilogy that also included the lackluster "X" and the truly excellent "Pearl." On Rotten Tomatoes, "X" had an impressive approval rating of 94%, while "Pearl" topped out at 92%. "MaXXXine," meanwhile, reached 74% approval.

Rose Glass' 2019 debut "Saint Maud" impressed 92% of the critics that reviewed it, as did Peter Strickland's outlandish "In Fabric," a film about a killer dress. A24 also put out a few legitimate modern classics in Robert Eggers' films "The Witch" and "The Lighthouse" (91% and 90% respectively) as well as Ari Aster's celebrated movies "Hereditary" and "Midsommar" (90% and 83% respectively). When a pop audience refers to "A24 horror," they usually allude to a certain kind of style that incorporates a lot of silence, sadness, and moments of quiet dread. A24 doesn't have a "house style," of course, but assumptions are still being made. The "A24 aesthetic" might be summed up in either Trey Edward Shults' "It Comes At Night" (88%), a film about a mysterious unseen force that is creating zombies, or Jonathan Glazer's "Under the Skin" (84%), a film about a visiting space alien that takes the form of Scarlett Johansson and feeds men into a carnivorous void in a ramshackle house.

asA24 has also distributed its share of horror clunkers. It was responsible for Kevin Smith's misguided horror-comedy "Tusk" (46%), a film about a man who is surgically transformed into a walrus. Critics also disliked Jeff Baena's "Life After Beth" (45%), which was about a young man trying to cope after his dead girlfriend returns from the grave.