The 10 Scariest Horror Movies Of 2024, Ranked

2024 was a great year for horror movies. Especially if you looked into the margins.

While the genre sometimes struggled at the box office (with a few noteworthy exceptions) over the past twelve months, genre buffs looking for a good scare actually had plenty of options at every turn. There were surprisingly thrilling mainstream releases from major studios, dark horse smash hits from smaller distributors, and enough winners in the nooks and crannies of streaming to fill a dozen horror-centric lists. As a platform for creative endeavors from exciting filmmakers, horror has never been healthier.

Nor has it been scarier. The /Film team sat down to hash out and rank the 10 scariest horror movies of 2024, a process that involved cutting a lot of great movies and then somehow finding a way to rank the survivors. (If you're wondering how everything actually came to be, the entire process was recorded, and it will be featured on a future episode of the /Film Daily podcast.) Movies like "Immaculate" and "Terrifier 3" barely missed the cut, while films like "Civil War" got the axe because they were terrifying without actually being horror films. What's left remains an embarrassment of chilling riches, with something for every kind of horror fan.

Here are the 10 scariest horror movies of 2024, ranked.

"Alien: Romulus" is effectively a Greatest Hits collection of the "Alien" franchise, which is a nice thing for fans who appreciate the many scares the series has delivered over the years. While Fede Álvarez's movie offers its own little updates to Xenomorph lore, it truly excels in cramming as many memorable moments from earlier installments as it can possibly can in its 119-minute runtime. 

Are you in the market for a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game on a space station? Perhaps one of those scenes where a slimy Xenomorph gets way too close to a horrified female protagonist (Cailee Spaeny) bracing for an attack? How about a punchy chestburster scene at an inopportune moment, or even a new take on an "Alien: Resurrection"-style hybrid creature? Well, you're in luck, because it's all here. What's more, the movie remixes these beats just enough to repeatedly bring you to the edge of your seat, fighting the urge to glance over your shoulder for fear that you'll see a salivating pharyngeal jaw rapidly approaching your face. 

On the whole, the homage-heavy approach ends up making "Alien: Romulus" a sequel that plays things too safe. However, at its better moments — and there are a fair few — the movie is profoundly scary, and makes a spirited attempt to recreate the claustrophobic atmosphere of Ridley Scott's sublime 1979 franchise-starter, "Alien." In terms of pure scariness, this is more than enough to earn a place on this list. (Pauli Poisuo)

"Late Night with the Devil" takes its time building the terror over 95 minutes, but manages to convey the sense that something is not quite right from the very beginning. The film presents itself as a tape of late-night talk show "Night Owls with Jack Delroy," with some behind-the-scenes documentary footage interspersed throughout. This episode of the fictional talk show aired on Halloween 1977, and sees host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) confronted with increasingly strange and paranormal happenings, culminating in the apparent possession of a young girl and mass suicide survivor Lilly D'Abo (Ingrid Torelli).

"Late Night with the Devil" initially gained a perfect score and a horror master's blessing, despite the fact it isn't relentlessly terrifying in the way of, say, "Skinamarink." But its meticulously crafted alternate version of 1970s American TV makes for a movie that at times feels unnervingly realistic even when the supernatural elements kick off. The tone of a late night talk show is captured perfectly, and the visual accoutrements, such as the 4:3 aspect ratio, only serve to enhance the verisimilitude of this strikingly original take on the found footage genre.

While some of the less-than-convincing VFX shots break the effect, by the time the film is over, you're left with this lingering sense that you got a brief glimpse into an uncanny alternate history that, even before the supernatural stuff occurs, just wasn't quite right in some awful way. (Joe Roberts)

If you've ever wished the Béla Tarr-riffing Gus Van Sant of "Gerry," "Elephant" and "Last Days" would make a slasher film, Chris Nash's debut feature, "In a Violent Nature," is here to scratch that itch good and raw. We've seen horror films told from the perspective of the killer before, but Nash tests our engagement by trailing a hulking heap of insensate viciousness; all this undead monster does is trudge and exterminate. This might sound like a big ask for a 90-minute movie, but Nash has a great eye for the Canadian wilderness, and a subtle sense of humor that surprises us as we follow his deliberate beast from victim to victim.

Yes, "In a Violent Nature" contains some laughs, but it's mostly a slow, slow burn that ultimately feels like a meditation on the purpose of the slasher genre. The obligatory scenes and transgressions are there (drinking, smoking, screwing), but there's a heavy inevitability to it all. This movie marinates in dread, and leaves you watching helplessly as our protagonist (he just wants his locket back) slays in spectacularly inventive ways. Why are horror fans drawn to the stalk-and-slash mechanics of these films over and over again? The answer, like it or not, is that there's a grim catharsis in watching a conscious, paralyzed-from-the-neck-down park ranger get slowly dismembered by a log splitter. Amazingly, that's nothing compared to the grisly fate met by a young woman who's found the most picturesque spot to do yoga. Béla Tarr would never. (Jeremy Smith)

"Smile 2" does every kind of scare, and it does every kind of scare exceptionally well. Writer/director Parker Finn breaks out every device from the horror filmmaker's toolkit and showcases a keen mastery of them all. Exquisite, sudden jump scares? There are plenty. Sequences of slow-building dread and unease? That's most of the movie. Elaborately orchestrated crescendos of gnarly violence and gore? Oh, baby. The horrible beauty of "Smile 2" is that it never wants to stop scaring you, and it keeps the scares coming from different directions, all in wildly different flavors. Naomi Scott's Sky Riley never has a chance to breathe, and neither does the audience.  

For a movie that's ultimately such a feel-bad experience, "Smile 2" is, somehow, also delirious good fun. It's merciless in how it pokes and prods and deceives, attacking the viewer's defenses with glee. The movie is in constant conversation with the folks viewing it, twisting one knife as it reaches for another, asking you to look left before it brings the freight train in from the right. Finn showcases such an immediate and confident voice, the kind of voice that you just know will have a long history in the horror genre if he chooses to double down on it. And he should. Because few 2024 horror movies were as fun, and as scary, as this one. (Jacob Hall)

"The First Omen" proves how it takes the right director to make a horror film as scary as can be. This script could easily be prequel fluff (and there are Easter Eggs), but Arkasha Stevenson and her plucky star Nell Tiger Free (as nun aspirant Margaret) hunker down and craft a film out to fill you with terror, not nostalgia. It helps that the typical legacy sequel/prequel reverence is underplayed; Stevenson is channeling less the original "Omen" and more films like "Possession," "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me," and the original religious/pregnancy horror picture, "Rosemary's Baby." Like the female leads of those films before her, Margaret knows something deeply sinister surrounds her but everywhere she turns, she finds doubt, making her feel crazy.

Speaking of knowing and unknowing, Stevenson subjects her audience to several long sequences of terror, forcing them to stare at their fear head on. Within those moments, she knows exactly what to reveal and what to hide. When a nun births a demon, Stevenson doesn't show us mere close-ups of her pained face, but all the gory details, down to a monstrous claw tearing out of her vagina. Or when the evil growing inside Margaret makes her convulse in the street, the camera remains focused on her but it's handheld, so it shakes with her and makes you cringe in your seat. The scene where Margaret is forcibly impregnanted, though? There Stevenson knows not to show everything, with hints of the horror being enough. (Devin Meenan)

One of the scariest movies of the year also happens to be an NFT. I'll be blunt: I still don't even know what an NFT is. I also don't really care (you can find more info on how to watch the film here). What I do care about is that "Chime" hails from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the filmmaker behind horror masterpieces "Pulse" and "Cure." Like those two films, "Chime" deals with ever-increasing dread and thick, oppressive atmosphere that feels like it could smother you to death. 

Every room in this short film (it clocks in at about 45 minutes) feels haunted. Not haunted by ghosts, per se, but haunted by the prevailing sense that something is very, very wrong. Mutsuo Yoshioka plays a culinary teacher who is approached by a student one day. The student claims he keeps hearing a mysterious "chime" sound described as "like a scream ... but not human." The student then proceeds to stab himself in the neck with a butcher knife as everyone looks on in horror. From here, the teacher finds his entire world unraveling in unsettling ways, resulting in a chilling, upsetting film that lingers like a bad dream. (Chris Evangelista)

"Longlegs" faced an uphill battle because the movie's marketing kept touting it as one of the scariest movies ever. But the movie delivers on that promise, just not in the way that traditional horror fans might think. "Longlegs" isn't packed with jump scares, and there's not a monster waiting around the corner. Instead, "Longlegs" is scary because of the increasing sense of dread, pulling the rug out from under us when all is said and done.

The mundane but peaceful wintry Oregon setting is repeatedly interrupted by an unsettling killer known only as Longlegs (an unhinged Nicolas Cage), who begins playing a twisted game of cat and mouse with rookie FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe). As she slowly pieces together the mystery of Longlegs, she only feels more uneasy.

While there are elements of "Longlegs" that play up the creepiness of Cage's turn as the pale-faced killer for dark laughs, that also feels like a way of coping with a character who is unpredictable. Imagine being the pharmacist who has to interact with Longlegs at the prescription counter, or being approached by him as you stand quietly in your snowy front yard. That's undeniably terrifying. 

Then there's the big twist that adds a whole new level of fear, one that takes Lee's traumatic history and ties it directly into the decades-long case of Longlegs. The supernatural element that arrives with the third act knocks us completely off-balance, and the results are brutal. The evil behind Longlegs runs deeper than we ever thought, and to make things even worse, it triumphs in the end. (Ethan Anderton)

It's not very often that you watch a movie that feels evil, but Pascal Plante's "Red Rooms" is a razor-sharp portrait of humanity's increasing obsession with true crime, the culpability of the criminal justice system, and our penchant for losing ourselves in online communities that overwhelms the viewer with such immeasurable dread that it's difficult to walk away without feeling like you're now carrying a curse. Juliette Gariépy stars as Kelly-Anne, a model who has become fixated on the trial of a serial killer who uploaded footage of his crimes to the dark web. When she's not posing for the camera, she dedicates her free time to crypto trading and playing online poker to gain access to the killer's home movies. Plante avoids leaning into true crime exploitation, instead terrorizing the audience with a sound design that will make imaginations go haywire.

The true horror is not in the serial killer's crimes, but in watching how the internet can consume a person to the point where their only interaction with those around them is rooted in voyeurism. "Red Rooms" is devoid of jump scares, electing instead to treat us all like the frog slowly boiling to death in a pot of water. It isn't just a story about one person's obsession, it's an existential examination of the way our society only functions if we legitimately stop caring about each other as human beings and accept that emotions are nothing more than a performative display. "Red Rooms" isn't evil, but it will make you believe that at our core — we all probably are. (BJ Colangelo)

Damian Mc Carthy's "Oddity" begins with one of the best openings of any film of 2024 (regardless of genre), and right from its hooky opening moments, it grabs you and doesn't let go. Its primary setting — a house being renovated in the isolated Irish countryside — is sufficiently creepy, as is the strange man who shows up one night telling the woman of the house that he's witnessed a stranger slip inside while she wasn't looking. When that woman mysteriously winds up dead, her twin sister, who happens to be a medium, suspects the whole truth hasn't been revealed and slowly starts to investigate. 

With a terrific horror visual (a full-size wooden carving of a man, which remains totally still ... until it doesn't) and one of the best jump scares of the year (it takes place in a tent), Mc Carthy crafts an eerie and unsettling folk horror fairytale that feels like it could be almost as effective if it were told around a campfire. The conclusion is incredibly satisfying and feels inevitable in the best way, and if its final seconds didn't include a slight misstep by showing something that would have been much spookier if left unseen, there's a good chance "Oddity" could have been the number one choice on this list. (Ben Pearson)

Scares can be like fetishes, things that are highly specific and personal in order to get a rise out of an individual. Yet there are also universal scares, just as there are generally enjoyable acts of titillation. In the same way that most people get excited by kissing and physical touch, the combination of the unknown and the uncanny strikes directly at every human being's core fears. If we don't know or don't understand what is threatening us, if this thing seems like it's impossible that it should exist but our senses are telling us that it unequivocally exists... Well, there's hardly a more frightening combination.

That combination is on brilliant, terrifying display in Robert Eggers' "Nosferatu," a movie which takes the classic Bram Stoker-by-way-of-F.W. Murnau vampire mythos and invigorates it with an infusion of warm blood. The film's deliberate clashing of elements are ingeniously engineered to elicit maximum discomfort: a monochromatic palette for a movie shot in color, jumpscares that immediately follow sensual moments, histrionic behavior within a repressed historical period, the eroticizing of emotional abuse and parasitic murder, and most of all, everything involving Bill Skarsgård's performance as Count Orlok, with the well-known actor's appearance and even voice changed into something disturbingly unrecognizable. A palpable sense of inevitable dread, begun right from the first minutes of the film, is the icing on the horrific cake. As the marketing taglines suggest, there is no respite from the movie's terror; your only choice is to succumb to it. (Bill Bria)