The 15 Best A24 Horror Movies, Ranked

For the vast majority of their existence, A24 has been a distributor of motion pictures. That means they find movies that other people have already made, and they manage the film's release. In recent years, they've moved into the production side, but for the most part "A24 movies" are simply movies that fit the distributor's brand identity.

That's totally fine, as far as it goes. Like a popstar who doesn't write their own material but has an incredible ear for a hit, there's a certain artistry to curation, too. Thanks to the kinds of films they have released, A24 has developed a following like we haven't seen since the early days of the studio system, when people were fans of, say, "MGM musicals" or "gangster pictures made by Warners." Horror fans love A24, and with good reason: They consistently put out some of the best horror movies on the market. 

Here are the best A24 horror movies, ranked.

In 2024, Osgood Perkins directed "Longlegs," the biggest indie horror box office hit in a decade. He quickly followed up that success with 2025's "The Monkey," another horror hit released by Neon. At the beginning of his directing career, however, Perkins helmed "The Blackcoat's Daughter" for A24. It's significantly less crowd-pleasing, but it's nevertheless a great little chiller featuring frightening performances from Kiernan Shipka and Emma Roberts.

Shipka plays Kat, a young woman at a boarding school who is upset to find that her parents haven't come to pick her up over break. Instead, she's left in the care of Rose (Lucy Boynton), an older girl who's more concerned with her boyfriend than her young charge. Kat falls under the spell of a malevolent presence at the school, leading to a shocking finale.

"The Blackcoat's Daughter" takes a long while to heat up, potentially testing the patience of horror fans hoping for more scares. Still, the third act delivers on the off-kilter, bloody madness that fans have now come to expect from Perkins, and it's a great start to a promising career.

Sometimes, all a movie needs to really sing is one great performance. Thankfully, "Heretic" has three of them. It's a dialogue-heavy horror movie that largely plays out as one long conversation, depending on its three stars to do the heavy lifting as, line by line, their situation morphs around them. Like many horror films put out by A24, it's a movie that rewards patience, living as much in the writing of these lines as it does in anything that's going to make you jump in your seat.

First, there's Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, two missionaries out to spread the good word. Then there's Hugh Grant, playing a man who's excited to have the chance to test the faith of these two young women. He's laid a trap, it turns out, and before the night is over, both girls will have to confront the root of their belief in a higher power.

Grant is terrifying in this twisted movie — his performance garnered him a whole host of awards season nominations — but Thatcher and East match him moment for moment. They're scared, sad, and ultimately defiant, and "Heretic" is riveting thanks in large part to the work they're doing.

In 2017, A24 released "It Comes at Night," directed by Trey Edward Shults. The movie didn't go over well with audiences, but critics loved it (it's currently at 88% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with an audience score of only 44%). A stark difference like that almost always indicates that a movie is worth your time. Upon release, people felt cheated by the film's marketing, which seemed to promise something scarier, but /Film's own Jacob Hall warned people in his review, "'It Comes At Night' is an excellent movie, but it's not the movie you're being sold." Years removed, though, it's easier to appreciate what the movie is actually doing, to judge it on its own terms rather than how it lived up to your expectations. 

This movie is more of a tone piece than a shocker. It's about a family holed up in a house after the end of the world, trapped inside by the recurrent presence of something that visits, well, at night. When another family shows up, they all must confront the fact that their suspicion of each other is maybe the most dangerous thing of all. This is a movie that understands that the very act of peering into the darkness is often more frightening than seeing something scary, and with actors like Christopher Abbott, Joel Edgerton, Riley Keough, and Kelvin Harrison Jr. doing the peering, you're in good hands.

A24 has tried its hand at several horror-comedies, and they don't always work well. "Life After Beth" is, shall we say, not Aubrey Plaza's best work. (It didn't even make our ranking of Plaza's ten best movies and TV shows.) Halina Reijn's "Bodies Bodies Bodies," on the other hand, is a fun-enough satire of Gen Z attitudes so expertly-performed that it sails over the line from "fine" to "good." Sure, it sometimes goes for the easy laugh instead of trying to make an actual point, but it's clear the entire cast is having a blast, so it's hard not to laugh along with them.

The movie is about a bunch of friends who take refuge at a nice house to ride out a hurricane. To bide their time, they play a "Mafia"-style game where someone gets "murdered." When actual dead bodies start to turn up, however, the friends must settle old scores in an attempt to figure out who's knocking them off one by one. Watching her glow-necklace-clad turn in "Bodies Bodies Bodies," it's clear Rachel Sennott was headed for stardom.

One of the most thrilling projects to emerge from the pandemic years was Ti West's "X" trilogy, which came out in quick succession, a nice change from the long gaps between West's previous films. His three collaborations with Mia Goth — "X," "Pearl," and "MaXXXine" — each function as three self-conscious genre homages, as they tackle sleazy 1970s horror in the style of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," early Technicolor melodramas, and trashy 1980s giallo-influenced horror respectively.

Though many fans might pick "Pearl" as the best of the bunch, that movie feels more like an acting exercise for co-writer Goth than it does a full, complete horror movie on its own. For that reason, "X" is the one that makes our list here. Goth still gets to shine in "X," playing both an adult film actress named Maxine and the creepy old lady version of her "Pearl" character, but this film stands on its own as a satisfying horror experience more than the other two films in the trilogy.

In "X," a stellar cast — including Jenna Ortega, Kid Cudi, Brittany Snow, and Goth — head out to a remote farmhouse to shoot a pornographic film. They don't know that the old woman who owns the farm has murder on her mind, and a gory, gonzo slasher film ensues. It's a blast.

One of the best things about the A24 brand is that they take chances on first-time filmmakers. In 2015, they released "The Witch," the first feature from director Robert Eggers. He's now one of the most prominent names in the horror space today, having crafted excellent period films like "The Northman" and "Nosferatu," but it all started with "The Witch."

The film skyrocketed Anya Taylor-Joy to stardom thanks to her incredible performance as Thomasin, a young woman in colonial times who's chafing at the regressive control her father (Ralph Ineson) has over their family. Her rebellion is taken as proof of witchcraft, leading her down a dark path that includes the family goat, who may just be possessed by a demon.

"The Witch" succeeds thanks to its strong attention to detail; modern tech couldn't capture Eggers' vision for the movie, so they used old techniques. Eggers even had his actors speak in a period-accurate dialect that sounds almost like a foreign language, giving the whole thing an eerie atmosphere. Posters for the film bore the tagline "A New England Folktale," and that's exactly what it is. The film builds and builds, culminating in some shocking imagery that's already gone down in horror history.

Before he became an internet-boyfriend hunk thanks to his roles in films like "Saltburn," Barry Keoghan terrified audiences in the 2017 Yorgos Lanthimos film "The Killing of a Sacred Deer." His Martin is a strange teenager, an intense fellow who latches on to the family of a surgeon named Steven (Colin Farrell). At first, they don't mind having him around, but soon, though, he grows obsessed.

Martin's father was one of Steven's patients, and he died several years earlier, so now Martin wants revenge. He tells Steven that if he doesn't kill a member of his own family to even things out, then they'll all die. One by one, they find themselves paralyzed. Is it psychosomatic? Or is Martin somehow responsible?

This is a strange, offbeat film that refuses to explain itself, which makes it all the better. Instead, all we have to go on are the committed performances from Keoghan, Farrell, Nicole Kidman, and Raffey Cassidy. You'll never look at someone eating spaghetti the same way again.

If "The Witch" was merely our first glimpse of the period-specific formalist horror of Robert Eggers, then "The Lighthouse" is where he really stepped into his own. It's essentially a two-hander, telling the tale of two lighthouse keepers (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) stuck together on a storm-tossed island. "The Lighthouse" is blackly funny — you can't help but chuckle at Dafoe's desperate, furious delivery of, "Why'd ye spill yer beans?!" — but it's also a film with a lot on its mind. (Check out our rundown of the metaphors and symbolism in "The Lighthouse" here.) It's uncompromising, unafraid to be downright weird.

"The Lighthouse" is also a visual feast, even as these performers seem to go insane before our very eyes due to their paranoia and isolation. The movie is shot in black and white, and it's almost square, filmed in 1.19:1 aspect ratio. But every frame is carefully-composed to deliver the maximum amount of madness and artistry. Quotable silliness aside, this is a film that shows a director in full control of what his camera captures.

Ari Aster is another director whose career got a big boost thanks to A24's confidence in his early work. His debut film "Hereditary" kickstarted a fresh round of discourse about "elevated horror," and while there's no such thing as an elevated horror movie, "Hereditary" is undeniably excellent at what it's doing.

This is a movie about the destruction of a family. Yes, there's a demonic element and some light culty stuff going on — perhaps to the movie's slight detriment — but at its core, this is a movie about a family that suffers an unimaginable tragedy and can't keep itself together in the wake of something horrific. As with many A24 horror movies, it hinges on the strength of its performances, and an absolutely harrowing Toni Collette gives us a cinematic mother for the ages. It's impossible to hear her wail of grief in this movie and not feel chilled to your very core, and that's even before she breaks out the piano wire.

If any movie has ever deserved the cliché descriptor "a nightmarish descent into madness," it's Gaspar Noé's "Climax," an exotic vision of hell. The movie is about a troupe of French dancers who are working on a wild piece of choreography, their bodies thrusting and spinning and gyrating through a stunning long-take shot set to throbbing electronic music. After they nail it, everyone sticks around to let loose with the help of a big vat of sangria. Unbeknownst to them, the alcohol's been spiked with LSD, and the night sinks into spiraling chaos and pandemonium.

Filmmaking as an artform is about what a gift it is to view bodies in motion. At first, it's thrilling to watch these dancers in their frenzied dance, but as the movie goes on and their mania takes hold, the thrashing and thrusting becomes horrific. They are contorted in seemingly-impossible ways, their bodies betraying them in a feverish orgy of pain and desperation. It's a movie like few others.

Australian brothers Michael & Danny Philippou first made a name for themselves on YouTube, where they were known as "RackaRacka." Their comedy shorts initially included various stunts and fratty "challenge" antics, but over time, they began to include horror elements in their videos, delighting in showing off their gore effects. That proved to be fertile training ground for "Talk To Me," one of the most intense horror films ever put out by A24, making them the best YouTubers to release a movie.

The film is about a young woman named Mia (Sophie Wilde) who's still grieving the death of her mother. At a house party, she's invited to take part in a "challenge." Her friends have a severed, embalmed, plaster-casted hand, and you can see a ghost if you grip it and say, "Talk to me." Furthermore, if you say, "I let you in," the spirit takes control of your body. The feeling is euphoric, like a drug. The high becomes irresistible, and Mia and her friends' lives spiral into addiction and insanity. It's sad, scary, funny, and frightening all at once, one of the most self-assured debuts on this list.

In "Under the Skin," Scarlett Johansson plays a mysterious woman who tools around Scotland in her van, picking up various men and luring them back home. We learn that the woman is an alien, and though the movie offers no easy answers, we gather that she's a creature who seems to be here to study humans. When the men follow her through her darkened lair, they sink down into a black void. Soon enough, she harvests their skin.

"Under the Skin" is uniquely unsettling, but this is probably the most elegant movie on this list. It's all about evoking dread, making us see the world a little differently than we're used to. Johansson is a capable actor who's more than up to the task. She's almost too beautiful, rendered alien by closeups that see her staring coolly, blankly out at the world. We understand why these men want to get to know her — to see what's under her skin — even if the eventual revelation is distressing. There are images here you'll never forget.

In "Green Room," the late, great Anton Yelchin stars as the frontman of a punk band who get a gig at a backwater bar somewhere in the deep South. At first they're uncomfortable with the confederate flags, and then the realization dawns that many of the clientele have swastika tattoos. This is a skinhead bar, and playing "Nazi Punks" goes over about as well as you imagine. Soon the band are trapped, unable to escape the bar as a group of evil rednecks try to slice and dice them. The violence in this movie is as shocking and upsetting as movie violence gets.

Few horror movies have ever aged as well as "Green Room." In the decade since its release, America has experienced a full-scale Nazi revival, elevating white supremacists to the highest levels of government. What once seemed like just a solid horror/thriller now feels like a warning: Indulge these people on any level at your own peril, because violence is sure to follow.

Jane Schoenbrun's sophomore feature "I Saw The TV Glow" is a movie drenched in 90s nostalgia, but that's a misdirection. It's not just a movie about people who escape into a  nostalgia far scarier than they remember; it's a movie about people who escape into nostalgia to avoid confronting the fact that they're not living authentic lives. They're afraid to face themselves even more than they're afraid of the television.

Justice Smith stars as "Owen," and the film follows the character far into adulthood. Owen's childhood friend Maddy (Jack Haven) disappeared when they were younger, reappearing years later with a warning that the television show they loved as kids is real, and they're trapped in an alternate reality by its evil villain. Is Maddy crazy, or is Owen in denial?

It's all a metaphor for trans-ness, a film about how horrifying it would be to reach the end of your life and realize that you never actually lived it the way you were meant to, but there's a universal quality that stretches beyond that too. It's beautiful, sad, and disturbing, and it also contains a message of hope: Though anxiety may choke your every moment and you fear that you're running out of air, "I Saw the TV Glow" tells us, "There is still time."

As with Robert Eggers, Ari Aster came out of the gate swinging and then immediately topped himself with his second film. In other words, "Hereditary" is great, but "Midsommar" is even more self-assured, and it's the best horror movie A24 has ever released.

Like "Hereditary," "Midsommar" is about the destruction of a family. Dani (Florence Pugh) has received the horrific news that her sister killed herself and their parents, leaving her alone in the world. To suppress her grief, she tags along on a trip to Sweden with her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and his friends. Before long, they're plunged into a sunlit nightmare, fending off friendly cultists who are celebrating the summer equinox.

Pugh is one of the best actors of her generation; her howl of grief rivals only Toni Collette's, her performance lending "Midsommar" a complex, climactic catharsis. Add in a bearskin suit, some unsettling runes, and an instantly-iconic flower dress, and you have a recipe for not just A24's best films, but one of the best horror movies ever, full-stop.