We genuinely can’t wait to see what Cregger does next. Even when you think you know where it’s going, Barbarian keeps pulling the rug out from underneath you. And then, in the middle of the night, she hears a strange noise…. They agree to share the place out of desperation. When she gets to the house, another tenant (Bill Skarsgård) is already occupying the residence. A woman (Georgina Campbell) rents an Airbnb in a rough neighborhood. (It topped the box office during its opening weekend, which was chalked up to a default victory thanks to late summer being a new-release dead zone.) Then word of mouth began to build, and even those who don’t normally go in for scary movies started to take notice. The big “surprise!” horror hit of 2022, comedian-turned-filmmaker Zach Cregger’s intelligent, funny, genuinely frightening and - when it needs to be - extremely brutal riff on the old don’t-go-in-the-basement narrative felt like it came out of left field, with little to no fanfare at first. Both Buckley and her costar Rory Kinnear deserve kudos for their work here, as do the VFX team. It soon becomes clear what Garland is up to, and the obviousness of his systematic-misogyny swing is matched only by how unsettling it is, especially when its final act treads heavily into hallucinatory territory. Neither, for that matter, are most of the gents she meets in town. She calls the police, who don’t seem to be much help. Out on a walk one day, she spies a sinister, naked figure who seems to be following her. A recently widowed woman named Harper (Jessie Buckley) goes to the English countryside in an attempt to grieve and heal. May we gingerly suggest that this was the most unfairly maligned horror movie of the past 12 months, and that it more than earns its place on this list. Proceed with extreme caution in regard to that one.)Īlex Garland’s allegory on the evil that men do - and we do mean that gender specifically - was greeted with a wave of hostility upon its release. And while we hesitate to “recommend” something as gnarly and unpleasant as The Sadness, the South Korean zombie movie that made even jaded horror fans blanch, we have to acknowledge that it does exactly what it sets out to do.
(A few quick shout-outs to some of the year’s other scary stand-outs: Dashcam, Flux Gourmet, Fresh, The Innocents, Mad God, The Menu, Smile, and A Wounded Fawn. These were the 10 horror movies that caused us to lose sleep in 2022, that jolted us out of comfort zones, that made us scream in the dark next to our fellow audience members, and that reminded us how potent the genre can be. (The best thing about Halloween Ends is its titular promise.) (It’s hard to figure out what’s the most outrageous aspect of this story: that this mondo DIY horror film made such a huge return on its $250K budget, that the killer-clown flick’s running time is a whopping 138 minutes, or that the original Terrifier got a sequel at all.) You had horror-movie elements working their way into everything from animated films to superhero blockbusters - really, what is Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness if not an Evil Dead movie that happened to end up in the MCU? And you had familiar faces return from the genre’s past, even if the year proved that not all franchise reboots are created equal.
You had your success stories, à la Universal’s The Black Phone becoming a summer sleeper hit your unlikely success stories, in which an old-fashioned word-of-mouth campaign helped propel Barbarian into a crossover smash and your even unlikelier success stories, like the extremely micro-budget Terrifier 2 racking up an $11.5 million haul to date. You had a lot of variety, with highbrow Euro-shock films and auteur-driven A24 projects bumping up against big-budget monster movies and scrappy indies. Let’s cut - and stab, and chop - to the chase: 2022 was a particularly solid year for horror.
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