The 15 best horror movies of 2022, ranked

Though often billed as a slasher, Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies actually takes the form of a darkly comic whodunit, as a group of young people try to avoid a killer in a sprawling mansion during a hurricane blackout. But while the scenes of darkened corridors which may or may not be stalked by a madman are certainly tense, the true horror in this laugh-out-loud thrill ride comes from watching a group of seemingly like-minded people slowly and savagely begin to eat their own in a spiral of scapegoats and secrets that just might get them all killed.

The internet has been fertile ground for new horror stories for a long time, but no one’s ever done it quite like Jill Schoenbrun with We’re All Going To The World’s Fair. The story of a teenage girl (Anna Cobb) who descends into the darkest depths of an online game that becomes all too real, it’s a film that gets tremendous mileage out of a fierce central performance, a constantly eerie atmosphere, and the sense that we could all dig ourselves in this deep if we were simply willing to turn over the right digital rocks.

Driven by stunning work from star Anna Diop, director Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny is a remarkable blend of domestic horror, immigrant horror, and folk horror, all centered on the intimate story of a single woman’s desire to build a foundation for her family. Other forces in her life, however, have different ideas, and what follows is a beautifully realized, dread-filled blend of folklore, anxiety, and dreamlike terror.

Phil Tippett and his collaborators spent decades working on Mad God, and the results were well worth the wait. A dark, endlessly imaginative descent into a world of monsters, Mad God emerges as a masterwork from one of cinema’s greatest visual wizards. It’s a story told without dialogue and even without certain conventional narrative choices, but that doesn’t stop Tippett’s stop-motion visions of terror from worming themselves through your eyes and into your brain forever.

After triumphing last year with an incredible performance in The Night House, Rebecca Hall returned in 2022 to once again make the case that she might be the finest horror actress working right now. In Resurrection, Hall takes on the role of overprotective mother haunted by a figure from her past, and simply puts the film on her back. Writer/director Andrew Semans knows exactly when to push in on Hall’s searing visage, and when to pull back, and as an audience, we can never look away.

Dark, dreamy, and laced with levels of mythic dread, Travis Stevens’ A Wounded Fawn begins as a serial killer story, then morphs into an exercise in pure psychological terror as the killer at the core of the story goes on a journey through his own mind. Every new scene brings with it something more nightmarish than the one before it, yet the film never loses an innate sense of raw, dreadful beauty.

The moviemaking collective known as The Adams Family returned in 2022 with another low-budget horror story, and in the process gave us one of the best folk-horror films of the last decade. A mother-daughter story centered on secrets, rituals, and a frightening legacy, Hellbender will suck you in with its beautifully staged visuals and musical interludes, then bite your head off with its thrilling, wonderfully gruesome finale.

For the first time in a long time, Hellraiser feels like Hellraiser again. The Night House director David Bruckner made sure of that, with a revitalization of the Clive Barker-created franchise centered on addiction, pleasure, and some of the most sumptuous horror visuals of 2022. Odessa A’zion and Jamie Clayton are fantastic in the leading role, the updated mythos works wonders for the depth of the story, and perhaps best of all, the film lays out a tremendous framework for even more stories to come.

Two families meet on vacation and agree to stay in touch. When one visits the other, what starts as an awkward clash of cultures and traditions soon becomes something much more terrifying. With Speak No Evil, director Christian Tafdrup has crafted an alarming, genuinely unsettling piece of horror that’s so nerve-shattering it will leave you at a loss for days. This is the Feel Bad Movie of 2022.

At its core, the Predator franchise is about resourceful humans working to survive against the ultimate killing machine, and what is that premise if not great fodder for a slasher film? Featuring a terrific cast led by a tremendous Amber Midthunder performance and precise, thrilling direction from Dan Trachtenberg, Prey is both one of the year’s most enjoyable movie rides and one of its best horror stories. It’s an edge-of-your-seat movie that we’ll be rewatching for years.

Luca Guadagnino’s story of two teenaged cannibals wandering through Reagan’s America, discovering their own tastes and connections along the way, is often as moving as it is frightening. Guadagnino coaxes stellar performances from both Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet, and balances out the raw emotion of their work with images of gore and depravity that are so matter-of-fact they almost feel like a strange anthropological document. It’s that rare film that will make your skin crawl and your heart wrench at the same time.

A strong contender for the year’s most pleasant box office surprise, Zach Cregger’s Barbarian works because it begins with familiar, relatable ideas about what we’re afraid of, then just keeps building on them until we as an audience are ground into submission. We all get being afraid of a strange man in our rental house, or a repairman with dark plans for us, or a Hollywood sleazeball with his back against the wall. But in the case of Barbarian, it’s always what happens next, the thing we never see coming, that’s more frightening, and that’s what makes this film one of the year’s best popcorn movie blasts.

Ti West’s return to horror with X was a welcome sight all by itself, a dazzling ode to 1970s slashers and DIY filmmaking featuring some of the year’s best kills and one of the 21st Century horror’s best villains so far. From the aspect ratio joke that opens the film to the delightfully gruesome climax, X both delivers the classic horror goods and tells a surprisingly affecting story about aging, loss, and violence.

In the immediate aftermath of X’s acclaimed premiere, West and his collaborator Mia Goth revealed that they’d done it all again with Pearl, an origin story for X’s aged slasher which was somehow even more deranged and visually arresting than the first film. Like X, Pearl is a film about the price of creation, and how far one woman is willing to go to become her true self, but this time around things get a beautiful Golden Age of Hollywood spin, driven by an absolutely transcendent performance from Goth. Bring on MaXXXine.

No one else is making movies quite like Jordan Peele right now, and NOPE proves that we’ve only just begun to see what the director behind Get Out and Us can really do when he’s left free to roam the dark landscapes of his mind. NOPE is many things all at once. It’s an alien movie, a family saga, a neo-Western, a satirical look at Hollywood and the nature of content creation, and a dark descent into the cost of spectacle and the threat of being sucked into a machine designed to chew you up and spit you up. It’s all of those things, and yet none of those elements ever feel underserved in favor of a different theme or a different approach. Throw in the year’s single scariest scene and the most astonishing visuals of Peele’s career so far, and you’ve got a masterpiece.

As we’ve already noted, this year was a great one for horror films, and a list of 15 movies doesn’t begin to count them all. So, if you’re still hungry for more scares, check out these other wonderful 2022 releases: Crimes Of The Future, Deadstream, Fresh, Glorious, The Innocents, Master, The Menu, Orphan: First Kill, Piggy, Scream, Terrifier 2, Watcher, Wendell & Wild, You Won’t Be Alone.