We live in an age of horrors, and our movies are doing a piss-poor job of keeping pace.
That might not bother me so much if film after film in 2024 hadn’t been touted as a supposed triumph of screen terror. This, after all, was the year of Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs, of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, of (really?) whoever made Late Night with the Devil. And it was the year I repeatedly left the theater deflated rather than thrilled, wondering about whatever hotshot horror director had just occupied my time, “Is this guy even afraid of anything?”
The satanists and vampires and serial killers who artfully did their thing in 2024 may have been good for the occasional jump scare or gross out or mood setting, but they represented no sublimation of this here scaredy-cat’s real fears. These were movies about movies, if not movies about movies about movies, and while I liked some (Maxxxine) and loathed others (Strange Darling), their formalism precluded any connection to my psyche’s recesses. In 2024, horror was comfort food.
Not that I begrudge anyone comfort in these discomfiting times, even if they sought solace in semi-intriguing puzzle boxes with unsatisfying solutions. Even if what comforted them was (somehow) Night Swim. But that’s not what I was after, not all the time at least. I wanted instead some way to process all that anxiety percolating within, and while I’m glad Neon raked it in with Longlegs (that allows them to release movies like Anora, right?) that didn’t make Perkins’s we’ve-got-Silence-of-the-Lambs-at-home any less silly.
The disappointments mounted as the year went on. The Substance was anything but comforting, and I appreciate how it pulls off the nasty little bait and switch that Taco Mike describes here. But while I know I should accept it as the comic gorefest it is rather than the feminist fable many still want it to be, what puts me off is that its hatred of female beauty standards oozes into a hatred of women themselves. (And while she’s capable enough, there’s just no need for Margaret Qualley to be in every film. The same goes double for Nicholas Hoult and Anya Taylor-Joy. Cast other people! Also, there are too many Skarsgårds.)
Nor did my free-floating dread find a resting place in The Beast, a film I rooted for as a fan of Léa Seydoux and overall pretentious Frenchness, and that many people I respect found particularly of its moment. Despite some remarkable images, its mood felt attenuated to me, and the sadly outmatched George McKay didn’t help matters any.
As for Nosferatu, like all of Eggers’s movies, it left me thinking, “Wow, that must have been really hard to make. You really put your back into it, Rob.” And then I just rewatched Werner Herzog’s 1979 version. (Better rats. Better vampire. Bruno Ganz. And I side with TikTokkers who say something is lost when we don’t get to see the count personally hauling a coffin to his new lair.)
Then I read Matt Zoller Seitz claiming that Nosferatu left him “feeling as if I was seeing a documentary record of evil, one that was itself cursed, and that I should not even be looking at, because by looking at it, I ran the risk of releasing that evil into the world.” Reading that, I didn’t feel like I’d seen a different movie—I felt like I belonged to a different species. Come on now. You are a grown man afraid of vampires?
Though I like to complain, I refuse to be cast as a sourpuss. I saw 148 new movies last year, and over here I recommend about a third of them, so I’m clearly not the hanging judge some mistake me for. If you've read my year in music piece you’ll know I just like to clear the boards before getting to the good stuff.
So what did unsettle me in 2024, beyond 2024 itself? Let’s start with I Saw the TV Glow, which finds psychological terror in a coming-out narrative that’s usually cast as liberatory. This was disembodied body horror—as the country obsesses over trans bodies, Jane Schoenbrun traces questions of identity into the mind, the soul, whatever you want to call that mysterious interior space where we are truly ourselves.
Contrast that with the lurid, not-even camp Emilia Pérez, which turns gender dysphoria into the stuff of cheap melodrama. I watched Jacques Audiard’s musical on Election Night, when I was a bit distracted, and gave it a soft pan. But now that it’s officially awards bait, all bets are off with this fiasco. I get that industry types like to pat themselves on the back for being open-minded, but did the Golden Globes have to pretend they actually liked the songs too?
There I go digressing again! Back to the scary stuff. If any movie made me feel close to what Zoller Seitz wrote about Nosferatu, it was Red Rooms, a film about horrible acts, and about wanting to see horrible acts committed. The anxiety it generated did feel familiar, but not in a cozy way. It was that same sense that anything could happen that pervaded 2024; Red Rooms duplicated, on a biochemical level, the experience of waiting for 2025.
Then again, the closer I looked at my list, everything felt like some strain of horror movie. All of Us Strangers was a ghost story, as was La Chimera. Evil Does Not Exist, a title that gets more worrisome the more you think of it, summons dread even in its quietest moments; if you want to call that folk-horror, you wouldn’t be alone.
And maybe it’s a stretch, but let’s read my top two films as horror movies as well. In Anora and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World the ultra-wealthy and the corporate interests that allow them to control our lives are the Big Bad to be outwitted. Both Ani the Brooklyn stripper and Angela the Romanian production assistant survive encounters with a new international class of careless people who, to paraphrase an astute 20th-century student of the wealthy, smash up things and creatures and let other people clean up the mess they had made. Both movies are also very funny, which you can optimistically see as the choice to laugh in the face of our masters or pessimistically accept as evidence that our absurd condition is beyond the amelioration of satire. But does either suggest a way forward beyond simple survival?
When researching Stanisław Jerzy Lec, the Polish poet whose aphorism provides the title to Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, I learned that he’d escaped from a Nazi prison camp by braining a guard with the shovel he’d just used to dig his own grave. And then he wrote a poem about it. Maybe there’s a lesson here for the times ahead: Always remain alert, because our darkest hour may also be the best opportunity to strike.
Well… that’s a pretty sentiment, no? But I suspect that the real moral that Do Not Expect Too Much… offers comes when Angela has just finished driving an exec to her hotel. Along the way, the woman, a descendent of Goethe played by the supremely well-composed Nina Hoss, has responded to each of Angela’s complaints about her country by wondering why Romanians don’t simply make their lives better. Exasperated and exhausted, Angela, who has been driving all day. quips to a doorman, “I can’t go on, Mr. Vladimir.” And he, unwittingly rewriting Beckett, replies “That’s what you think.” Scary stuff.
