The 25 Best Horror Movies of 2023
2023 was the year the centre of gravity left Hollywood. The films people actually argued about came from Argentina, Australia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines, and the loudest of them, Talk to Me, was two brothers from Adelaide filming grief as a party drug. Meanwhile Demián Rugna wrote the decade's most pitiless possession rules and Takashi Yamazaki made the best Godzilla in forty years for less than the marketing budget of a Marvel trailer.
The studios spent the year on inheritance. Saw X, Scream VI, Evil Dead Rise, Insidious, The Nun II, The Exorcist: Believer, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines. Some of that was better than it had any right to be, and three of them are on this list. But 2023's real signature was scale: a micro-budget experiment shot in an Edmonton basement got a theatrical run, and a demon walked into suburban America carrying somebody else's language.
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How this list was built
Ranking is on critical standing and on what a film does that nothing else that year did, which is why franchise entries appear here on merit rather than on brand and why several films with no marketing spend at all sit high. Notes describe mechanism and theme, since these are films readers may still be catching up on and a reveal spoiled is a film lost.
2023 is the worst year in recent memory for the festival calendar. A stack of the titles audiences experienced as 2023 releases had premiered in 2022, and a couple that premiered on the 2023 circuit did not reach cinemas until 2024. Rather than pick a side, each entry carries the year the reference works file it plus a note explaining the split, so the page stays useful whichever date you arrived with.
Original-language titles are given where they exist. Where a film comes from Québec or elsewhere in Canada we say so, because that is a lens this catalogue applies on purpose and 2023 was a strong year for it.
The films on this list
Talk to Me 2023
The Philippous treat a séance like a party drug: hold the hand, take your turn, film it for the group chat. Grief and peer pressure doing identical work, with effects that hurt.
When Evil Lurks 2023
Rugna writes possession as an infection with rules, then breaks each protective rule on screen. Argentine horror that treats children and animals as entirely fair game.
Skinamarink 2023
Ball films a house at 4am from a toddler's height, in grain and half-darkness, with the adults reduced to voices. Either the most patient horror film of its moment or nothing at all.
Godzilla Minus One 2023
Yamazaki puts the monster back in 1947 rubble and makes the state's abandonment of its own people the real horror. The best Godzilla in decades and the cruellest about Japan.
Evil Dead Rise 2023
Cronin moves the cabin into a Los Angeles tower block and relocates the possession into motherhood. Cheese-grater cinema with a real sense of family dread underneath.
Sleep 2023
A marriage tested by parasomnia, played half as comedy until the diagnosis stops mattering. Yu builds tension from an apartment, a dog and two readings of one symptom.
Beau Is Afraid 2023
Three hours of anxiety rendered as picaresque, with Joaquin Phoenix flinching through a city assembled entirely from his mother's judgement. Comedy, if you can stand it.
Infinity Pool 2023
Resort tourism as a regime of impunity: pay enough and your crimes are served by a double. Cronenberg the younger films wealth as a substance you can overdose on.
Birth/Rebirth 2023
Two women, one morgue, one dead child, no melodrama anywhere. Moss reworks Frankenstein as clinical labour and refuses to let either woman off the hook for it.
Huesera: The Bone Woman 2023
Pregnancy horror built on cracking sounds and abandoned desire, with Mexican bone-woman folklore standing in for everything a mother is not permitted to want.
Tiger Stripes 2023
Malaysian puberty horror where the transformation reads as rebellion rather than curse. Eu shoots schoolgirl cruelty and bodily change with the same jittery energy.
In My Mother's Skin 2023
The occupied Philippines, and a fairy that feeds on obedience. Dagatan films wartime hunger and colonial ruin in gilded, rotting close-ups that never let the child look away.
El Conde 2023
Pinochet as a bored vampire who never died, shot in black and white by Ed Lachman and played entirely for contempt. Genre used as an insult, very precisely aimed.
Suitable Flesh 2023
Lovecraft's body-swapping filtered through the late-80s erotic thriller, with Barbara Crampton and Heather Graham fully committed. Trash pedigree honoured rather than parodied.
Brooklyn 45 2023
Five veterans, one parlour, December 1945, and a séance that turns into a war-crimes tribunal. Geoghegan gets more from a single room than most films get from a budget.
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person 2023
A Québec vampire who cannot bring herself to kill, paired with a boy who wants to die. Deadpan and tender, with a real feel for suburban Montréal melancholy.
Thanksgiving 2023
Roth finally shoots the fake trailer and the slasher works: a Black Friday stampede as opening argument, kills staged with butcher's precision.
Saw X 2023
The best entry since the original, because it puts Tobin Bell back at the centre: medical fraud, a terminal diagnosis, traps delivered as an ethics lecture.
Scream VI 2023
Ghostface in New York, where the crowd itself is the hiding place. The subway sequence alone justifies a sixth entry, and the legacy bookkeeping stays mercifully light.
The Boogeyman 2023
Savage builds a monster out of doorways and light sources, turning King's short story into a portrait of a household nobody is managing. Sound design does the rest.
Knock at the Cabin 2023
Apocalypse as a forced choice, staged in close-ups and half-frames so that belief becomes the tension. Dave Bautista's gentleness is the most unsettling thing in it.
No One Will Save You 2023
Alien home invasion with almost no dialogue, carried by Kaitlyn Dever and by a town's silent verdict. Duffield trusts staging over exposition from the first frame.
Totally Killer 2023
A time-travel slasher comedy that keeps its rules straight, using 1987 to needle both eras rather than only the past. Kiernan Shipka carries the tone without smirking.
It Lives Inside 2023
A pishach loose in American suburbia, and a teenager whose deeper fear is her own family's language. Diaspora shame handed a demon to carry it around.
Sister Death 2023
Plaza returns to post-war Spanish Catholicism: a convent school, a novice with visions, punishment dressed up as pedagogy. Restrained until it very much is not.
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