The Best Horror Movies of the Year (So Far) – Vulture

Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Courtesy of the Studios

Two months into 2020 and we may have only one true horror blockbuster (thanks to Blumhouse and Leigh Whannell), but behind it is an impressive lineup of genre titles just begging for your attention. Its a time of grand returns: of filmmaker Richard Stanley, of the Universal Monsters, of some classic 1980s screen heavies and B-movie legends, and of the art-house horror darlings Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. So, pack your things and get ready to take a bad vacation with Riley Keough before going very deep-sea diving with Kristen Stewart and some angry sea monsters and then cooling your heels at the blood-soaked local VFW chapter. Here is the best horror of 2020 so far:

You wont see the long game of After Midnight coming, and thats what makes it so much fun. Jeremy Gardner wrote, co-directed, and starred in this humble creature feature that is also a pretty inventive breakup movie. When Abby (Brea Grant) walks out on Hank (Gardner) after a decade-long relationship in their small southern hometown, Hank spirals into a depression and maybe starts going a little crazy, staying up late every night to fend off the mysterious monster that keeps banging on his front door. Is Hanks grief pushing him to imagine some outlandish terror, or is there really something coming to his porch every night? And will he and Abby ever reconcile? The answers will surprise you.

Photo: Gustavo Figueiredo/RLJE Films

After a decades-long absence from the directors chair (at least in the context of narrative features), Richard Stanley finally returned in the weirdest, wildest way with the H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space, for which he also wrote the screenplay. Nicolas Cage and Joely Richardson star as a married couple living in a beautiful rural home with their three kids. Their pleasant little life is rudely interrupted when a glowing meteorite strikes down in their front lawn. Soon, the surrounding area starts to resemble Area X in Annihilation, and each member of the family starts deteriorating in a uniquely disturbing way. (Plus, Cage goes absolutely nuts in this movie, which is a gorgeous sci-fi nightmare you cant miss.)

A great thing about Elijah Woods is that if hes starring in a movie it will almost certainly be strange or terrifying or gory or a combination of all three. In Come to Daddy, Wood plays Norval, a Los Angeles soft boy whose estranged dad has written a letter requesting a reunion at his remote coastal home. Since Norval knows almost nothing about his dad and yearns to connect, he agrees and schleps through the woods into semi-isolation, where he finds a real bastard of a man waiting to greet him. But maybe his dad is just uncomfortable with his feelings when it comes to family? Well, the situation takes a truly bizarre turn for the worse, and things just keep getting crazier and bloodier from there.

Director Osgood Perkins specializes in slow-moving tone studies that immerse the viewer in haunting environs, and his update of the Hansel & Gretel fairytale pays proper homage to its twisted Brothers Grimm origins. When the two kids are cast out of their home by an unhinged mother, Gretel (Sophia Lillis) knows its up to her to provide for and protect her little brother. One day deep in the woods they find a cottage with a beautiful bounty on the table, and hungry Hansel (Samuel Leakey) cant help breaking in to steal a few bites. That, of course, is when they meet the witch of the house, who takes the siblings in to shelter them and fatten them up. Except this time around, the witch (named Holda, played by Alice Krige) takes a liking to Gretel and enlightens her about the truth of her feminine power and the secrets of the Earth. Sophia Lillis is having a moment, so get onboard.

The Lodge is a polarizing experience, and certain shocking narrative choices by co-directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala are just as likely to alienate some audience members as they are to cast an unbreakable spell on others. We sit in the latter camp. Riley Keough stars as Grace, a young woman going on a winter holiday with her fianc and his kids, who are outraged he was able to replace their mother so quickly. To make matters worse, the dad (Richard Armitage) has to stay back in the city for work while the three of them hole up at a snowy cabin where, one morning, everyone wakes to find basically all of the household objects missing. No food. No Christmas stockings. No nothing. And theyre too snowed in to leave or get help. The mystery is, are the children having some insidious fun at Graces expense to punish their future step mom, or is there a supernatural menace manifesting from her mysterious past to terrorize them all? The directors behind Goodnight Mommy will make you question the fundamental innocence of children once again.

Photo: Courtesy of Universal Pictures

The years first horror blockbuster is a new spin on a classic. Writer and director Leigh Whannell conceived of this take on Universals The Invisible Man by making the title character a domestic abuser and the hero his girlfriend who is trying to escape him at any cost. Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) swore to Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) that shed never be able to leave him, and if she ever tried he would find her and walk right up to her without her ever even noticing. Well, Adrian makes good on his promise after Cecilia breaks free, but he makes his presence very, very known but only to her, dragging her back into his cycle of abuse and gaslighting alone. Moss gives a major performance, and Whannell threads the needle of mass-appeal cinema and vital social messaging with deftness, while still making a movie that hits like an 18-wheel truck.

The fact that Underwater was made years ago and rather unceremoniously just dropped into theaters this January with little fanfare is a shame, because it is a fun and relentless thrill ride that stars Kristen Stewart saving lives and fighting sea monsters. When a humongous oil-drilling rig unleashes hordes of extremophiles (and one super-beast that looks uncannily like Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies), the only remaining crew members in the facility must make their way across the ocean floor in hopes of reaching undamaged escape pods, and its just a cascading series of terrors for about 90 minutes. Even T.J. Miller is a good, welcome addition to the cast, and how often are you hearing that in 2020?

Fire up that time machine, because we are going back to the 1980s. Director Joe Begos follows the excellent achievement that was Bliss with this rip-roaring story of a bunch of hard-ass service veterans caught in the middle of a feud between a sadistic drug dealer and a thief who steals his stash. The story is set in a nearish future in which a new, extremely addictive drug has turned huge swathes of the population into junkies, and when the local supplier loses his product to a young woman seeking revenge on him, he sends an army of tweakers into the bar where she seeks refuge, and where she is being protected by the likes of Stephen Lang, William Sadler, Fred Williamson, Martin Kove, and David Patrick Kelly. Heads will be split open. Limbs will be severed. And the blood will keep on flowing.

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The Best Horror Movies of the Year (So Far) - Vulture

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero