Editorials
The 10 Best Horror Movies Released in the First Half of 2022!
It’s that time again; we’re halfway through another year. Already.
The first half of 2022 was much lighter on theatrical releases than the heavily stacked back half. Even still, it held no shortage of fantastic horror releases. The genre has proven time and time again that it thrives in every format, and offerings have become downright overwhelming on VOD and streaming platforms. From highly-anticipated theatrical releases to knockout indie debuts and even some massively under-the-radar titles, 2022’s best horrors deliver on variety.
As a refresher and to ensure great movies don’t fall through the cracks, here are the 10 best horror movies of 2022… so far!
Master
ZOE RENEE stars in MASTER Photo: Linda Kallerus © AMAZON CONTENT SERVICES LLC
Writer/Director Mariama Diallo uses a New England curse to connect the past to the present, blending a variety of terrors, real and imagined, all funneled through the lives of three women. Master casts a bewitching spell of occult and psychological horror, underscoring the true source of fear in a potent way. Diallo’s deft layering of supernatural chills with historical terror and realism makes for a compelling experience that pulls you into the interior lives of these women. The style in capturing the increasingly dense mythology is impeccable. Diallo demonstrates a keen eye for composition and an ability to instill an unsettling atmosphere quickly. Darkness slowly closes around Jasmine, Gail, and Liv, causing them to struggle for air in a claustrophobic and hostile environment. Even if it doesn’t entirely stick its landing, it’s the precise type of intelligent, creepy, and complex horror that makes Diallo one to watch.
The Black Phone
Ethan Hawke as The Grabber in The Black Phone, directed by Scott Derrickson.
It’s 1978, and children are missing in a North Denver neighborhood. If that’s not enough, Finney (Mason Thames) and younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) spend their home life walking on eggshells around their drunk dad (Jeremy Davies). But not long after one of Finney’s only friends goes missing, he crosses paths with the kidnapper (Ethan Hawke). Finney gets trapped in the kidnapper’s near-empty basement, save for a broken black phone, with no way out. With time of the essence as death looms, Finney gets help from beyond the grave as the kidnapper’s past victims dial in on the black phone. Director Scott Derrickson and writer C. Robert Cargill’s adaptation of Joe Hill’s short story nestles a tender tale underneath the scares. Its biggest strength lies with its lead performances. Thames brings the heart, but McGraw is a rare exceptional talent. And Hawke is in a league of his own, playing against type in a remarkably unsettling way.
Bull
Kill List‘s Neil Maskell stars as the eponymous Bull, a gang enforcer that adores his son Aiden (Henri Charles). But Bull mysteriously went silent for a decade, gone without a trace. Now, he’s back and in search of his old gang, who are surprised to see him. It quickly becomes apparent that Bull is on a rage-fueled mission for payback against an egregious double-cross. At the top of his hit list are father-in-law and local crime boss Norm (David Hayman) and Bull’s drug-addicted wife Gemma (Lois Brabin-Platt), who happens to be Norm’s daughter. More than carve his path through personal justice, Bull wants to find his son. The latest by Paul Andrew Williams (The Cottage, Cherry Tree Lane) reads like a classic, gritty crime thriller turned vengeance quest but plays like a horror movie in many ways. The bloody kills, the creatively staged deaths, and an unrestrained killer marries a crime revenge-thriller with a slasher.
See For Me
![‘See for Me’: Complex Home Invasion Thriller Gives Strong Start to 2022! [Indie Horror Spotlight]](https://i0.wp.com/bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/see-for-me-movie.png?resize=740%2C415&ssl=1)
Sophie (Skyler Davenport) was once a highly successful and renowned skier, but blindness seems to have cut her career short. The dashed dreams and aspirations bred resentment in Sophie, leading her to push everyone away as she clings tighter to stubborn independence. When Sophie takes on a cat-sitting job at a secluded mansion, she hides her blindness from the owner. Then three thieves break in, not realizing anyone is home. Sophie’s only means of defense and evasion comes from a phone app that allows an army vet and gamer, Kelly (Jessica Parker Kennedy), to operate remotely as her eyes. See for Me, directed by Randall Okita and written by Adam Yorke and Tommy Gushue, is more interested in exploring the moral complexities of its protagonist. It offers an authentic performance with a visually impaired actor and gives Sophie agency with flawed complexity. It keeps Okita’s stylish thriller fresh and fascinating; even after the home invasion thrills evolve into something else.
The Sadness
The premise, which sees a viral mutation cause the infected to become sadistically violent, reads like a familiar setup in outbreak horror. It quickly becomes apparent that The Sadness refuses to adhere to the average viral horror movie. Director Rob Jabbaz keeps a death grip on the pulse of the current climate, delivering a rage-filled manifesto that aims to tick off every cinematic taboo possible and tests your gag reflex in the process. It’s transgressive horror of the highest, most aggressive order. Heed all of the trigger warnings and then some. The filmmaker delivers his message with blunt force trauma, breaking all the rules along the way. It’s a vicious anthem that keeps you in its grip, forces you to stare into the abyss, and dares you to look away.
The House
Netflix’s stop-motion animated anthology weaves together three creepy tales tethered to one house. The segments span time and tone, telling of a low-income family, an anxious developer, and a fed-up landlady who all become tied to the same mysterious house. Daughter Mabel (Mia Goth) navigates a mounting house of horrors as her parents lose themselves to newly acquired luxury in the first story. The second sees unwanted pests swarming and waylaying a developer’s plans, while the third segment closes the darkly comedic and unsettling anthology on an uplifting note amid an isolated dystopia. The House occasionally unnerves but always taps into deep-seated dread. The animation is breathtaking, and the symbolism bears repeat viewings. Directed by Emma de Swaef, Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, and Paloma Baeza, The House features voice acting by Mia Goth, Claudie Blakley, Matthew Goode, Mark Heap, Miranda Richardson, and Helena Bonham Carter.
Scream
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Ghostface and Jenna Ortega in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group’s “Scream.”
Watcher
American Julia (Maika Monroe) uproots her life to accompany her half-Romanian husband Francis (Karl Glusman) to Bucharest for his high-pressure job. She’s left almost entirely on her own to adjust to a new country and culture, and it’s made even harder by the language barrier. Alone all day and increasingly at night, Julia stares out the window and notices an eerie face staring back. That feeling of being watched transforms into full-blown paranoia with the discovery that a killer named Spider has been stalking and decapitating women in the area. But is someone following Julia, or is it a byproduct of loneliness and culture shock? Chloe Okuno’s ability to create eerie unease from an uncomplicated premise impresses. It’s a measured, moody psychodrama that allows Okuno to wear her influences on her sleeves, making them her own, until one bloody and satisfying finale that seals the deal on Watcher being one of 2022’s best horrors.
The Innocents
Writer/Director Eskil Vogt crafts a stunning portrayal of childhood morality with a tale of four children discovering supernatural abilities over a summer. The Innocents is a provocative look at the fine razor line between good and evil and the darker side of innocence. Four compelling performances ground the disturbing horror, adding complex emotions and morality to fuel the tension. Vogt twists the knife further by setting it under the bright Nordic sun; the terror these kids commit happens right under the adults’ noses, often in plain sight, with no one the wiser. The emotional authenticity heightens the horror, creating one of the most viscerally disturbing depictions of childhood in recent memory.
X
Set in 1979 Texas, a group of aspiring adult filmmakers load up in a van and drive from Houston to the boonies to shoot. Producer Wayne (The Ring‘s Martin Henderson) enlists his girlfriend Maxine (Mia Goth), Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), and Jackson (Scott Mescudi) to star. Then he’s rented a boarding house on the cheap from the reclusive elder Howard (Stephen Ure), who warns them to stay out of his wife’s sight. The porn production quickly devolves into a fucked up horror picture when things spiral out of control. The lean, straightforward narrative gets straight to the goods and never wastes time on heavy exposition. It’s all in the little details and the talented cast making these characters feel lived-in with a shared history. X demonstrates why West should be given full reign to go full throttle on deranged, savage, and intense horror comedies more often. It’s a blast, and one of the very best horror movies of 2022… so far.
Upcoming Festival Favorites to look out for in the second half of 2022: Sissy, Piggy, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Resurrection, Deadstream.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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