The 15 best A24 horror movies ranked, from “Talk to Me ”to “Midsommar”

For when you’re ready for a little existential ambiguity in your horror diet.

The term ”elevated horror” is inherently patronizing toward the horror genre, where filmmakers have been incorporating sophisticated ideas alongside scares since the beginning. But if there’s a modern brand that can claim to be the home for elevated horror movies, it’s A24.

Since its founding in 2012, A24 has actively sought out and distributed, as the company’s mission statement states, "movies from a distinctive point of view.” When it comes to its burgeoning horror catalog, that means viewers are often left reeling for one reason or another, and often in an inventive or somewhat novel way.

There’s no official formula, but sitting down for an A24 horror film carries certain expectations. Ambiguity, craftsmanship, strong performances, heady themes, and violence — when it finally comes — that’s as visceral as it is grounded. So strap in as we run down the 15 best A24 horror movies, ranked.

15. The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015)

Moody and intricate (sometimes maddeningly so), this debut from Oz Perkins (son of Anthony) inflicts supernatural horror and grief upon the students of a Catholic boarding school. Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, and Emma Roberts are the focus of three separate but interwoven stories, with Perkins expertly keeping us off balance while still playing fair with the plot’s time-hopping structure.

Left behind at their foreboding campus over winter break, Boynton and Shipka are at the mercy of the school’s imperious nuns and old secrets. Split into three slices (whose interconnectedness is revealed with patient, ruthless logic), The Blackcoat’s Daughter is all slow-burns and suggestion — until it’s not. Perkins relies more on atmosphere than jump scares, but when the payoffs come, the pent-up anxiety he’s cultivated erupts into thudding dread. —Dennis Perkins

Where to watch The Blackcoat’s Daughter: Max

14. It Comes at Night (2017)

This tale of a plausible viral apocalypse makes the case that true horrors can lurk just outside our view — and possibly within us all. A pandemic has sent a family fleeing to isolation in the woods, where they watchfully guard themselves against infection (and other survivors). But soon, an intruder introduces both suspicion and hope for connection, as loneliness battles with the fear that something considerably larger than a virus is hiding in the dark.

The best post-apocalyptic horror movies posit that we are the true danger to our continued survival as a species. With a stellar cast (Joel Edgerton and Carmen Ejogo lead one family, while Christopher Abbott and Riley Keough form the other), director Trey Edward Shults allows the tension to build until it all explodes in a climax as devastating as it is dispiritingly, horribly human. —D.P.

Where to watch It Comes at Night: Max

13. Saint Maud (2020)

Rose Glass’ debut feature is 84 minutes of concentrated, escalating dread and yawning horror. The story of a young hospice nurse (Morfydd Clark) sent to care for a wealthy former dancer dying of lymphoma (Jennifer Ehle) is a character study of madness and repression as the pious aide sets out to “save” her latest charge, according to her own deeply unsettling beliefs.

Maud appears easy to figure out at first as her seemingly naive caregiver prays for guidance in her duties, with Clark evoking Sissy Spacek’s Carrie in her apparent unworldliness. But as Maud’s God begins to talk back, and her desperate pleas for divine intervention send her into fits of orgasmic fervor and desperate carnality, Glass hints at the depths of mania powering the nurse’s dedication. As with many of A24’s horror movies, we’re left to ponder whether anything supernatural happens as Maud’s quest reaches its apotheosis, proving that fanatical belief is enough to inspire great terrors. —D.P.

Where to watch Saint Maud: Amazon Prime Video

12. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Fans of Yorgos Lanthimos’ work (The Lobster, Dogtooth) admire his signature icy, deadpan style. But this chilling family horror is the director at his most deliberate and ruthless as he unfurls a tale of absurdist vengeance. Doctors Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman are placidly married with two perfect children, their daily interactions nearly a parody of Kubrick-style stilted and inconsequential dialogue. It’s only when a mysterious young man (Barry Keoghan) inserts himself into their lives that some energy seeps into their routines (gnawing terror will do that).

With a title and premise inspired by the myth of Iphigenia, Greek scholars might imagine they have a head start on puzzling out the strange things that happen as Keoghan’s blankly polite teenager begins to affect the family in inexplicably creepy ways. Farrell and Kidman are outstanding, even as Lanthimos’ ritualistic plotting and direction keep them hemmed into their characters’ rigid conceptions. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is an ingenious and idiosyncratic trap, with an ending as inevitable as it is horrific. —D.P.

Where to watch The Killing of a Sacred Deer: Max

11. Lamb (2021)

It’s not quite the Eraserhead baby, nor the It’s Alive baby, nor even the Trainspotting baby. Rather, the Lamb baby is quite literally a hybrid of those words: the face of a lamb and the body of a human child, which is unsettling in a wholly novel way. That grieving parents María (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Sn?r Guenason) name the mutt after their own dead daughter, Ada, pushes the film into the realm of a psychological fever dream, albeit one that operates on a dry, profoundly deadpan register.

The parents’ willing suspension of disbelief is the only thing keeping Ada’s existence from being a pure manifestation of body horror by proxy. Instead, a different sense of dread creeps in, the nagging feeling that Ada does not belong to them. Meanwhile, the ewe who gave birth to her won’t go away or stop pestering these human usurpers. We realize… wait, is this an abduction movie? And are we rooting for the wrong side? —Chris Bellamy

Where to watch Lamb: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

10. Climax (2018)

No less a drug using expert than Hunter S. Thompson once evoked Colonel Kurtz’s immortal “the horror, the horror” to describe a bad trip in his novel Hell’s Angels. With that in mind, Gaspar Noé’s Climax might as well have been called Hell’s Dancers. A French dance troupe stages a party and somebody spikes the punch with psychedelics. You might guess what kind of chaos breaks loose, but the realities of this extreme horror film are much bleaker than whatever you’re imagining.

As the party collapses into collective, mob-like madness, a sense of despair is unleashed along with paranoia, depravity, violence, and carnage. The horror is the implicit violation of the drug-fueled nightmare, a group meant to exist in harmony — featuring a cast of real dancers as the luridly fluid characters — being thrown violently out of sync, like a body spasming involuntarily. Meanwhile, Noe’s anxious camera emphasizes their increasing disorientation and anguished confusion. When the party’s over, only destruction is in its place. —C.B.

Where to watch Climax: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

9. Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

There are slasher movies, and then there’s whatever Bodies Bodies Bodies is (this is a compliment). Genre trappings abound in horror, but Halina Reijn’s film gives the murder mystery template a gleefully modern spin; here, it’s effectively the machinery for a send-up of Gen Z psychology. Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) brings her new girlfriend (Maria Bakalova) to meet her old friends for a house party during a raging hurricane, which brings out the more frenetic sides of the cabin fever cohorts. The eponymous parlor game ensues… until one character winds up really, truly dead. And then another. And then another.

It would be cruel to spoil one of the decade’s great climactic punchlines; suffice it to say the movie cleverly leverages the rules of the slasher format to turn the tables on its house full of would-be victims. —C.B.

Where to watch Bodies Bodies Bodies: Netflix

8. X (2022)

While it may be best appreciated in concert with its prequel, Pearl (2022) — not to mention MaXXXine (2024) — Ti West’s X stands on its own as one of the gnarliest slashers in recent memory. The setting is familiar enough: rural Texas farmland, a creepy old couple, charming dirtbags secretly shooting a dirty movie. X pushes those setpieces towards their weirdest, grossest possibilities, fashioning a mournful plunge into the horror of aging and the pain of realizing your body can’t do what it used to. Regret and envy, the film posits, can easily inspire vengeance, and these creative kills are proof.

If nothing else, X made everyone take notice of Mia Goth as a generational horror talent (apparently, not enough people saw 2016’s A Cure for Wellness). X revolves around her character’s obsession with star power, while Goth’s dual-role performance leaves no doubt of her own prowess onscreen, single-handedly justifying the conceit of the whole trilogy. —C.B.

Where to watch X: YouTube TV

7. Green Room (2015)

Jeremy Saulnier’s taut, gory thriller might not delve into otherworldly terrors, but it doesn’t have to. Following a struggling but committed punk band (led by the late Anton Yelchin) to a gig in the Oregon backwoods that goes bloodily awry, Green Room shows that there are ruthless human monsters among us as the group performs at a (surprise!) neo-Nazi roadhouse. (Though to their detriment, they open their raucous set with a deliciously inflammatory Dead Kennedys cover.)

Stumbling across the sort of nefarious crime you get whenever Nazis are involved, the band barricades themselves in the club’s grimy green room and tries to figure out a way to escape with their lives. Patrick Stewart, of all people, is an all-time villain as the skinheads’ calculating leader, issuing merciless orders in the same reasonable cadence we’ve been conditioned to trust so implicitly. The violence, when it comes, is brutal and realistic, as Yelchin, Stewart, Alia Shawkat, and Imogen Poots imbue their disparate characters with inner life that makes each successive shock that much more nerve-fraying. —D.P.

Where to watch Green Room: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

6. Midsommar (2019)

Horror thrives in the darkness, which makes the mounting terrors of Ari Aster’s immersive nightmare here especially impressive. The incessantly bright and colorful palette of the film’s Swedish summer locale leaves the characters — and viewers — nowhere to hide. Tagging along with her lunkish boyfriend and his grad school friends for a trip to study a rare rural folk festival, the depressed and grieving Dani (Florence Pugh) finds herself drawn further and further into the commune’s rituals, even after the film’s first, jaw-droppingly bloody shock.

Aster weaves an inescapable nightmare out of sunshine, blindingly white fabrics, and garlands of flowers as Dani and her outsider band never quite understand the menace lurking behind their pleasant hosts’ placid smiles. In the isolated Swedish countryside of the never-setting sun, Midsommar hints at deeper, darker forces underneath the commune’s folksy and welcoming exterior, leading to a climax where the full weight of tradition and belief roars with terrifying finality. —D.P.

Where to watch Midsommar: Max

5. Under the Skin (2013)

Jonathan Glazer’s unclassifiable sort-of horror film quickly weeded out those not willing to follow its uniquely trying and abstract path. In Under the Skin, Scarlett Johansson plays a blank, accommodating woman whose nightly ventures into Glasgow see her pick up men and bring them back to — well, that would be saying too much.

Here, high-concept plot elements that might otherwise be lurid emerge as part of the film’s own, singular vision. What happens to those men in Johansson’s care is the stuff of pulp and exploitation, while Glazer’s exquisite visuals and measured, inscrutable plan transform genre convention into thoughtful (if mesmerizingly horrific) meditation. Like Johansson’s character, Under the Skin comes at its subjects through an unnervingly alien lens. —D.P.

Where to watch Under the Skin: Max

4. The Lighthouse (2019)

Robert Eggers’ second feature is a hallucinatory, maddeningly claustrophobic blend of folk horror and darkly funny character work from Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. A24’s commitment to auteurism is evident in the black-and-white cinematography, the solitary 19th-century New England lighthouse setting, and a nearly square aspect ratio. As the two keepers’ accelerating madness batters their already uneasy relationship (much like the eventual hurricane does to the lighthouse), the film becomes a phantasmagorical endurance test, with the two antagonistic leads hurling themselves against their tight confinement.

Dafoe, as the crustiest “wickie” on the brutal coast, roars and bellows with wild-eyed Shakespearean menace, while newbie Pattinson catches glimpses of his partner’s strange midnight rituals and finds inexplicable things washed up on the rocky shore. Everything is soaked in stashes of harsh liquor and inadequately buried tensions, leading to an utterly go-for-broke, ambiguous denouement. —D.P.

Where to watch The Lighthouse: Max

3. Talk to Me (2023)

Young people doing dumb things at parties is a time-honored tenet of life and horror movies. Drinking too much, making a fool of yourself, casually puncturing the delicate veil between the living and the dead — you know, the usual. But there’s a strange intimacy to Talk to Me’s premise, in which teens act tough by holding a mummified hand, declaring the titular phrase, and inviting one lucky spirit from the other side to inhabit their body. In another context, it would be romantic. Call it “90 Seconds in Heaven,” since after a minute and a half, as the urban legend goes, the possession gets harder to shake and might even become permanent.

That metaphysical connection soon snowballs into a mounting existential threat when Mia (Sophie Wilde) allows her best friend’s eager little brother to have one round with the hand, after which his body is never the same. Here, spiritual infractions are met with savage physical punishment and some of the more grotesque images in recent horror memory (which, as the genre has become ever more popular and emboldened, is seriously saying something). —C.B.

Where to watch Talk to Me: Paramount+

2. Hereditary (2018)

Ari Aster’s directorial debut cemented him as a defining voice of modern arthouse horror. A searing tale of grief and buried family secrets, the film is a showcase for the great Toni Collette, whose artist matriarch must cope with an unthinkable tragedy while something even more daunting lurks in her past. As a woman whose dawning realization infests and wrenches apart her family, Collette turns in one of the most towering horror performances in memory.

Aster’s craftsmanship matches his lead’s, with Hereditary being as controlled and meticulous as the miniature tableaux Collette’s character creates. As is often the case in so-called elevated horror, we’re primed to accept the film’s mounting evils as either psychological or supernatural, never quite certain on which side the ax will fall. Even if Hereditary eventually provides clear answers, the implications linger with the force of undisputed classics like The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby. —D.P.

Where to watch Hereditary: Max

1. The Witch (2015)

Robert Eggers has become synonymous with A24’s particular horror brand, and while The Witch and 2019’s The Lighthouse are wildly different films, each encapsulates the studio’s aura in its own way. 17th-century New England is the setting for this enigmatic tale of an outcast Puritan family haunted by superstition, paranoia, disappearances, and the growing fear that something in the deep, dark woods surrounding their homestead is attacking their rigid faith.

Anya Taylor-Joy, in her film debut as the family’s teenage daughter, appears to be the center of the escalating occurrences, as the clan comes apart in the face of a series of mysterious and grotesque tragedies. Eggers’ stunning visuals and meticulous pace draw viewers into their increasingly desperate mania, gradually wedging open the door between rational interpretation and supernatural inescapability. Ultimately less ambiguous than it seems, The Witch etches its story in sudden, shocking strokes. —D.P.

Where to watch The Witch: Max

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.