The best horror movies of the year so far, ranked by scariness
The year got off to a rather slow start when it comes to horror movies, but now that the release calendar has ramped up, there are at least a few horror movies worth watching in 2024.
While it’s still early on, it’s hard not to feel like this year’s horror theme is “fun” (if you’re our kind of sicko), or at least “playfulness.” With killer swimming pools that haunt former baseball pros, deadly convents, and haunted talk shows, most of the year’s best movies so far are doing a delightful job of making their horror feel fresh and inventive, making us smile and scream in equal measure.
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But whether you’re more toward the smiling end or just in it for the screams, we’ve put together a list of the best horror movies of 2024 so far, ranked by scariness. Scariness is certainly different for everyone, but we’ve tried to break it down into two categories: terror, which is the movie’s overall tension, jump scares, and general suspense, and gore, which is all about how bloody the movie gets.
Run time: 1h 38m
Director: Bryce McGuire
Cast: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle
Where to watch: Digital purchase on Amazon and Apple TV
Night Swim is a movie about a killer pool, and it’s both better, funnier, and scarier than you might expect. With an fantastically goofy performance by Wyatt Russell as an ex-baseball player moving his family into a new house with an ancient and malevolent wish-granting pool in the backyard, the movie has a very specific tone that snaps back and forth from silly to creepy without a moment’s notice.
Night Swim is for the die-hard horror fans. Not because it’s especially scary (it isn’t) but because its scariness is limited to a few great ideas and specific moments, and otherwise the movie is a self-aware and silly blast. It’s a movie perfectly built for anyone that loves to scroll a streaming service and throw on nice little horror movie at 11:30 p.m. In other words, Night Swim is a pretty good time, but one you might not remember
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