Eight Cinema Creators Who Are Redefining Today's Scary Movies
Within the landscape of contemporary movie-making, a fresh cohort of artists is stretching the limits of the horror film style. From societal allegories to visceral fright-fests, these eight movie-makers are crafting memorable experiences that redefine dread for a new generation.
Jordan Peele
The director behind Get Out has crafted pointed allegories delving into the perils, subtleties, and paradoxes of Black life in the US. His impact is obvious from the sheer number of imitators, with the top among them supported by the director by way of his Monkeypaw.
Robert Eggers
An expert uncoverer of the least known pockets of the bygone eras, this filmmaker of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and Nosferatu is known for revealing the foreign facets of historical periods and depicting them free from contemporary alteration. Eggers' sinister time machines unlock gateways to psychosis, desire, and transformation.
Jane Schoenbrun
The contemporary creator with their pulse most attuned to the younger spirit, as attuned to the isolation, and significant relationships, of an digitally-obsessed era. Channeling ideas of connection and pop culture through gender transition and the history of corporeal fear, works such as I Saw the TV Glow plumb the strangest fractures of the identity.
Damien Leone
Leone’s three-part saga of Terrifier features is this era's major horror success story, proof that fan support can still create true blockbusters from skillfully made small-scale bloodshed. More than the new horror villain, psychotic icon Art the Clown is proof that the public’s desire for blood – gratuitous, humorous, unbridled – remains unslakable.
Rose Glass
Merging the boundary between delusion and the real world, with her works Saint Maud and Love Lies Bleeding, Glass has assembled a portfolio of driven protagonists compelled to the edge by the intensity of their commitment to distorted beliefs. Known for imaginative climaxes that challenge straightforward understandings into suspicion, her works stay with you – though not so much like a pebble in your footwear than a sharp object in your sole.
Danny and Michael Philippou
From the primordial ooze of YouTube arose a team of siblings dominating the cinema landscape with a trendy brand of provocation. With their films Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, they staged atrocity exhibitions in between authentic depictions of how today’s teenagers behave. Film students look up to them as if they’re freshly made saints.
Julia Ducournau
Her refined, metaphor-forward fusion of genre trappings with art film flourishes gained her a Palme d’Or, the first time the Cannes Film Festival awarded its premier award to a terror movie. Holding the blood-soaked banner of the extreme cinema wave, the Titane filmmaker delves into the appetites of the isolated to spectacular result.
Na Hong-jin
One of the most thrilling artists to arise from Eastern cinema in recent years, the Korean filmmaker has crafted one gem of folk horror (The Wailing) and co-scripted a second one (The Medium). Paced with supreme certainty and precise mood management, his movies converts mainstream formulas into frightful, original styles.
These eight directors embody the wide-ranging and groundbreaking path of scary cinema, propelling the boundaries of dread into fresh dimensions.
