2019 dumped a whole lot of horror movies on us, and like most years, many of them weren’t great. But there were still plenty of spook shows released this year that are absolutely worth your time. So I sat down to rank the top ten most horrifying movie moments of the year, in hopes of helping you curate your spooktacular viewing experience.
Now, this is by no means an exhaustive list. I am but one man, and have not seen every single scary film released this year. (The most notable absence is The Lighthouse, a film I have been dying to see and was simply unable to due to circumstances beyond my control.) There were also a slew of films that delivered memorable scenes that I ultimately chose to leave off the list, including some top-shelf monster movie violence in Crawl and Itsy Bitsy and a truly inspired murder sequence in the otherwise forgettable Child’s Play remake. Anyway, with all that out of the way, onward to the list!
Note: I did my best to avoid spoilers, but the list does contain some minor ones.
10. Annabelle Comes Home - The Ferryman
Look, I’m just as surprised as you are to see this movie on this list. But the latest Conjuring spinoff was actually pretty decent, and it brought some genuinely creepifying moments to bolster its refreshingly straightforward plot. It’s essentially a ghost home invasion movie, with two teenage babysitters trapped inside a haunted house with their young charge. One of those ghosts is the Ferryman, and as far as I can tell, he is literally Charon the boatman from Greek mythology, only now he has a thing for blonde women. There’s plenty of drawn out tension, including an excellently staged encounter with a bloody bride made all the more eerie because it takes place in the sunny mid-afternoon. But the film’s standout sequence is when the Ferryman finally shows up to stalk Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman) through the blacked-out house. Without giving too much away, they establish a game involving the boatman’s coins that elicited a resounding “Oh fuck that” from yours truly that escalates to a truly unexpected degree, leading to one of the most unforgettable images of horror I saw in a theater this year. Also, the movie features an Incidental Werewolf™, which in my opinion can do nothing but benefit the viewing experience.
9. It Chapter Two - Under the Bleachers
It Chapter Two is full of such bonkers imagery that it’s hard to decide which scene deserves to be crowned the standout scariest moment. There are a few moments in the movie that are so over-the-top beyond anything I’ve ever even had nightmares about that I literally felt my brain disconnect more than once as it struggled to make sense of what I was seeing. But in terms of good old-fashioned scariness, the most frightening sequence is when Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) lures a little girl beneath the bleachers at a local baseball game. It’s a gut-wrenching scene, as Pennywise plays on the girl’s empathy and promises to use his magic to blow away the birthmark on her face if she’ll only just get a little closer. The fact that her parents, and indeed a whole crowd of adults, are only yards away makes it even more horrifying (and all too real).
8. Brightburn - The Car Attack
Brightburn never quite manages to live up to the genius of its premise, but there are a few moments of greatness in this slasher film spin on the Superman origin story. Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn) is an evil little shit with the powers of the famous Kryptonian, and he uses his superhuman abilities to terrorize his parents, stalk his school crush, and murder his uncle in truly insane fashion. To be fair, every one of the multiple murders Brandon commits are totally insane, but this one is the creepiest. It begins with Brandon creeping around his aunt and uncle’s house, and friends, take the typical “murderer stalking you in a dark house” trope and add a killer who can travel at the speed of sound. It’s wildly unsettling in all-new ways. And when Brandon finally attacks his uncle as he’s driving down a deserted country road, the movie briefly reaches the heights it was meant to. If viewed from a certain perspective, Superman is indistinguishable from a demon, and the car attack scene showcases just how terrifying a superpowered being can be. After leaving the theater, I felt myself kind of siding with Lex Luthor.
7. Pet Sematary - Bringing Ellie Home
The surprisingly good Pet Sematary remake was brought to us by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, the same directing duo who made the grotesquely horrifying and wholly unforgettable Starry Eyes. They decided to alter Stephen King’s source material in ways that even a die-hard King fan like myself can appreciate, primarily in having the Creed’s elder daughter Ellie be the child that is killed and subsequently resurrected by the evil force in the Pet Sematary, as opposed to the toddler Gage. The scene wherein Victor (Jason Clarke) introduces the undead Ellie to her mother Rachel (Amy Seimetz) is so goddamn dark you could smear it over your eyes and go to a Misfits concert. By having Ellie be the one to come back to life, who unlike Gage is able to speak and interact and had a fully realized personality when she died, adds a level of horror not fully explored in King’s novel or the previous film adaptation. The macabre homecoming is followed by a scene in which Ellie interrogates Victor over what happened to her, flat-out asking “Did I die?” and eerily referring to where she went when she did. The afterlife is not a pleasant place in Pet Sematary, and Ellie gives us a chilling window into that fact.
6. Parasite - The Man on the Stairs
Parasite isn’t a horror movie, but director Bong Joon-ho has always skated pretty close to the genre. The film is about the Kims, a poor family living in South Korea and struggling to make ends meet with limited employment opportunities. One by one, they con their way into working for the Parks, an absurdly wealthy family, by posing as tutors, a chauffeur, and a housekeeper. The Parks have a young son who has become socially withdrawn ever since his development was disrupted by an incident in which he thinks he saw a ghost in the house. It’s eventually revealed that what the little boy saw was a man who has been secretly living in a hidden basement for years, and let me tell you, the flashback in which Joon-ho finally shows us what the boy saw is fucking frightening. The boy is sitting on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night, eating his leftover birthday cake, when a man’s leering face suddenly appears at the top of the basement stairs, wild-eyed and completely shrouded by darkness. It’s technically not a jump scare, because Joon-ho doesn’t do a snap zoom or a music cue, or use anything beyond total silence to punctuate the moment. But I damn-near shrieked. It’s so unexpected and simply, quietly horrifying that I hope Bong Joon-ho’s next film is a full-blown ghost story.
5. Lords of Chaos - The Murder in the Park
The dramatization of the truly wild events surrounding the formation of the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem and the subsequent murder of one of its founding members doesn’t immediately sound like it would be partcularly funny or scary, but it somehow manages to be both. The film’s sharply ironic narration (delivered by an excellent Rory Culkin) is undercut by a handful of scenes of extreme, disturbing violence. The most shocking of which is delivered by Valter Skarsgård (yes, this list features two Skarsgårds). In an unforgettably brutal scene, Skarsgård’s character butchers a random man in a park with chilling sociopathic detachment. The relentless violence of the attack coupled with Skarsgård’s completely emotionless performance is deeply disturbing. He’s killing a man for essentially no reason, and it’s clear he feels absolutely nothing about it. It ranks alongside the opening sequence of Dario Argento’s Suspiria as one of the most psychologically upsetting murder scenes I’ve ever seen.
4. Under the Silver Lake - The Owl Woman
Under the Silver Lake isn’t really a horror movie, but the neo-noir black comedy thriller about the seedy underbelly of Hollywood’s elite class has its fair share of frightening shit. That should come as no surprise considering it was directed by David Robert Mitchell, whose breakout film It Follows was loaded with deeply unsettling imagery. Sam (Andrew Garfield) stumbles upon a macabre conspiracy hidden in plain sight in Los Angeles, centered around a mysterious group who regularly dispatch an assassin called the Owl Woman to kill anyone who gets too close to uncovering the truth. And folks, when Sam stumbles upon the explosively violent murder scene of one of his conspiracy-theory buddies and discovers the Owl Woman on the man’s home security footage, it scared the absolute shit out of me. Like, the “turn on all the lights in the house” kind of scared. The sequence is terrifying and surreal and possibly even supernatural, and it’s made all the worse by the implication that this absolutely won’t be the last time Sam sees the Owl Woman.
3. Us - Red’s Speech
Jordan Peele’s Us only further solidified my opinion that it is unfair for him to be so good at so many things. His film about an underground lair of evil duplicates ascending in violent revolution against their above-ground counterparts scores a lot of spookiness points for all of the things it never explains. And the fact that we never really understand the frightening mystery behind it all is part of what makes Red’s speech to Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o in a masterful dual role) so chilling. A sinister tale of a lifetime of doom and misery, Red delivers her indictment against Adelaide in a harsh, choked voice (the reason for which becomes clear in the film’s predictable but effective twist), surrounded by the mute gargoyles that make up her mirror-image family. Both of Peele’s films excel at keeping the audience in a state of perpetual unease, punctuated by unexpected spikes of terror. And this scene is a perfect example of both.
2. Doctor Sleep - The Baseball Boy Murder
Ok, you remember how I said Lords of Chaos contains one of the most horrifying murder scenes in cinematic history? Mike Flanagan apparently heard me say that and asked the universe to hold his beer. Flanagan is easily one of the best horror directors currently working, and while his adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel novel Doctor Sleep ultimately disappointed me, the director’s trademark excellence shines through in several spots (pun relentlessly, unapologetically intended). The most unforgettable part of the film, however, is when Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) and her gang of psychic vampires abduct a little boy and torture him to death. To call the sequence “upsetting” would be a massive understatement. It made me physically uncomfortable to the point where I felt like what I was watching must be illegal. It was disturbing on a primal level, and I was upset about it for the rest of the day. If that isn’t effective horror, I don’t know what is.
1. Midsommar - The Murder/Suicide
I went into Midsommar expecting to see more of the brain-slashing imagery director Ari Aster unleashed on us in his previous film Hereditary, and I was not disappointed. While the film was mostly a miss for me, the opening sequence is Aster at his very best, taking something familiar and comforting - the family home - and turning it into a chamber of horrors. Dani (Florence Pugh) is trying desperately to get ahold of her sister Terri and her parents after receiving a distressing email from Terri indicating that she intends to harm herself, and boy howdy does she harm herself. In an expertly staged sequence, Aster gradually reveals that the reason her parents are not answering is because they have been murdered in their sleep by Terri, who leaked carbon monoxide into the family house and poisoned everyone inside. We slowly follow the hose from the car’s exhaust pipe in the garage as it winds its way through the house, ultimately ending in Terri’s room, where she is propped up with the hose feverishly taped to her mouth, covered in vomit and extremely deceased. It’s an absolutely shocking image that has not left my mind all year, and it’s a hell of a way to start your movie.