(Photo by Warner Bros./RADiUS-TWC/Universal Pictures/A24/IFC Midnight/Courtesy Everett Collection)
100 Best 2010s Horror Movies
The latest: Mermaids, musical numbers, a lot of blood, and a sexy love triangle! The Lure has it all!
The horror genre: What a decade the 2010s were. The rumblings of a quality horror comeback felt during the 2000s morphed into a full-blown renaissance during the 2010s. Genre films not only burst through multiplex and arthouse walls, but found new delivery methods of cruelty-on-demand with the meteoric rise of streaming services, giving new meaning to home invasions.
The 2010s started with a bumper crop of unlikely remake success stories: Piranha 3-D, Fright Night, and Let Me In were all Certified Fresh by some malevolent miracle. Meanwhile, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil and Cabin in the Woods were hilariously tearing apart the foundations of horror tropes, creaky after decades of abuse, allowing for something else to be built upon the remains.
While 2013’s The Conjuring turned relentless old-school scares into blockbuster business, 2014 marks when the beginning of this new nightmare really took shape, with unexpected headline grabbers like Under the Skin, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, and The Babadook. This was going to be horror in the 2010s: An unseen force spreading into bewildering frontiers of intimate grief and personal storytelling, frequently on back-to-basics budgets.
So by 2017, horror was all but inescapable: In the record books (It became the highest-grossing horror movie ever), at the Oscars (Get Out), on streaming (Gerald’s Game, 1922), and, of course, at your local theater, where Happy Death Day became a surprise hit. Though considering it was made by return-on-investment masters Blumhouse, that should’ve been expected.
Then came Hereditary! A Quiet Place! A Halloween sequel that doesn’t suck! And we took all these movies and more, and ranked them by Adjusted Tomatometer, which factors in release year and number of reviews to help compare movies of different sizes and times. Speaking of: Because the competition is so cutthroat, we put in a 40-review minimum, ensuring the most critically-buzzed were the ones to fill out the collection. (So if you’re asking where’s Creep, ask the thousands of critics who never wrote about it to get the movie up to 40 reviews.)
We think we’ve delayed the inevitable long enough: Whether you’re here to find new horror movies and recommendations, or to let the last 10 years of diabolical memories come rushing back, see the blood, sweat, tears, and more blood that made this decade one to carry to the grave in our guide to the 100 Best 2010s Horror Movies!
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