It’s Never Too Early For A Fright! The 10 Best Horror Movie Early-Releases Of This Century So Far

Talk of CIA conspiracies is all the rage nowadays, and UFO sightings and mind-control are the most culturally popular of them all. The film focuses on news reporter John Klein (Richard Gere), who investigates sightings of a large, moth-like creature with red eyes, as drawn by a crash survivor named Mary (Debra Messing) in her notebook.

The Mothman Prophecies was not well-regarded by critics upon its release, and it was just as divisive as the book, which many claimed was just incoherent ramblings. Over time, however, the film attained a cult following. As more information became public about the CIA’s involvement in human experimentation via MKUltra, films like The Mothman Prophecies predictably became more of a public fascination.

It features great bone-chilling, suspenseful sequences, like the Silver Bridge sequence, where Washington Post reporter John Klein witnesses the bridge starting to collapse, and its ambiguous, cliffhanger ending perfectly feeds into the conspiracies it portrays.

Final Destination 2 has perhaps benefited more from time and age than any of the other Final Destination movies, sans Bloodlines, which came out just last year and was touted as perhaps the best in the series thus far. FD 2 was hailed as much better paced and more creative, with a better sense of humor than the first movie, and it featured one of the greatest and most iconic opening kills in horror movie history.

The film also thinks more theoretically about the concept of “Death” and introduces new loopholes to cheat it, keeping the film’s twists from becoming too predictable. It’s a movie that mixes the exploitative kills the franchise’s fans love with well-crafted action sequences and suspense.

Deeply unpleasant, unrelentingly bleak, and filled with some of the gnarliest and blood-curdling torture sequences ever put in a mainstream Hollywood movie, Hostel arrived after the comforting holiday season like a homicidal maniac into American viewers’ lives.

The story follows two friends, Paxton and Josh (Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson, respectively), on a European trip who get caught up with the wrong crowd and find themselves as candidates for torture by a group of anonymous rich clientele.

Over time, the film became a key text of the “torture porn” genre and featured a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo from Audition director Takashi Miike. Its gritty, washed out aesthetic and uber-realistic prosthetics made for truly disturbing scenes of tendon-slicing and organ puncturing gore.

Also, in typical 2000s fashion, when movies were still using viral marketing via email rather than social media, it had its own creepy website for the fictional “Elite Hunting” corporation, where you could enter your email address.

When Teeth premiered at Sundance, its premise was a huge topic of discussion, jokes,and morbid curiosity among classmates in my high school. Teeth follows a teenage girl named Dawn (Jess Weixler) who has vagina dentata, inspired by the medieval folktale in which the vagina is said to contain teeth as a defense mechanism.

Its understated and minimalist approach to horror is laden with comedy. It was necessarily brought up in feminist critique as well because of its premise, as well as for concerns about its depiction of sexual assault. Sundance always had a particular shocking and eclectic charm in the 2000s, and along with films like The Squid and the Whale or Napoleon Dynamite, I always considered Teeth a flagship film of what a “Sundance movie” was.

Yes, Lake Mungo never actually got a theatrical release in the U.S., but it’s too good a movie not to include here, and it did premiere in January at the After Dark Horror Fest, so I’ll make an exception here.

Australian director Joel Anderson’s first and only feature has appropriately gained a massive level of appreciation over time. Being both prescient in its usage of found footage and modern technology like surveillance cams, cell phones, and Photoshop as a means of tracking and deceiving people, as well as a heartbreaking metaphorical exploration of grief, this is one of the most soulful but also the most painful horror films of this century so far.

Anderson’s ability to carve out the story to mimic waves of hope and disappointment that people might experience when they lose loved ones is meticulous and well crafted, turning the apparitions of Alice, the deceased daughter of the Palmer family, into a cipher for stages of grief.

Dear Readers, I have to come clean. I said this list would be no-rank, neutral, in chronological order. But I can’t help but let you know that this is my favorite horror film of this century thus far. Kill List introduces us to ex-hitmen Jay (Neil Maskell) and Gal (Michael Smiley), who are called out of retirement for one last job.

A sinister and bleak dive into a rabbit hole of some of the most sadistic criminals in England. They check off names from their list one by one, but it’s not long before they come face to face with something strange and demonic that turns their mission upside-down.

Kill List relies more on inferred horror, creating its tension from what is not seen on screen. In one scene, Jay and Gal watch a series of tapes that make them shake uncontrollably and violently smash the laptop they’re watching on, letting audiences imagine the horrific things they might be seeing. Kill List is electrifying from its first second to its last.

Robert Eggers is much more well known now for his brooding, folkloric fables that mix horror, adventure, and dark humor. This signature style began with The Witch (The VVitch) in 2015.

In 1630s New England, two teenage siblings, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), discover a witch living in the woods near their secluded home after their young baby brother is mysteriously killed.

The film’s juxtaposition of pagan witchcraft with the early American settlement colonies’ Puritan religious extremism is potent in its creepy imagery, religious allegory, and symbolism. Eggers has carried these foundational aspects of his cinema to all his films over the past decade, but The Witch still remains the most potent and chilling of his movies.

M. Night Shyamalan’s Split is an amalgamation of his early films that mix elements of suspense and horror, but also incorporates a new chapter of his film career in its whimsy and audacity. While the early Shyamalan whispered terror into our ears, Split screams it in our faces.

James McAvoy gives a career-defining role as a man with multiple aliases and a violent form of dissociative identity disorder who keeps several young women captive and slowly reveals to them one very dangerous and lethal secret he has. The biggest surprise in Split comes when it is revealed that it’s part of the Unbreakable “universe,” and it became one of Shyamalan’s more popular movies.

Let’s face it, one of the biggest gripes of horror fans is that it simply doesn’t get enough respect, especially from elite institutions like the Academy. The only horror films in the last 40 years to receive a Best Picture nomination are The Silence of the Lambs, The Sixth Sense, Black Swan, The Substance, and Get Out. (Sinners and Frankenstein joined that very small club this year.)

Get Out was an even rarer nomination in that it was released in theaters in February, a month that often doesn’t even exist in the Academy’s mind. Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris Washington, a young Black man who visits his white girlfriend Rose’s (Alison Armitage) parents for the first time. When he gets there, though, he notices the only Black people around are groundskeeper Walter (Marcus Henderson), housekeeper Georgina (Betty Gabriel), and Andre Hayworth (Lakieth Stanfield), who all act worryingly and suspiciously in front of him. Is he in some sort of trap?

Peele’s incredible blend of police procedural, comedy, and suspense creates one of the most entertaining and politically conscious horror films of this century. He excavates the deception of “well-meaning white moderates” as well as the dark corners of American suburbia.

2020 was decidedly a terrible year for the entire planet, but January began with Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man so… at least it started off on the right foot! Re-envisioning H.G. Wells’ iconic novel into a tale of romantic violence where a woman named Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) is stalked and psychologically abused by her ex-boyfriend Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), the novel’s main character, who is able to make himself invisible.

The film turns the tables multiple times, keeping the action and plot on edge and unpredictable. Cecilia isn’t a total victim for long in the movie, and she has her own ways of being violent and unforgiving, giving the film a multi-dimensional female lead that isn’t reduced to just “damsel in distress”. Elisabeth Moss’ performance is phenomenal, maybe the best performance from any movie on this list. Her hysteria, resolve, and anger shine through her unblinking stare. She’s perfectly cast in this terrific movie.