As the SAG-AFTRA drags into its third month and audiences find themselves in spooky season, the time has come to celebrate the two of the best independent studios for taking a stance on labor rights and making great scary movies.
Shortly after the start of the strike, A24 and Neon made interim agreements with the union that met the actors’ demands and allowed the studios to continue making films with union members, movies like the several instantly iconic Horror films they’ve produced in the last decade. Here, in no particular order, find the best scary movies from A24 and Neon, including modern classics and films that slipped under the radar.
1. Green Room (2015)
Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room makes its small scale an asset. The film centers on a punk band trapped in a skinhead venue after taking a gig there in their desperation for funds. When the band discovers a body in the venue’s green room, they become the white supremacists’ prisoners, a position they refuse to accept.
Green Room packs a powerful punch as a low-key siege film, heavily inspired by John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, full of brief but brutal bursts of violence as the band makes various attempts to escape the room. They barter, plan, and fight to varying degrees of success and failure. But the palpable tension never lets up.
2. Crimes of the Future (2022)
After more than two decades away, David Cronenberg returned to the body horror subgenre with a film that feels like a final statement from a master. Crimes of the Future takes place in an undisclosed future where human evolution has spurred some people to develop new organs. The film centers on one such human, an artist with a partner who surgically removes the seemingly useless organs in front of audiences as performance art.
Crimes of the Future cares more about ideas than narrative momentum. Plotlines featuring a governmental agency attempting to catalog new organs, murderous medical techs, and a group of evolved humans who eat plastic serve as launchpads for philosophical explorations. But those explorations are so fascinating and thoughtful that what the film lacks in scares and emotion, it more than makes up for in intellectual excitement.
3. The Witch (2015)
Few films become classics as quickly as The Witch. The film’s quotable ending, beloved goat character Black Phillip (Charlie), and endorsements from Stephen King and the Satanic Temple ensured it a spot in the pantheon of iconic 21st-century horror.
The film tells the story of a Puritan family ousted from their colony (for being too severe in their theology) who create a home near the edge of a forest that may or may not house a witch. When crops start to fail, and the family’s youngest child goes missing, suspicions fall on the eldest daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor Joy), who’s just on her way out of puberty.
The Witch deserves all the praise that’s been heaped upon it and maybe even more. Few films succeed in delivering scares, big ideas, and magnificent endings the way The Witch does. It's one of the best scary movies from A24.
4. In the Earth (2021)
Filmmaker Ben Wheatley never stops surprising audiences. Between directing a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and the giant shark attack sequel The Meg 2, Wheatley made a striking little folk horror film with Neon. In the Earth follows plant scientist Martin (Joel Fry) and his park guide Alma (Ellora Torchia) as they journey deep into a forest, suffer an attack from a mysterious stranger, and are welcomed into the camp of hermit Zach (Reece Shearsmith).
But does Zach really want to help the two interlopers in the forest? The longer Martin and Alma stay with Zach, the more suspicious they become of his intentions. But In the Earth expands beyond an interpersonal drama as Martin and Alma discover that the phenomena Martin set out to study may be more mystical than scientific.
5. X (2022)
The first released, but second chronologically in a film trilogy from A24, X centers on the fateful encounter between up-and-coming adult film star Maxine (Mia Goth) and elderly Pearl (Mia Goth) in 1979. Maxine arrives at Pearl and her husband’s farm to film a new movie with the rest of her crew. But their attempts to slip their salacious endeavor by the property owners fail, and things soon escalate into a bloodbath.
X succeeds as a slasher and an affecting portrait of regret, longing, and grief for a life not lived. Goth delivers incredible dual performances and lends the murderous Pearl a deep sadness that almost makes it feel like she's a hero.
6. The Bad Batch (2016)
Ana Lily Amirpour followed up her black-and-white Persian-language vampire western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night with a brightly lit, desert-set post-apocalyptic Neo-Western, horror, romance(?) movie. The Bad Batch centers on an open-air prison in the American Southwest where people expelled from society must fend for themselves to survive.
In that desert, Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) struggles to find a safe place to live and build a sense of community. On one end of the desert are cannibals, who early in the film take Arlen’s arm, and on the other, a strange cult-like society that seems to worship a man called The Dream (Keanu Reeves). The Bad Batch draws equally from hillbilly horror like The Hills Have Eyes, post-apocalyptic westerns like Mad Max, and myriad other influences to create something delightfully unique.
7. The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015)
The second film from Anthony Perkins’s son, Osgood Perkins, centers on an all-girls Catholic boarding school during a brutally cold winter break. Of all the students, only two girls, Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton), remain with the nuns at the upstate New York school during a weeklong break in February. Rose fears that she may be pregnant, while Kat suffers from nightmares of her parents’ death in a violent car crash.
But as the film goes on, we learn that something supernatural may be spending the break with the teens. As Kat begins to act strangely and a mysterious girl named Joan (Emma Roberts) makes her way to the school, The Blackcoat’s Daughter invites audiences into a mysterious and unnerving story full of dreadful atmosphere.
8. Revenge (2017)
Unsurprisingly, Revenge tells a story of the dish best served cold. When Jen (Matilda Lutz) goes on vacation with her wealthy boyfriend, some of his hunting buddies arrive earlier than expected, and one sexually assaults Jen. Instead of keeping her safe, her boyfriend attempts to kill her so she can’t talk about the assault.
But Jen doesn’t die. She survives a seemingly fatal wound, restores herself through a series of cauterizations, and sets out to hunt the men who wronged her. Revenge challenges viewers not to look away throughout, from its stomach-churning violence to the horrific ways the men treat Jen and one another. But those relationships between the men make Revenge more than a simple retribution story. The film’s investment extends beyond the inciting and retributive violence to the social relationships that motivate and allow the inciting violence.
9. It Comes at Night (2017)
Neon and A24 realize that the post-apocalypse is a perfect setting for horror stories. But unlike The Bad Batch, It Comes at Night isn’t brightly lit or full of scary groups of people. Trading the equally vibrant and threatening communities of that film for an isolated home in the woods, It Comes at Night tells the story of two families thrown together when one arrives at the remote home of another begging for help.
For a while, the two families get along and work together. But as the film goes on, threats from the outside world, including infection, other people, and something that may or may not be supernatural, cause tensions to rise. Without a doubt, it's one of the best scary movies from A24.
10. Titane (2021)
Titane made history when it won the Palme d’Or in 2021. The body horror, serial killer, queer coming-of-age, family drama delighted and confused audiences in equal measure at the festival and upon its release to the public, but no matter how people feel about it, there’s no denying the film’s power to fascinate.
The film centers on a model with a titanium plate in her head (the result of a childhood car accident) who makes love to a car, kills several people, and finds a home with a firefighter who believes she’s his long-lost son. Titane weaves between genres and tones so smoothly that it’s impossible to pin down, ensuring a spot in the pantheon of infinitely beguiling films.
11. Tusk (2014)
While A24 has become synonymous with slow-paced, idea-forward horror films to some horror fans, Tusk belies that assessment of the studio’s horror output. Tusk, written and directed by cult-favorite filmmaker Kevin Smith, follows obnoxious podcaster Wallace (Justin Long) as he goes to the home of a mysterious man offering interesting stories. But Wallace finds much more than he bargained for, and soon, his host Howard (Michael Parks) transforms the human Wallace into a walrus.
Tusk never takes itself seriously, but that doesn’t mean it’s pure comedy. The film shows the gradual transformation of Wallace with shocking detail, offering a plethora of body horror images for fans of the grotesque.
12. Possessor (2020)
Written and directed by David Cronenberg’s son Brandon, Possessor follows in the elder Cronenberg’s footsteps in the sci-fi horror genre while also carving out its own space. The film follows assassin Tasya (Andrea Riseborough) in a future where her job takes her, not around the world, but through different people’s bodies. Tasya and others like her possess other people’s bodies to get close to their targets.
It’s a disturbing enough concept that draws on ideas of, well, possession. But things become more troubling when Tasya’s newest host, Colin (Christopher Abbott), begins to rebel. Possessor paints a terrifying picture of a body not only as the object of a battle but also as the site, as Tasya and Colin vie for control of his physical form.
