Every Horror Movie of 2015, Ranked

From the perspective of a horror aficionado, 2015 was a something of a disappointing year. For those dejected souls—this writer included—who contend that the tawdriest of film genres should be regarded as a vital artistic form, relatively few works emerged in the past twelve months to bolster their case. Filmmakers seemed to be learning all the wrong lessons, dispersing and amplifying the most tiresome aspects of contemporary horror. These were seemingly inescapable: the feeble jump scares, the uninspired aesthetics, the howlingly stupid dialog, and the absurd, exhausting ubiquity of the found footage trope. Amid all the muck, however, a few gems glimmer. This is, perhaps, the year’s saving grace for a devoted admirer of horror cinema. The rare highlights are genuine achievements: some frightfully ingenious, some devilishly gorgeous, and all profoundly disturbing in their way.

In the spirit of completeness, here is every horror movie of 2015, ranked from worst to best. A film qualifies for this list if it could be viewed theatrically by the ticketed general public in the St. Louis metropolitan area between January 1 and December 31, 2015.

19. The Lazarus Effect

Like the other films near the nadir of this list, The Lazarus Effect commits the unforgivable sins of being simultaneously earnest, ludicrous, and utterly un-scary. What makes it the Worst Horror Film of 2015, however, is its squandered potential. It takes an exceptional sort of incompetence to so spectacularly misapply actor Mark Duplass’ talents, let alone to completely waste a cast that also brings together Olivia Wilde, Sarah Bolger, Donald Glover, Evan Peters, and genre fixture Ray Wise. This isn’t just a bad movie, it’s a maddeningly bad movie. That director David Gelb also helmed the sublime documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi is nigh incomprehensible. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]

18. The Vatican Tapes

Not even the redoubtable Michael Peña can salvage The Vatican Tapes, a cheap-looking trainwreck of a religious horror feature that bafflingly swipes elements from another awful film, 1999’s Stigmata. The script not only seems to have been absentmindedly assembled from the vestigial parts of three or four different features, it also possesses one of the most rushed, contemptuous endings of the year, in any genre. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]

17. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension

The original Paranormal Activity remains curiously over-praised, but the sixth (sixth!) installment in this drab, bizarrely convoluted mess of a franchise is a prodigious dud in part due to its cheerful abandonment of its ancestor’s few successful aspects. Using slipshod CGI and pointless 3D to reveal the series’ heretofore invisible restless spirits is only the most conspicuous of this tedious film’s sins. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]

16. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse

Favoring gross-out humor and slapstick rather than horror, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse fails dismally at evoking laughter. Its repulsive, lazy characterization is fatiguing yet unsurprising, while the film’s wannabe NC-17 shocks are either awkwardly cartoonish or shamelessly stolen from superior pictures (Hey there, Re-Animator!) The film’s practical effects, at least, are delightfully gruesome, first-rate stuff. [Now available for digital rental and purchase. Available on DVD/Blu-ray on January 5.]

15. The Gallows

Not as dreadful as its toxic reputation would suggest, The Gallows is the rare bloodless slasher flick, a variation that is either intriguing or asinine, depending on one’s perspective. The film’s shot-on-a-smartphone conceit creates a sprawling yet somehow suffocating labyrinth out of an after-hours high school, but that hardly redeems its other crimes, particularly its insufferably protracted scenes and unconvincing teen characters. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]

14. Poltergeist

This misguided remake of the landmark 1982 creepfest is more superfluous than actively terrible, although it suffers from typical bad horror movie afflictions, such as characters who make dunderheaded choices. It’s mostly a benign, toothless reimagining of the original for a post-recession America, although its foray into the ghostly underworld that the original wisely kept off screen reveals wretchedly poor judgment. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]

13. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death

A surefooted lead performance from Phoebe Fox and lusciously moldering production design can’t save this creaky gothic ghost tale from mediocrity. The original Woman in Black‘s dusty, unremarkable story didn’t demand a sequel at all, let alone one as aimless, repetitive, and oddly overwrought as Angel of Death. It’s such a middling and entirely forgettable horror picture, one can hardly be annoyed with it. [Now available on DVD and for digital rental and purchase.]

12. Sinister 2

Ciarán Foy’s film isn’t especially imaginative or engrossing, but it does accomplish the minimum that a Sinister sequel demands. It scrapes together a credible way to continue a story that seemed complete, reconfiguring the original’s feature’s mystery structure as smoldering intra-family conflict. Although Sinister 2 lacks verve, it makes up for this with bleakness and a few gruesome flourishes. (One word: alligators.) [Now available for digital purchase. Available on DVD/Blu-ray on January 12.]

11. Attack on Titan: Part 1

The first of two Attack on Titan feature films illustrates the challenge in translating anime’s frenzied tonal flitting to live action without producing a hyperactive mess. Part 1 is an honorable shambles, an overcrowded work of steampunk sci-fi horror that only really engages when the titular monsters are onscreen. Lumbering, childlike colossi with a taste for dismemberment, the titans are genuinely nightmarish creations. [Now available on import DVD from Amazon.]

10. Krampus

A Christmas horror-comedy feature from Trick ‘r Treat director Michael Dougherty should be a sure thing, but Krampus is disappointingly uneven. Its humor is too reliant on insipid slapstick and cheap suburbanites-vs.-rednecks potshots. There’s still much to admire, however: the creepy creature design, the story’s moral ambiguity, and the occasional moment of truly bone-chilling terror. [Available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase in 2016.]

9. Insidious: Chapter 3

After Chapter 2‘s tangential nuttiness, Leigh Whannell returns the Insidious series to a simpler model with this straightforward but effective spook story about innocence under threat from an otherworldly evil. On the whole, the film’s merits—robust characters, subtly heterodox storytelling, and offhanded spatters of nastiness—outweigh its formulaic scares and at times undernourished plotting. Reviewed here. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]

8. The Green Inferno

Is Eli Roth’s homage to the Italian cannibal films gratuitously violent, cynically smug, and kind of racist? You bet. It’s also weirdly fascinating, and easily Roth’s brainiest and most multi-layered feature to date. The Green Inferno is grindhouse horror for philosophers: a nightmarish, Hobbesian fable about warfare, survival, and the distillation of human morality to its most bloody, essential principles. Reviewed here. [Now available for digital purchase. Available on DVD/Blu-ray in 2016.]

7. Maggie

Just when it appeared that all the pathos had long been wrung out of the zombie apocalypse, along comes Henry Hobson’s mournful, devastating tragedy Maggie. Whittling the conceit of an undead epidemic down to the scale of one family, the film boasts an anguished, revelatory performance from Arnold Schwarzenegger and a brittle, quietly panicked portrayal of the titular infected teenager by Abigail Breslin. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]

6. Unfriended

Unfriended‘s eye-rolling high concept—a horror feature constrained to a real-time view of a high schooler’s laptop screen—pays unexpectedly spine-tingling dividends in the hands of director Levan Gabriadze. The most formally daring horror film since Rodrigo Cortés’ Buried, the film is also a remorseless depiction of the blood-slicked pandemonium that would be unleashed if every secret thing suddenly came to light. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]

5. The Gift

Joel Edgerton’s disturbing debut feature initially positions itself as a thriller about an unctuous stalker who turns menacingly aggrieved. This proves to be one of the most ruthless cinematic fake-outs in recent memory: The Gift is in fact a horror story about the monster has been standing right in front of you all along. Only the film’s questionable treatment of its female lead prevents it from attaining a loftier spot on this list. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]

4. The Visit

M. Night Shyamalan’s return to horror proves to be the writer-director’s most thoughtful and substantive film since Unbreakable. Crucially, Shyamalan doesn’t allow The Visit‘s thematic ambitions to get in the way of its midnight movie scares. Indeed, it’s the film’s sharp horror fundamentals that permit it to grapple so effortlessly with some of the thorniest, most shameful anxieties that real-world families face. Reviewed here. [Now available for digital purchase. Available on DVD/Blu-ray on January 5.]

3. Crimson Peak

Strictly speaking, Guillermo del Toro’s luscious, grand guignol gothic romance isn’t frightening in the usual way, but that’s beside the point. Its phantasmal scares might be sparse, but Crimson Peak is really about the terror of moral putrefaction; the way that rotten decadence devours all it touches. In any case, when will cinema again see an edifice whose decaying majesty is comparable that of the titular haunted mansion? Reviewed here. [Available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase in 2016.]

2. Goodnight Mommy

Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s mesmerizing, meticulously constructed tale of the parent-child dynamic gone mysterious awry is a showcase for some of the most eerily assured filmmaking of 2015. Goodnight Mommy‘s scenario starts out subtly unnerving, gradually becomes more unstable, and then suddenly takes a sickening U-turn into the appallingly transgressive. It’s icy, remorseless horror of the finest sort. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]

1. It Follows

There is so much that David Robert Mitchell’s lo-fi triumph It Follows gets right, it’s difficult to know where to begin. One could point out the elegant use of slow zooms and pans to create harrowing tension; the indelible design of the dog-tired Detroit locations; the hypnotic, throwback synthesizer score; and, most conspicuously, Mitchell’s virtuosic control of the mise en scène in seemingly every shot. What ultimately makes It Follows an instant masterpiece is how these elements and more harmonize so potently to create one of the most cerebral and yet viscerally terrifying films of the past decade: a nightmare of mingled sex and death that simultaneously embodies and transcends the genre’s strengths. Reviewed here. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]

Bonus Online Streaming Films

Several limited release horror features never made it to St. Louis theaters this year. This list would be lacking if it did not at least tip its hat to a pair of notable new films that became available through online streaming services in 2015.

Creep

Patrick Brice’s Creep gets exactly right what The Lazarus Effect fumbled so spectacularly, in that it puts Mark Duplass’ fulsome, slightly off-putting quirkiness to excellent use. A stripped-down, found footage feature starring just two actors, Creep is a deliriously hilarious and frightening tale about the fuzzy borders where social awkwardness shifts into something much more disturbing. [Now available for digital rental and purchase.]

The Final Girls

A low-rent mashup of Cabin in the Woods meets The Last Action Hero, Todd Strauss-Schulson’s cheeky horror fantasy sees a hapless group of friends sucked into a 1980s slasher movie. The film’s unearned attempts at poignancy and tired “Hey, the 80s!” humor are mostly forgettable. In its best moments, however, The Final Girls is an enthusiastic and formally adventurous exploration of cinema-as-alternate-reality. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]