One of the main reasons I’ve come to love horror movies is that, for all of their lowbrow pleasures, they so often are high art. Horror directors play with style, form, and technique with a freedom and fervor you don’t find as consistently in other genres.

I think part of that has to do with budgets. Horror films are famously low-budget affairs, which benefits them in a couple of ways. First, it forces filmmakers to innovate, whether it’s using practical effects or utilizing camera movement and editing to generate suspense. The most famous example is probably Jaws, in which Steven Spielberg came up with his shark’s-eye view because his mechanical shark wasn’t working.

Low budgets also come with a measure of freedom. With so little at stake, studios often leave horror directors alone, allowing them room to experiment.

This year I’ve watched a half dozen films by the celebrated British directing duo Powell and Pressburger — none of them horror. So I was intrigued to catch up with Michael Powell’s solo effort, 1960’s Peeping Tom, considered by many the first slasher film (it came out just months before Psycho). Powell brings the same creative camerawork and distinctive use of color to this genre film as he does to the romantic dramas he made with his partner.

Another older film I caught up with is 1997’s Perfect Blue, an anime directed by Satoshi Kon. This is the highest-rated horror film on Letterboxd, probably due to the large and very online anime fandom. It’s a psychological thriller following a J-Pop star who leaves her band to become a movie actress, only to be haunted by visions of her former self. The movie, which was an inspiration for Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, uses its animated palette to evoke the hazy realm between reality and fantasy.

This year has already given us a handful of expertly crafted horror films. Late Night with the Devil takes the form of an unearthed recording of a TV talk show on which a live exorcism resulted in disaster. The found footage conceit has become a staple of the genre since The Blair Witch Project and it’s given a clever twist here.

In a Violent Nature reimagines the slasher film by telling it from the perspective of the killer, whose hulking presence we follow from behind like in a third-person video game. At times the movie feels like a Terrence Malick film, lingering on the natural surroundings.

Writer-director JT Mollner’s Strange Darling is a suspense thriller told out of sequence, its fractured timeline forcing the audience to repeatedly recontextualize events. It’s one of the year’s best films.

Another of the year’s best is I Saw the TV Glow, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, a trans woman who uses a teen’s obsession with a TV show as a metaphor for gender transition. Schoenbrun’s use of sound and color are particularly impressive. I imagine I’ll be writing a lot more about this one in my 2024 top ten so I’ll just say I highly recommend it.

In the meantime, Happy Halloween!