Rewind 2024 - my favourite horror moments of the year

a year of killer clowns (... well, clown singular really), curséd talkshows, bodily autonomy and remembering YOU ARE ONE

Accurate photographic representation of that feeling you get when your working day is about to get so much worse.

on a personal note

Thank you to everyone who read/subscribed to/ gave me encouraging noises about The Horror The Horror this year; it’s a joy to have my little corner of the internet visited by so many simpatico people and I hope you’ll join me for more delving into the world of horror and storytelling in 2025, because we could all do with some catharsis and I am happy to keep providing.

And now:

a freeform hodge-podge list of THTH’s favourites of the year

funniest moment

For me, personally, FOR ME, the funniest moment in horror this year wasn’t even from a movie, it was Terrifier 3 absolutely destroying Joker: Folie a Deux at the box office without even breaking a sweat. Terrifier 3 is the first instalment in the franchise to get a wide release in cinemas, after the first two built up a cult following at festivals and through home release.

It is a WILDLY polarizing series of films with a number of mean, brutal kills and a central antagonist who may well be immortal. To have a third film in this kind of franchise go so hard at the box office to the point where it quite handily beats the sequel to an Academy Award winner fills me with so much joy and hope for the genre and to be honest also a little bit of schadenfreude I’m not gonna lie. The fact that the official Terrifier Instagram account fully played into it was just a beautiful bonus.

ho ho holy fucking shit indeed.

most terrifyingly gross moment

I mean, there are a number of moments from Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance that could qualify for this but the one that truly fucked me up the most, and I am not even remotely joking when I say this, is the scene where Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is having to sit in a restaurant listening to her show producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) justify dismissing her from her job due to her age as he eats shrimp in a way that’s so disgustingly violent and sloppy that it kind of made me never want to eat anything again.

favourite iconic new horror prop

Staying with The Substance - it has to be Elizabeth Sparkle’s (yes I will continue to refer to the character by her full name, it is CORRECT if your name is that iconic) Cunty Yellow Coat. Bitch, you WISH you were this fashionable even when you’re having a nervous breakdown. I know I do!!!!!

favourite horror-related experience of the year

Watching Panos Cosmatos’s psychedelic 2018 masterpiece Mandy, one of my favourite movies of all time, on a big screen for the first time. God bless the Prince Charles Cinema in London, truly the spiritual home for sickos (/affectionate) like me.

favourite horror book (fiction and non-fiction)

For reasons which have a lot to do with a combination of moving house and just being very busy and stressed for a lot of this year, I didn’t end up reading as much as I wanted to, but I do have two favourites in this category this year. One is a primal scream of a book about a Korean-American teenager on the verge of snapping after her father’s affair leaves her family in disarray. The other is a lovingly researched and accessible look at why we are drawn to the horror genre. I highly suggest you both read them.

fiction: The Eyes are the Best Part - Monika Kim

non-fiction: Feeding the Monster: Why Horror has a Hold on Us - Anna Bogutskaya

favourite film discussed on THTH

I’ve watched a lot of new to me horror for this year’s crop of issues so I have a bunch to choose from - in the end, it’s a tie between the eerily beautiful The Night of the Hunter (which I recently discussed for MovieJawn) and the bleak and stressful Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

favourite hair cut

duh.

favourite horror movie of the year

duh.

scattershot thoughts

• I genuinely would like a word with whoever was responsible for the cinema rollout of Cuckoo in the UK because seriously?? One whole week in theatres, two screenings max per day in the middle of the day and then NOTHING? Dan Stevens plays the flute like the little freaky weirdo he is and you pay him DUST?

• Least favourite horror movie of the year is still Imaginary, lol omg how could you fumble a premise like that to THAT extent.

• MORE LEAD ROLES FOR DAVID DASTMALCHIAN AND DAN STEVENS, YOU COWARDS.

• Funniest cameo of the year goes to the portrait of Bill Clinton in Longlegs and the way it’s framed to loom over Blair Underwood’s character at all times.

• Hugh Grant is NOT good in Heretic THERE I SAID IT.

• I would like to tell you I did not expect to love Interview with a Vampire as much as I did when I saw it for the first time this year. I would like to tell you that but in hindsight I would be lying because OF COURSE I did.

• That rumour about Amsterdamned 2 better be true.

• Additionally, yes I did do a boat tour of the canals of Amsterdam when we were there over the summer, and yes it was much less of a traumatic experience than the one in Amsterdamned.

• I think the marketing campaign for Nosferatu runs rings around the Longlegs one and I for one am highly hyped about dragging my ass out of bed on New Year’s Day (when it releases in the UK) and going to see it on like four hours of sleep because I am just THAT seated.

• I know that by now I’m preaching to the choir here but Immaculate and The First Omen are two of the msot painfully relevant horror movies of the year and act as a cornerstone to my ongoing thesis that horror is a genre which helps us work through our fears and angers in a productive, safe space.

• I wonder if I can find another weird Dutch horror movie to dissect for the first issue of 2025 OH WAIT I ACTUALLY HAVE ONE and it’s a bummer!

other places i wrote for this year

• I have articles in the first two issues of Monstrous Flesh Journal, which you can buy here.

• I have an article in issue IX (The World) of The Nottingham Horror Collective’s zine, which you can buy here.

• I am a staff writer at MovieJawn, and you can find my tag (which has everything I’ve written so far) here.

award to myself for the most brain rot thing i made in service of an issue of The Horror The Horror this year

Breda McQueen you will always be famous.