No company has shaped modern horror like A24. The New York studio, founded in 2012 by Daniel Katz, David Fenkel and John Hodges, built a reputation on arthouse films with cult followings, and its horror releases became a genre of their own: slow dread, gorgeous cinematography, grief and family trauma where the jump scares used to be. The label "elevated horror" attached itself to these films, and fans argue about it endlessly. Whatever you call it, these nine films are the essential starting point, in roughly the order they arrived.
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The Witch (2015)
Robert Eggers' feature debut, subtitled A New-England Folktale, follows a Puritan family in 1630s New England preyed upon by an evil force in the woods beyond their farm. It was also the feature film debut of Anya Taylor-Joy. After premiering at Sundance in January 2015, it was released widely by A24 in February 2016 and grossed $40 million against a $4 million budget. It is the film that announced what an A24 horror movie could be: meticulous, period perfect and genuinely frightening.
It Comes at Night (2017)
Trey Edward Shults' psychological horror film stars Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Riley Keough as a family hiding in a forest while a highly contagious disease overtakes the world. Critics loved it and general audiences, expecting monsters, were less sure. That gap is the point. It Comes at Night is about paranoia, not creatures, and it has aged into one of the studio's most unsettling films.
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Hereditary (2018)
Ari Aster's debut is the film most people mean when they talk about A24 horror. Toni Collette plays Annie Graham, a grieving miniature artist who uncovers disturbing secrets about her late mother, while her family is tormented by sinister events. A24 greenlit Hereditary after Aster's short films caught its attention, and Aster conceived it as primarily a family drama in two distinct halves. Collette's performance is one of the great horror performances of the century.
Midsommar (2019)
Aster followed up with a horror film set almost entirely in daylight. Florence Pugh and Jack Reynor play an American couple drawn into a violent cult in rural Sweden, and the story is really about a deteriorating relationship, inspired by a difficult breakup Aster experienced himself. The score by the British electronic musician Bobby Krlic draws on Nordic folk music, and the film was largely shot around Budapest. Midsommar is beautiful, funny and deeply cruel, often in the same shot.
The Lighthouse (2019)
Eggers returned with Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as 19th century lighthouse keepers stranded on a remote New England outpost by a violent storm. The idea grew from a script by his brother Max based on Edgar Allan Poe's unfinished story "The Light-House," and the look draws on 1890s photography and 1930s French maritime films. It was shot in Nova Scotia. The Lighthouse defies genre categorization, which is exactly why it belongs here.
Men (2022)
Alex Garland's surreal folk horror stars Jessie Buckley as a widow on a countryside holiday who is disturbed and tormented by the village's strange men, every one of them played by Rory Kinnear. A24 released Men in the US in May 2022. Its narrative approach divided critics, but the imagery, especially the ending, is impossible to forget.
X (2022)
Ti West's slasher, set in 1979, follows a cast and crew who gather to make a pornographic film on an elderly couple's rural Texas property. Mia Goth plays two roles, the young Maxine and, under extensive prosthetics, the elderly Pearl. X draws on horror and exploitation cinema and is really about beauty, aging and self worth. It is the most purely fun film on this list.
Pearl (2022)
West shot this prequel in New Zealand immediately after X, using the same sets, with Goth co-writing the screenplay and reprising the title role. Set on a Texas homestead in 1918, Pearl is an origin story about a young woman whose dream of movie stardom collides with her home life and her violent streak. Goth's performance, especially a final close up that seems to last forever, made the film a sensation.
Talk to Me (2023)
Australian brothers Danny and Michael Philippou made their feature debut with this story of teenagers who discover they can contact spirits using an embalmed hand. A24 released Talk to Me in the US in July 2023, and it grossed $92 million worldwide against a production budget of $4.5 million, becoming A24's highest grossing horror film at the time. It is the most energetic film here, and proof that the studio's horror brand had room for a party movie with a dark heart.
What ties them together
Look past the folk costumes and the slasher masks and the same ideas keep returning: grief, inheritance, isolation and the terror of the people closest to you. Almost every film here is about a family or a small community turning on itself. The monsters, when they appear at all, tend to arrive late. That patience is what separates these films from the multiplex horror of the 2000s, and it is why they reward a second viewing.
Where to go next
Watch them in order and you can trace how a small distributor turned a handful of debut directors into the genre's leading voices. The studio's latest horror hit even inspired a fragrance, as we covered in our piece on the Backrooms x Joya scent kit. For the business story behind the brand, read about why Google put $75 million into A24. And if The Witch and The Lighthouse are your favorites, Eggers' next film is Werwulf.
Turn off the lights, put the phone in another room, and let the dread do its work.
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