8 Cinema Creators Who Are Redefining Modern Horror Genre

Within the landscape of contemporary movie-making, a new cohort of visionaries is expanding the limits of the horror genre. Ranging from cultural allegories to intense chillers, these eight filmmakers are producing lasting adventures that reimagine dread for a current age.

Jordan Peele

The director of Get Out has created spring-loaded symbolic tales examining the perils, subtleties, and contradictions of African American experience in the United States. His impact is clear from the multitude of copycats, with the best among them guided by the filmmaker via his production company.

Robert Eggers

An expert explorer of the darkest recesses of the bygone eras, this director of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and Nosferatu specializes in finding the unfamiliar aspects of historical periods and presenting them free from modern-day revisionism. His unholy time machines create doorways to madness, longing, and transcendence.

Jane Schoenbrun

The millennial director with their pulse most in touch with the generation’s spirit, as attuned to the solitudes, and significant relationships, of an digitally-obsessed era. Weaving concepts of bonding and mainstream entertainment through trans identity and the history of corporeal fear, films such as I Saw the TV Glow explore the strangest fissures of the identity.

Damien Leone

Leone’s three-part saga of Terrifier movies is this century’s great horror success story, evidence that word of mouth can still generate genuine hits from well-executed low-budget gore. Not just the modern horror villain, insane poster boy Art the Clown is confirmation that the public’s thirst for violence – over-the-top, hilarious, unchecked – remains insatiable.

Rose Glass

Blurring the line between delusion and reality, with her movies Saint Maud and Love Lies Bleeding, Glass has assembled a gallery of driven protagonists compelled to extremes by the strength of their dedication to twisted beliefs. Given to imaginative grand finales that challenge straightforward readings into doubt, her films linger – though not so much like a pebble in your shoe than a sharp object in your foot.

YouTube Sensations

From the primordial ooze of YouTube came a pair of brothers dominating the cinema landscape with a trendy brand of provocation. With their films Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, they staged violent spectacles in between authentic portrayals of how modern young people act. Cinema enthusiasts pray to them as if they’re freshly canonised icons.

Julia Ducournau

Her refined, metaphor-forward combination of scary movie conventions with art film flourishes earned her a prestigious award, the first time the festival presented its premier award to a horror picture. Holding the viscera-flecked standard of the New French Extremity, the Titane filmmaker indulges the appetites of the disconnected to spectacular effect.

Na Hong-jin

A member of the most thrilling filmmakers to arise from Asia in recent years, the South Korean director has made one jewel of folk horror (The Wailing) and collaborated on a second one (The Medium). Arranged with supreme certainty and meticulous atmosphere crafting, his movies transposes conventional structures into terrifying, novel shapes.

These directors embody the wide-ranging and groundbreaking path of horror, propelling the boundaries of dread into new territories.