With one extremely notable exception, the best the genre had to offer this year didn’t try to conjure up specific issues or examples of The Fucked-Up World We Live In Today instead, the class of ’19 channeled the kind of free-floating anxiety and center-can’t hold dread that characterizes what it’s like to log on or look outside your window.Īnd while there were some decent franchise sequels ( Annabelle Comes Home) and the now-requisite Stephen King adaptations - from Pet Sematary and the superior, if still kinda lackluster It: Chapter Two to the Kubrick cosplay of Mike Flanagan’s admirable Doctor Sleep - 2019 will mostly be remembered as the year that the recently crowned “next wave” names of horror beat the sophomore slump. When you dredge up and/or tap into collective nightmares for the screen, how do you compete with the real-life terrors going on past the theater’s walls? For the horror movies of 2019, the answer was: You don’t.
