Best Black Horror Movies of 2024

Honorable Mentions: Followers, Midnight Taxi, The Despaired, The Inheritance, Lovely, Dark, and Deep

Special Achievement Award: Georgina Campbell, who this year established herself as a bona fide scream queen with roles in The Watchers, T.I.M., and Lovely, Dark, and Deep, coming on the heels of Barbarian, Bird Box Barcelona, and All My Friends Hate Me in the previous two years.

Biggest Disappointment: The Deliverance (dishonorable mentions: Imaginary, Festival of the Living Dead, House of Spoils)

Special “So Bad It’s Good” Award: The Front Room. This tonally wonky film in which a pregnant Black woman (Brandy Norwood) must deal with her white husband’s overbearing stepmother is fascinating in its willingness to revel in repugnance. Apart from the borderline ageist gross-out content, it’s rife with unintentional awkwardness that comes from two white men writing about pregnancy and racism. The characters feel like unreal placeholders for human beings. Only Kathryn Hunter’s unhinged performance as the stepmother keeps it together, lending a sense of intention to the terribleness.

Just Phoning It In: Samuel L. Jackson in Damaged, Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding, Jr. in Skeletons in the Closet, 50 Cent in Boneyard (granted, this implies that 50 Cent can do better than this, which is dubious)

This Tubi offering is a formulaic slasher mystery with tame kills but a compelling enough story to maintain interest, the most intriguing element of which is *SPOILER ALERT* that the apparent sidekick Black girl (Getenesh Berhe) ends up being the Final Girl.

If you’re patient enough to make it through a protracted first half, the second half of this British-Nigerian production provides ample demonic possession mayhem and revelations of juicy secrets in the story of a spirit hunter (Vanessa Vanderpuye) assisting a family haunted by a malevolent entity. Impressive visuals and strong performances help overcome early pacing issues and some pervasive melodrama.

When two burglar sisters (Jazmine Robinson, Rayana Briggs) break into the wrong home, they discover a captive woman and incur the wrath of a serial killer who seeks vengeance for the invasion. This BET+ film overcomes a ridiculous plot twist with a fast pace, likable characters, and a touch of humor to rise above most of this network’s genre fare.

It’s hard to judge exactly how “Black” this slasher is because the main character (Cassiel Eatock-Winnik) seems to be portrayed by a white woman and yet when there is a clip of her mother, she’s played by a Black actress. Regardless, even if you consider her white, three—count ’em, three—of the primary supporting cast of protagonists (Savana Tardieu, N’kone Mametja, Khosi Ngema) are Black. Granted, given that the characters are all teens sent to a camp for sexual addiction, it’s debatable whether these are the best portrayals. Still, it’s an enjoyable film—gory with a dash of humor and a message sure to annoy anti-woke trolls.

After a slow start that feels like a low-end rom-com or a high-end porno, The Match hits its stride as an engrossing cat-and-mouse game in which two singles (Brittany S. Hall, Lanre Idewu) who meet on a mysterious dating app are locked in a mansion and told that one of them has to kill the other.

A fun, yet not particularly funny, satire of the shallowness of influencer culture, Clickbait features a rare instance of a Black gay “Final Guy” (Roberto Kyle) who survives a Squid Games-like series of social media-centered challenges in which the loser of each round is killed. It’s intentionally goofy but with a message that hits home.

What this low-budget Canadian horror-comedy lacks in plot it makes up for in wacky retro vibes. It’s basically a horror-skewed Jumanji in which a cursed video tape unleashes fictional characters from cheesy ’80s and ’90s films into the real world—specifically, the last video store in Canada, in which the store’s owner and a reluctant customer (Yaayaa Adams) must fight for survival against the beings, human and non-human alike.

If you find yourself in a Netflix-and-chill relationship where one person wants to watch a rom-com and the other wants to watch a horror movie, this might be the perfect solution. OK, it’s far from perfect, but propelled by solid comedic performances, this fun British horror-comedy rides a wave of charmingly broad humor in the story of three recently dumped co-workers (Ella-Rae Smith, Cassie Clare, Miriam-Teak Lee) whose ex-boyfriends start to get murdered one by one.

Squatters aren’t particularly sympathetic, but when pitted against a murderous “pharma bro” like in this film, they’re downright heroic. Here, a young Black woman (Khosi Ngema) takes up residence in a billionaire’s mansion while he’s away, only to find herself running for her life when he returns early and she witnesses his dark secrets. Gruesome, fast-paced class warfare with a dose of Barbarian insanity.

Claustrophobic paranoia propels this relentlessly bleak offering about a deadly battle between American and Russian astronauts that ensues aboard the International Space Station when war between the U.S. and Russia breaks out on Earth. Ariana DeBose plays the American newcomer caught in the crossfire. The script ultimately paints itself into a corner that leaves us feeling hollow—surprisingly dark for a major theatrical release—but it still provides a non-stop dose of tense cat-and-mouse-and-mouse-and-mouse-and-mouse-and-mouse thrills for the bulk of the run time.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner takes on the guise of a gritty, no-frills slasher when a young man (Corteon Moore) brings his wealthy girlfriend (Keeya King) to meet his blue-collar family. Instead of the racial divisions of the Sidney Poitier film, this movie (which is not related, despite the title) delves into the class divide within Black America, something you don’t see too much in horror—particularly when the upper-class representative is darker skinned and the lower-class characters are mixed race.

Georgina Campbell lends credence to this predictable but campily engaging low-brow Fatal Attraction-style thriller with a robot as the obsessed villain, leveraging modern A.I. fears to add a new layer to the terror. Think AfrAId meets M3GAN in the body of a life-sized Ken doll.

While it wins no points for originality or intelligence, this post-apocalyptic monster movie presents the requisite popcorn thrills, fast pace, and solid CGI effects, along with a strong cast led by Anthony Mackie as a father who has to venture into the lands occupied by giant rhinoceros bug creatures in order to find medicine for his sick son. Morena Baccarin plays the scientist searching for the answers to why the beings can’t venture over 8,000 feet in elevation and how they can be killed. Nothing revolutionary, but it should satisfy fans of films like A Quiet Place and The Tomorrow War.

The character of young Mark—Robin to the lead hero’s Batman—is Black in this movie adaptation, and while the film itself feels uneven and rushed with a made-for-TV sterility, it certainly has its moments with several nice action set pieces (including the drive-in finale), and Mark is a certified vampire ass-kicker who plays no small part in saving the day—arguably more than main protagonist Ben (Lewis Pullman) and certainly more than that punk-ass Mark in the 1979 miniseries. Bonus: the character of Dr. Cody gets a race AND gender shift, played by the always wonderful Alfre Woodard.

While it suffers from being released after similar (and superior) time-jumping slashers like Totally Killer, Final Girls, the Happy Death Day films, and the Fear Street trilogy, this tale of a teen (Madison Bailey) who travels back 20 years to save her sister (Antonia Gentry) from a serial killer offers enough entertainment from both a horror perspective and a time-travel perspective to offset the sentimental melodrama.

While it lacks a lot of the off-kilter WTF Adult Swim edge, this sequel is arguably more fun than the original—more of a straightforward comedy, primarily a spoof of those Hallmark Christmas movies, with the first film’s Final Girl (Andrea Laing) being stranded in a small town populated by “clumsy hunks” perpetually seeking a “meet cute.” Unfortunately for everyone in the town, the curse of the flying killer yule log follows her, leaving a trail of hunky bodies in its wake.

This nonfiction film separates itself from a lot of paranormal documentaries with its matter-of-fact approach, eschewing voice-overs and musical cues in favor of a more naturalistic feel consisting of primarily environmental sounds and testimonies by the subjects, a Black family in New York City that claims to be plagued by malevolent entities. It’s a slow burner generally lacking in sensationalism (unlike Demon House, whose story inspired this year’s The Deliverance), even though some of the sounds and images feel exaggerated for effect. The end result is an unnerving and genuinely sad portrait of a family that, regardless of whether you believe they’re being haunted by actual ghosts or not, is clearly haunted by something—be it external or internal.

In this enigmatic French thriller, Franck (JoeyStarr) is a world-weary hitman seeking to run off with his girlfriend (Asia Argento) and their ill-gotten wealth at the expense of his gangster boss. However, he hits a roadblock when he picks up a mysterious hitchhiker who turns out to be a serial killer with bad intentions.

This esoteric film starring Justice Smith as a teen who becomes obsessed with a cult TV show isn’t for everyone. It’s slow, angsty, meditative, Cronenbergian and arguably more drama than horror, but it’s vibrantly original with a hypnotic lo-fi appeal that speaks to adolescent feelings of insecurity, identity, isolation, and belonging.

Admittedly, I’m not a huge fan of the Quiet Place movies, but this origin story set in New York City (It should be noted that the most unlikely aspect of the movie is that New Yorkers could be quiet enough to survive this apocalypse.) might be the best of the three, aided by a strong cast and characters that aren’t overtly dumb enough to have a baby during an invasion of sound-sensitive aliens. The story is straightforward and doesn’t add much to the overall mythology, but it provides an ample number of the anxiety-laden scenes that are the series’ bread and butter, along with some emotional heft. Lupita N’yongo shines as always, even though as the lead protagonist, *SPOILER ALERT* she still somehow manages to be a Sacrificial Negro.

Halle Berry stars in this wildly underrated mind trip that deserved a bigger audience than it received, but the two boys who play her sons (Percy Daggs IV, Anthony B. Jenkins) carry the story—no small feat for child actors. Berry plays a paranoid mother who keeps her kids secluded in a cabin in the woods, insisting that they stay tethered to the protection of the house by a rope whenever they step outside, or else an evil presence will attack. The plot doesn’t make complete sense (or rather, it might if it were explained better) and the is-she-insane-or-not mind games aren’t novel, but when the emotional core is this strong and the genre trappings are this potent, you’re willing to forgive the shortcomings.

Playing like an entry in Hulu’s excellent After Dark anthology franchise (granted, without the holiday angle), this is a fun, no-frills tale of a single mother (Jerrika Hinton) whose son is kidnapped by a children’s television host who turns out to be a malevolent supernatural entity who can escape from the TV realm to “rescue” kids from uncaring parents. Propelled by a dark sense of humor and a deliciously goofy, bow tie-clad villain expertly portrayed by Elvis Nolasco, Mr. Crocket adds a level of lightheartedness that Black horror hasn’t maintained in recent years.

Sadly, the social relevance of “The Most Dangerous Game” has only increased in the century since it was written, and The Hunted understandably puts a modern spin on it that reflects the racist and xenophobic nationalism that pervades so-called First World countries. The story finds a small boat full of African refugees being taken in by a group of rich Europeans on a secluded Mediterranean island, ostensibly to help them get to Europe but secretly with the intention of hunting and killing them like wild game. Unbeknownst to the captors, one of the refugees (Lily Banda) is an ex-South Sudanese militia member who uses her particular set of skills to go Rambo on their asses. Fast-paced and action-packed with a slick, Hollywood-esque style, The Hunted makes for cathartic viewing in the wake of the 2024 election.

This fast-paced popcorn thriller, a much-improved re-imagining of writer-director Kerry Bellessa’s 2012 film of the same name, stars Tyler James Williams as a rideshare driver who teams with his fare (Hayden Panettiere) to track a car they suspect as being the one wanted in an Amber Alert child abduction. Tense with efficient yet heartfelt storytelling, it’s light on horror but heavy on entertainment.

This urban French Arachnophobia about a spider invasion in a run-down apartment building features impressive CGI effects, strong performances, an unexpected twinge of humor, and an unapologetic championing of the rights of the largely Brown and Black working class, all wrapped up in creepy-crawly genre trappings.

There’s only one Black character in this sequel—android Andy (David Jonsson)—and while he’s not the lead, he is unquestionably second in prominence of the protagonists, and for a time, you could say he’s second in prominence of the antagonists. He’s also the emotional core of the film, the brotherly figure to lead Rain (Cailee Spaeny), as well as the key figure who kick starts the plot, as he is the only way a ragtag group of youths can access a derelict spacecraft that they plan to use to escape their pea soup planet. He also manages to save Rain’s life near the end of the movie with a heroic act that kills several Xenomorphs without sacrificing himself in the process. Bravo! Jonsson’s performance as Andy is the standout of a bunch of otherwise bland, barely distinguishable characters, but despite the film’s shortcomings, director Fede Alvarez lends his trademark slick horror edge, delivering cinematic visuals and some anxiety-laden moments that belong among the best of an up-and-down franchise.

Out of Darkness is a harrowing, beautifully shot UK production with a thought-provoking message of universality and clannishness that is as applicable today as it was 45,000 years ago when the story is set. In it, a small group of early humans travels to a distant land in search of food, only to find barren soil and mysterious predators that emerge at night. While it flags a bit as outright horror, it ultimately provides powerful, if sadly accurate, commentary on the legacy of tribalism and gender power dynamics.

This supernatural thriller carries mind-tripping Timecrimes vibes, centering around the fascinating question of how far one would go to improve one’s life. Danielle Deadwyler and Aldis Hodge excel as a married couple grieving the loss of their son. While exploring the woods around their family cabin, she stumbles through a gateway that leads to parallel universes and gets lost in a maze of time and space and the inherent danger that comes when two of the same person try to exist in the same place at the same time. It’s gripping and emotional with life-affirming resonance.

Naomie Harris and Natalie Dormer give stellar performances in this British film about a woman (Harris) who seeks out her estranged bestie from grade school (Dormer) in hopes of hiring her to kill her husband. Things unspool with scrumptiously dark twists, shocking revelations, and some unexpected parallels to the current extreme divisiveness in which we live today. A grossly overlooked thriller.

Writer-director Zoë Kravitz knocks it out of the park with her behind-the-camera debut, a thriller starring Naomi Ackie as a woman whisked away to a private island by a billionaire (Channing Tatum), along with a group of partygoers whose experience turns out to be a lot darker than it seems. A wonderful blend of the humorous and the horrific with a superb cast, an engaging sense of mystery, stylish direction, and a timely message.