The Get Out director’s spring-loaded allegories for the perils, nuances and contradictions of Black life in the US have spawned a new cinematic vocabulary; you can judge his influence by the sheer number of imitators, the best of them nurtured by Peele himself through his Monkeypaw production company.
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An expert excavator of the most obscure pockets of the past, this director of The Witch, The Lighthouse and Nosferatu excels in finding the foreign facets of distant history and presenting them without modern-day revisionism. His unholy time machines open portals to madness, desire and transcendence.
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The millennial film-maker with their finger closest to the generation’s pulse, as attuned to the solitudes, and meaningful bonds, of an internet-besotted age. Filtering themes of connection and pop culture through trans identity and the tradition of body horror, works such as I Saw the TV Glow plumb the eeriest fissures of the self.
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Leone’s trilogy of Terrifier films is this century’s great horror success story, evidence that word of mouth can still create bona fide hits from well-executed microbudget gore. More than the next Jason or Freddy, psychotic poster boy Art the Clown is proof that the public’s thirst for blood – gratuitous, hilarious, unbridled – remains unslakable.
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Blurring the line between hallucination and reality, with her films Saint Maud and Love Lies Bleeding, Glass has assembled a gallery of intense women driven to extremes by the depth of their devotion to distorted ideals. Given to fantastical grand finales that call easy interpretations into question, her films stay with you – though less like a pebble in your shoe than a nail in your foot.
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From the primordial ooze of YouTube came a pair of brothers conquering the world with a zeitgeisty brand of provocation. With their films Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, they staged atrocity exhibitions in between credible depictions of how today’s young people think and behave. Film students pray to them as if they’re freshly canonised saints.
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Her sleek, metaphor-forward fusion of genre trappings with arthouse flourishes earned her a Palme d’Or, the first time the festival awarded its top prize to a horror picture. Carrying the viscera-flecked banner of the New French Extremity, the Titane director indulges the appetites of the alienated to spectacular effect.
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One of the most exciting talents to emerge from Asia in recent years, the South Korean film-maker has directed one jewel of folk horror (The Wailing) and co-scripted another (The Medium). Paced with supreme confidence and precise tonal control, his work transposes Hollywood templates into frightful, novel forms.
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