As 2022 has actually managed to find a way to be even more full of existential dread than 2021, people would be forgiven for facing enough horror burn-out from the real world to have a strong aversion to horror in cinematic form.
For most people, this is probably the case. And those people would be unlikely to click on an article reflecting on horror cinema this year. But at a time where processing fear and anxiety for many is a part of a daily routine, horror movies can play an active part in working out the darkness that has always existed in our world and imaginary ones.
Now we are living through an age in which fear and anxiety are plaguing people’s psyches like perhaps never before, horror cinema plays a multi-functional role as a coping mechanism. There is something soul-cleansing about trying to understand the evil that exists in our world.
Some people have been drawn more to horror cinema, as it is now a genre that better reflects the mood of the world we are living in. Watching characters trying to pave their way out of peril, and gain strength in the face of unimaginable nightmares, is empowering. The horror film has always asked audiences to ponder whether they would find bravery and strength in a tough situation or cower and scream. Perhaps people can relate more to characters driven to psychological distress due to the looming threats the world is processing; there is an argument that you become better equipped if you were to ever be in a frightening situation, with an education from horror films of what at least not to do in a gravely bad situation. There is ultimately something Darwinian about horror films.
Filmmakers are thriving off the atmosphere of fear in the current moment and fueling their imaginations, injecting new life into the horror film.
It is hard to make a horror film in 2022, as so much ground has been well-trodden in the 100 plus years filmmakers have been reflecting the nightmares that lie beneath back at us through film. It is a genre that is often more content to regurgitate itself than reinvent and in even the best new horror films, you feel the echoes of the films that have clearly influenced the imaginations of the new generations. But to a large degree, this is how creativity works.
By the time you get to the season of the witch in October, there are already more than enough horror films being made and released into the various cinematic ethers that are out there.
So on a night in which Taiwan is being battered by bad conditions from a typhoon, in which oppressive weather engulfs this house, and lashes of rain and wind batter the windows and slam doors shut; a night in which my eyes are pulled from the screen to catch a glimpse of horror cliche levels of lightning and thunder, I decided to reflect on the best horror films 2022 had to offer. In no particular order, here are the horror films I think are of note from this year…
Shepherd
Trauma has been used a lot in horror lately, to anchor the audience to a character in tragic circumstances. Ari Aster has done this twice successfully in Hereditary and Midsommer. The character at the center of this low-budget moody British horror film has a mind paralized by anxiety and guilt due to a recent loss, so much so that he decides his best cause of action would be to move to a remote Scottish island and live a basic life as a shepherd.
But there is something strange about this island and the ferrywoman who took him there – played by the always menacing Katie Dickie. This is one of those horror films that gets its tension and mounting sense of dread by playing with the uncertainty about what exactly is happening to this character. We know minds consumed by guilt and anxiety can be torturous places to be trapped in. But then again, so can odd, sparse, haunting isolated islands almost entirely uninhabited. Just without anything strange and eerie happening, the island, with a locked up lighthouse seems, weird and quietly unsettling. A great stage for a horror film to play out on.
This is one of those films in which you have to hatch a theory of what you think is happening to unlock the mysteries and the strangeness. There are hints and images with loaded meanings, and riffs on various mythologies and a finale that seems to ask more questions than it answers.Overall, it is a much more cohesive film on a second watch, as it has something of the Kubrick, The Shining effect, in that you feel more drawn in to its atmosphere of dread and fear on further watches, plus, the little signs you picked up along the way the first time around, help as keys to unlock the nightmares the second time around. It is a film that, on second watch reveals just what the film is about from its opening shot, but it is way easier to see the meaning, with a subsequent viewing. Both first and second watch confirm that Shepherd has an inspired use of dark imagery to express how the mind punishes the guilty.
Men
Alex Garland’s tense and unnerving Men, is one of a handful of film’s on this list that have explored the ‘me too’ re-examination of toxic male behavior through horror tropes.
There are few things as terrifying for a woman than to suddenly sense that unwanted male attention may soon turn sinister. For the first two thirds of Men, we see Jessie Buckley’s character alone in a nondescript seemingly gentle English country town. She’s there for a much needed recuperation retreat, from a real world horror she is traumatized by. But we soon see that this tranquility could easily be disrupted by the looming threat of unwanted male attention. And when a strange figure appears to track her home, she becomes aware that the isolation could be dangerous.
This might sound like the usual slasher stalker cliches, but there is something deeper and more inline with current social commentary at work here. This is a film shot entirely through the female gaze, so even seemingly innocuous attempts from the males in the film to offer her assistance feel off-kilter and uneasy. There are so many scenes of the kind of awkward comfortableness, from a man overstepping his boundaries, that a woman faces every-day. Garland has always been one for a bit of surrealism under the surface, so seeds of folk horror are planted. The third act will be a bit of a leap for a lot of viewers to go with, for it replaces strange Cronenbergian bodily weirdness for the taught tension that defines the majority of the film. But for fans of symbolism under the surface, there is a lot to discuss that is an interesting creative metaphor for the lineage of toxic masculinity.
Black Phone
Ethan Hawke seemed to want to shred his nice guy image in 2022 in a way that Tom Hanks could only dream of. For in both Moon Knight and Black Phone, this usually likable screen presence found something within himself that was rather sinister.
This is an abduction thriller, with a striking and beguiling Hawke snatching a kid in a black van, child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang style.
It seems to pin down its real world horror genre from the start, which is why the element of supernaturalness that arises, surprises, and actually provides the film’s best scenes.
Generally, it is a flawed film, but how the director Scott Derrickson shifts into a different horror genre and uses the black phone of the title is quite original. In this midsection, he finds some almost Spanish horror film levels of spine-tingling moments – horror tinged with melancholy.
It all seems rather promising, but it fizzles out in a third act that is quite anti-climatic and riddled with obvious missteps and underwritten ideas. Plus at times, it is so close to the recent IT, that you wonder if the director is aware that King’s classic was recently remade. Ethan Hawke’s character’s getup though, will make a cracking Halloween costume this year.
Hellbender
Hellbender takes the mother daughter relationship from Carrie, replaces the toxicity and abuse with warmth and connection, and then experiments with the supernatural element of the dynamic. The mother in the film is as stifling as Piper Laurie in Carrie, in the sense that she gets very anxious if her daughter attempts to socialize, but is this overreaching motherly nurturing to protect her daughter or to protect outsiders?
Opening with an attention-grabbing, apprehend the witch, period set prologue, the film then goes on to settle down in the present day and capture the bond of the central pair, who are on such good terms with each other that they can jam as a bass and drums, Kiss make up style wearing alt rock combo. The two produce some really atmospheric tunes that build the occult vibe of the film. It’s perhaps all very organic as it is co-written and co-directed by the two female leads, Zelda Adams and Tobey Poser, along with director John Adams.
Just when things seem to be hitting quite the harmonious chord, it all goes a bit Raw, as dormant appetites are awakened…
Where Hellbender goes from here, creates a mounting tension and some trippy visual sequences, as the audience is left gripped by who, or what exactly these two are and what they might be capable of left without discipline.
It’s a Carrie/Raw mash-up that, whilst not as enthralling as those two films, provides just enough shivers to be a good watch this Halloween.
Amulet
Amulet is probably the most disorientating and uneasily uncertain film on this list as, until the totally mind-bendingly surreal surprise final section, it is very hard to read where it is all going, and lets just say, you should win a prize if you pick up on the hints that point to the perplexing, but meaningful climax.
It all starts rather innocuously, as a central European refugee, Tomas (Alec Secareanu) is given shelter by Imelda Staunton’s kind and compassionate nun.
The house is a bit strange and kind of in a state of decay, but the central character is satisfied with the accommodation and it becomes apparent that there is a woman there who is prepared to cook for him. It is all a little bit of an unusual social dynamic.
Here is where the film throws a cliche at the audience, as there is a strange old woman living in the attic, introduced as the carer’s mother. Tomas is warned not to go near the door as she is introduced as physically dangerous. This cliche is eerily subverted later in one of the many, wtf moments the film finds in it’s head-spinning final act.
The two central characters seemed both bruised with a lot of burdens to bear and baggage to unpack, which establishes the film’s almost melancholy tone.
The mood is pierced by some strange, ominous moments as it plots a way to the most surprising ending of the year. It’s warped its twisted, and changes your perspective on all the characters. In the most abstract way possible, it delivers a message packed with pathos about one of the most contentious issues our society is currently processing. The use of the recurring motive of the amulet itself, could drift from the attention of those not fully engaged, but if you connect to the film what it represents, is probably the best use of a prop scene in a horror film all year.
Nope
Jordan Peele has been to this decade as what M Night Shyamalan was to the late 90s early 2000s: a director who can take an old horror genre and totally reconfigure the dormant threat.
What’s more, Peele seems interested in subtext as beneath the shocks and horrors is rich social commentary with totally unique messages on issues like race and class.
After two good films though, the pressure starts to mount when you have carved yourself a reputation as a new voice in horror (just ask M Night), and expectations proceed you.
The opening of Nope has some interesting, scenes, but everything all feels a little fragmented and disjointed, and lacking momentum, that is until a moment, when a rather middling film, finds a whole new gear and starts pulses racing.
Do you remember that moment in Signs, when you have a shiver down your back when you think you are actually seeing an alien? Well Nope kicks in to life with a moment that rivals that scene in Night’s second film for impact.
It isn’t giving anything away to say that from that moment on, Peele takes the most hackneyed of flying saucer cliches and completely changes them into something, raw, vital, and organic.
The rather pedestrian pace of the first 30 minutes is replaced by a movie with a lot more edge, as from nothing, Nope becomes a full-blooded horror film.
All those early fragments of storytelling too, come back into play as the film becomes a much more lean beast of a film.
From the midway point, inventive scene follows inventive scene. The sound design alone becomes threatening and immersive. I went in expecting Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I came out having experiencing something closer to Jaws. In fact, there are several really subtle and clever nods to Spielberg’s oeuvre.
It’s never just surface with Peele though, there are so many layers of meaning to unpack as the films teases you into a second watch, and enthralling conversations with those who are unpacking the layers of subtext to Peele’s third genre-bending film.
This was a horror sci-fi, that manages to be genuinely scary, even as it is riffing on the Spielberg canon. Very few directors can get a film to sit with its audience for days after it ends too.
X
Studio A24 have been one of the companies that have put a shot of life back into horror cinema this decade. Having given Ari Aster the platform to reinvent folk horror for a new unsuspecting audience, they have kept their reputation for bankrolling directors trying to revitalize horror, the latest being Ti West, who was given the opportunity to reconfigure seventies rural horror cliches into something with a fresh sense of menace.
Yes, major plot influences from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deliverance, and perhaps most surprisingly Psycho are prominently, pushing through the screenplay, but there is a sense of tension and uncertainty to this story of a DIY porn movie crew rocking up into the estate a geriatric farm couple.
Ti West cut his teeth as a horror director with the underrated anthology horror series VHS, he’s been in the industry a while now, and knows the relationship between tension and timing to deliver the horror shocks. There are lots of gags in there two about the pains of trying to be an arthouse director on the budget of a student.
X has a patient delivery as the audience contemplates which of the characters is going to snap first. There is a tension between two groups and major potential for cross generational moral clashes, but how the action commences really surprises as West recharges horror tropes into something quite vital and disturbing again. The film seems to play off and play with the rules between sex and death that were well discussed by Jamie Kennedy’s character in the Scream series.
How exactly the film decides to riff on Psycho in particular provides a fun conversation for classic horror films after the film. West seemed to be trying to make horror history, as fast after the release of X, came a prequel Pearl and it has just been announced that West intends to complete a unprecedented trilogy in a year with the forthcoming release of MaXXXine.
She Will
The character, Veronica (Alice Krige) who rolls up in the remote woodland setting in the Scottish Highlands here, seems too fragile to withstand the stresses of being in a psychological horror film. She is an old, faded film star, who is coming to terms with major life-changing surgery and is dealing with debilitating anxiety. There is a strong Norma Desmond vibe to her; her vulnerability is quite affecting and there is an early scene that mentally plugs you into her major mental stress.
She’s there for a rest and recovery session, but as anyone who has seen a horror film, trying to rest in a cabin on the edge of the woods, is a very bad idea.
The film subverts the obvious tropes it presents, with a style of horror that is atmospheric, hypnotic and full of surprises.
We are presented with a backstory, with pain, suffering, and tortured witches. ‘It’s creepy,’ her carer says. “It’s not creepy, it’s tragic”,Veronica snaps back.
The very ground the film is set on is seeped with mystery whilst the crimes of the past are whispered on the wind. It manages to be spooky in a way that feels both traditional and something different.
In a seemingly separate storyline, we see that she has a twisted history with a prominent filmmaker. Since the demise of Weinstein, many filmmakers have had skeletons in their closets, rattling into the present moment. Here we have a genius piece of casting – Malcolm McDowell. As Alex in a Clockwork Orange, his character tortured and abused many women. That almost seems in the background of his performance here.
How the filmmaker Charlotte Colbert plans to weave the two sections of the story together is a question prominent in the mind’s of the viewer.
Abstract pieces of storytelling from the past, present and future of the narrative dance around on the screen in a bewitching style. It is all done by director Colbert with a spellbinding visual sequencing that wordlessly, tells its stories and reveals the meaning of it all. Clint Mansel’s eerie, but elegant score, deepening the film’s dark mood.
There’s mystery, there’s magic, and a feminist message whispered on the wind – in one of the year’s most haunting films.
Pearl
We open on an idyllic Americana Southern farm, with sweeping, romantic music announcing we are going to be in for something wholesome. The farm wouldn’t be out of place in The Wizard and Oz, and we meet a seemingly sweet, farm girl, who is clearly evoking Dorothy. An old fashioned title sequence further announces the retro mood – your grandmother might be enticed to watch the film were it playing on TV, but she would be in for a rude awakening – as it is all a rather chic, faux setup, to wrong-foot the audience and play against the dark heart of the protagonist: Pearl.
After this we get, into a near Brother’s Grimm fairytale as we see, Pearl has a tough life, tending to her wheel=chair bound, father and following orders from her overly stern German immigrant mother. She dreams of leaving the farm and heading for the bright lights of the city and dance stardom, but her mother has other ideas.
It is a novel idea, disguising a seventies style horror film as a piece of golden age cinema and the sly visual stylings hides the malice and malevolence within.
This is a surprise prequel to Ti West’s X, with the director giving us an original story, set a mere sixty years prior to the first film, but landing in the exact same year. The farm is the same in both stories, so we get answers to the questions X poses about who in particular these strange farm folk are and what has gone on in this place – the farm was spooky in part 1 and the mystery of its history is revealed in Pearl.
Ti West clearly understands the mechanics of horror and does well at paying homage to the genre classics, whilst being subversive with cinematic styles. He also knows the value of restraint, choosing to build the character and keep the psychosis bubbling under the surface, rather than going for a full blood bath early doors. He has something of the Tarantino approach to screen violence: build the tension and suspense and then let rip. Mia Goth has been a revelation in both films. She gets a mesmerizing long monologue scene in Pearl, that was similar to that scene in Inglorious Basterds – where Christoph Waltz’s nazi general toys with some farmers. You can practically taste the fear and dread on the listener, and it is a totally engaging scene. There is a duality to the character, you can’t help have sympathy for her plight, but the cauldron of dark emotions within are troubling.
It’s tense, it’s taught and more character based than the previous film, plus West, finds a whole new method on riffing on Psycho.
Smile
Grinning is more commonly associated with evil than good. There are few pictures of angels smiling broadly in iconography and way more of demons. Kubrick knew this well, understanding perfectly, there are few looks as chilling as a leering smile signaling malevolent intent. He used the ominous leer in A Clockwork Orange, A full Metal Jacket and Jack had it too in The Shining.
Writer Director Parker Finn builds on this principle, with the smile used in a seriously disquieting style. Instinct tells us there is something deeply off about the locked in, up turned mouthed look of intent certain people have in this film.
The first subversive use of the smile is done brilliantly well in a scene of considerable shock value with an intense sense of dread. You sense the director is fully unlocking a primal fear with his concept, which proves to be a clever twist on the psychological horror film.
It all helps that the central figure is not one of several naive teens, but a grounded clinical psychologist, whose actual job is to deal with patients suffering deteriorated mental states.
Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) has spent a career dismissing the visions of patients as paranoid delusions, so it is a wry irony that this character is now pursued by some dark, inexplicable force that makes her sound deranged. Most people wouldn’t be believed if they claimed suicidal people were manically grinning at them, and it sounds even more incredulous coming from someone in the mental profession.
Horror works best when you feel you are plugging into the emotional state of mind of a character and seeing the scenario from their perspective even though the other characters see them as increasingly unstable.
Finn uses this tension and emotional connection to jam a knife into your psyche, feeding in a wire into your brain, mainlining the fear and panic that the increasingly desperate, isolated character has when faced with the ever terrifying reality.
They think she is losing her mind, but you believe her, and you’ll throw out all your understanding of psychology and totally buy all the unsettling supernatural mythology on offer. Some horror films can be hit or miss, this one lands every single scene, as you are with this character in what she goes through. When the jump scares arise, they really land. Even when it decides to really show you what is going on, even when it decides to use a bit of CGI, even when it decides to elaborate with backstory, you are with her until the end of this journey. You are in FInn’s grip – he is no doubt smiling with glee at how well he has managed to turn the mental screws here.
Smile is up there with the decade’s high watermarks of the psychological horror subgenre, It Follows and Drag Me to Hell. Easily this is the most terrifying horror film of the year. And check out its inspired online marketing campaign…
Having actors holding the long smile at sporting events is the best marketing campaign for a horror film since The Blair Witch Project. Smile will still be playing in cinemas this Halloween, and is creeping people out both inside and outside the cinema.
Barbarian
Writer/director Zack Cregger’s much talked about horror Barbarian opens with a strange house in a stormy night with a wary and weary woman approaching. That is of course the oldest horror trick in the book, but there is an immediate sense of something not being right, and from its standard start, it then moves into a horror film that suspense-fully reveals layers of surprises.
Our girl is Tess (Gerogina Campbell). She arrives to an Airbnb, desperate to shelter from the rain, only to find that the bed she intended to sleep in has been double booked by a guy (Bill Skarsgaard)
Awkward conversations ensue as the pair come to terms with their dilemma. At this point, the audience is already asking questions. Is this an accident? Can she trust this guy? Is this all some elaborate trap for some ‘me too’ themed tension?
Well, it is hard to say anything about Barabaran without ruining the many surprises, so it is best to go in with as little or no knowledge as possible and whatever you do, do not watch the trailer.
I’ll just say that things take a turn for the worse when a doorway is discovered in a basement. When strange doorways in basements are unlocked in horror movies, very little good can come of it. What exactly is behind the door is a mystery that is hard to guess and generates a big shock scare and then some others too. Like many horror films of late such as Only Lovers Left Alive and It Follows, the film turns the moral and physical decay of the once great city of Detroit, into something eerie, atmospheric and unsettling.
If you would like to enter a door to any further analysis of Barbarian from me, understand then the rest of this will be given a SPOILER WARNING!…
I would say that Cregger must have seen the excellent Spanish zombie movie REC, for the thing that rampages out of the darkness, has a strong physical resemblance to that monster from REC, with at least about half of the scare factor of that scene too.
It’s as if Cregger takes the scenes from REC and decides to write an elaborate backstory for the beast.
From this point though, the film tries to take a leaf out of Mary Shelly’s book and generate a great deal of sympathy for the monster, as the female basement abomination has a maternal instinct, which gives a vulnerability and therefore a duality to the fiend. With this plotline, Cregger owes a debt to the underrated and haunting 2013 film Mama for a storyline that mixes up the grotesque and the maternal.
The mid way cutaway to Justin Long in the car is a Deer Hunter level of jarring scene change and audience’s are left wondering whether this is an anthology horror and the cliff hanger would be left dangling permanently. But when the seemingly disparate story engineers itself a way to get Long in the house too, the skin-crawling chills resume.
It is nice to see Long back in a film, but you do have to wonder if when a director wants an actor to go through something humiliating and emasculating, they give Long a call as what his character is subject to here is up there with what he suffered in the unfortunate horror Tusk.
Barbarian has had staying power at the U.S box office and been well-received by both critics and audiences.
I would say it has a sufficient number of scares, tension and ideas to be interesting, but take away the maternal storyline and there isn’t anything that hasn’t been done in the inbred freaks franchise of The Hills Have Eyes and its degenerative copy The Wrong Turn franchise. If I were being cynical, I would rebrand it, Wrong Turn to the basement. By the end though, there is a nice debate to be had about which character barbarian actually refers to.
Honorary Mentions
Hellraiser 2022
There are a lot of remakes that seem terrified to vary from the original and instead they do a bland retread. Hulu’s Hellrasier 2 was not one of them as it takes the sadistic puzzlebox from the original franchise, and reconfigures the threat, finding many new ways to allow all hell to break loose. Usually expanding mythologies from earlier films, detracts from the danger, but the extra dimensions to the story, adds something to this dark and creepy concept – and the fiendish S&M courting Centobites here are no less ghoulish, than they were in Clive Barker’s strange and demented original.
Prey
Like Hellraiser 2022, this film brought back a well-worn franchise, but did it with some bold new ideas, at least in the setting anyway. Technically this would now be a prequel in the series as the dread-locked invisible alien, crash landed to earth, in an America at only the early stages of Western invasion. There once were warriors in this land who might be a match for the physical attributes of the Predator. Pitting it against a fierce Native American tribe, is quite a fresh idea, but ultimately there is always a limit to what a Predator film can do, and therefore you know where it is all going. At least Hulu tried to do something different with the series though. Enjoyable, if predictable, but it definitely seems to forget some of the mythology previous conjured in the franchise.
The Seed
If you feel that horror doesn’t get under the skin as much now as it is too reliant on CGI, and should not have totally abandoned the squelchy model making techniques of yesteryear for their strange designs, then you’d be right. With that in mind, it is worth checking out this old school horror film, which although clearly riffs heavily on Species, Alien, The Thing and Critters, has some of the eighties style icky otherworldly fun and the outrageously vapid central characters are clearly mocking the opportunistic, self-serving narcissism of the influencer generation. Not out of this world, but ultimately quite a fun watch with a great final shot. If you liked the underrated horror/satire that was The Neon Demon, you make like The Seed.
Umma
This century opened with a trend in Asian based ghost stories, that were both melancholy and unsettling, the trend seemed to end quite a few years ago now, but this Netflix made ghost story with a good performance by Sandra Oh, does a worthy job of reminding you why that style of horror movie is still more effective than most ghost stories.
There is an interesting cross culture cross over between Sandra Oh, A South Korean American and her ties to her mother back in her native country. Sure, you can spot from the beginning, that every point in the setup is going to come into play, from her job as a bee keeper to her isolation in a rural America, to the fact she has a strong aversion to electricity, but it tells a spooky and elegant nicely written, surprisingly engaging little ghost story and there aren’t too many of those around at the moment.
Still here? Great! Well here are a few horror films from 2022 that I didn’t think worked…
The Sadness
Taiwan seems first out of the blocks with a viral mutation spin on the zombie story, via minds warped by post COVID fears. Personally though, I do not want to see zombies this demented – they are both violently and sexually deviant – either walking around out there in those streets of Taipei or in a film.
It all starts pretty promising, but it ups the ante early doors with some potent shock value and, becomes even more psychotic and shocking from there. It was too far to the gory extreme of horror for me, with a script, with more than a hint of misogyny in its many layers of perversity. A hardcore horror film for those who like their zombie flicks with buckets of blood, with a camera leering at the violence with high levels of shock value and unhealthy dollop of sickness.
The Invitation
This Gothic chiller attempts to satirize the predatory nature of the ultra-rich, with a seeming lack of awareness that the director Jessica M Thompson is playing out one of the oldest tricks in the horror book. The very mention of that gothic romantic novel would undermine her setup. It teases out the mystery, but when it gets to its entirely unremarkable reveal, you start to wonder if the eighties born director, is fully aware at just how much this lore has been done before.
Orphan: First Kill
The first film had one of the best horror twist endings of the decade. With the second film, new director William Brent Bell knows he has to come up with something major to make the blood run as cold as the reveal did in the first film, to save a film creaking under the audience’s awareness of who this character really. Admittedly, it finds a twist that is very hard to predict, but for all its surprises, it totally undermines the integrity of some of the characters, and sends the film down an increasingly incredulous path. Orphan was made by a twist, the sequel ironically unravels because of one.
Scream was Wes Craven finding a way to riff on a genre that he had helped build in a way that would now be considered meta. But having characters with an awareness of horror films, now feels a little forced and conventional. Plus, the Agatha Christie via Scooby Doo who done it plot mechanics means the audience is even more aware than the characters as to how this has to play out and tries to twists itself and twist itself, bluff then double bluff the audience, but I guessed what the reveal was going to be from a glance at the poster and I can’t say that about any of the other films. Ghostface’s knife is not as sharp as it once was. The open mouths of shock the franchise caused in the viewer is now replaced with closed mouths of nonchalance.
Thanks for staying to the end and I hope you get a good scare from the best horror had to offer in 2022. Happy Halloween!
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