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Within the world of current filmmaking, a new generation of creators is expanding the limits of the horror category. From cultural commentaries to intense chillers, these eight filmmakers are creating lasting adventures that reshape terror for a current generation.

The Mind Behind Get Out

The director behind Get Out has developed sharp metaphors exploring the risks, subtleties, and paradoxes of Black life in the United States. His influence is evident from the sheer number of imitators, with the top within them guided by the filmmaker via his Monkeypaw.

Robert Eggers

A masterful uncoverer of the most obscure pockets of the bygone eras, this director of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and Nosferatu specializes in uncovering the foreign elements of historical periods and presenting them free from present-day revisionism. His unholy historical explorations unlock gateways to madness, longing, and transformation.

Jane Schoenbrun

The modern director with their pulse most attuned to the millennial pulse, as sensitive to the solitudes, and deep connections, of an internet-besotted era. Weaving themes of connection and mainstream entertainment through gender transition and the legacy of physical terror, works such as I Saw the TV Glow explore the eeriest fissures of the psyche.

Gore Maestro

The director's series of Terrifier films is this era's major scary movie success story, evidence that word of mouth can still generate genuine hits from well-executed microbudget gore. Beyond the modern horror villain, insane figure Art the Clown is proof that the viewers' craving for gore – gratuitous, hilarious, unbridled – remains endless.

Rose Glass

Blurring the boundary between delusion and the real world, with her films Saint Maud and Love Lies Bleeding, Glass has assembled a collection of driven women compelled to the edge by the intensity of their commitment to warped values. Given to imaginative grand finales that challenge simple interpretations into suspicion, her movies remain – though not so much like a stone in your shoe than a nail in your foot.

YouTube Sensations

From the humble origins of online video arrived a team of brothers dominating the cinema landscape with a zeitgeisty brand of shock. With their works Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, they staged shocking displays in between authentic depictions of how today’s young people think. Cinema enthusiasts idolize them as if they’re freshly made saints.

Julia Ducournau

Her polished, metaphor-forward blend of horror elements with arthouse touches earned her a prestigious award, the historic moment the festival awarded its premier award to a terror movie. Holding the viscera-flecked standard of the extreme cinema wave, the Titane creator indulges the desires of the disconnected to spectacular result.

Na Hong-jin

A member of the most thrilling filmmakers to arise from Asia in modern times, the South Korean filmmaker has made one jewel of traditional terror (The Wailing) and co-scripted one more (The Medium). Arranged with total confidence and exact mood management, his films transposes mainstream formulas into horrifying, unique forms.

The listed directors embody the diverse and groundbreaking path of scary cinema, driving the edges of terror into unexplored territories.