When Evil Lurks is the scariest horror movie of 2023 if your idea of fear is bleak supernatural escalation, helplessness, and violence that can arrive without warning. Talk to Me is the better first recommendation for most viewers: it is accessible, tightly constructed, and frightening without sacrificing narrative momentum.
This is a scariness-first ranking rather than a list of the year’s best-reviewed films. The order weighs dread, helplessness, disturbing imagery, bodily fear, shock, and the ability to leave an unpleasant afterimage after the credits. Fear is subjective, however. A viewer who dislikes gore may find Huesera: The Bone Woman or Skinamarink more terrifying than Evil Dead Rise, while someone who prefers conventional supernatural scares may respond more strongly to Talk to Me than to The Outwaters.
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Talk to Me (4K) UHD/BD/DGTL | $13.99 | Buy on Amazon |
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Talk to Me BD/DVD DGTL | $8.99 | Buy on Amazon |
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Talk to Me Blu-Ray | $16.16 | Buy on Amazon |
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Talk To Me (Blu-ray) | $17.20 | Buy on Amazon |
The 10 scariest horror movies of 2023
| Rank | Film | Primary fear | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | When Evil Lurks | Possession, contagion, helplessness | Viewers who want the year’s harshest supernatural horror |
| 2 | Talk to Me | Possession, grief, peer pressure | A strong first choice for most horror viewers |
| 3 | Skinamarink | Darkness, isolation, liminal dread | Patient viewers who enjoy experimental nightmares |
| 4 | The Outwaters | Disorientation, cosmic dread, sensory assault | Experienced viewers seeking something abrasive and opaque |
| 5 | Huesera: The Bone Woman | Pregnancy horror, body horror, occult dread | Viewers drawn to psychological and reproductive horror |
| 6 | Evil Dead Rise | Gore, demonic possession, family danger | Fans of fast, bloody, claustrophobic horror |
| 7 | Infinity Pool | Identity horror, moral degradation | Adults who prefer transgressive, intellectually disturbing films |
| 8 | Beau Is Afraid | Anxiety, shame, surreal catastrophe | Viewers comfortable with horror mixed with absurdist comedy |
| 9 | Scream VI | Slasher suspense, pursuit, jump scares | Viewers wanting polished and accessible genre entertainment |
| 10 | M3GAN | Uncanny technology, domestic danger | Viewers wanting fun techno-horror rather than sustained terror |
How to read the ranking: “Best” here means most effective at producing fear, not necessarily the most accomplished, original, or enjoyable film. Some of the lower-ranked movies are easier to recommend for a casual movie night than the films above them.
1. When Evil Lurks
Demián Rugna’s Argentine possession film is 2023’s most punishing horror experience. It begins with brothers discovering a demonic infection near a farmhouse. After they fail to follow the required rites, the possessions spread through the surrounding rural community, and the danger becomes much larger than a single haunted building or isolated family.
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- When a group of friends discover how to conjure spirits using an embalmed hand, they become hooked on the new thrill, until one of them goes too far and unleashes terrifying supernatural forces.
What makes the film so frightening is its sense of contaminated normality. The threat is supernatural, but the characters’ decisions, misunderstandings, and attempts to solve the problem can make everything worse. The film establishes rules without making those rules feel like a safety manual. Knowing that certain actions are dangerous does not mean anyone can reliably prevent them.
Rugna also uses abrupt, upsetting violence rather than predictable build-ups. The film can move from apparent quiet to shocking brutality with very little warning, creating a rare feeling that no character—or viewer—is protected by conventional horror logic. Its rural setting adds to that fear: the threat feels capable of moving across a whole community instead of remaining trapped in one room.
Fear profile: Possession, contagion, helplessness, moral dread, and shocking violence.
Choose it if: You want the bleakest and least reassuring supernatural horror on this list.
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Content note: Graphic violence, disturbing treatment of children and animals, possession, and bleak subject matter.
2. Talk to Me
Danny and Michael Philippou’s debut is the most accessible genuinely frightening film in the ranking. Its premise is simple and immediately effective: a group of friends uses an embalmed hand to conjure spirits. The ritual becomes a party-game sensation, then an addiction, and eventually a supernatural problem that the characters cannot control.
The film’s strongest idea is that danger is reinforced by social pressure. The characters do not continue because they are unaware that the hand is dangerous; they continue because the experience is thrilling, performative, and difficult to resist. That makes the supernatural mechanism feel connected to recognizable behavior. Grief deepens the horror, turning the ritual into more than a dare and giving the escalating possessions an emotional cost.
Talk to Me combines clear storytelling, memorable shocks, strong performances, and a rapidly worsening situation. Roger Ebert’s review singled out the opening terror and Sophie Wilde’s performance, while The Guardian treated the film as an unusually energetic and frightening debut. It ranks just below When Evil Lurks because its polished structure and moments of conventional horror make it slightly less oppressive, but it is the safest recommendation for a group with different definitions of scary.
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Fear profile: Supernatural possession, peer pressure, grief, body horror, and jump scares.
Choose it if: You want a scary film with recognizable characters, a clear premise, and strong narrative momentum.
Content note: Supernatural violence, possession, grief, disturbing imagery, and intense emotional distress.
If you prefer to own the film
A24’s official film page identifies the 2023 release, its directors and cast, and points viewers toward DVD and Blu-ray listings through Amazon. If you are building a physical horror collection, the Talk to Me Blu-ray is the clearest home-video recommendation connected to this ranking. Retailer availability, format, and price can vary by country and publication date.
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Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink is less a conventional narrative than a sustained childhood nightmare. It uses darkness, empty rooms, fragmentary sound, and obscured images to make familiar domestic spaces feel fundamentally wrong. The film withholds the information viewers normally use to orient themselves: who is in control, what has happened, where the characters are, and what the entity—or force—in the house wants.
That refusal to explain is the source of its power and its divisiveness. Some viewers will find the extremely slow pace and limited imagery frustrating. Others will experience the film as a remarkably effective recreation of being awake in a dark house as a child, unable to understand the shape of the danger around you.
Roger Ebert’s coverage emphasized how the film undermines the ordinary questions audiences ask while watching a movie. That is an important distinction: Skinamarink is not constantly delivering conventional scares. Instead, it changes the conditions of watching. A dark hallway, a ceiling, or a barely audible voice becomes threatening because the film has removed the reassurance that an image will eventually clarify itself.
Fear profile: Liminal spaces, childhood isolation, darkness, suggestion, and unseen entities.
Choose it if: You prefer atmosphere and implication to exposition, plot clarity, or frequent jump scares.
Content note: Childhood peril, isolation, oppressive darkness, disturbing images, and sustained psychological unease.
4. The Outwaters
Robbie Banfitch’s found-footage film is an abrasive attack on spatial and narrative certainty. It begins from the familiar language of a recorded trip, then gradually abandons the idea that the viewer can confidently understand where the characters are or what is happening to them. Darkness, chaotic sound, fragmented images, and bodily threat replace ordinary geography.
Rank #2
- When a group of friends discover how to conjure spirits using an embalmed hand, they become hooked on the new thrill, until one of them goes too far and unleashes terrifying supernatural forces.
The Outwaters is not conventionally scary in the way Talk to Me is. Its terror comes from disorientation. The film creates the sensation that the characters are trapped inside an incomprehensible nightmare, and that the camera is not a reliable tool for making the nightmare understandable. As the film becomes more extreme, sensory overload itself becomes part of the horror.
Its opacity will be a dealbreaker for viewers who need a clear mythology or a steady plot. For experienced horror viewers, however, that opacity is exactly the point. Roger Ebert included it among the notable horror films of 2023 as part of the year’s movement toward more destabilizing, internet-era forms of horror.
Fear profile: Found footage, cosmic dread, disorientation, sensory overload, and bodily threat.
Choose it if: You want an experimental film that feels physically and psychologically disorienting rather than conventionally suspenseful.
Content note: Extreme violence, bodily threat, frightening sound design, darkness, and intense sensory imagery.
5. Huesera: The Bone Woman
Michelle Garza Cervera’s Mexican body-horror film turns pregnancy, domestic expectation, and bodily transformation into a slow-moving nightmare. Its protagonist’s life becomes increasingly haunted and physically distorted, while pressure from relationships, family roles, and social expectations closes in around her.
The horror is cumulative rather than shock-driven. The protagonist’s body, home, relationships, and sense of reality begin to feel unstable at the same time. That combination gives the film an unusually intimate form of dread: the threat is not merely something entering the home, but something that appears to be changing the meaning of the home and the body within it.
Huesera appears in Roger Ebert’s selection of notable 2023 horror and was also highlighted by Shudder among its genre offerings. It ranks below the first four because it is less relentlessly terrifying, but it may be more disturbing for viewers who respond to reproductive horror, social confinement, and psychological deterioration than to demons or slasher attacks.
Fear profile: Body horror, pregnancy horror, occult dread, domestic pressure, and psychological collapse.
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Choose it if: You want horror with a strong physical and emotional aftereffect, not a sequence of nonstop shocks.
Content note: Pregnancy and reproductive themes, body horror, occult imagery, domestic distress, and disturbing transformation.
6. Evil Dead Rise
Lee Cronin relocates the Evil Dead franchise from its familiar cabin setting to a Los Angeles apartment building. The change gives the series a particularly effective form of claustrophobia: ordinary domestic spaces, corridors, elevators, kitchens, and bedrooms become traps once demonic possession takes hold.
The film is more kinetic and openly gory than the atmospheric entries above it. Its mutilation, frantic possession sequences, and practical-effects-style shocks are designed to produce a physical reaction. Family danger gives the violence an additional charge, while the apartment’s vertical, compartmentalized layout creates repeated opportunities for characters to be isolated or cornered.
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Fear profile: Demonic possession, graphic gore, family danger, claustrophobia, and sudden physical shocks.
Choose it if: You want fast, violent, high-energy horror with little patience for a slow burn.
Content note: Graphic gore, mutilation, possession, family danger, and disturbing violence involving children.
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Brandon Cronenberg’s science-fiction horror film follows a couple at an island resort after a fatal accident leaves them facing execution—or an expensive process that allows a duplicate to die in their place. The premise turns privilege, identity, and moral responsibility into a form of psychological horror that becomes increasingly grotesque.
Rank #3
- Talk to Me
The film’s fear is less about being chased than about discovering how easily a person can surrender a stable sense of self. Masks, ritualized violence, drug-induced visions, and identity disintegration create an atmosphere of moral contamination. The resort’s apparent luxury does not provide safety; instead, it becomes a sealed environment where wealth can remove consequences while making the characters’ behavior more disturbing.
Infinity Pool belongs on a scariness list because loss of identity and dehumanization can be more frightening than a monster. It ranks seventh because its effect is primarily transgressive and intellectually disturbing. Viewers seeking direct scares may find it less frightening than its imagery and premise suggest.
Fear profile: Identity horror, body horror, class satire, surreal violence, and psychological degradation.
Choose it if: You prefer adult horror that unsettles through moral corruption, privilege, and the collapse of personal identity.
Content note: Violent imagery, disturbing rituals, drug-induced hallucination sequences, psychological degradation, and mature subject matter.
8. Beau Is Afraid
Ari Aster’s sprawling surreal nightmare follows an intensely anxious man attempting to reach his mother. A24 describes it as an epic odyssey centered on a paranoid man trying to get home, and that basic journey becomes a machine for amplifying fear. Ordinary obstacles turn catastrophic, social interactions become humiliating threats, and the world repeatedly confirms the protagonist’s worst expectations.
The film’s horror is rooted in anxiety, guilt, shame, parental control, and the terror of being unable to behave correctly in a hostile social world. Its opening movement is especially effective because it transforms everyday vulnerability into escalating panic. Later tonal shifts and absurdist comedy make the film less consistently frightening, but they also make its nightmare logic more elaborate and unpredictable.
Beau Is Afraid ranks eighth because it does not maintain conventional horror intensity throughout. It is better understood as an extended psychological nightmare that periodically becomes hilarious, grotesque, or surreal. For viewers who find panic and humiliation more distressing than ghosts, however, it can be considerably more frightening than its position suggests.
Fear profile: Anxiety, paranoia, maternal horror, social humiliation, guilt, and surreal catastrophe.
Choose it if: You want an ambitious psychological odyssey and do not mind comedy interrupting the terror.
Content note: Panic, emotional abuse, parental control, humiliation, disturbing imagery, and surreal violence.
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Scream VI is a polished and effective slasher, but its self-aware structure, franchise familiarity, and comic relief reduce its feeling of helplessness compared with the films ranked above it. Its strongest scares come from attacks in confined urban spaces and from the continuing uncertainty over who is behind the Ghostface mask.
The film understands how to create suspense through pursuit, sudden interruptions, and the possibility that a familiar genre rule may not protect a character this time. It also benefits from the energy of its ensemble and the continued prominence of Jenna Ortega in contemporary horror. But the Scream series asks viewers to enjoy the mechanics of the slasher as well as fear them. That knowingly entertaining tone keeps it from producing the same oppressive dread as the top half of this list.
Fear profile: Slasher suspense, pursuit, jump scares, mystery, and confined-space attacks.
Choose it if: You want accessible horror intensity, a franchise mystery, and a more entertaining than punishing experience.
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Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.10. M3GAN
Gerard Johnstone’s killer-doll movie is one of 2023’s most recognizable horror releases, but it works better as entertaining techno-horror than as a sustained terror machine. The premise follows a roboticist testing an advanced companion doll for her niece. The machine is designed to help, protect, and learn—making its loss of control more unsettling than the idea of a plainly malevolent monster.
The uncanny behavior of a childlike machine supplies the film’s most effective fear. A supposedly helpful domestic technology becomes an unpredictable source of danger, while the doll’s movements and imitation of human behavior produce an uneasy gap between artificial companionship and genuine emotion.
Rank #4
Humor, satire, and the film’s playful dance-meme appeal keep the atmosphere light compared with the other entries. That makes M3GAN an excellent gateway film for viewers who want horror-popcorn entertainment, but a weaker choice for anyone looking for prolonged dread or disturbing realism.
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Fear profile: Uncanny technology, killer-child imagery, domestic danger, dark comedy, and loss of control.
Choose it if: You want a fun, recognizable horror movie with memorable scares rather than relentless terror.
Content note: Child danger, violent attacks, unsettling artificial intelligence, and dark comedy.
Where to start, depending on what scares you
The ranking gives one overall order, but fear is better understood as a set of different responses. Use this guide if your personal definition of scary does not match the list exactly:
- For the most punishing supernatural horror: Start with When Evil Lurks.
- For the best all-around gateway: Choose Talk to Me.
- For darkness, silence, and liminal spaces: Choose Skinamarink.
- For experimental, disorienting horror: Try The Outwaters.
- For pregnancy and body horror: Choose Huesera: The Bone Woman.
- For graphic gore and frantic possession: Choose Evil Dead Rise.
- For identity and moral horror: Choose Infinity Pool.
- For anxiety, shame, and parental dread: Choose Beau Is Afraid.
- For a conventional slasher: Choose Scream VI.
- For playful techno-horror: Choose M3GAN.
A practical content-warning guide
Several of these films are not simply scary; they are specifically upsetting in ways that may matter more than their position in the ranking.
- Most graphic: When Evil Lurks, Evil Dead Rise, and The Outwaters.
- Children in danger: When Evil Lurks, Evil Dead Rise, and M3GAN.
- Animal distress: When Evil Lurks.
- Pregnancy and reproductive horror: Huesera: The Bone Woman.
- Childhood isolation and darkness: Skinamarink.
- Identity loss and psychological degradation: Infinity Pool.
- Severe anxiety, guilt, and humiliation: Beau Is Afraid.
If you are sensitive to graphic violence, begin with Skinamarink, Beau Is Afraid, or M3GAN, although each has its own significant psychological or thematic triggers. If you dislike ambiguity, avoid starting with Skinamarink or The Outwaters; Talk to Me and Scream VI offer much clearer narrative frameworks.
For more international and experimental horror
The Shudder horror streaming service is a natural catalog to investigate for viewers drawn to this list’s supernatural, international, and experimental entries. Shudder’s official horror pages identify films including When Evil Lurks, Skinamarink, and Huesera: The Bone Woman among its offerings, but catalogs vary by country and can change over time. Check the service’s current catalog before subscribing or planning a particular double feature.
For horror collectors
Fans who collect licensed film memorabilia may also want to look for an official Talk to Me poster or other A24 merchandise. Treat this as a separate collector option rather than a substitute for the film itself, and verify current stock and regional shipping before ordering.
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Honorable mentions and films that narrowly missed
Saw X is a strong choice for viewers who define fear through pain, elaborate traps, and graphic gore. It is not ranked in the top ten because its dominant mode is torture suspense rather than supernatural dread.
The Blackening is an accomplished horror satire, but its comic energy makes it a poor fit for a scariness-first ranking. Knock at the Cabin, The Boogeyman, Cobweb, Insidious: The Red Door, The Nun II, and Five Nights at Freddy’s are all reasonable inclusions in a broad guide to 2023 horror. They fall outside this list because the ten films above offer a stronger combination of fear intensity, critical recognition, disturbing imagery, or lingering unease for this particular angle.
Why critical consensus does not settle the question
Several of the year’s most acclaimed horror films—particularly Talk to Me, When Evil Lurks, Huesera: The Bone Woman, Infinity Pool, Evil Dead Rise, and Skinamarink—also appear high here. That overlap is not accidental, but reviews and aggregate scores do not measure the same thing as fear intensity.
A critic may value a film’s structure, performances, ideas, visual design, or originality even when the film is not especially frightening. Conversely, an abrasive or divisive movie may create a more powerful fear response for a particular viewer. That is why When Evil Lurks takes the top spot despite the ranking not being a conventional quality poll, and why entertaining films such as Scream VI and M3GAN remain worthwhile recommendations even though they land near the bottom.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the scariest horror movie of 2023?
When Evil Lurks is the top pick for overall fear intensity. Its possession premise, bleak rules, expanding rural threat, shocking violence, and refusal to make viewers feel safe give it the strongest combination of dread and helplessness on this list.
Is Talk to Me scarier than When Evil Lurks?
For most viewers, Talk to Me is the more accessible film, with clearer rules, recognizable characters, and conventional supernatural escalation. When Evil Lurks is harsher, more unpredictable, and more upsetting, so it ranks higher for viewers who want punishing supernatural horror.
Which 2023 horror movie is the most experimental?
Skinamarink is the most extreme experiment in atmosphere, darkness, fragmentary sound, and childhood nightmare logic. The Outwaters is the more physically disorienting choice, using found footage, sensory overload, and increasingly unstable space.
Which films on this list are the most graphic?
When Evil Lurks, Evil Dead Rise, and The Outwaters are the strongest warnings for graphic violence and bodily threat. When Evil Lurks also contains disturbing material involving children and animals, while Evil Dead Rise includes intense family danger.
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The Bottom Line
Final verdict: Watch When Evil Lurks for the most punishing fear, Talk to Me for the best balance of accessibility and terror, and Skinamarink or The Outwaters if you want a nightmare that refuses to explain itself. For gore, choose Evil Dead Rise; for body horror, choose Huesera: The Bone Woman; and for a more playful night, choose Scream VI or M3GAN.
Quick Recap
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