It should be no surprise that, as another year winds to a close, horror continued to dominate in 2024. Terrifier 3, for example, became the highest-grossing Unrated movie in box office history, throwing all the indie cinema rules out the window in the process. Longlegs caught everyone off guard, becoming Neon‘s highest-grossing film upon release in July, and streaming service Mubi smartly acquired the body horror movie The Substance, where it became the platform’s highest-grossing film at the box office.

That doesn’t even touch on the huge studio earners like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, or Alien: Romulus. Yet the surprises extend well beyond how well horror performed at the box office; 2024 horror is defined by the way it refused to stay within its tidy genre bounds.

This is reflected in the way that 2024 horror found new angles to push franchises forward through prequels and sequels,...