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Within the realm of modern filmmaking, a fresh generation of visionaries is pushing the edges of the scary movie category. Ranging from societal metaphors to intense chillers, these eight movie-makers are producing unforgettable experiences that reimagine terror for a current era.

Jordan Peele

The filmmaker behind Get Out has created pointed allegories examining the perils, complexities, and contradictions of African American experience in the US. Peele's effect is clear from the multitude of imitators, with the finest of them guided by Peele himself by way of his production company.

Master of Historical Horror

A skilled explorer of the least known pockets of the past, this filmmaker of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and Nosferatu excels in revealing the unfamiliar facets of historical periods and depicting them without modern-day alteration. Eggers' unholy journeys into the past open portals to madness, craving, and elevation.

Jane Schoenbrun

The modern director with their finger most attuned to the younger spirit, as attuned to the loneliness, and significant relationships, of an digitally-obsessed time. Filtering concepts of relationships and popular media by way of gender transition and the tradition of corporeal fear, works such as I Saw the TV Glow plumb the most unsettling fissures of the self.

Gore Maestro

Leone’s series of Terrifier films is this decade's significant horror success story, proof that audience buzz can still create genuine successes from well-executed low-budget bloodshed. More than the modern horror villain, psychotic figure Art the Clown is proof that the viewers' thirst for violence – gratuitous, comical, unchecked – remains unslakable.

Rose Glass

Merging the division between delusion and reality, with her movies Saint Maud and Love Lies Bleeding, Glass has created a gallery of driven protagonists pushed to extremes by the intensity of their dedication to distorted beliefs. Prone to fantastical climaxes that question easy readings into question, her movies remain – though not so much like a stone in your shoe than a sharp object in your sole.

YouTube Sensations

Emerging from the early beginnings of digital platform came a team of siblings dominating the film industry with a current type of shock. With their movies Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, they presented violent spectacles in between credible representations of how today’s young people act. Aspiring directors look up to them as if they’re recently canonised heroes.

Julia Ducournau

Her sleek, symbolism-rich blend of genre trappings with art film touches gained her a top Cannes prize, the historic moment the Cannes Film Festival gave its top prize to a terror movie. Holding the gore-stained standard of the extreme cinema wave, the Titane filmmaker indulges the desires of the isolated to remarkable outcome.

Na Hong-jin

One of the most thrilling artists to emerge from Eastern cinema in the past decade, the Korean creator has made one gem of traditional terror (The Wailing) and collaborated on one more (The Medium). Paced with supreme assurance and exact mood management, his films converts mainstream formulas into terrifying, novel styles.

The listed filmmakers represent the wide-ranging and innovative path of horror, driving the boundaries of dread into unexplored territories.