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Within the world of contemporary filmmaking, a new cohort of artists is stretching the edges of the horror style. Ranging from cultural allegories to intense chillers, these eight filmmakers are crafting lasting adventures that reshape terror for a new age.

Jordan Peele

The director of Get Out has created pointed symbolic tales exploring the risks, nuances, and conflicts of Black existence in the US. His effect is evident from the multitude of copycats, with the best among them guided by the filmmaker by way of his production company.

Robert Eggers

A masterful explorer of the most obscure corners of the bygone eras, this filmmaker of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and Nosferatu is known for finding the foreign elements of past epochs and showing them without present-day reinterpretation. Eggers' unholy journeys into the past create doorways to psychosis, desire, and elevation.

Jane Schoenbrun

The modern creator with their focus most in touch with the millennial pulse, as sensitive to the isolation, and significant relationships, of an online-focused era. Weaving themes of connection and popular media through trans identity and the history of corporeal fear, works such as I Saw the TV Glow delve into the most unsettling fractures of the psyche.

Damien Leone

Leone’s trilogy of Terrifier films is this era's great scary movie triumph, evidence that word of mouth can still create true blockbusters from skillfully made low-budget gore. Beyond the next horror villain, psychotic icon Art the Clown is proof that the viewers' desire for violence – excessive, humorous, unchecked – remains unslakable.

Blurrer of Realities

Obscuring the division between fantasy and actuality, with her movies Saint Maud and Love Lies Bleeding, The director has built a gallery of intense women driven to extremes by the strength of their commitment to warped beliefs. Prone to imaginative grand finales that call easy interpretations into suspicion, her works linger – though not so much like a rock in your shoe than a sharp object in your foot.

Danny and Michael Philippou

From the early beginnings of digital platform came a pair of siblings dominating the world with a trendy brand of shock. With their movies Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, they presented violent spectacles in between realistic portrayals of how today’s youth think. Film students pray to them as if they’re recently declared heroes.

Julia Ducournau

The director's polished, metaphor-forward combination of horror elements with art film styles won her a prestigious award, the initial instance the event awarded its top prize to a scary film. Carrying the viscera-flecked banner of the French horror movement, the Titane filmmaker indulges the cravings of the isolated to remarkable effect.

Asian Horror Visionary

Among the most intriguing talents to come forth from Eastern cinema in modern times, the Korean filmmaker has made one jewel of mythical fear (The Wailing) and collaborated on one more (The Medium). Paced with total assurance and precise tonal control, his movies converts conventional structures into terrifying, original forms.

These eight creators represent the wide-ranging and creative direction of horror, propelling the limits of fear into fresh realms.