The Scariest Things The Scariest Things

The 2024 Thingy Awards! It is time for the Mid-Year Scariest Things grand celebration: Once again, we surveyed and received votes from our favorite fans and industry contacts to determine the best horror movies of last year. If there were a couple of themes from last year: Possession and Australia. We got a lot of both in 2023, and it was GOOD. It was one of the best years for horror in the past ten years!

★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★

Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

In Ghost Game, a trio of mischief-makers stakes out an old manor with a dark legend surrounding it. Their goal: stay in the house without the new residents discovering them. Internal relationship conflicts, a disturbed resident family, and the potential of a supernatural haunt upend their Ghost Game efforts. A solid cat-and-mouse thriller with fun haunted house tropes propels this film, which was the centerpiece of the Portland Horror Film Festival.

★★★★ out of ★★★★★

Intensity: 🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸, with sexual assault trigger warnings.



DID I?, the winner of the Portland Horror Film Festival's Goule D'Or (Best Feature in Festival) Award, takes an honest approach to the cruelty and ramifications of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). The psychological thriller invests its time with Genevieve, a bookish junior editor at a publishing company who struggles with her alter ego, Stevie, who is a bit of a wild child. Her traumas are buried deep, and it puts several new wrinkles into the good/evil dichotomy that films that used what used to be called multiple personality disorder under the microscope.

★★★★ out of ★★★★★

Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for copious comic gore



The Invisible Raptor is a crowd-pleaser, plain and simple. This spoof of Jurassic Park flips the script on the behemoth tentpole franchise by not trying to do digital dinosaurs at all. Instead, The team behind The Invisible Raptor did the monster movie without the monster, and it worked brilliantly. This is a meta-movie for the Easter Egg enthusiasts, but be warned, there is so much blood and shit in this movie that it isn't for the squeamish or the kiddos! (Though the twelve-year-old me would LOVE this movie.)

It was a dark and stormy night! Prepare to enter the foggy moor with The Scariest Things as we discuss the genre's roots in Gothic Horror, the ornate and narratively complex origins of horror film.

It has become something of a Hollywood crutch. The cynical amongst us consider prequels, sequels, and reboots to be lazy storytelling. Franchise horror comes in all forms. When obvious profits are predicted, big-budget studio films and straight-to-streaming B-movies fall into the same formula. Rinse, repeat, and rinse again. We think we can do this a little better.