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Across the world of contemporary movie-making, a innovative generation of artists is stretching the limits of the scary movie category. From societal commentaries to intense chillers, these 8 directors are creating memorable experiences that reshape terror for a modern era.

Jordan Peele

The creator behind Get Out has created sharp allegories examining the perils, complexities, and contradictions of Black life in the United States. Peele's effect is clear from the multitude of copycats, with the best within them guided by the director through his production company.

Master of Historical Horror

A masterful explorer of the least known corners of the past, this director of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and Nosferatu excels in finding the foreign facets of historical periods and presenting them without present-day reinterpretation. His unholy journeys into the past unlock gateways to insanity, craving, and transformation.

Jane Schoenbrun

The millennial creator with their finger most attuned to the younger heartbeat, as sensitive to the solitudes, and significant relationships, of an online-focused era. Channeling concepts of connection and mainstream entertainment through gender transition and the tradition of physical terror, creations such as I Saw the TV Glow plumb the eeriest fractures of the self.

Gore Maestro

The director's trilogy of Terrifier films is this decade's significant horror triumph, evidence that fan support can still create bona fide hits from skillfully made low-budget gore. More than the next Jason or Freddy, psychotic figure Art the Clown is proof that the audience's thirst for violence – gratuitous, hilarious, unbridled – remains endless.

Rose Glass

Merging the boundary between fantasy and the real world, with her films Saint Maud and Love Lies Bleeding, Glass has created a collection of intense female characters driven to extremes by the depth of their commitment to twisted values. Prone to imaginative climaxes that call simple interpretations into doubt, her films stay with you – though less like a rock in your shoe than a nail in your sole.

Danny and Michael Philippou

From the early beginnings of YouTube came a team of brothers dominating the cinema landscape with a trendy brand of provocation. With their works Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, they presented atrocity exhibitions in between realistic portrayals of how today’s teenagers behave. Film students idolize them as if they’re newly made saints.

Arthouse Horror Pioneer

Her polished, metaphor-forward fusion of genre trappings with independent flourishes earned her a Palme d’Or, the historic moment the Cannes Film Festival presented its highest honor to a scary film. Holding the blood-soaked banner of the French horror movement, the Titane director indulges the appetites of the isolated to spectacular result.

Asian Horror Visionary

One of the most intriguing talents to arise from Eastern cinema in the past decade, the Korean filmmaker has crafted one gem of folk horror (The Wailing) and co-written one more (The Medium). Paced with total assurance and exact mood management, his movies transforms Hollywood templates into frightful, original shapes.

These creators signify the varied and innovative future of horror, pushing the limits of dread into new territories.