12 Arthouse Horror Directors Who Are Reinventing The Genre

The Soska Sisters
Jen and Sylvia Soska are perhaps not as fully-formed as other filmmakers listed here —their best film is somewhat rough around the edges— but they’ve already become horror icons, and one suspects that their masterpiece is yet to come. The sisters are life-long horror fans from Canada, and their tiny-budgeted feature debut “Dead Hooker In A Trunk” ended up getting theatrical distribution from IFC, which led the way to the far better follow-up “American Mary.” That film sees “Ginger Snaps” star Katharine Isabelle play a medical student who becomes embroiled in a world of underground surgery, and though the writing is sometimes a little bit sloppy and the acting mixed, it’s rich, gory and manages to hit the fetish-y body-horror sweet spot it’s aiming for with aplomb. Since then, they’ve done some stylish work on DTV genre pics “See No Evil 2” and “Vendetta,” though they’re clearly better than the material in both cases. But hopefully, their next gig will be more deserving: they’re remaking “Rabid,” as originally made by their idol and fellow Canadian David Cronenberg. And unlike any other filmmaker here, they also have a side-gig as… game-show hosts, presenting the Game Show Network’s horror show “Hellevator.”

Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani
Married French filmmakers based in Belgium, Cattet & Forzani push the dreamlike visions of Dario Argento to even more bizarre and disorienting heights in the features “Amer” and “The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears.” Imitations of Argento’s intuitive and nightmarish “Suspiria” are plentiful, but no other filmmaker since has demonstrated the facility with dream logic and sensory experience that we see in Cattet & Forzani’s films. In particular, “The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears” boasts outlandish architecture, an eye-popping color palette and a veritable parade of images that bring to mind Bosch by way of a fetish shop. More a bizarre refraction of giallo film tendencies than a true continuation of the genre, ‘Strange Color’ is nonetheless one of the most striking and at times divisive horror thrillers of the decade. That alone makes it an essential view. If Cattet and Forzani ever attack character and narrative with the inventive viciousness they have applied to images, they might craft a genre classic; as it is, their work is essential for those willing to explore horror’s unusual byways.

Ben Wheatley
When Wheatley and co-writer/editor/partner Amy Jump wove a thriller out of post-military malaise, political thriller plot points and leftfield horror of “The Wicker Man,” they crafted one of the most surprising must-see films of 2011. “Kill List” is a shocking, deeply disturbing story of soldiers-turned-hitmen that is all the more effective for being impossible to predict and occasionally close to baffling. As one of Wheatley’s many visions of individuals caught inside peculiar and obscure systems, it is also a statement of purpose. Not all Wheatley’s films are horror, but his work consistently puts characters into seemingly impossible situations, whether in the middle of a class war (“High-Rise“), in the countryside with drug-influenced war deserters (“A Field in England“), or simply the prison of their own desires and insecurities (“Sightseers“). Wheatley and Jump take a sledgehammer to the stabilizing concepts typically used to prop up genre stories, and their films force audiences to fend for themselves in uncertain territory. Few modern filmmakers are so willing to throw caution to the wind as they remove the safety nets present even in seemingly “extreme” genre work.

Peter Strickland
Where any number of up and coming directors are content to appropriate the conventions of ’70s horror and exploitation with irony and/or enthusiasm, Strickland internalizes the tenets of European shockers to create deeply observed character studies with a distinctly dark, bizarre angle. His little-seen debut “Katalin Varga” spins a new take on the rape-revenge film. His breakout “Berberian Sound Studio,” expanded from an early short pulled equally from Italian thrillers and the work of Hitchcock and De Palma to weave an unsettlingly realistic nightmare tapestry around the central performance from Toby Jones as a sound engineer hired to craft audio for a giallo film. Strickland’s follow-up “The Duke of Burgundy” is not a horror picture at all, but it uses the tone and aesthetic of ’70s exploitation films to highlight ominous overtones in a very unusual love story. Adept at building eerie worlds that are familiar yet off-kilter, Strickland can emphasize the uncertainty of a situation without losing hold of the characters he subjects to stress and manipulation. His movies are engineered like ingenious little traps to snare audiences, and his sure hand with character fends off chilliness, making for experiences that are as inviting as they are bizarre.

There is a larger movement than just those listed here, and there’s been all kinds of exciting filmmakers breathing new life into the horror world in the last few years apart from the dozen above (or thirteen including Eggers), as well as those who came before them, like Guillermo Del Toro, Lucky McKee, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Park Chan-Wook, Neil Marshall and Nacho Vigalondo).

There are a few that we didn’t include because, while they’ve made horror films, their interests straddle more genres as such, including “Green Room” director Jeremy Saulnier, “Cold In July” helmer Jim Mickle, “The Invitation”’s Karyn Kusama and “It Follows” filmmaker David Robert Mitchell. But among the purer horror heads, Kevin Kolsch & Dennis Widmyer (“Starry Eyes”), Nicholas Pesce (“Eyes Of My Mother”), Mike Flanagan (“Hush,” “Oculus”), Leo Gabriadze (“Unfriended”), Corin Hardy (“The Hallow”), Radio Silence (“Devil’s Due”), Roxane Benjamin (“Southbound”), Can Evrenol (“Baskin”), Michael Thelin (“Emelie”), Craig William Macneill (“The Boy”), Ted Geoghegan (“We Are Still Here”), and E.L. Katz (“Cheap Thrills”) have all shown immense promise.

Anyone else you’re impressed by? Let us know in the comments.