Guest Post on Kendall Reviews: “Mike Thorn’s 10 favourite horror films from the 2010s”

Horror cinema still suffers from the burden of David Edelstein’s reductive, vaguely moralizing mid-2000s condemnation of “torture porn.” Throughout the 2010s, the genre has mostly strayed away from the urgency, viscera and political heft of films like The Devil’s Rejects (2005) and Hostel (2005), opting instead for low-budget supernatural found footage fare (see most of Blumhouse’s output) and prestige exercises in genre-deaf bluffing (see most of the most popularly praised titles of the past three or so years). I tend to like horror films that proudly inhabit their genre, paying respect to its central affect while also demonstrating formal knowledge and identifying new possibilities. I prefer to see horror films pushing boundaries within a contemporary context than vaguely “cerebral” repetitions of the past. Limiting myself to one title per director, I’ve highlighted ten of my favorite horror films released between 2010 and 2017 (organized chronologically).