Every year, film fanatics flock to Austin, Texas in the middle of March. Their destination is the South by Southwest film festival (“SXSW“), where filmmakers debut serious dramas and enlightening documentaries, and gather in large auditoriums to discuss the technological future of the film industry as a whole.
But that’s the classy side of SXSW. Serious film fans know that the best part of the festival is the “Midnighters” section, where fantastic and experimental new horror thrillers debut to eager audiences, who are actively looking for the next blockbuster sensations and cult classics. And they’ve got the right idea. Look over the list of films that debuted at any year of the SXSW film festival and you’ll find a lot of dramas, comedies and documentaries that failed to make a big impression. But practically every year for over a decade now there have at least one or two horror movies that earned big bucks, critical acclaim, passionate fanbases or some combination of the three.
Also: 24 Must-See Films From the SXSW 2017 Film Festival
Time will tell which of this year’s SXSW horror movies will leave a mark on the industry, but before the festival gets going next month we wanted to take a look back at 25 of the biggest horror movies that came out of the festival. These are the films that horror lovers still talk about, that either rocked the box office or are still building up their hardcore cult following. They’re the films that made SXSW a haven for horror lovers. How many have you seen…?
The 25 Biggest SXSW Horror Movies Ever:
Top Photo: Summit Entertainment
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon, and watch him on the weekly YouTube series What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
The 25 Biggest SXSW Horror Movies Ever
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Attack the Block
Before he saved the galaxy in Star Wars, John Boyega saved a rough neighborhood from invading aliens in this acclaimed sci-fi/horror/comedy from writer/director Joe Cornish.
Photo: Screen Gems
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Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
A documentary film crew finds out what horror movie slashers do when they're not killing teenagers in Scott Glosserman's clever cult hit.
Photo: Anchor Bay
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Best Worst Movie
It's not technically a horror movie, but Michael Stephenson's documentary about the making of the worst horror movie ever, Troll 2, and the film's unlikely fanbase is a funny and thoughtful love note to the whole genre.
Photo: Magicstone Productions
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Bubba Ho-Tep
Bruce Campbell gives his greatest performance as an aging Elvis Presley, who teams up with a black JFK to fight a mummy, in Don Coscarelli's unexpectedly moving horror-comedy.
Photo: Vitagraph Films
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Cabin Fever
Eli Roth bursts onto the scene, skin a-peeling, with this low-budget gorefest that earned him an almost immediate spot in the horror firmament.
Photo: Lionsgate
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The Cabin in the Woods
Drew Goddard directed, and co-wrote with Joss Whedon, an ingenious horror satire about a group of college kids getting killed by monsters, and the fascinating reason why this sort of thing happens over and over and over again.
Photo: Lionsgate
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Cheap Thrills
A rich couple offers two poor schlubs money in exchange for... doing stuff, and oh, what stuff it is. E.L. Katz's social thriller became an almost immediate cult classic.
Photo: Drafthouse Films
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Don't Breathe
Fede Alvarez returned to SXSW with a home invasion horror thriller with spectacular style and awesome twists, about a group of teens who break into a blind man's house and discover he's more dangerous than they are. Don't Breathe became a blockbuster when it hit theaters later that year.
Photo: Screen Gems
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Drag Me To Hell
Sam Raimi's long-awaited return to the horror genre did not disappoint. It's a dynamic tale of a woman cursed by a demon, and the great lengths she'll go to in order to save her soul. As you can imagine, Sam Raimi's films the hell out of every single moment.
Photo: Universal Pictures
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Evil Dead
Fede Alvarez's first feature was the unexpectedly fantastic remake of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, a gory blast of energy that eventually turns the audience's expectations of the original film back around on them.
Photo: TriStar Pictures
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The Eye
SXSW introduced American audiences to the Pang Brothers by premiering The Eye, an acclaimed supernatural medical thriller about a blind woman who receives an eye transplant and discovers she can now see ghosts. (It was later remade as a less-than-impressive Jessica Alba thriller.)
Photo: Mediacorp Raintree Pictures
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The Final Girls
A group of modern teenagers find themselves stuck in a midnight horror movie in The Final Girls, a clever and affectionate satire of the slasher genre, which is now developing a well-deserved cult following.
Photo: Vertical Entertainment
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Insidious
James Wan's grand and guignol supernatural thriller combines suburban strife and very loud noises and spawned a hit horror franchise in the process.
Photo: FilmDistrict
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The Invitation
A man gets invited to his ex-wife's dinner part and can't shake the impression he gets that something is very, very wrong. Karyn Kusama's mature thriller turned out to be one of the best movies of 2016.
Photo: Drafthouse Films
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John Dies at the End
Don Coscarelli's whiling dervish adaptation of the hit novel by David Wong is just as hallucinogenic and hilarious as you'd expect, and turned out to be one of the horror master's finest achievements.
Photo: Magnet Releasing
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Kill List
Ben Wheatley's disquieting horror thriller, about a hitman who discovers disturbing connections between his latest targets, helped catapult the filmmaker to upper echelons of modern horror filmmakers.
Photo: IFC Midnight
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Oculus
A multigenerational story of a family torn apart by, of all things, a haunted mirror. Oculus is an ambitious and impressive supernatural thriller from Mike Flanagan, another filmmaker who became one of the biggest names in the genre after making a big splash at SXSW.
Photo: Relativity Media
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Pontypool
The English-language has been infected with a deadly virus, and a radio shock jock is stuck in his station dealing with the fallout. A strange and marvelous horror concept helped turn Pontypool into a cult favorite.
Photo: Maple Pictures
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A Serbian Film
A Serbian Film helped develop its reputation as one of the most disgusting motion pictures ever made at SXSW. Maybe it's great art, maybe it's just despicable, but either way it's notorious.
Photo: Contra Film
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Sinister
Before he directed Doctor Strange, Scott Derrickson impressed audiences at SXSW with this intelligent and creepy supernatural thriller about a true crime author who moves his family into a house where the previous tenants were murdered under mysterious circumstances.
Photo: Summit Entertainment
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Slither
Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn also got a huge boost from SXSW, where his directorial debut Slither earned raves from the horror community. It's a humorously grotesque motion picture about space slugs that mutate the denizens of a charming small town.
Photo: Universal Pictures
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Tucker & Dale vs. Evil
Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine star as innocent rednecks who are attacked in their own cabin by racist yuppie kids (who assumed the lovable "Tucker and Dale" were going to kill them). Eli Craig's brilliant satire is one of the best and funniest horror comedies of the decade.
Photo: Magnet Releasing
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Under the Shadow
It's bad enough that Shideh is trapped in her apartment by war, sexism and stifling Iranian laws, but now she's might also have a djinn in there too. Babak Anvari's critically-acclaimed supernatural drama is a very scary film and damning social commentary.
Photo: Vertical Entertainment
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V/H/S
An ambitious found footage anthology film, full of scary stories told from the point of view of the victims' or the killers' cameras. V/H/S was a bit of a mixed bag but was such a novelty, and had such great highlights, that it spawned a whole franchise.
Photo: Magnet Releasing
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You're Next
Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett's home invasion thriller subverted audience expectations and became such a huge hit on the festival circuit that fans were a little surprised that it didn't become a blockbuster. Still, You're Next remains one of the most acclaimed horror movies of the decade and it has an absolutely rabid fanbase.
Photo: Lionsgate
