10 Best Monster Horror Movies Of The 2020s (So Far)

3. Smile (2022)

2022 was a stellar year for the monster movie, delivering a glut of major productions that delivered the goods in innovative, shocking, and downright ghastly ways. But the year’s most innovative and unsettling entry in the canon comes in the unassuming form of Smile.

What could have been a run-of-the-mill psycho-supernatural horror, à la 2018’s Truth or Dare, is elevated by writer-director Parker Finn and his team to become a monster movie quite unlike anything else of the half decade, where the monster is intangible, illusory, and, well, kind of everywhere at once.

No space is safe for therapist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), who witnesses the grinning suicide of a patient and is then haunted by smiling figures wherever she goes. Rose can’t be certain where the line between reality and delusion is drawn, and finds herself trapped in a seemingly unescapable nightmare that, if she can’t muster up the gumption to off someone else in brutal fashion, will result in her parasitic monster stalker consuming her whole.

While Smile 2 would be equally as comfortable in this spot, we have to go for Smile because its jump scares are more original and tactful, it relies less on narrative rug pulls and more on authentic twists, and really just because it started the whole darned thing.