10 Best & 10 Worst Horror Movies Of 2016

2. 10 Cloverfield Lane

Dubbed a ‘spiritual successor’ to the 2008 found footage monster flick Cloverfield, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a tense and gripping psychological horror that like many of this year’s best offerings focuses on cerebral scares and character-driven plotlines rather than scenes of gratuitous gore and violence.

John Goodman is on form as a possibly delusional survivalist named Howard Stambler who rescues (or perhaps kidnaps) Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s character Michelle and whisks her off to his nuclear bunker telling her stories of an alien invasion taking over the planet. They are soon joined by mysterious handyman Emmett (John Gallagher Jr) who amps up the paranoia when he informs Michelle that Howard may actually be a murderous madman rather than her saviour.

Its close setting affords 10 Cloverfield Lane an effectively paranoid and claustrophobic atmosphere and while there are subtle nods to its predecessor for the more involved Cloverfield fan, it wholly works as a standalone movie. All in all, it’s an impressive feature debut from director Dan Trachtenberg and an assured addition to the ‘Cloververse’.