10 Directors Who Need To Make A Horror Movie

8. Steve McQueen

It's been a while since I've been as thoroughly blown away by a writer/director as I was by McQueen. His two feature films, Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011) are so devastating, so beautifully crafted, and so bloody good. The most notable element is that they're not safe. McQueen shows you things that you will not want to see and he'll show you things that you didn't even know you didn't want to see. But the stories need those scenes to be powerful, and this is something that McQueen not only recognizes but seems to master with natural finesse.

It's hard to recall a time when I felt scared watching a non-horror film. When I watched Shame, I was so entranced by the gritty, complex depravity of Michael Fassbender's sex addicted character Brandon that I found myself watching it as one would watch something truly, intentionally scary. McQueen has Brandon teetering on the edge the whole time that it keeps you guessing until the conclusion; and even then, it's not wrapped up in a nice and neat bow and your anxieties for this person aren't entirely settled.

Given that the heart and soul of his two films face, at their very core despite their more detailed circumstances, primal needs already, it would seem easy for McQueen to take a quick left turn towards the horror genre and give us something, well, horrifically beautiful. When I was making this list, the first horror film that jumped out at me when I wrote down McQueen was the unbelievable 2008 film Let the Right One In. I imagine a McQueen horror film would share similar cinematic traits: a careful unraveling of the plot, a unique twisting of melodramatic conventions, and cinematography so bold that you probably didn't think something that scary could be so visually stunning.