I know what you thought when you read the title on this piece: “It’s April.” Yes, it is, but shut up. Shhhh. Stop. It’s okay. I know it’s April. We all know it’s April. I have gadgets all around me screaming the date at me at any given time during the day. Relax. It’s going to be fine.
Maybe April is premature for talking about the best of the year to date in any discipline, for any reason, in any capacity, but this is the world we live in. Blame clickbait. Also, there are a fucking lot of great horror movies out in 2017 already, and we haven’t even gotten to see Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch or Andrés Muschietti’s It yet (or Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night, for that matter). That feels like a reasonable justification for this exercise.
Mostly, though, I’m just tickled that almost fully half of the blurbs on this list belong to me. I wish I’d gotten to say some things about The Lure, which I adore, but hey, you can’t always get what you want (and besides, I wanted to write about The Transfiguration and Raw, too, so I think I did okay).
Ferry your browser windows over to Paste Magazine, the fine online establishment where you can read this list in full. (I bet you won’t guess which film occupies the #1 spot.)
A Constant Visual Feast 
What a year for horror, already! Tons here I haven’t seen. We Are the Flesh, The Transfiguration, and Prevenge all look amazing.
And I hold out a tiny bit of hope that Stephen King’s IT may actually be good enough to make the year-end list.
So far so good, right? PREVENGE is fantastic – if you haven’t already, you can check out my review on this very site. Personally, I rank it just below GET OUT as far as 2017’s horror canon goes, but RAW is real good, too. (Also personally: I really, really hated THE BLACKCOAT’S DAUGHTER, but I’m in the minority on that one.)
I’m holding out hope for IT, too. I think it’s a terrific story. If Muschietti can get it right, and serialize it the way properly, I’ll be pleased.
Aye, I’ll check out your Prevenge review for sure! I haven’t seen The Blackcoat’s Daughter, but the trailer didn’t interest me much, haha. Oh, and another one I’ve been meaning to see is The Devil’s Candy. I just love 2017.
Stay woke. Great List. Do you have your thoughts on Alien: Covenant somewhere? Ironically that horror cost how many millions and doesn’t rank in my opinion with the six films I’ve seen from your list, made for nothing
I sure do. Short version: I had major problems with it.
https://agcrump.wordpress.com/2017/06/01/review-alien-covenant-2017-dir-ridley-scott/
Either make a damn ALIEN movie or make a damn “philosophical amoral artificial intelligence” movie. Scott’s mixing things that are not better together.