Sunday Scaries: The Best Performances in Horror for 2023

Timing’s a bitch, sometimes. I was so proud of my Best Horror Performances of 2022 article when I scheduled it. I was so confident that it would stand the test of time. Then, the night before it was set to publish and it was too late to change anything, I decided to relent and watch The Menu on a whim and it ended up being not only one of my favorite movies of that year, but also by far the best of 2022’s three “Eat the Rich” dark comedies in my eyes. Naturally, it was the only one of them to have not received a single Oscar nomination at the 95^th Academy Awards.

What does this have to do with the Sunday Scaries, you may ask? Well, because just about every online resource categorizes The Menu as equal parts comedy and horror, that means its cast should have been considered for last year’s ranking and only my foolish reluctance to even see the movie kept them out of the top five. I didn’t even bring it up as one of the movies I didn’t watch before making the list! Shame on me. So I feel I owe Hong Chau a one-year-late writeup gushing over her indelible work as the intimidating maître d’ of Julian Slowik’s elite private island restaurant.

Because she is fantastic in The Menu; a perfect alchemical synthesis of both the horror and humor of Seth Reiss and Will Tracy’s black-hearted script, despite very few scenes of her being the actual center of attention. Most of her screen time is in the background as this uncanny little enforcer of order throughout the sadistic dining experience masterminded by a boss she’s borderline religiously devoted to, and even at the far edges of the frame, her very presence manages to constantly set you on edge. Plus, the way she said “tore-tee-yas!” gave me the biggest laugh of 2022. The only other horror performance from last year that can measure up to it was (and I think… yeah, I’d say she still is) my #1 pick Mia Goth, and if she deserved a Best Lead Actress nomination for Pearl, then I believe Hong Chau should have won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her knockout turn in The Menu.

With that mea culpa out of the way, I am committed to not making that mistake again. I proactively sought out every horror movie this year to ensure another excellent performance wouldn’t slip by my radar (heh) again. This included watching some movies I otherwise had no real interest in seeing, and sure enough, that did yield some Top Five-worthy inclusions below. But first, the honorable mentions:

• Ann Dowd in The Exorcist: Believer
• Anne Heche in You’re Killing Me
• Marin Ireland and Judy Reyes in Birth/Rebirth
• Jeremy Holm in Herd
• Ryunosuke Kamiki in Godzilla Minus One
• Margo Martindale in Cocaine Bear
• Joaquin Phoenix in Beau Is Afraid
• Shawnee Smith in Saw X
• Nell Verlaque in Thanksgiving

And now, for the definitely-I-promise-I-will-not-regret-in-hindsight Top Five:

5) Taissa Farmiga in The Nun II

I said best performances, okay?! The quality of the movies themselves is not a factor in these rankings! Okay, kidding aside, The Nun II isn’t as bad as you may have heard. As someone who has wrestled with conflicted feelings about the most profitable shared cinematic universe franchise of all time for… oh wow, it’s already been a full decade?… this pleasantly surprised me. The first two installments in the mainline series are exceptionally well-crafted horror films pushing a whitewashed hagiography of a toxic married couple who made their fortune as serial fabulists, con artists, and (allegedly!) sex criminals. But at least those are actually scary horror movies made by real filmmakers. Some of the spinoffs, like Annabelle, made up for their lack of Ed and Lorraine Warren by being thuddingly boring and incompetently made. The Curse of La Llorona was so bad that it was retconned out of the franchise after it was released!

But The Nun II hits a nice sweet spot. It’s not frustratingly great, and it’s not unwatchably bad. It’s just a fun, blunt, trite, disposable little haunted house ride. A major asset it has in its favor is its lead actress, Taissa Farmiga, giving a wearied and surprisingly subtle performance in the middle of all the kitschy “boo!” theatrics going on around her. There’s not much connective tissue between the first one and this sequel, but Sister Irene, as played by Farmiga, has definitely changed a great deal while maintaining her core spiritual convictions. The Nun II did not deserve such a grounded, compelling protagonist, but I’m so grateful that we got one anyway.

4) Kenneth Branagh in A Haunting in Venice

I keep supporting, in principle, Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot movies without actually loving Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile all that much. They’re… mediocre, at best. So if he couldn’t hit it off with two of Agatha Christie’s most popular and acclaimed Poirot novels, what chance does the comparatively meh Hallowe’en Party have? Turns out, third time was the charm, as this is Branagh’s best handling of Probably Zee Greatest Detective In Zee World™ as both a director and actor. His habit of just haphazardly throwing a bunch of disunified stylistic choices at the screen usually doesn’t work all that well, especially when he keeps applying that to prestigious literary, symphonic, and non-Shakespeare stage adaptations. But his kitchen sink approach is perfect for schlock, and this is one of the schlockiest stories in Christie’s oeuvre.

And as an actor, he’s really firing on all cylinders. Far from his two previous outings where he seemed to be having a little too much fun taking center stage as the man who would inevitably figure everything out with his one-of-a-kind investigative genius, this time he’s not only comfortable taking on a less prominent role among his ensemble, he portrays Poirot here as a man wrestling with a lot of fear, grief, and best of all, doubt in his own abilities without it being spelled out through dialogue. If this really is Branagh’s last time as this character, he’s going out on a high note.

3) Ellen Adair in Herd

Full Disclosure: I interviewed Ellen Adair for a previous edition of the Sunday Scaries, and while I did find my conversation with them enormously rewarding, I would still rank them in the top five best horror performances in the most out-of-nowhere surprise I experienced this year even if we never spoke to each other. Since one of our two protagonists is severely wounded early on and most of the rest of the supporting cast is set up as varying degrees of threats to their lives, it falls on Jamie to be the active driver of the story when everything goes to hell. But at the same time, she can’t fall into Gay Aesop or Magical Gay stereotypes where she’s literally the only morally reasonable character in some heavy-handed parable.

With the slightest gestures and glances, Adair communicates Jamie as someone with excellent situational awareness, especially when she enters Big John’s compound and realizes she has to pretend to let her guard down among the doomsday prep community surrounding her without actually letting her guard down. But Jamie is also prone to unhealthily holding on to her resentments. She’s brusque, short-tempered, and untactful with others when she’s unsure how to deconflict those situations. Adair doesn’t shy away from these less flattering aspects of our harried protagonist. I mentioned this in my review, but Adair even acquits themselves well when having to deliver occasional solitary-outbursts-as-clunky-exposition. There’s a lot to admire in Herd, and Adair’s compelling lead performance is definitely one of them.

2) Dave Bautista in Knock at the Cabin

My least-favorite film that made it into this top five, Knock at the Cabin is one of the rare examples of a film based on a book with a major change to its source material I cannot even theoretically defend on principle. The whole point of the book, Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World, is that these doomsday cultists do not convince our protagonists that the end of the world can only be prevented by the deaths of either Andrew, Eric, or Wen. It is very much a parable of being a same-sex couple dealing with religious extremists who wholeheartedly believe that the existence of a gay couple must be destroyed for the greater good, and a defiant conviction that a God who would rather end the world than let these two dads and their adopted daughter be happy is a God not worth appeasing.

The specific way M. Night Shyamalan changes this dynamic in his film’s ending suggests a deeply messed up view of not only the themes of the story, but what he thinks of gay couples in general. Shame on him for that, but in the midst of such a narratively inexcusable adaptation is Dave Bautista, who I have nothing but praise for. He makes exactly the right choice in portraying the physically gigantic leader of this terrifying cult as warm, soft-spoken, and genuinely tormented by this mission to “save the world.” Dare I say it is the most moving performance in a Shyamalan film since Bruce Willis in Unbreakable.

1) Tobin Bell in Saw X

No, I am not joking. I’m not being facetious or going to spring a “So bad it’s awesome!” joke on you. I’ve spoken before about my hatred of the Saw franchise in general, finding just about all of the ones I have seen incompetently made and thematically despicable, but I have also conceded that series mainstay Tobin Bell has been a consistently strong presence throughout the franchise, fully earning his place right next to the likes of Robert Englund and Kane Hodder as a horror icon. In some installments, he just plays an extended cameo. In other ones, he plays a more prominent role. But only now, with the tenth entry in a series that got started while Pope John Paul II was still alive, has anyone taken it upon themselves to give Bell a proper leading role and his most infamous movie character a protagonist function in the story.

This one decision alone results in the only Saw movie I’ve encountered with a wholly successful, character-driven narrative structure. But it’s Bell, taking full advantage of this long-overdue opportunity, that puts this one over the hurdle of “Actually Good.” This movie isn’t just leaning on his distinctive low growl in taped instructions for brief snippets. In the lead role, he goes through a full arc of vulnerability, followed by a light in his eyes of weary hope at this new experimental treatment, quiet jubilation during the brief period when he believed he was cured, followed by realizing what actually happened to him. During the big revelation at the end of the first act, we see Bell’s face, in that one scene, flawlessly express wordless confusion morphing into shame and then rage finalized by the kind of resolve that anyone who has ever seen a Saw movie will immediately recognize signals next.

And that’s just his acting in the first half-hour! Once it settles into the old formula, Bell indulges us a little with the reliable Jigsaw menace we all expect from him, but he layers that with unprecedented little grace notes in his characterization of John Kramer to make him a more interesting and morally shaded monster than he’s ever been before. He changes his demeanor and even the tone and cadence of his voice depending on who he’s speaking to in the “house of games” he sets up, which adds considerably to the interpersonal tensions of the movie. This pays particular dividends in the scenes he shares with Shawnee Smith (also quite good here, despite having to work around a particularly bad wig), finally correcting for the otherwise utterly wasted potential of John and Amanda’s relationship in previous movies. In fact, now that I’m thinking back to it, the double-cross-oh-no-double-double-cross climax is also so well-played by him. There’s a variable in that final confrontation he didn’t account for that causes an expression of genuine panic from him to a degree he didn’t when his table-turn was originally going as he predicted.

In my preview article pontificating on Saw X, I wondered just how dependent this franchise is on Tobin Bell to remain viable to horror fans. I’m certainly not the one to answer that question since I am not normally a fan of these movies. At all. But what I know now is that he was owed this center-stage opportunity for a long time, and after finally getting it, made it the finest acting of his career and my easy choice for the best performance in a horror movie this year.

Let me know what you think the best performances in horror were last year in the comments.