10 Great Directors You Wish Would Make a Horror Movie
Paul Thomas Anderson ('Phantom Thread')
There are few more singular auteurs in contemporary film than Paul Thomas Anderson, and especially after “Phantom Thread,” he seems like he’d be especially skilled at exploring the psychological depths of a dysfunctional, perhaps inevitably violent relationship. Imagine the final scenes of “There Will Be Blood” stretched to feature length -- it’s too grisly and delightful to resist!
Wes Anderson ('Isle Of Dogs')
In 2013, "Saturday Night Live" skillfully parodied what a Wes Anderson horror movie might look like with the short film “The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders." But given the increasing depth of his films -- the remarkable substance of the final moments of “Grand Budapest Hotel,” for example -- Anderson would be a great candidate for a horror film, perhaps the story of a dollhouse maker whose attention to detail becomes an exercise in suffocating self-destruction. His production design would of course be impeccable, but the prospect of exploring his meticulousness in a specific narrative context is simply irresistible.
Ryan Coogler ('Black Panther')
Ryan Coogler is one of our favorite working filmmakers, as much as anything because of his gift for transforming accessible, entertaining studio fare into deeply personal explorations that resonate culturally. He seems like the ideal person to inherit an ailing franchise and breathe new life into it, or perhaps to just take a familiar genre trope -- be it a slasher movie or creature feature -- and turn it into something special, unique, and meaningful to his own artistic journey, that also happens to scare the hell out of audiences.
Pete Docter ('Inside Out')
Even among the incredible roster of talent at Pixar, Pete Docter seems to stand head and shoulders above his colleagues, and not just because he does that literally. Notwithstanding the opportunity to see an animated horror film, or even a Pixar-driven animated horror film, Docter is such a soulful, intelligent filmmaker that it feels like he could explore the nature of grief, or deconstruct what it is that scares us most deeply, and dig into that for a transcendent experience - and somehow make it not need to be R-rated.
David Fincher ('Gone Girl')
Fincher feels like an obvious choice, although one might argue that either or both of his first two films were horror. But as he’s matured as a storyteller, his Hitchcockian instincts have of course been refined, but paired with a deliciously cruel sense of morality, as embodied by his work in “Gone Girl,” where he turned a best-selling page turner into this spectacular, suspenseful meditation on relationships, female empowerment, and emotional dysfunction.
Cary Fukunaga ('Beasts Of No Nation')
I suppose this one should carry an asterisk since technically Fukunaga was slated to direct “It” before being replaced by Warner Bros., but if you watch his criminally-underrated “Jane Eyre,” there’s practically a horror movie in that literary adaptation waiting to get out (same with his “True Detective” season). To be fair he’s yet to sort of define himself as a filmmaker - he’s remarkably versatile, and seems interested in courting mainstream material (as he’s doing the next Bond movie), but that only makes us want to see him do something scary that much more.
Greta Gerwig ('Lady Bird')
“Lady Bird” was one of the best movies of 2017 and it was driven so beautifully and singularly by Greta Gerwig, who transformed so many of her own experiences into this pained, funny, heartbreaking story about a young woman’s coming of age. How wonderful could it be to see her apply that same sensitivity to a horror movie?
Dan Gilroy ('Nightcrawler')
“Nightcrawler” was one of the best films of the last decade -- mean, unsparing, and sociopathic as Jake Gyllenhaal’s central character. Gilroy seems like an ideal choice to dig into the psyche of a serial killer or examine the inhumanity doled out to others perhaps in a workplace, or maybe in some interpersonal relationship, in a way that’s perhaps less conventionally terrifying than just relentlessly unsettling. Also, bring back Gyllenhaal; he was robbed of the Oscar that year.
Phil Lord & Chris Miller ("The LEGO Movie")
Horror comedies maintain a notoriously tricky balance to work -- they cannot undermine the shock value of the horror with jokes, nor dig too deeply into the business of shadows and monsters to leave the whole thing, well, unfunny. But Lord and Miller are such experts when it comes not only to understanding storytelling mechanics, but in commenting and deconstructing them while managing to sneakily use them to create tangible emotional connections and otherwise just entertain the hell out of their audience -- something thrilling and hilarious in equal measures, reducing genre clichés to ash while mining them for explosive payoffs.
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg pioneered the crowd-pleasing thriller (“Jaws”) and produced a handful of horror movies (“Poltergeist,” etc.) but has never officially directed one of his own. There are few directors with a greater mastery of technique and form, and he would undoubtedly knock a horror film out of the park - maybe a ghost story? That said, maybe he could work with a different cinematographer? Kaminski, to be fair, directed the underrated “Stigmata,” but imagine if Spielberg collaborated with someone who could really plumb the visual depths of the darkness of the frame as he subjected his characters (and his audience) to the terrors he envisioned?
