5 Bloodiest Horror Movie Scenes Of 2024

From Navarro’s chestburster in Alien: Romulus to Monstro Elisasue’s on-stage degradation in The Substance, the horror movies of 2024 were bursting at the seams with blood and gore. This has been a really terrific year for horror films. I Saw the TV Glow dealt with poignant social themes, A Quiet Place: Day One offered a surprisingly character-driven perspective of the apocalypse, and Trap saw M. Night Shyamalan at his Shyamalan-iest (for better or worse).

And 2024 didn’t just deliver great horror movies; it delivered blood-drenched horror movies. Longlegs has a scene where the eponymous serial killer paints a police interrogation room with his own blood. Under Paris has a scene where a triathlon’s worth of swimmers are served up to a hungry shark. This year’s horror films offered some extremely gory sequences.

5

The Triathlon Massacre

Under Paris

As the bloodthirsty shark Lilith makes her way into the River Seine in Under Paris, the city’s corrupt mayor — in the tradition of Jaws’ Mayor Vaughn — refuses to cancel an upcoming triathlon, because she’d rather risk her citizens’ lives than lose any commerce or publicity. Unsurprisingly, this decision comes back to bite her when Lilith arrives on the scene during the swim. With a buffet of swimmers to enjoy, Lilith feasts away.

The Seine turns red with blood as Lilith chomps her way through dozens of swimmers. There’s one great overhead shot of Lilith bursting through the surface with an unsuspecting swimmer caught in her jaws. This sequence plays out like a much bloodier and more gratuitous version of Jaws’ beach scene. Jaws didn’t have the money or CGI to kill off quite as many people.

4

Aurora’s Death

In A Violent Nature

As the murderous Johnny goes on a teen-killing spree in a throwback to classic slashers, there are a bunch of brutal kills in In a Violent Nature. Colt gets hacked to death with an axe. Ehren is pinned to a tree with a handheld saw. The Ranger gets his head chopped off with a wood splitter. But the goriest death in the movie is saved for Aurora. Aurora’s death could’ve been split up into a few different kills, but she’s unfortunate enough to get them all in a row.

Johnny corners Aurora on the edge of a cliff. As she tries to flee, he stabs her in the gut, then sinks his hook into her head and pulls the chain through her body, snapping her spine and yanking her head through her stomach. It’s one of the most creative kills in the entire slasher genre.

3

Longlegs Smashes His Face Against A Table

Longlegs

For the most part, Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs isn’t as gory as it is unsettling. It terrifies its audience by showing them the aftermath of horrific murders and the events surrounding them, not so much the murders themselves. It’s more of a chilling crime thriller like The Silence of the Lambs than a blood-soaked slasher like A Nightmare on Elm Street. But there is one shockingly bloody sequence about halfway through the movie.

After the “Longlegs” killer, Dale Ferdinand Kobble, is captured, Lee joins him in an interrogation room to question him, but she doesn’t get much information out of him. All he tells her is that he serves Satan before smashing his own face against the table, gruesomely taking his own life. He paints the room with his own blood — talk about a shocking sequence.

2

Navarro’s Chestburster

Alien: Romulus

The chestburster in the original Alien movie is one of the most iconic gore sequences in the history of horror cinema. It pushed the boundaries of on-screen bloodshed and really caught audiences off guard in 1979. 45 years later, Fede Álvarez managed to push the gore even further with his own disgusting chestburster sequence in Alien: Romulus. As soon as a facehugger latched onto Navarro, long-time franchise fans knew she was doomed.

Within moments, a baby xenomorph is trying to force its way out of her chest. Thanks to a nifty scanning device, Navarro is able to watch her own silhouetted ribcage get destroyed by the tiny alien. Kay frantically tries to help her friend before a plume of blood bursts out all over her face. This scene was spoiled by the trailer, but it still hits extremely hard.

1

Monstro Elisasue Goes On Stage

The Substance

Coralie Fargeat’s first feature, Revenge, ended with a bloodbath, so it was fitting for her second movie, The Substance, to end with another bloodbath. As Sue starts falling apart on the eve of her star-making live TV performance, she races home to try to fix it. She ignores the Substance’s rules and takes the Activator serum a second time, only to reincarnate as “Monstro Elisasue,” a grotesque amalgamation of all the absurd male fantasies that have been mentioned by sleazy Hollywood suits throughout the film.

The hideous spectacle of Monstro Elisasue is one of the greatest prosthetic effects in the history of body horror. As she steps onto the stage in front of horrified onlookers, she starts to disintegrate and sprays the audience with gallons of blood. This blood-soaked finale is reminiscent of the prom scene in Brian De Palma’s Carrie; it’s sickeningly gruesome, but it’s also deeply tragic.