The Shape of Water

By Watch Darkly's standard, yes, though not in the way a slasher or a haunted-house film is. Most outlets file it as romance or fantasy, it won Best Picture as an adult fairy tale, and Guillermo del Toro has said he set out to make the monster beautiful rather than frightening. If you come to it wanting to be scared, this is not that film. It earns a place in a horror catalog through what it is built from. The Amphibian Man is a direct descendant of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and del Toro first pitched the story as a Universal monster movie told from the creature's point of view. The film also carries genuine horror content: a recurring body-horror thread as a character's wound festers across the story, an on-screen animal death, and scenes of torture. Our test for inclusion is whether a film holds real horror in its lineage and its content, not whether a database labels it 'horror.' By that test it sits alongside other sympathetic-monster films we keep, including Edward Scissorhands and del Toro's own Crimson Peak and Frankenstein.