Remember when horror was good? It wasn’t that long ago—just last year, in fact. Scary movies went on an absolute tear in 2017. We had blockbusters like Split and It, auteurist chillers like Raw, It Comes At Night, Thelma, Super Dark Times—and, of course, Get Out. Jordan Peele’s masterpiece of social horror should have won that Oscar, and when it didn’t maybe the air went out of the genre? Something happened. I’m not sure there’s been a good scary movie since.

Okay, there was Hereditary in June. There was A Quiet Place. Which was a fun 90 minutes at the multiplex, but really more of a PG-13 thriller than a horror flick. What else? Did you subject yourself to Winchester? The Nun? Slender Man?

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We didn’t even get a decent shark movie this year. No—2018 has not been good for horror. And I’m including David Gordon Green’s wildly overpraised Halloween in that assessment, which has been making buckets of money, perhaps because there’s nothing else remotely scary to go see. But Halloween is not scary. It’s a ploddingly retro slasher film, and strenuously (I’d say cynically) woke in its vision of female empowerment via revenge. (Please check out the French flick Revenge if you want to see something really provocative on that subject.) It’s hard not to be happy for Jamie Lee Curtis, who has been taking a victory lap for headlining the highest grossing film in history with a female lead over 55. But all that money doesn’t make Halloween any less forgettable.

Suspiria is not forgettable. Nor is it, I hasten to say, much of a horror film, despite being a remake of one. Italian director Luca Guadagnino has turned Dario Argento’s campy ’70s classic—a crimson bloodbath of a movie—into a self-serious art film set in Berlin, which is so stylized and airless that it’s impossible to feel much of anything watching it beyond confusion. Horror needs an element of fun, of dark delight (Hereditary, which I liked, missed this quality too), and I defy you to take any delight in Suspiria, or to explain what on earth is going on in that final set piece, in which heads explode and bodies fall apart and never once does your heart race. It has been rolling out slowly across the country and may eventually perform well at the box office, probably because there is so much pent-up demand for horror, and so much goodwill for Guadagnino after the transporting Call Me by Your Name. I will say I wasn’t bored in Suspiria (I was bored in Halloween). But I certainly wasn’t scared.

Any scares on the small screen? Television is where the action is at these days, anyway, and I applauded The Terror, on AMC this spring, for actually bringing chills to episodic TV—not an easy thing to do. There is buzz around horror maestro Jason Blum’s investment in Blumhouse TV (but it has yet to yield anything really interesting, and I’m including the new monthly horror anthology Into the Dark on Hulu in that judgment). Since Netflix’s original movie offerings are finally getting good, I watched Gareth Evans’s new film The Apostle with great anticipation. It’s a Wicker Man–style story of a religious cult on a Welsh island at the turn of the century, starring Dan Stevens, Lucy Boynton, and Michael Sheen. But it’s a mess, devolving into torture-laced melodrama somewhere around the hour mark. And then you have another hour to go.

Which brings me to The Haunting of Hill House, a 10-part series on Netflix which comes to us from director Mike Flanagan, who gave me a thrill or two with his films Oculus, Ouija: Origin of Evil, and Hush (I really do see all these movies). Hill House has rich source material in Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel and it has ambition to spare. This is as much a Six Feet Under–style drama about the fault lines in a family as it is a spook-show about a haunted house. But the scares are here: a grotesquely tall ghost floating down a hall, a crone with a snapped neck, a pale, open-mouthed creature in a basement. The trouble is . . . Netflix? The natural bloat of streaming TV? Hill House is well over 10 hours of television and the pacing is agonizingly slow. Horror is about dark delight, yes—but it’s also about intensity, a quality in extremely short supply in Hill House. Here’s what you notice while waiting to see another ghost: the generic nowhere vibe of the locations, the strangely cheap gilt-glow lighting, the mediocre acting. I’ve enjoyed many a low-budget, badly acted horror film, but the good ones race along so quickly that you don’t care.

This all the more disappointing because just living through 2018 has felt a bit like a horror film. The counterintuitive thing about scary movies is they can actually make us feel better, not worse, about the horrors in the real world. “We go to horror not to be terrified,” the ace horror director Karyn Kusama (The Invitation, XX) told me last year, “but to be terrified in a familiar form that allows us just a little bit of control over our experience.” Control! Wouldn’t that be a nice feeling to have right now? The year isn’t over and maybe a good, cathartic scare is on its way. Otherwise, here’s to the golden age of horror returning in 2019.