The Best Horror Movies of All Time
Horror's canon never holds still, so rank this into the order you would actually defend. What qualifies: the film has to be built to frighten you. Funny is allowed. Jurassic Park is out: it is built to make you gasp, not flinch. It also needs a threat out of reach: a monster, something supernatural, or a person nobody in it gets the measure of. A killer diagnosed in a closing scene still counts. A plot that runs on profiling him does not, which is why The Silence of the Lambs is out. Theatrical features only. Language is not a criterion. Remakes stand apart from their originals, by year: Ringu (1998) is here and the 2002 American version is not, Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead is here and the 2004 remake is not. Where a film starts is set by how many of six all-time rankings carry it: Empire, Rolling Stone, Time Out, Variety, IndieWire, the Guardian. The bottom band is held rather than left over, and is where the recent films mostly sit. Below the band nothing is ranked.
Psycho (1960) is #1 on “The Best Horror Movies of All Time”.
- 1
Psycho (1960)
Hitchcock shot this for $806,947 in black and white, borrowing the crew from his own television series to keep the cost down. Marion Crane takes the money and runs, stops at a motel, and is dead before the film is half over. The shower curtain tears off its rings as she falls. The knife is never once shown entering her.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054215/ - 2
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper shot it through a Texas summer that hit 110 degrees on 26 July, with Gunnar Hansen in the mask twelve to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Leatherface takes Kirk with a mallet and slides the steel door shut behind him, and the film has barely started. The MPAA gave it an X. Britain banned it until 1999.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072271/ - 3
The Exorcist (1973)
Friedkin's film became the first horror picture nominated for Best Picture, and audiences behaved accordingly. People fainted, and one man left on a stretcher twenty minutes in. The head turning a full circle in the bedroom is what everybody quotes. The hospital tests earlier, all needles and real equipment, are the ones that actually get under people.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070047/ - 4
The Shining (1980)
Kubrick used the newly built Steadicam to chase Danny's tricycle round the Overlook corridors, which is why the floor never seems to end. Blood pours out of the opening elevator doors and keeps coming after you expect it to stop. Guinness once handed him the record for retakes on one scene, and Shelley Duvall paid for how he worked.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081505/ - 5
Halloween (1978)
Carpenter had $300,000 and twenty shooting days in May 1978. The mask is a Captain Kirk face bought for $1.98 on Hollywood Boulevard, eye holes widened, sprayed a bluish white. The end credits call the man wearing it The Shape. The white mask surfaces out of the dark behind Laurie while she is talking to somebody else.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077651/ - 6
Alien (1979)
Fox put up $4.2 million and then doubled it once Ridley Scott's storyboards came in. H. R. Giger designed the creature, the derelict ship and the surface of the planetoid, so the machinery and the animal look like the same idea. The chestburster comes up through the dinner table in one take, and the blood that hit Veronica Cartwright was not something she had been warned about.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/ - 7
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Romero made it outside Pittsburgh for about $100,000 and then lost it. The distributor changed the title, the copyright notice went missing, and the picture fell into the public domain on release. Karen picks up the trowel in the cellar and uses it on her mother. In 1968 a child did not do that on screen, and the ending is worse.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063350/ - 8
Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Polanski shot the exteriors at the Dakota and kept the threat at the level of neighbours who will not leave you alone. Minnie pushes the chalky mousse across the table and Rosemary eats enough of it. Ruth Gordon won Best Supporting Actress for playing her, which is the right verdict on a performance the film mostly treats as a nuisance.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063522/ - 9
Nosferatu (1922)
Murnau filmed Dracula without buying Dracula, and Bram Stoker's widow won a ruling ordering every copy destroyed. Prints survived anyway, which is the only reason you can watch Orlok's shadow climb the staircase wall, hand first. Max Schreck plays him as vermin rather than an aristocrat, and vampire films have been choosing between the two ever since.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013442/ - 10
Don't Look Now (1973)
Roeg adapted a Daphne du Maurier story and cut it so the past and the future keep leaking into each other. John and Laura Baxter lose a daughter, go to Venice for a church restoration, and John starts catching sight of a small red coat in the alleys. When it turns around the film is finished in ninety seconds.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069995/ - 11
The Wicker Man (1973)
Robin Hardy sends a devout policeman to a Scottish island to find a missing girl, and every islander lies to him pleasantly for eighty minutes. Christopher Lee played Lord Summerisle and called it his best film. The doors of the wicker figure swing shut with Howie inside, the singing starts, and the burning head falls away to show the sun going down.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070917/ - 12
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Robert Wiene had the shadows and the streaks of light painted straight onto the sets, so the town leans the wrong way in every shot. Cesare carries Jane across the painted rooftops with his arms held out in front of him. A frame story at the end calls the narrator an asylum inmate, which is either a studio compromise or the first twist ending.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0010323/ - 13
Audition (1999)
Takashi Miike spends an hour on a widower who lets a friend stage a fake film audition so he can meet women, and it plays as a slow, mildly funny romance. Then Asami takes the wire saw out of the bag. It opened in Japanese cinemas in March 2000, and people who have sat through the last half hour tend to warn everybody else.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235198/ - 14
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Three film students went into the woods with a 35 page outline and improvised every line, and the official website ran faux police reports until people turned up believing it. Nothing supernatural is ever put on screen. Heather runs down into the basement, finds Mike standing in the corner facing the wall, and the camera drops.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185937/ - 15
The Thing (1982)
Universal spent $15 million and got $19.6 million back, and 1982 reviewers called it wretched excess. Rob Bottin built the creature from mayonnaise, creamed corn and K-Y Jelly, and was hospitalised with exhaustion and pneumonia before the shoot ended. The defibrillator paddles go into the open chest and the chest closes on them. The last two men sit in the snow and wait to freeze.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787/ - 16
Evil Dead II (1987)
Sam Raimi remade his own first film as a slapstick routine and it is still frightening, which should not work. Ash's right hand turns on him, he takes it off with a chainsaw, and it runs off to hide behind the skirting board. He pins it under a stack of books with A Farewell to Arms on top.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092991/ - 17
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
James Whale made the sequel funnier than the original and more upsetting with it, which is a strange trick to pull off. Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley in the prologue and the bride at the end. The bandages come off and she hisses at the man she was built for. Jack Pierce set her hair on a wire frame, modelled on Nefertiti.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026138/ - 18
Carrie (1976)
Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie both took Academy Award nominations out of a $1.8 million horror picture, which almost never happens. Chris and Billy tip a bucket of pig blood over Carrie at the prom and the hall gets what follows. The last shot, a hand coming out of the grave, was filmed backwards, and Spacek insisted on using her own.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074285/ - 19
The Haunting (1963)
Robert Wise adapted Shirley Jackson and settled before shooting that he would show almost nothing. The parlour door bends inward, over and over, under something on the other side. It is laminated wood and a strong crew member with a length of timber. Some of the sound sits so low in the bass that you feel it before you hear it.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057129/ - 20
Get Out (2017)
Jordan Peele made it for $4.5 million, took $259.8 million and won an Academy Award for the screenplay. Missy stirs a spoon in a teacup and Chris drops through the floor of himself into what she calls the sunken place, watching his own eyes from a long way down. He never does find out what that room is.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5052448/ - 21
Ringu (1998)
Hideo Nakata's film took 1.7 billion yen in Japan and turned a cursed videotape into a decade of imitators. Watch the tape and you have seven days. Sadako climbs out of the well and then out of the television, moving in jerks that never resolve into walking. The tape itself is ninety seconds of images nobody in the film can source.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0178868/ - 22
Jaws (1975)
Spielberg was scheduled for 55 days and shot for 159, mostly because the mechanical sharks kept failing in salt water. So he hid the animal and gave you yellow barrels instead: three go under, and then they come back up. Quint's speech about the Indianapolis is three men at a table and one lamp.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073195/ - 23
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Romero shot nights in the Monroeville Mall from eleven until seven, once the real shops had shut. The dead ride the escalators because they remember doing it. Tom Savini's blood is bright and fluorescent and looks wrong on purpose. Four people barricade a shopping centre, get everything they ever wanted, and become unbearable to each other.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/ - 24
Let the Right One In (2008)
Tomas Alfredson set a vampire story in Blackeberg in the early eighties and shot it as a film about two lonely children, which it also is. Eli walks into Oskar's flat without being asked and starts bleeding from the eyes and the pores until he says the words. The snow does most of the lighting.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1139797/ - 25
Suspiria (1977)
Dario Argento processed this in Technicolor on the last machine left in Rome, which is why the reds land like a lamp in your face. Goblin's score runs over an opening double murder: one girl is hanged through a skylight, and her friend, standing below in the lobby, is killed by the falling glass. The dance academy is a coven.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076786/ - 26
The Descent (2005)
Neil Marshall built twenty one cave sets at Pinewood out of sprayed polyurethane rock, so the squeezes are real walls and the actors are genuinely stuck. Six women go down and the film waits a long time before it needs a monster. British and American prints end differently: one has Sarah driving away, the other leaves her still in the cave with the crawlers getting louder.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435625/ - 27
It Follows (2014)
David Robert Mitchell gave his monster one rule. It walks, it never stops, and only the cursed person can see it. So you spend the film reading the backgrounds, and there is usually somebody at the far end of the schoolyard walking straight at the camera. Disasterpeace wrote the score and it sounds like a house alarm.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3235888/ - 28
28 Days Later (2002)
Danny Boyle shot most of this on Canon XL1 camcorders, and the crew closed London streets for a few minutes at a time on Sunday mornings to get the empty city. In the tunnel, headlights, a burst tyre and something coming fast, the idea sells itself. The soldiers in the last act are the part people still argue about.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289043/ - 29
The Babadook (2014)
Jennifer Kent's first feature is mostly a mother who has not slept, and the monster arrives as a pop-up book somebody has put on the shelf. It gets worse with every page. She tears it up and it comes back taped together on the doorstep. The ending does not defeat the thing. It puts it in the basement and feeds it.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2321549/ - 30
Hereditary (2018)
Ari Aster built the house as a set with removable walls so he could shoot it the way Annie shoots her miniatures, and the film keeps mistaking one for the other. Peter swerves for a dead deer, Charlie's head meets a telephone pole at the side of the road, and he drives home and goes to bed without saying a word.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7784604/ - 31
Weapons (2025)
Zach Cregger's film cost $38 million and took $270 million worldwide, which for an original horror picture with no franchise behind it is rare. It opens on seventeen children from one classroom leaving their front doors at 2:17 in the morning, arms held back, running into the dark. Everything after that is people trying to account for one image.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26581740/
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