The 100 best horror movies of all time (updated for 2026)

Directors: Danny and Michael Philippou

Cast: Sophie Wilde, Alexandra Jensen, Joe Bird

Handshake drugs
Grief, trauma and the failure to cope with it are the dominant themes of 2020s horror, and the first feature from Australian twins Danny and Michael Philippou seizes the zeitgeist in gripping fashion – emphasis on ‘grip’. A young woman reeling from the death of her mother (a revelatory Sophie Wilde) falls in with a group of teens whose high of choice is willful demonic possession, achieved via a ritual involving an embalmed hand of indeterminate origin. Irresponsible kids messing with forces beyond their control? You don’t say! Yes, it’s an old trope, but the Philippous, who initially made their names on YouTube, give it modern salience, as communing with the dead becomes just another avenue for chasing clout on social media. Unsettling, energetic and blanketed with heavy sadness, it’s one of the most impressive debuts of the modern era.

Director: Leigh Whannell

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Oliver Jackson-Cohen

What we do in the shadows
Leigh Whannell’s canny retooling of HG Wells’s sci-fi novel offers a tart statement on toxic men and their gaslighting ways. Elisabeth Moss plays Cecilia, an architect traumatised by her abusive tech entrepreneur husband Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Soon, Griffin is reported dead by suicide. But is he? And why have things started going bump in the night? Whannell is respectful to the classic Universal monster movie with which it shares its name (look out for a cameo from those trademark bandages), but this is no reverential retread. It has ideas of its own, specifically around the way an abusive relationship can turn life into a prison. Moss, needless to say, makes a killer scream-queen.

Director: Frank Darabont

Cast: Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Toby Jones

Situation normal: all fogged up
Having tackled Stephen King twice already – in The Shawshank Redemption and its inferior follow-up The Green Mile – Frank Darabont made his first out-and-out horror movie with this bleak, pointed adaptation of King’s novella about a mysterious fog which swamps a small town, forcing the inhabitants to take shelter in the local supermarket. On one level this is pure throwback, an old-school tentacles-and-all monster movie which really comes alive in its glittering monochrome DVD version. But it’s also a ferociously modern drama, picking apart the political and social threads which just about held America together under the Bush administration. Religious dogma, political division and – finally and devastatingly – military intervention all go under Darabont’s shakeycam microscope, resulting in perhaps the most intelligent, compelling and heartbreaking horror movie of the century so far. 

Director: Larry Cohen

Cast: Tony Lo Bianco, Deborah Raffin

Jesus kills 
Cult favourite Larry Cohen earned a reputation for turning schlock into gold. Whether it’s a movie about a mythical avian beast, a mutant baby or a brain-eating dessert treat, his films frequently have some extra element – a smart script, an inspired performance, a sharp satirical edge – that makes them far better than they should be. In the case of arguably his best movie, though, it’s simply a wonder why it’s not more broadly thought of as a top-tier horror-thriller of the 1970s. While investigating a string of seemingly random acts of violence, a New York police detective (Lo Bianco) keeps hearing the same chilling refrain from the perpetrators: ‘God told me to.’ Is it mass psychosis, a religious cult or something stranger? Cohen matches gritty NYC location photography with a supernatural sci-fi twist that presages M Night Shyamalan. It’s upsetting, bizarre and, like most of the director’s work, truly one of a kind. Keep an eye out for the random Andy Kaufman cameo, too.

Director: Rose Glass

Cast: Morfydd Clark, Jennifer Ehle

Nurse me back to health
This brilliantly unsettling debut from Rose Glass (Love Lies Bleeding) sweeps in on a humdrum English coastal town with a fierce cargo of religious mania, psychological power games and the odd moment of nightmarish ickiness. Morfydd Clark is astonishing as the deeply religious Maud, a live-in nurse whose first private assignment takes her to the house of Jennifer Ehle’s terminally ill and terminally spiky ex-dancer. The ensuing dance between troubled ascetic and ciggy-smoking sensualist has shades of the psychological frictions of Persona, a major influence on Saint Maud, and goes downhill fast from there. Ehle is great and in a just world Clark would be winning awards for her remarkable piece of physical acting. The result is the best British horror since Under the Skin.

Director: Stuart Gordon

Cast: Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott

I am the resurrection
A kind of madcap blend of the original HP Lovecraft short story with National Lampoon’s Animal House, Re-Animator is horror as cartoon, combining gore and guffaws in a giddy parade of grotesque imagery. Jeffrey ‘the thinking man’s Bruce Campbell’ Combs plays disturbed anti-hero Herbert West (even the way he says his name is funny), the science graduate who stumbles across a glowing green resurrection serum and opts to try it out on the overbearing Dean and his nubile, leggy daughter. Re-Animator is a prime example of the home video horror boom in action: it’s weird, wild, unpredictable and frequently very silly, the kind of imaginative but slickly constructed offbeat horror film which seems to have gone entirely out of fashion. 

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Timothy Balme, Diana Peñalver, Elizabeth Moody

Abbott and Costello meet The Evil Dead
Before he got bogged down in endless Hobbitry, Peter Jackson was one of the world’s most ferociously inventive independent exploitation filmmakers, a worthy successor to the George Romero and Sam Raimi school of DIY gore. His first movie, Bad Taste, was filmed over four years of weekends with a band of enthusiastic mates, but by the time of Braindead (AKA Dead Alive) Jackson had a budget – of sorts – and a professional crew. The result is one of the most relentlessly, gleefully nasty movies ever released, incorporating mutant monkeys, zombie flesh-eaters, death by lawnmower, kung-fu priests and jokes about ‘The Archers’. It also contains the queasiest dinner scene since La Grande Bouffe, involving spurting blood, dissolving flesh, human ears and bowls of claggy rice pudding. 

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold

The same, but different
More than any other Cronenberg film, Dead Ringers tests the limits of what constitutes a horror movie. Yes it has blood, ‘tools for operating on mutant women’ and a general tone of deep disquiet, but it’s first and foremost a study of domestic psychosis under unique circumstances. It’s also an unparalleled acting showcase: using computer-controlled camera technology, Jeremy Irons was able to portray both lead characters, twin gynaecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle. What’s remarkable is how clearly he delineates between them: Elliot the steely, ‘masculine’ shark; Beverly the passive ‘feminine’ carer. As in The Fly, Cronenberg’s interest in the tenuous connections between body and mind is combined with an unexpectedly sensitive portrayal of romantic attachment, making the brothers’ inevitable psychological collapse all the more effectively disturbing.

Director: George A Romero

Cast: Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander

All you need is Bub
There are many who view Romero’s conclusion to his original Living Dead trilogy as something of a comedown, neither as groundbreaking as Night or as satirical and entertaining as Dawn. And it’s true, Romero’s initial ambitions for the project – a wholesale attack on Reaganite inequality, with the zombies as a new disenfranchised underclass – were stymied by budgetary concerns, though many of those ideas found their way into the belated follow-up, Land of the Dead. But Day of the Dead is still an astonishing movie, an unrelenting attack on the senses fuelled by an unprecedented sense of despair and rampant nihilism. By this point, it’s hard to tell who we’re really rooting for, the hateful, bickering soldier ‘heroes’ or their shuffling, bloodthirsty zombie captives, personified by the ‘thinking zombie’, the oddly lovable Bub.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Cast: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi

Don’t look now
Pasolini’s final film doesn’t belong to the horror genre in any traditional sense at all – but it’s hard to imagine any film on this list surpassing this 1944-set vision of despair for its sheer provocative transgression and devastatingly bleak and pessimistic view of humanity. Drawing on the writings of the Marquis de Sade and influenced by Dante’s Inferno, Pasolini imagined four fascist libertines taking a group of young men and women prisoner in a stately home in Italy and subjecting them to an unimaginable cycle of terror. Rape, torture, murder, the forced eating of shit – it’s all here. The film provoked outrage in many quarters, but, viewed now, any claims that it is pornographic seem ridiculous. It’s a complete absence of pleasure that Pasolini provokes in this disturbing portrait of a society gone to the dogs.

Director: Don Coscarelli

Cast: Michael Baldwin, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm

In space, no one can eat ice cream
By the early ’80s, the home video boom had fuelled a tidal wave of American horror. But with proper financial backing and almost total creative freedom, these films were a world away from the cheapo grit of the grindhouse: directors like Stuart Gordon, Frank Henenlotter and Don Coscarelli had the funding to realise visions which would have been impossible a few years before, resulting in some of the most idiosyncratic movies in the horror canon. Phantasm is the film that kickstarted it all, combining inventive DIY horror with a berserk plot involving homicidal space midgets, heroic ice-cream men, flying spheres which drill into the brain and of course the terrifying ‘Tall Man’. Over the course of three wild sequels, Coscarelli expanded his bizarre universe in a variety of imaginative and deliriously entertaining ways – but the original set the standard.

Director: Bernard Rose

Sweets to the sweet…
Bernard Rose’s loose adaptation of Clive Barker’s The Forbidden has only grown in clout over time. That’s wildly appropriate for a grim story centred around whispered urban legends, which follows Virginia Madsen’s skeptical white academic as she explores the slums of Chicago to study the myth of a vengeful, hook-handed ghost (Tony Todd, glowering with a mouthful of bees). Set to a haunting piano-driven Philip Glass score, Candyman is an oddly prescient film that has only grown more powerful with time, striking a deft balance between splattery scares and themes of gentrification, white privilege and violence against the Black community. That Nia DaCosta struggled with the same balance in a recent revamp is less a knock on the Jordan Peele-produced film and more a testament to Rose’s baroque, grisly vision. Like the lustful ghost at its heart, the film’s legacy becomes more powerful as the years go by. 

Director: Terence Fisher

Cast: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Michael Gough

Charm offensive
A horror fan’s sanctuary during the tame Vincent Prince era of the late ’50s and ‘60s, Hammer Film Productions injected the tired genre with garish bloody colour, shocking violence and the remarkably committed acting duo of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. If 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein pried open the coffin, this one – a massively influential global success – plunged the stake home. It’s impressive enough that Lee managed to step out of the shadow of the immortal Bela Lugosi, crafting a Count who was virile, sexy and vicious. But the real impact of Dracula is best felt in retrospect: Has there been another Bram Stoker adaptation that’s been this captivating? Several directors have tried; none have survived the night. 

Director: Mario Bava

Cast: Boris Karloff, Mark Damon, Michèle Mercier

Tale of the unexpected
Although anthology horror films are fiendishly difficult to pull off, in its original Italian version (as opposed to the reshuffled, re-scored travesty released in the US), Bava’s bold, expressionistic use of colour and lighting imposes a stylistic consistency on this disparate trio of tales. Boris Karloff’s sonorous intro and epilogue also help. The Telephone seethes with twisted eroticism, as a Parisian prostitute (Mercier) is terrified by threatening phone calls from her vengeful ex-pimp. Russian vampire lore informs The Wurdalak, which starts with the discovery of a stabbed and headless corpse, then progresses to ghoulish, atmospheric scenes of blood-sucking. A nurse who steals a valuable ring from a dead body is haunted by guilt in The Drop of Water. The visual debt owed by Argento’s Suspiria and Inferno is abundantly clear. 

Director: Don Siegel

Cast: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Carolyn Jones

The pod couple
A zombie movie in all but name, Don Siegel’s eerie frightener about alien invasion, forceably-imposed conformity and sinister vegetation is now best interpreted as a terrifying parable about the dark side of populism. Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter are the two lovebirds in a fictional California town who get wise to a conspiracy that replace the population with soulless pod people. As the two try to escape and conspiracy thriller gives way to sweat-coated jailbreak movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers exudes the scratchy, urgent kind of paranoia that leaves you reflecting on the world around. It was given a post-Watergate remake courtesy of Philip Kaufman’s 1978 classic. It may be sacrilege to say it, but maybe the post-truth era deserves one too?

Director: Ari Aster

Cast: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Will Poulter

A cult classic
Hereditary director Ari Aster once described Midsommar as ‘The Wizard of Oz for perverts,’ but it could just as easily be called ‘The Wicker Man on psilocybin.’ Yet for all its horror, Midsommar has a lot on its mushroom-addled mind than pulverised skulls and flayed torsos (though there’s that too). It’s also a surprisingly funny tale of ugly American hubris, an oddly affirming feminist break-up story and meandering thinkpiece about the collision of modern culture and ancient traditions, with Florence Pugh delivering a career-defining performance steeped in grief, confusion, heartbreak, rage and hope. All the while, horror looms in broad daylight, rearing its head not to jolt the audience, but to push the deranged fairy tale toward its fiery, bear-suited conclusion. 

Director: John Krasinski,

Cast: Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe

Silence is golden
Michael Bay doesn’t appear on too many ‘greatest films’ lists, so it’s only fair to give the Don of Destruction some credit for helping spawn this creature-feature classic as producer. A Quiet Place follows a family’s attempts to survive in a post-apocalyptic world patrolled by an alien species that hunts by sound, like some kind of satanic land dolphin. In many ways, it’s the antithesis of a Michael Bay movie: instead of noise, there’s silence; instead of berserk action, there’s stillness. It just makes the experience all the more terrifying. Actor-turned-first-time-director John Krasinski shows an almost Hitchcockian command of tension as the slightest creak or spillage can bring slathering hell-beasts raining down from the surrounding countryside. Emily Blunt, meanwhile, steals the show in front of the camera: the childbirth scene, in particular, will never leave you. Its sequel, and the 2024 prequel, were surprisingly effective as well. 

Cast: Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle

Wolfing around
The best teenage werewolf movie, period. Womens’ bodies have always been a prime source of fascination for horror cinema, from the animal sexuality of Cat People to let’s-not-go-there modern shockers like Teeth. But the best of the bunch has to be this crafty Canadian werewolf movie, in which a teenage girl’s first period is swiftly followed by a wild dog attack – and a series of terrifying but strangely thrilling physical transformations. The film is also notable for its smart, Buffy-ish observations on teenage life, before the conflation of high school trauma and supernatural horror became a cliché. A word of warning, though: the unnecessary sequels are best avoided.

Director: David Robert Mitchell 

Cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist

Virgin on the ridiculous
There’s nothing wrong with a messy horror movie – flying limbs, cardboard monsters, terrible acting. But there’s something uniquely pleasurable – and unsettling – about a scary movie where every shot, every line, every beat of music feels painstakingly composed to scare the bejesus out of you. It Follows is a prime example: for every second of this sparse, precise story of supernatural stalkers in suburbia, you know that writer-director David Robert Mitchell has both hands firmly on the wheel. You’re just never sure where he’s driving you. 

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Michael B Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Delroy Lindo

Vampire blues
After reinvigorating the Rocky franchise and producing the greatest Marvel movie ever, Ryan Coogler might just be the best blockbuster filmmaker of his generation – and his vampire blues musical period piece is as ambitious as mainstream horror gets. Michael B Jordan plays twin hustlers returning home to the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s to go straight-ish, only to have their new juke joint besieged by a gang of banjo-strumming undead. Atop a familiar ‘survive the night’ structure, Coogler piles on ideas related to religion, racism, American folklore and Black cultural history. And yet, the movie never loses its sense of crowd-pleasing spectacle. While plenty frightening (and frequently horny), the most bravura moment is something else: a radical, hallucinatory music sequence visualising the throughline connecting Robert Johnson to funk, house and hip-hop. It’s bold, daring and instantly iconic.

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh

Cloudy with a chance of pirates
In between inventing the modern slasher flick and setting a new bar for gross-out sci-fi, John Carpenter made a ghost story so traditional it begins with grizzled John Houseman recounting the tale 'round a campfire for a group of children. Such classicism wouldn’t seem in the director’s wheelhouse, but Carpenter proves he can take just about any horror subgenre and add his signature to it. Set in a small California coastal town, the plot drifts along slowly, like the titular eerie glowing fog that comes rolling in from the ocean, carrying with it the community’s long-buried secrets. Carpenter plays with light, shadow and colour, including some of the blackest-ever blacks, to conjure an effectively chilling atmosphere. It won’t shock or nauseate you, but it’ll raise old-school goosebumps like nothing since, well, Goosebumps.

Director: Clive Barker

Cast: Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Sean Chapman, Doug Bradley

Skinless wonder
From the disturbed imagination of gifted British fabulist Clive Barker comes a Faustian pact with a difference, involving a mysterious puzzle-box, a painful rebirth and the diet of human flesh needed to put the skin back on the flayed muscle of jaded sensualist Frank’s resurrected body. By solving the puzzle, Frank enters the world of exquisite cruelty presided over by Pinhead (Bradley) and his fellow Cenobites – glamorous sadists with a penchant for ripped flesh and transcendent pain. Despite Barker’s determination to ‘embrace the monstrous’, the fetishistic appeal of the Cenobites goes hand in hand with an atmosphere of clammy, mind-warping dread. The unsettling moral ambiguities of Frank’s relationship with his ex-lover Julia (now his brother’s wife) resonate far more than the conventional sub-plot involving his teenage niece Kirsty. 

Director: Mario Bava

Cast: Barbara Steele, John Richardson

Untempered Steele
For students of horror, 1960 is remembered as the year of Peeping Tom and Psycho. But Bava’s monochrome masterpiece Black Sunday fully deserves to be set alongside them: while Hitchcock and Powell were revolutionizing the genre by bringing the terror closer to home, Bava was doing almost the opposite, creating a boldly imaginative and dreamlike world inspired by the Universal classics, while at the same time using groundbreaking special effects to ensure that the horrors depicted on screen were more graphically disturbing than ever before. Black Sunday is a film crammed with surreal and still shocking imagery: while it’s most famous for the opening scene in which a spiked mask is hammered onto the face of dark witch Barbara Steele, there are many more wonderfully nasty sights to behold, from an empty eye socket crawling with maggots to a walking corpse who looks suspiciously like Sonny Bono. 

Director: Bob Clark

Cast: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder

Sorority sisters in pre-slasher slay ride shocker
A low-budget Canadian precursor of the ‘seasonal slasher’ cycle that was kicked into gear by the success of Halloween four years later, Clark’s imaginatively nasty film traps a group of college students in a snow-dusted sorority house, where they are terrorised by an obscene phone caller before being bumped off one by one. Anticipating many now familiar conventions, Clark cranks up the level of threat through his pioneering use of prowling shots from the psycho killer's point of view, reinforced here by a discordant sound design. A sparky, pre-Superman Margot Kidder gives as good as she gets, but it’s hard to tell which, if any, of the girls will survive this Yuletide slay ride. Clark also pulls off a wicked plot twist near the end, a flourish that’s simple yet devastatingly effective. 

Director: James Whale

Cast: Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger, Charles Laughton

Perfect weather for ducks
Believed lost for over 30 years, they found The Old Dark House in the Universal Studios vaults in 1968. Thank goodness! What a tragedy it would have been to lose this deliciously ghoulish comedy of manners. The film was adapted from JB Priestley’s novel Benighted, and sees a young couple, a chorus girl, a war veteran and a gruff self-made industrialist take shelter in a tumbledown Welsh mansion during a rainstorm. Its inmates, the Femm family, are quite frankly bonkers. Head of the household is Horace (a juicily camp turn by Thesiger: ‘It’s only gin. I like gin,’), who’s constantly bickering with his batty, deaf sister. Upstairs, their 101- year-old dad is bedridden and Saul their pyromaniac brother is locked in the attic, while Morgan the mad butler (Karloff) is getting fighting-drunk in the kitchen. Full of acid wit and howlingly funny, The Old Dark House is one of the most giddily glorious films you’re ever likely to see. 

Director: Zach Cregger

Cast: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Amy Madigan

Do you know where your children are?
Is it about school shootings? Society’s demonisation of single, childless women? Writer-director Zach Cregger’s debilitating fear of old ladies? All of the above or nothing at all? Whatever your take, Cregger’s second feature is simply mondo entertainment, a significant level-up, filmmaking-wise, from his head-turning debut, 2022’s Barbarian. In suburban Pennsylvania, an entire class of schoolkids vanishes overnight, Naruto-running out of their homes and into the darkness of their tree-lined streets. Cregger puzzles out the mystery in a series of interconnected vignettes involving a tormented schoolteacher (Garner), a grieving father (Brolin), a jittery cop (Alden Ehrenreich), a junkie thief (Austin Abrams) and an eccentric elderly woman, played by Amy Madigan in a role that won her an Oscar. It’s eerie, engrossing and often pretty icky. Coming from a former sketch comic, it’s also very funny, and pays off with one hell of a hilariously gruesome punchline.

Director: Mario Bava

Cast: Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Erika Blanc

The little death
Bava’s ghoulish small-town ghost story may feel a little tame following the explicit eeriness of his groundbreaking Black Sunday, but Kill, Baby… Kill! is still a radical and unsettling work. When a coroner is called to a small town to inspect the corpse of a maid, he finds a silver coin inserted into her heart. The village is suffering under an ancient curse – and those who speak out about it meet bloody and untimely ends. Embracing the opportunity to shoot in full colour, Bava creates a lurid, entrancing dream-world which clearly informed the work of Argento and Fulci, and indeed any director interested in exploring otherworldly ideas: one scene, where the hero seems to pursue a vision of himself, is an almost shot-for-shot antecedent of David Lynch’s disturbing final episode of Twin Peaks. 

Director: Robert Wiene

Cast: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt

Trapped in the closet 
There was no way director Robert Wiene could’ve known how disturbingly prescient his masterpiece of art-horror would turn out to be. A tale of hypnotism, hysteria and multiple murder set in a twisted, folksy German landscape filtered through the disturbed imagination of a madman, its fractured landscapes reflect the shattered psyche of a nation in defeat, but they also prefigure the greater horrors to come. And almost a century later, at least one sequence here remains genuinely frightening: the midnight attack on a helpless young woman by a shambling, somnambulant strangler. The ending, too, still shocks: the whole world is a madhouse, Wiene is saying, so who’s really sane? 

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris and Christopher Eccleston

Hate crime
If every generation gets the zombies its deserves, what would ours be like? Full of rage was the answer Danny Boyle came up with in 28 Days Later..., in which a group of animal liberation militants free lab chimps infected with a fatal virus. The disease quickly spreads through the British population, turning people into berserk zombies. One month later, in a London hospital, bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a coma, to find London cloaked in an unearthly silence. There are scenes here that will send a shiver down your spine, such as the swarm of rats running in terror from an approaching undead horde. But the real horror begins when Jim and his band of survivors reach the ‘safety’ of a group of soldiers barricaded in a stately mansion up north. Boyle returns to the franchise for the upcoming 2025 sequel, whose trailer deserves some awards all on its own.

Director: Jordan Peele

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener

More than just the ‘sunken place’
Horror films are at their best when the fear stems from the human condition itself. It’s what makes Jordan Peele’s Get Out one of the most essential cinematic outings in recent memory. Starring British actor Daniel Kaluuya (yep, the guy out of Skins) as Chris, a photographer accompanying his white girlfriend (Williams) for a weekend with her parents that turns sour, the film’s terror comes from the mirror it holds up to society’s continuing threat of racism. Utilising the horror trope of isolated suburbs, Peele subverts expectations, distinctly carving out a new niche in the genre that’s equal parts horror, comedy and social commentary. The sinister ‘sunken place’ has resonated so much that it’s now part of cultural lexicon. What’s so unsettling about Peele’s film, however, is just how zeitgeisty it remains.

Director: Jennifer Kent

Cast: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman

The mummy’s curse
The territory where scary movies overlap with social realism remains largely unexplored by filmmakers. Horror has traditionally been a genre bent on entertainment – however twisted – and so reminders of real-world tragedy tend to stifle the fun. So props to first-time filmmaker Jennifer Kent for never shying away from her central character’s predicament: yes, our heroine Amelia is being stalked by something supernatural, but we’re never sure if it’s made the life of this grieving single mother appreciably worse. And as women continue to be shut out of filmmaking roles, how satisfying that The Babadook was one of the best-reviewed horror movies of the decade so far. 

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Cast: Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins, Niall MacGinnis

Devil in disguise 
Jacques Tourneur never intended to show the audience the demon that terrorises his Night of the Demon. But producer Hal E Chester insisted the flaming beast make two personal appearances to bookend this tale of an American psychologist, Dr Holden (Andrews), a world-renowned paranormal sceptic. He’s in London to debunk a devil cult, whose apparently avuncular leader, Dr. Julian Karswell (MacGinnis), he takes for a harmless fake (he should really be paying more attention to Karswell’s devilish goatee). Tourneur was right about the monster – it’s B-movie silly. But the French-born director knew his business and elsewhere gives an object lesson in frightening the audience out their seats with the mere placing of a hand on a banister. Scriptwriter Charles Bennett was likewise enraged by the demon: ‘If [Chester, the producer] walked up my driveway right now, I'd shoot him dead.’ 

Director: Robert Eggers

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie

‘Did ye make some unholy bond with that goat?’ 
The Lighthouse director Robert Eggers’ made one of the most explosive cinematic debuts of all time with this artful slow-burner occupying a swirling vortex of religious zealotry, colonial hubris and black magic. Bathed in the iridescent light of oil lamps and often taking on the look of centuries-old woodcuts, The Witch is a marvel of craftsmanship, from the period-accurate dialogue to the rustic sets. It’s a horrifying ordeal, with breakout performances by Anya Taylor-Joy and young Harvey Scrimshaw grounding an escalating tale of exiled settlers overcome by paranoia. As the film spins out into a deranged finale, a sinister voice asks ‘wouldst thou like to live deliciously?’ Given the horrors that unfold up to that point, it’s a sumptuous proposition.

Director: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Katherine MacColl, David Warbeck

All I have to do is dream
Outside the arthouse, horror is the only cinematic genre where pure surrealism is not only acceptable but expected – and there are few more graphic examples than Fulci’s bonkers bayou bloodbath The Beyond. There’s a plot of sorts, but it’s fairly standard: a young woman inherits a hotel which happens to have been built over a gateway to hell. But this is merely a loose framework within which Fulci goes all out to upset and horrify his audience: faces melt inexplicably, tarantulas rip out human tongues, zombies rise from the grave, eyes are repeatedly torn out. The result is more accurately nightmarish than almost any other film on this list, a true descent into the depths of meaningless, unpredictable, terrifyingly beautiful horror, with a scorpion-sharp sting in the tail. 

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cast: Kumiko Aso, Haruhiko Katô, Koyuki

Would you like to meet a ghost?
Much of the world was still figuring out how to set up an email account when Japanese maverick Kiyoshi Kurosawa portended the soul-destroying isolation of the Extremely Online Age. Slow and spectral, his supernatural techno-chiller is better experienced than explained, but the basic idea is that spirits are entering the physical realm en masse via the internet and pushing the living out, not so much killing them as ‘trapping them in their own loneliness’, as one character surmises. Kurosawa makes masterful use of space and stillness, as well as grainy low-res video and the once-familiar crackle-and-screech of dial-up modems, to evoke a world in the midst of quiet evaporation. Less-patient audiences will squirm, but those who fall under its spell will be chilled by its prescience. ‘People don't really connect, you know?’ says another character. Who could’ve known just how disconnected we’d all soon become?

Director: Joel Anderson 

Cast: Rosie Traynor, David Pledger 

Drown and out
Sadness and fear are often intertwined, and this Australian cult favourite is equally bone-chilling and soul-bruising. Presented in convincing mock-doc style, it tells of a family haunted, in more ways than one, by the drowning death of their teen daughter. Rather than making a metaphor for grief, like so many modern horror films, director Joel Anderson confronts it head-on, and discovers that the notion of ‘closure’ is an empty promise, on both sides of the supernatural divide. A few too many unnecessary plot twists muddy things, but the movie is most successful as a sensorial experience, built from chilling sound design and shiver-inducing images, culminating in a jumpscare that reverberates far beyond a momentary shock.

Director: Charles Laughton

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish

Sleep, little ones, sleep
Charles Laughton’s only work as a director may be terrifying, but is it really a horror film? That uncertainty is doubtless the reason for its low placing in this list, because there’s no question about the film’s quality: this is a near-perfect example of pure cinema. There are strong ties to the genre: Robert Mitchum plays Harry Powell, a murderous preacher whose pursuit of hidden booty leads him to hunt down a pair of hapless orphaned children through a mystical Southern dreamscape. But more than half a century after it was made, The Night of the Hunter continues to shrug off attempts at easy categorisation: if it’s a horror movie, then it’s also an adventure story, a crime thriller, a coming-of-age drama and a fairy tale. One thing remains certain, however: it’s a masterpiece. 

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Cast: Véra Clouzot, Simone Signoret

Schools out forever 
There’s much fun to be had with French filmmaker Clouzot’s boarding school-set puzzler from 1955, a suspenseful comic tease with added frights. First, there are the grotesque characters, each horrific enough in their own way, from the boo-hiss headmaster (Paul Meurisse) to his nervy wife (Vera Clouzot) and bullish mistress (Signoret). Clouzot has been tagged the ‘French Hitchcock’, and it’s a fair enough comparison: like his British counterpart, he allows for ample playfulness amid the scares. Apart from being compelling right to the final frame, the main reason why Les Diaboliques deserves a place in this list is the way that Clouzot continually upends us with the ambiguous aftermath of the headmaster’s murder – as well as how he pulls off an unforeseeable scare late in the day.

Directors: Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza

Cast: Manuela Velasco, Ferrán Terraza, David Vert

Whatever you witness... never stop recording 
A rare found-footage film that actually makes sense, Spanish export [Rec] possesses an eerie prescience in its story of a group of firefighters and a news crew locked in a quarantined apartment building. The dread is palatable from the onset, but once the mysteriously infected tenants start gnashing their teeth, the film grabs viewers by the throat in a way few modern zombie yarns do. Taking a cue from George A Romero, [Rec] wrings endless tension from its single location, amping up the dread (and gruesome kills) with a sprinkling of religious horror in its fevered sprint to a breathless finale. 

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Cast: Julian West, Jan Hieronimko, Sybille Schmitz

The first bite is the deepest 
In 1932, the New York Times’s film critic was not impressed. Vampyr, he declared, was ‘one of the worst films’ he’d ever seen, but added grudgingly that director Carl Dreyer could always be relied upon to be ‘different’. And Vampyr is different, a film like no other. Dreyer spun his cinematic nightmare from two stories from a Sheridan Le Fanu collection. It stars Nicolas de Gunzburg (a Russian aristocrat who bankrolled the film, appearing under the alias Julian West) as an occult-obsessed young man who visits a French village haunted by a vampire. The lord of the manor dies and his young daughter is gravely ill, bite wounds to her neck. His intention, said Dreyer, was ‘to create a daydream on the screen and to show that the horrific is not to be found around us, but in our own unconscious mind.’ And Vampyr is often compared to a waking dream, full of strange hallucinatory images that strike dread in audiences even today. 

Director: Coralie Fargeat

Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid

The wrong stuff
Absolutely nothing about Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror fantasia is subtle, and why should it be? As a film about the entertainment industry’s undisguised contempt for women, the sledgehammering is the point, and what the target deserves. And so, Fargeat creates an unreal world, full of garish colours, boldface typography and exclusively piggish men, and expresses her disgust by splattering it all with blood, guts, lime-green bile, prawn shells, egg yolks and other miscellaneous viscera. Demi Moore, who knows something about ageing in Hollywood, delivers an intensely visceral performance as a fading movie star pushed to taking a drug that’s definitely not FDA approved and literally gives birth to a manifestation of her own internalised misogyny. Shot at angles that practically shove its grotesqueries up your nose, it’s aggressively confrontational, audaciously over-the-top and easily the grossest movie ever nominated for Best Picture – quite an achievement.

Director: Masaki Kobayashi

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Rentarô Mikuni, Michiyo Aratama

Pack up your troubles 
Based on traditional Japanese folk tales and filmed in ravishing wide-screen on hand-painted sets, these four stories – of raven-haired women, beautiful female spectres, blind singing monks and ghostly samurai warriors – created a template for much of the indigenous supernatural cinema that would follow. The eternally youthful wife in The Black Hair, in particular, prefigures the many raven-haired women with shadowed ivory faces found in modern J-horror movies such as Ringu. Kobayashi’s stylised use of colour is more symbolic than naturalistic, and coupled with the avant garde electronic score by Toru Takemitsu, which also incorporates sampled natural sounds, it generates both a haunting atmosphere and some subtle supernatural chills. 

Director: George Sluizer

Cast: Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets

Gone girl
It’s a simple premise: a man’s girlfriend disappears from a rest stop without a trace, and the mystery of what happened to her consumes him to the point of near madness. But what makes Dutch director George Sluizer’s psychological thriller so successfully frightening is how it pushes the audience to the verge of insanity, making it so easy to imagine ourselves in the same horrifying situation. It leads to a dangerous bargain, and one of the most unshakeable, don’t-you-dare-spoil-it endings in movie history. Why Sluizer would remake the film in America and change his own brilliant climax is another act of madness altogether.

Director: M Night Shyamalan

Cast: Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Colette

Shyamalanadingdong
It’s been endlessly parodied and director M Night Shyalaman’s career has gone seriously off the boil since. But The Sixth Sense brought ghostly chills (this is far from the gory end of horror) to an approving mass audience. Even now it feels wrong to reveal the twist on which the film is built, so we won’t. Suffice to say that the film’s power derives from ultimately being an acute and acutely strange study of grief and its fallout. Child star Haley Joel Osment (what happened to him?) plays a young boy who can see and talk to the dead (‘I see dead people’ now up there with ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ in the movie-quote pantheon), while Bruce Willis plays the psychologist who attempts to diagnose his condition. It’s so effective because Shyalaman manages not to reveal the truth until very late on and, crucially, make it feel credible when he does. 

Director: Na Hong-jin

A demon-ghost-possession-cop-folklore-zombie comedy-thriller for the ages
Bumbling cops and restrictive bureaucracy are constants in South Korean cinema, but few films contrast the pull between modern law enforcement and ancient evil with as deft a hand as The Wailing. Director Na Hong-jin proved to be a master at upending expectations with his serial-killer potboiler The Chaser, but nothing he pulled off in that underseen gem holds a candle to the tightrope walked here. Part folk-horror, part demonic-possession hair-curler and part pitch-black procedural comedy, The Wailing takes its time, unspooling across 156 richly detailed, skin-crawlingly meticulous minutes. The less you know the better: This is a film that lulls you with its beauty, then sears your eyeballs with reckless abandon.

Director: Roman Polanski

Cast: Catherine Deneuve

The girl can’t help it
Polanski once said in an interview that Repulsion is one of the films he made as ‘matters of convenience’. In this case he was on his uppers – flat broke in London – and was offered the chance to make a horror film. Which doesn’t tell the half of it. Has there been a more dread-filled study of mental collapse? Catherine Deneuve plays a repressed young Belgian woman, Carole, who lives in London with her sister and works as a manicurist. ‘Give me Revlon’s fire and ice,’ says one of her dowager customers. Fire and ice: it could be a description of Deneuve’s on screen presence, her secretive and chilliness. All around Carole, London is upbeat, going places. The youth are about to quake. In her flat cracks appear in the walls and Carole drifts off into fugues and finally psychosis. The noise of everyday life is deafening, Polanski piercing the subconscious to poke at what lies beneath. 

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox 

Nudge nudge, wink wink
Twenty-five years, a sea of imitators and five sequels (and counting) later, it’s easy to forget how bracing Scream was when Ghostface slashed his way into the pop consciousness. As he did with New Nightmare, Wes Craven – working with a supremely clever script from Kevin Williamson – completely upended the slasher tropes he’d helped cultivate, opening with a sly nod to genre granddaddy Psycho then dissecting and subverting everything that came thereafter. Yet for all the winks, nods and jokes, it’s often forgotten how genuinely frightening Scream is, a gore-drenched Agatha Christie whodunit whose characters’ self-awareness proves to be ineffective plot armour once the blades start glistening.

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart

Daddy issues
Several movies on this list confront the fear of parenthood, usually manifesting in the birth of the spawn of Satan. Of course, David Lynch being David Lynch, he expresses his anxiety over becoming a father a bit differently: with a hallucinatory stress dream involving a screeching lizard baby. Shot in gauzy black-and-white, the late director’s debut feature adheres to the nightmare logic that would become his signature, but you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to decipher its meaning. In many ways, it remains Lynch’s most personal film – and while he continued to work at the edges of horror, the rawness of the imagery makes it arguably his most terrifying.

Director: Dario Argento

Cast: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi

There’s always room for giallo
Suspiria hooked audiences with its nightmarish beauty, but if you want to see Dario Argento truly get nasty, check out his giallo masterwork, perhaps the quintessential example of the genre’s blend of noirish mystery and slasher ultraviolence. A jazz musician (Hemmings) witnesses a grisly murder, then becomes both sleuth and target after a newspaper plasters his photo on the frontpage. As often happens with Argento, the plotting gets convoluted, but the kills are at once brutal and artful, and his camera seems to have a life of its own, constantly scanning, swooping and sometimes doing the killing. (Several murders are first-person, the culprit identified only by a pair of leather gloves, often worn by the director himself.) Also, there’s a creepy mechanical doll that makes Jigsaw look like Lambchop.

Director: Ken Russell

Cast: Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave

Sister act
In lesser hands, the wild theatrics and camp stylings of Ken Russell’s story of religious persecution and demonic possession in seventeenth-century France would turn The Devils into no more than a fleshy, hysterical romp. But what’s brilliant about The Devils is that Russell achieves a real, serious sense of fear and claustrophobia alongside the ample lunacy. Partly that’s down to Reed's reserved performance – compared, at least, to the madness around him – which means that when his character, Father Grandier, is finally tortured we feel the full horror of corrupt government and wayward religious fervour directed towards him. That said, The Devils is also hugely fun, from Derek Jarman’s immense, overwhelming set design to Vanessa Redgrave’s vulnerable, possessed performance as Sister Jeanne. In March 2012, the BFI finally released The Devils on DVD as part of an impressive two-disc package: a fitting tribute to Russell, who died in November 2011. 

Director: Neil Marshall

Cast: Shauna Macdonald, MyAnna Buring, Natalie Mendoza

Way down in the holes
If it was only about a group of thrill-seeking women lost in a subterranean cave system, Neil Marshall’s intensely uncomfortable survival thriller would still make this list for the sheer claustrophobia it evokes. Adding a race of flesh-craving humanoid mole-rats to the mix almost feels unfair, to both the protagonists and the nervous systems of everyone watching. Marshall’s film arrived a few years before the so-called ‘horror renaissance’, but it deserves mention alongside A Quiet Place and The Conjuring for reminding audiences how fun a well-executed genre picture can be, even when it’s this suffocatingly stressful. Just remember to breathe – it’s remarkable how easy it is to forget.

Director: Michael Powell

Cast: Karlheinz Böhm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey

The eye of the beholder
Made the same year as Psycho – another film about a deranged single man – this was the film that brought Powell’s career to a premature halt, so upsetting did his contemporaries find the story of a young photographer and filmmaker who disguises a murder weapon as a camera in order to trap and kill women. In retrospect, Mark Lewis (Böhm) remains a disturbing figure and his screen murders have an intimate cruelty to them – Shearer’s demise in an empty film studio is especially horrible. But surely it was the most modern elements of the film – the suggestion that the camera itself is so invasive and predatory as to ‘kill’ and the idea that Lewis is playing out a childhood trauma – that alienated viewers in the early 1960s and caused Powell’s critics to grumble instead about its portrayal of semi-naked prostitutes? This is a great horror film about the horror of cinema itself. 

Director: Hideo Nakata

Cast: Nanako Matsushima, Miki Nakatani

Who’s that girl?
It is possibly the scariest scene in cinema history: (spoiler alert!) a man watches a video in which a ghostly figure in white, long black hair pulled witchily over her face, crawls like nothing human out of a well and then just keeps coming, out of his TV and into the real world... Ring is a masterpiece of fear and atmospheric terror. A journalist (Nanako Matsushima) is investigating a rumour that’s spreading like wildfire among teenagers about a spooky VHS. Everyone who has watched the video, so the story goes, dies seven days later. The drip, drip, drip of dread of Hideo Nakata’s film will turn your stomach to ice – it’s not for nothing that Ring is highest grossing horror in Japanese film history. 

Director: Philip Kaufman

Cast: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum

Vote for the green party 
It’s gratifying to see both Body Snatchers movies on this list: Don Siegel’s 1956 original may be punchier and more bracing, but Philip The Right Stuff Kaufman’s ’70s remake is funnier and more self-aware. While the original movie was (depending on who you believe) an examination of either McCarthyist conformity or encroaching communism, the remake takes things into weirder, more oblique territory, lampooning the fallout from the ’60s ideal with its lentils-and-beansprouts nature freaks and its bandwagon-jumping psychotherapy converts. Plus, it’s an absolutely terrific horror movie: the scene where Sutherland smashes up a gestating pod-person with a rake is gruesome as hell, but it’s that famously devastating closing shot that really chills the blood. 

Directors: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer

Cast: Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers, Ralph Michael

Don’t be a dummy 
It’s Redgrave as a ventriloquist possessed by his own dummy that most people rightly remember about this Ealing Studios anthology of horror yarns, woven together as a series of tales told by guests at a tea party at a remote cottage. The tales themselves vary in quality, but the talent involved – the cream of Ealing – remains impressive. As well as the ventriloquist’s episode, the other strong segment is directed by Robert Hamer (It Always Rains on Sunday) and features a mirror that reflects another time and place. For this story, a husband (Michael) is possessed, dragged into the mirror and inspired to try and kill his wife (Withers). Horror disappeared from cinemas during the war, so this marked a return to screens for the genre. 

Director: Alejandro Amenábar

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Christopher Eccleston

Jersey devil 
Nicole Kidman plays the mother of two young children who have a photo-sensitive disorder that forces them to stay indoors in this distinctly grown-up ghost story set on the island of Jersey in 1945. With hints of 1951’s The Innocents (itself based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw), Spanish writer-director Alejandro Amenabar upsets the equilibrium of this family’s prim, proper lives by introducing a trio of new servants to the house (Eric Sykes plays a gardener) with whom arrive a series of low-key but upending supernatural goings-on. The scares here are incremental and subtle, driven not by outright terror but by doors that close themselves or pianos that play on their own. This is mature psychological horror, built on intelligence and an alluring, solid foundation of old-fashioned craft.

Director: Jonathan Demme

Cast: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins

He’d like to have you for dinner!
Ah yes, the famous biopic of the late, great gentleman cannibal, Hannibal Lecter. No, he didn’t actually exist, but you can almost forgive certain mush-brained politicians for seeming to think he did. Anthony Hopkins is chillingly believable in the role, playing him not as a brute or monster, like most serial killers to that point, but as a man of manners, intelligent as he is unfeeling. He is not the only reason Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winner succeeds: Jodie Foster is equally mesmerising as the FBI agent staring the devil in the eye and trying not to flinch. And Lecter isn't even the biggest sicko in the movie. But his presence permeates the entire film, even as he spends most of it in prison — and indeed, it can still be felt today, from movies like Longlegs to the presidential candidates invoking his name, hoping to terrify voters into submission.

Director: Roman Polanski

Cast: Roman Polanski, Isabelle Adjani

Roman á clef
What is it about Polanski and confined spaces? With Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and finally this Paris-set film, the Polish director proved himself a master of turning the humble flat into frightening domestic terrain. Here, Polanski himself plays a man who moves into an empty apartment, previously occupied by a woman who attempted suicide, and finds himself at the centre of a paranoid storm in which his neighbours are increasingly accusing and vicious towards him – causing his mental state to worsen as it becomes less and less clear exactly what’s real and what’s not. The Tenant may be set in the present, but it’s hard not to impose the horror of Polanski’s own childhood experiences in the Warsaw ghetto on to this story of the walls closing in on one man’s world. 

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann

It’s all in the mind
It’s hard to watch Swedish actor von Sydow as a tortured artist in Bergman’s portrait of a man in deep crisis without thinking of the same actor’s self-mocking act as a troubled painter in Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters (1986). This is deadly serious though: the real and imagined sit side by side and haunt each other as von Sydow’s demons take over the imagery and mood of the film as his wife (Ullman) recalls this terrible period in her life. Conceived alongside Persona, Bergman offers the full horror of an artist’s breakdown and crumbling of his marriage (and perhaps his wife’s mind too) – all of which is presented, at times, as a full-on Gothic nightmare, with characters walking on ceilings, men appearing in hallucinations as birds and a gruesome flashback in which Von Sydow’s character remembers attacking a young boy with a rock. Haunting – and even more so when you discover it emerged from Bergman’s own demons and nervous breakdown in the mid-1960s. 

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Marisa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega

Ghosts of the civil dead
A smaller-scale companion piece to Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone also follows children through the fog of the Spanish Civil War. Unfolding as a gothic mystery with shades of Lord of the Flies, it’s a film dripping with mesmerising, threatening imagery: an unexploded bomb creaking in a schoolyard, a ghostly boy whose cracked skull seeps blood upward into the ether. Like the supremely creepy, del Toro-produced The Orphanage, we’re soon to discover that the ghosts are the least sinister thing lurking in damp cellars and crumbling corridors. It’s a film that lingers with you, and one that makes you wish that the now Oscar-winning auteur would revisit his roots as a master of small-scale horrors with huge emotional weight. 

Director: Andrzej Zulawski

Cast: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Heinz Bennent

Breaking up is hard to do
A disorienting depiction of the psychological ravages of divorce – with a dash of Cronenbergian body horror – Polish director Andrzej Zulawski’s unnervingly intense film seems to be  suffering from some kind of demonic possession itself. The camera continually swirls around Mark (Neill) and Anna (Adjani), the disintegrating couple at the movie’s centre, conveying their shared madness by capturing them in increasingly tight close-ups. Adjani, in particular, legitimately disturbs as a wife at her breaking point, screeching and crying like Shelley Duvall in The Shining channeling Diamanda Galas. In one remarkable scene in a subway station, Adjani whips herself into a convulsive ballet before collapsing to the ground in a pool of blood and other fluids. Like the film itself, it is bravely unhinged.

Director: Adrian Lyne

Cast: Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Pena, Danny Aiello

One pill makes you larger…
A surprise entry on this list, Lyne’s psychedelic post-’Nam comedown thriller seems to have fallen from favour in recent years, but has evidently managed to stick in the minds of horror experts. In a decisive and unexpected break from his then-popular goofy-dweeb persona, Robbins plays Jacob, a worn-out war veteran whose mind begins to fragment once the conflict is over. Is he going crazy, or are there darker forces at work? Beautifully designed by Fatal Attraction helmer Lyne, Jacob’s Ladder feels like an offbeat slice of post-hippy experimentation retooled for the MTV generation: what it lacks in depth and subtlety, it more than makes up for in shock tactics and woozy unpredictability, all anchored in Robbins’s wide-eyed and pitiable central turn. 

Director: Georges Franju

Cast: Edith Scob, Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel

Flaying alive 
Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In was inspired in part by Franju’s clinical, monochrome movie about an obsessive professor of plastic surgery. With the help of his lover/assistant, Louise (Valli), Professeur Génessier (Brasseur) abducts and peels the faces off young women. He then grafts the victims’ flayed visage on his daughter Christiane’s badly scarred face, which in the meantime is hidden and protected by a featureless plastic mask. Effectively imprisoned by her father, who feels responsible for the car accident in which she was disfigured, the infantilised Christiane is like a caged baby bird waiting to find its wings. There were reports of audience members fainting during the facial surgery scenes, but for Franju this was a tale of anguish rather than a horror movie per se. 

Director: James Whale

Cast: Colin Clive, Boris Karloff, Mae Clarke

Gods and monsters 
The door opens and the monster lumbers in, taking his first unsteady baby steps. He’s alive! But as he turns to the face the camera, there’s a ghoulish deadness behind his eyes. How we picture Frankenstein’s monster is defined by make-up legend Jack Pierce’s handiwork: those neck-bolts, the flat head, the sunken eyes. In 1932 the audience was expecting Bela Lugosi as the Monster, but he’d been dropped by the studio (and Lugosi himself had disapproved of the way the script turned Mary Shelley’s philosophising creation into a non-speaking part). Boris Karloff, then a relative unknown, was cast by on-the-rise director James Whale, who also brought to Frankenstein his trademark dry wit. Not that his film lacks scares, and a scene in which a farmer carries the limp body of his daughter through a village celebrating Frankenstein’s wedding is still deeply shocking. 

Director: Robin Hardy

Cast: Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland

Island strife
Fifty years old and as chillingly essential as ever, Robin Hardy’s landmark folk horror is an offering to the cinematic gods that required a sacrifice or two of its own just to get made on Scotland’s tropical west coast back in 1972. But if its path to the screen was almost as rocky as the journey Edward Woodward’s Presbyterian policeman makes through the pagan community of Summerisle – its four different cuts are testament to a brutal post-production battle – the toil and pain is nowhere to be found in its creepily unfolding tale of dawning terror. Christopher Lee rated his performance as the suave, menacing Lord Summerisle, a cult leader who’d probably have ten million YouTube subscribers these days, one of his finest, while Woodward essays a clenched, tormented man of faith, whose doggedness leaves him blindsided, trapped and doomed. The ending, of course, needs no introduction, if a whole lot of recovering from.

Director: Herk Harvey

Cast: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger

Haunted dancehall
Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls may not be the scariest movie ever made, but it’s certainly one of the eeriest. An insidiously cheap creepshow that feels like it’s being projected directly from your nightmares (Harvey used an Arriflex camera – typically used for newsreels – as a cost-cutting measure, adding an unsettling edge of realism), the film tells the barebones story of a woman who loses a drag race by driving off a bridge and into the river below. She survives the accident, but comes to with no memory of what transpired. And that’s when things get weird. Casting himself as the face of inexplicable evil and slowly dismantling any semblance of logic, Harvey creates a purgatorial dead-end where every turn just leads deeper into the darkness. In the process, he paved the way for Eraserhead and other experimental, micro-budget terrors. 

Director: James Whale

Cast: Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Elsa Lanchester, Ernest Thesiger

She’s alive!
Is Bride of Frankenstein the best film inspired by Mary Frankenstein’s nineteenth-century bone-chiller? Time Out’s panel of experts voted it so. Director Whale tried to duck out of making a follow-up to his 1931 hit Frankenstein, but the studio turned the screws and Whale caved, declaring that if he must make another film, it would be a real ‘hoot’. But while Bride is full of camp, sly humour, Karloff’s return as the lumbering monster is also incredibly moving. Dr Frankenstein has given up playing God and tinkering with cadavers, but his dastardly mentor Praetorious blackmails him into creating a mate (Lanchester) for the monster. Legendary make-up ace Jack Pierce’s look for the Bride – barbed wire scars, diva make-up, frizzed out hair streaked with lightening bolts – and Lanchester’s jolting movements, eerily innocent, make this an American gothic to remember. A musical reimagining, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is coming in 2025.

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Cast: Simone Simon, Kent Smith

Watch out boy, she’ll chew you up
The idea of horror as an act of political or cultural subversion may have gained traction in the ’70s, but it’s been there all along: what is Shelley’s Frankenstein if not a satire on class? The message in Jacques Tourneur’s eerily beautiful Cat People may be more subtle, but it’s equally persuasive: this is a study of the innate power of female sexuality, and how suppressing that power can force it to burst forth in unexpected and dangerous ways. Simone Simon plays Irena, A Serbian immigrant whose repressive childhood – involving, the film implies, sexual abuse – causes her to transform into a deadly panther in moments of arousal. The film’s power lies in the way Tourneur subtly explores these themes without ever crossing the line of taste, or losing sight of the emotional tragedy at the story’s core. 

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: James Woods, Sonja Smits, Debbie Harry

Long live the new flesh 
Cronenberg’s most prescient film explores, through the eyes and media-altered mind of sleazy cable television programmer Max Renn (James Woods), the dangerous world imagined by the censors – one in which exposure to extreme images destroys the viewer’s ability to distinguish between plastic reality and perverse fantasy. As the late-night Videodrome channel’s violent imagery distorts Max’s perception, we are forced to share his subjective point of view. So we can’t be sure if his sado-masochistic relationship with Nicki Brand (Blondie singer Harry) is any more real than the vagina-like orifice that has opened up in his stomach. And when Max slots a video tape into this corporeal opening, flesh and technology meld into one. ‘You have to learn to live with a strange new reality,’ insists self-styled media evangelist Brian O’Blivion. And how. 

Director: Peter Medak

Cast: George C Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas

Did it just get cold in here...?
Old fashioned in the best sense of the phrase, Medak’s oft-neglected supernatural thriller uses pure cinematic technique to scare the hell out of us. The magisterial Scott plays a well known composer who, following the death of his wife and son in a road accident, takes up a teaching job in Seattle and moves into an eerie, haunted Victorian house. Even the most hackneyed scenes, such as a séance in which a scribbling medium attempts to contact the unquiet spirit of the murdered boy, are staged with consummate skill and emotional conviction. Guillermo del Toro maintains that the best ghost stories all have an undertow of melancholy. That’s certainly true here. 

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor

Our feathered friends 
Along with Psycho, this loose spin on a Daphne du Maurier novella marked Hitchcock’s main foray into horror territory. The Birds sees pernicious flocks of birds follow a metropolitan, San Franciscan blonde (Tippi Hedren) to a sleepy coastal town, and it’s these winged creatures that terrify as Hedren fights to resist being pecked to death. Hitchcock often scares by suggestion as crows appear on telegraph wires and the noise of them becomes increasingly intense – but he also shows full-on, unsettling aerial attacks, and the special effects for these scenes still endure. Psychologically, The Birds is perhaps not Hitchcock’s most fully realised film, but it’s certainly one of his most open as we are left to wonder why, exactly, Hedren’s fledgling romance with Rod Taylor and his claustrophobic relationship with his mum (Jessica Tandy) inspire such avian terror. Just imagine those birds in 3D. 

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss

You can make it on your own
Low-budget DIY horror was already a force by 1981 – the Texas Chain Saw Massacre folks had shown that you could make millions with an old camera, some enthusiastic friends and a few garden tools – but the movie which took the movement to new heights was Raimi’s astonishing debut. Adapting their own short Within the Woods, childhood friends Raimi, producer Robert Tapert and star Campbell secured funding from local businesses and traipsed off to the forest to make one of the most ferocious, original and unrelenting horror movies of all time. Sure, it looks a little rough around the edges now (and that still censored tree-rape scene is just unnecessarily vicious), but The Evil Dead remains an inspiration for first-time filmmakers, a testament to the power of plasticine, glue and gumption. 

Directors: Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez

Cast: Heather Donahue, Michael C Williams, Joshua Leonard

A year later their footage was found... 
Although the alleged anthropological footage of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) pre-dated Myrick and Sánchez's terrifying faux documentary by nearly two decades, this film made them the founding fathers of modern ‘found footage’ horror. Shot for $50,000 in just eight days, it purports to show an edited version of the grainy, hand-held videotape shot by missing film students Heather, Josh and Michael, while investigating the Blair Witch legend in and around Burkittsville, Maryland. There are interviews with locals, footage of the trio getting hopelessly lost in the woods, and increasingly hysterical arguments. At night, inside their flimsy tent, they are assailed by creepy scuffling and eerie screams. Crucially, since neither director was a horror nerd, they cut a highly original path through the dark woods of our imagination. 

Director: Tobe Hooper

Cast: JoBeth Williams, Heather O’Rourke, Craig T Nelson

See you on the otherside
Do funfair haunted houses still exist, or are they obsolete in this era of torture porn and human centipedes? Either way, they’re the perfect comparison for Poltergeist, a film which draws you in, gooses you gleefully for two hours then spits you out the other side, quivering but happy. There’s nothing too nasty in this effects-packed ghost story – the odd face-rip, the occasional pop-up corpse – but the effect is more bracing and enjoyable than a hundred Hostels. The big question still surrounding the film, of course, is who really made the movie – credited director Tobe Hooper, or Steven Spielberg, the producer whose hands-on approach led some observers to cry foul. There’s no doubt that Poltergeist looks and feels like a Spielberg movie, all suburban angst and shimmering God-light – but it has a wholly Hooper-ish ferocity at points as well. Let’s call it a happy collaboration. 

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Gregory Peck, Lee Remick

Parents just don't understand 
A genuine blockbuster upon release, Richard Donner’s contribution to the Satanic panic wave of the ’70s and ’80s sent mothers digging through their kid’s hair for the mark of the beast and forever made it impossible for anyone named Damien to go to the bank or order a drink at Starbucks without receiving a few raised eyebrows. While not nearly as artful as Rosemary’s Baby – the other big movie about parents unwittingly raising the devil’s child, released a decade prior – it is much more accessible, and no less eerie, even if its plotting is quite a bit sillier. After his own son dies during childbirth, an American diplomat (a fully committed Gregory Peck) swaps him with a recently orphaned newborn, somehow without his wife (Lee Remick) knowing, and within five years realises why the hospital chaplain was so quick to give the baby up. Peck sells it all with his perpetually furrowed (and bushy) brow, and the pacing is Jaws-level tight. Ignore the multiple sequels, but the 2024 prequel reconnects with many of the elements that made the original so successful.  

Director: Tod Browning

Cast: Olga Baclanova, Harry Earles

One of us, one of us…
Tod Browning’s pre-Code masterpiece is a movie at once years ahead of its time and difficult to imagine a major studio getting behind today. In telling the sordid tale of a circus troupe infiltrated by a gold-digging normie, Browning famously cast actual sideshow performers, including Siamese twins, a limbless man and a ‘pinhead’. At the time, it icked out audiences, pissed off MGM head Irving Thalberg and damaged Browning’s reputation – and it’s easy to imagine the deluge of thinkpieces decrying it as ‘exploitative’ that’d come out if it was made now. But if Freaks were merely, well, a freak show, it’d be thought of as little more than a historical curiosity. Instead, it treats the cast – who, it must be said, are made for the camera in more ways than one – with more humanity than many other filmmakers would have, then or now. Even in its terrifying climax, in which the troupe exacts chilling revenge against the conniving intruder in their midst, it’s made clear that the true monsters aren’t the ones with physical deformities… which probably upset theater-goers and Hollywood power players more than anything else.

Director: FW Murnau

Cast: Max Schreck, Greta Schröder

Birth of a nation
The film that made it all happen, Murnau’s loose, unofficial adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula may not have been the first horror movie (that honour probably goes to George Meliés’s Le Manoir du Diable) but it’s certainly the most influential. (See its many remakes, including Robert Eggers' upscaled 2025 take.) So many keynotes of the genre emerge fully formed here: the use of light and shadow, threat and tension, beauty and ugliness, a man in grotesque make-up threatening an innocent girl. And what’s remarkable is that it remains a deeply unsettling piece of work: Schreck’s contorted performance, not to mention that hideous, batlike make-up, may be the film’s most iconic image, but the plague-of-rats scene is deeply unnerving too – we can only imagine how it must have seemed to audiences emerging from the First World War. 

Director: Robert Wise

Cast: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson

Things that go bump in the night
With some horror movies, it’s all about context – watch The Haunting on a well-lit afternoon and it’ll seem creaky, old-fashioned, even a bit silly. But watch it late at night, alone, and this might be the greatest ghost story of them all, in which the things going bump in the night aren’t out there in the dark, but right inside the room – or inside your mind. The use of wide angles is gorgeously unsettling – director Robert Wise is clearly a student of Orson Welles, whose off-kilter influence is all over the film. Wise would return to terrify us again four years later with The Sound of Music – a jack of all trades, indeed.

Director: Takashi Miike

Cast: Ryo Ishibashi, Eihi Shiina, Jun Kunimura

Love hurts
It’s one of the great fake-outs in movie history. If you didn’t know any better – or if you’re unfamiliar with the work of deranged genius Takashi Miike – for much of Audition’s runtime, you might think you were watching a staid romantic dramedy about a widower searching for a new wife via a fake casting call. Shoot, even if you are familiar with the Miike oeuvre, you’d might think it an outlier in the canon of the guy known for such bloody disgusting displays as Ichi the Killer and The Happiness of the Katakuris, given how slow and unassuming and, frankly, boring the first half of the picture is. And then, just as you’ve been lulled nearly to sleep, blammo: out comes the needles and piano wire, as the widower’s meek new bride turns out to be not so meek after all. That narrative curveball, though, is just one element that makes it a horror classic. Beneath its ultraviolent conclusion lies a piercing (ahem) critique of masculinity and gender roles in Japan. 

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon

Freddy’s coming for you
It’s arguably the single greatest set-up for a modern horror movie: a monster that invades your dreams, slashing away at your very psyche with his razor-fingered gloves. And while the franchise may have descended swiftly into self-parody – they marketed Freddy Krueger dolls to pre-teens, if you recall – the original remains one of the most daring, inventive and downright terrifying shockers of the last century. Wes Craven’s control over his material is absolute, and even a handful of low-rent, low-budget effects can’t undermine the mounting air of existential, avant-garde dread. It’s also, lest we forget, the movie that made a studio: New Line Cinema were barely a glint in the indie scene’s eye when they forked out $1.8 million for Wes Craven to realise his delirious vision. Seven Nightmare sequels and little more than a decade later, they funded the entire Lord of the Rings’ trilogy. Cheers, Freddy. 

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson

My bloody valentine
In the movies, vampirism is often employed as a metaphor for all sorts of tough subjects, from drug addiction to AIDS. In this Scandinavian insta-classic, it’s used to explore a less grim but more broadly relatable experience: adolescent loneliness. Oskar (Hedebrant) is a pre-teen outcast living in an icy Swedish suburb who forges a strong bond with a girl named Eli (Leandersson) who doesn’t seem to have many other friends either, for reasons that are both similar and drastically different. ‘I'm 12,’ she tells him. ‘But I've been 12 for a long time.’ Its tone (and landscape) is frigid but the emotions are warm – Alfredson handles the young friendship with great sensitivity, and turns in something closer to the Dardenne brothers than a true horror movie, despite containing at least one very memorable dismembering. And yet, it’s one of the most effective uses of vampire mythology ever made. The American remake isn’t half-bad either, but the original will make your heart swell as much as your skin crawl.

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis

Friends don’t let friends teleport
David Cronenberg’s delirious reimagining of that old story of a scientist whose experiments with teleportation lead to a nasty genetic mixup, The Fly isn’t just one of the very finest horror movies, it’s also one of cinema’s great tragic romances. Charming, tentative and beautifully written, the initial relationship between leads Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis harks back to the screwball romances of old, which only makes Goldblum’s ensuing physical and mental degradation all the more horrifying to behold. In Cronenberg’s hands, this genetic disease becomes a forceful metaphor for everything bad you can imagine, from cancer, Aids and ageing to lost love and inexplicable heartbreak. Beautiful, sickening, exhilarating, savage, inspiring and inspired, The Fly is humanist cinema at its most non-human, and a master filmmaker’s finest hour. 

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry

Hail to the king, baby
In which Bruce Campbell reveals himself to be the Fangoria generation’s answer to Buster Keaton. The Evil Dead had humour but it was still, at heart, a Video Nasty: that tree-rape scene tended to kill the chuckles. But in Evil Dead 2, the fact that Raimi and Campbell had begun their career alternating between horror shorts and Three Stooges knockoffs paid massive dividends: this is without doubt the most successful blend of horror and comedy, and a classic in either field. The breakthrough moment comes midway, as Campbell’s own hand is possessed by an evil spirit, leading to some of the most jawdropping slapstick imaginable (and a peerless Hemingway gag). But Raimi never forgets to keep the blood flowing: limbs fly, eyeballs explode, and you don’t even want to know what goes on in that woodshed. 

Director: John Landis

Cast: David Naughton, Jenny Agutter, Griffin Dunne

His hair was perfect
Most horror-comedies tend to overdo the comedy, leaving the horror elements light and limp. Not so here. Don’t get us wrong: it’s mighty funny, typically at the expense of the Brits, who are painted as either drunken townies or pretentious big city snobs. But no level of droll caricature can soften the visceral terror of watching David Naughton’s lupine transformation, which changed the game for the werewolf subgenre. No more Lon Chaney disappearing into the woods and returning with a fur mask. Instead, devised by effects genius Rick Baker, it’s depicted with skin-stretching, stomach-churning, literally-hair-raising realism typically reserved for nature documentaries or health class videos about childbirth. The initial transformation is so impressive the Academy Awards basically invented the Best Make-Up category just to properly honour Baker’s achievement, and if the movie had nothing else going for it, it would probably still make this list for that scene alone. But the whole thing is monstrously entertaining, and contains more than one bravura moment – the beast’s climatic rampage through Piccadilly Circus is iconic in its own right.

Director: Brian De Palma

Cast: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving

Don’t get mad, get even
She wasn’t the favourite to play ‘creepy Carrie’, but it’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Sissy Spacek (looking like she’s stepped into the ‘70s from another time altogether) in the role. Stephen King got the idea for the novel, his first, in the girls’ locker room of a college where he was working as a caretaker. Teenage girls can be pure evil and it’s in a locker room that we meet Carrie, who’s just had her first period and is being told to ‘plug it up!’ by the mean girls. Carrie’s secret is that she has telekinetic powers, which are about to wreak an apocalypse at the school prom. As for the pig’s blood scene, it doesn’t matter how many times you watch it, you’re willing that bucket not to drop. Spacek gamely offered to be covered in real pig’s blood, but in the end was drenched with a mix of syrup and food colouring. 

Director: Jack Clayton

Cast: Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave, Pamela Franklin

Suffer the little children
Kids are creepy enough in real life, with their pliable morals and tiny little hands. Still, the movies always manage to take it a step further. Arguably the most irksome spooky-child movie in existence, The Innocents was adapted by no less a light than Truman Capote from Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, about a governess hired to educate two aristocratic brats who might be hiding a dark, supernatural secret. Consciously attempting to place his film apart from the operatic antics of Hammer, director Jack Clayton created a masterwork of restraint, from Deborah Kerr’s lip-biting lead performance to the film’s groundbreaking but subtly employed electronic score. 

Director: Ari Aster

Cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne

Where’s your head at?
Like The Babadook, it’s the disruption of domesticity and family trauma that haunts Hereditary, the debut film from writer-director Ari Aster. Toni Collette plays Annie, an artist who constructs uncannily realistic dioramas: miniature rooms that embody the film’s theme of a larger, malevolent entity playing with human toys. Her family is on the brink, with teenager stoner son Peter (Alex Wolff) and creepy daughter Charlie (played expertly by Milly Shapiro) becoming increasingly more disturbed as the film progresses. After a catastrophic and stomach-churning accident, the film takes another turn, forcing the viewer to take a leap of faith as a mother’s grief merges with the supernatural. Thankfully, Aster manages it with his gift of exquisite camera placement and generous patience; he’s not merely a summoner of Kubrickian chill but also brings empathy. 

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Cast: Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie

Nothing is what it seems
Voted the best British film of all time in a 2010 Time Out poll of experts, Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s short story isn't just a masterpiece of terror, it’s also a work of bottomless empathy and slender, spectral beauty. This being a list of horror movies, we’ll skip over the film’s infamous marital sex scene – still, in this writer's opinion, the most convincing ever filmed – and go straight to the spooky bits: the shots of Venice in winter, all boarded up and lonesome; the two psychic sisters, imparting their impenetrable orphic knowledge; and most of all that hammer-blow of an ending, in which a child-sized crimson Mackintosh coat hides the worst of all possible fears. 

Director: George A Romero

Cast: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Marilyn Eastman

The beginning of the end
The film that changed it all, that took horror out of the realm of creaky castles and mad science and into the harsh light of the modern day. Director George Romero insists that much of what made his debut so groundbreaking – the in-your-face documentary camerawork, the unadorned interiors and unpolished performances – were just the necessary result of zero-budget filmmaking. But that’s not the case for the film’s progressive race and gender politics, or its slam-bang editing, or its show-stopping violence: as the dead girl rises up to feed on her helpless mother, it’s still possible to feel the world shift a little on its axis. 

Director: Dario Argento

Cast: Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci

Murder in the dance school
Storywise, there isn’t much to Dario Argento’s giallo masterpiece: an American girl (Jessica Harper) attends a prestigious ballet academy in Germany, only to discover evil forces lurking within. It’s the stuff of fairy tales; indeed, Argento has noted Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as an influence. Stylistically, though, there may not be another horror movie that does quite as much, and with such singular flair. It’s pure sensory overload, full of unnaturally bright primary colours, over-the-top setpieces involving pits of razor wire and exposed organs, and a shuddering soundtrack from Italian prog rockers Goblin, which doesn’t so much raise goosebumps as strip flesh straight from the bone. Not even Thom Yorke, who scored Guadagnino’s 2018 remake, can compare. Few movies can: it’s a nightmare seemingly transposed directly from subconscious to screen.

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss

Blood in the water
It’s often said that Steven Spielberg’s monumental blockbuster scared off an entire generation from ever stepping a pinky toe in the ocean again. But to paraphrase an old Chris Rock bit, that shark didn’t go crazy – that shark went shark. In other words, you can’t blame a carnivorous sea beast for eating people if those people are going to keep brazenly dangling their juicy limbs in front of its snout. (Yes, in real life, it’s extremely rare for sharks to attack humans, and Spielberg did more damage to the reputation of the Carcharodon carcharias than anyone else, but that’s not really the point.) If Amity Island’s elected officials had done the right thing and closed the beaches immediately, the body count would’ve stalled at one hippie party girl. (RIP, Chrissie.) And that – along with the masterful pacing, get-you-every-time jump scares and addition-by-subtraction effects – is what makes Jaws so immortally frightening. Sure, being bitten in half by a great white seems like a terrible way to die, but it’s an avoidable fear. Greed, incompetence and hubris, though? Those are threats you can’t escape, whether you go in the water or not.

Director: George A Romero

Cast: Ken Foree, Gaylen Ross, David Emge

Shop ’n’ maul
With Night of the Living Dead, George Romero invented the modern zombie movie. Then, a decade later, he changed the game all over again. Much of Dawn of the Dead’s reputation is steeped in its next-level gore, and yes, Tom Savini’s effects are still among the most nauseating ever put on screen. But Romero ups the volume on everything from his first film: the scope, the action, the humour, the social commentary. Shifting from the country to the ’burbs, the movie follows four survivors as they hole up in a massive shopping mall, unaware that even the undead feel an instinctual pull to shop ’til they drop. All zombie flicks since follow in its shambling footsteps, and while some may be bigger, scarier, funnier, even gorier, not even Romero himself could make something as entertaining – though he did get close.

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis

Is that a carving knife in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?
Movie snobs always have to point out that Bob Clark’s Black Christmas actually birthed the slasher subgenre, but it was the astonishing success of John Carpenter’s breakthrough indie ($70 million worldwide on a $300,000 budget) that really set things in motion. But forget all the masked wannabes and knife-wielding suburban loonies that came after, and marvel at the streamlined power of Carpenter’s film: the gliding camera, the concealing shadows, the single-minded presence of masked villain Michael Myers, as perfect a killer as the shark in Jaws. Almost four decades later, it’s still close to flawless. 

Director: Roman Polanski

Cast: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon

The hoof that rocks the cradle
It’s hard enough moving into a flat and trying to start a family without having to wrestle with the enveloping suspicion that your new neighbours might be satanists dead-set on parenting a demon child via you. This is the intelligent, subtle face of horror, as Polanski limits the specifics to a minimum and keeps us guessing as to how much is going on merely in the mind of Mia Farrow’s character as she comes to believe she’s been impregnated by a creepy bunch of well-to-do Manhattanites with a connection to the occult. There are some more explicit key scenes – a potential nighttime rape and a chilling climax – that serve to get right under our skin without making the whole premise seem ridiculous. Farrow and Cassavetes’s performances as a couple disintegrating serve Polanski well in his attempt to make the potential alienation of everyday family life feel horrific, and the faux-naive score, evoking lullabies, makes the whole affair feel doubly creepy in the most heady way possible. 

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley

Ch-ch-changes
The world wasn’t ready for The Thing. It’s hard to imagine given its current enshrinement in the sci-fi and horror canons, but when John Carpenter released his remake of 1951’s The Thing From Another World, it was slagged off as nothing more than an Alien ripoff more interested in boundary-pushing special effects than character and story. Even considering the context of the time period, you have to wonder if critics of the day were even watching the same movie. Sure, the gory bits stick deep in both memory and stomach. But the shocking eruptions of viscera are buoyed by the paranoid tension that runs through the US Outpost 31 Antarctic research center, as a parasitic alien lifeform infiltrates, mutates and separates its dozen isolated crew members. Forty years later, The Thing is rightly regarded as Carpenter’s masterpiece. Hey, things change – sometimes for the better.    

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh

What would mother think?
A few years back, David Thomson’s book The Moment of Psycho argued that Alfred Hitchcock’s blackly comic serial-killer masterpiece didn’t just change cinema, but society itself. By confronting audiences with everyday horrors; by knowingly manipulating them into sympathising with a murderer; by offering an amoral, adulterous heroine then bumping her off so savagely; by mocking Freudian psychology and the pompous stuffed-shirts who practice it; by pushing an image of America as a trap-laden labyrinth populated by creepy cops and nice-as-pie psychopaths; and by implying that women (brace yourself now) actually use the toilet sometimes, Hitch helped pave the way for all the cultural earthquakes and moral rebalancing acts that the coming decade had to offer. And he did it all with a wink and a smile. Now that’s showbusiness.

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm

The miracle of birth
Talk about above and beyond: Ridley Scott was hired by Twentieth Century Fox to make ‘Jaws in space’, and came back with one of the most stylish, subversive, downright beautiful films in either the horror or sci-fi genre. The masterstroke, of course, was hiring Swiss madman HR Giger as the film’s chief designer – his work brings a slippery, organic grotesquerie to what could’ve been a straight-up bug hunt (© Aliens). But let’s not overlook Dan O’Bannon’s script, which builds character without assigning age, race or even gender – plus one of the finest casts ever assembled. 

Director: Tobe Hooper

Cast: Gunnar Hansen, Marilyn Burns

Sounds like the neighbours are doing DIY again
‘Who will survive… and what will be left of them?’ It’s a question that applies as much to the audience for Tobe Hooper’s relentless stalk-and-saw shocker as to its doomed, hapless characters. Horror had never been this raw before, and it could be argued that it hasn’t since, the sheer grimy ugliness of the piece leading some to walk out, others to cry sadism and many more to acclaim the film as a modern masterpiece; horror in its purest, most unforgiving form. Sequels and remakes have come thick and fast, but nothing will ever match your first encounter with the original and its brutal, hammer-over-the-head power. 

Director: Stanley Kubrick 

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall 

Do not disturb
The scariest moments in The Shining are so iconic they’ve become in-jokes: Jack Nicholson leering psychotically from posters on the walls of student bedrooms everywhere... ‘Here’s Johnny’. Even so, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of execution and claustrophobia still retains the power to frighten audiences out of their wits. Nicholson is Jack Torrance, a writer working as a caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains over winter. Stephen King, on whose novel the film was based, was famously unimpressed. The problem, he said, was that ghost-sceptic Kubrick was ‘a man who thinks too much and feels too little’. He resented Kubrick for stripping out the supernatural elements of his story. Torrance is not tortured by ghosts but by inadequacy and alcoholism. And for many, it’s as a study of insanity and failure that The Shining is so chilling.

Director: William Friedkin

Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow

Fifty years of sucking cocks in hell
By the ’70s, horror had divided into two camps: on one hand, there were the ‘real life’ terrors of Psycho and Night of the Living Dead, films that brought horror into the realm of the everyday, making it all the more shocking. On the other, there were the more outrageous dream-horrors popular in Europe, the work of Hammer Studios in the UK and Mario Bava and Dario Argento in Italy, films that prized artistry, oddity and explicit gore over narrative logic. The first film to attempt to bring the two together was Rosemary’s Baby, but Polanski’s heart clearly belonged to the surreal. The first to achieve that blend with absolute certainty was The Exorcist – which perhaps explains its position as the unassailable winner of this poll.

In cutting from the clanging bazaars of Iraq to the quiet streets of Georgetown, in blending dizzying dream sequences with starkly believable human drama, Friedkin created a horror movie like no other – both brutal and beautiful, artful and exploitative, exploring wacked-out religious concepts with the clinical precision of an agnostic scientist. And make no mistake: The Exorcist is most definitely a horror film: though it may be filled with rigorously examined ideas and wonderfully observed character moments, its primary concern is with shocking, scaring and, yes, horrifying its audience out of their wits – does mainstream cinema contain a more upsetting image than the crucifix scene? That it still succeeds, almost four decades later, is testament to Friedkin’s remarkable vision.