101 Best Horror Movies of All Time

Is Irena (Simone Simon), the enigmatic Serbian immigrant at the center of Jacques Tourneur’s atmospheric chiller, really evil? She’s different from other women; there’s something about her that makes her unfit for marriage or happiness, although she deeply desires them both. There’s also the legacy that Irena must contend with, in which intense feelings may (or may not) turn her into a predatory jungle cat. The mix of the supernatural and the tragic is typical of the 11 horror films that producer Val Lewton made for RKO Pictures between 1942 and 1944, which relied more on suggestion and imagination over shocks and scares; anyone looking for a prime example of what he brought to the genre could do worse than Cat People‘s stand-out sequence in which Jane Rudolph is stalked by a growling something near a public pool. And it’s a movie long been embraced by queer horror fans, who see themselves in this misunderstood monster.—K.R.

Part neo-Western, part old-school vampire chronicle and 100-percent adrenaline rush, Kathyrn Bigelow’s sophomore feature throws cowpoke-next-door Adrian Pasdar into the deep end with a family of bloodsuckers who tool around in a blacked-out R.V., looking for dinner once the sun goes down. It’s a gory, giddy take on the American love of the open highway, where dangerous outlaw types like Lance Henriksen’s alpha vamp and Bill Paxton’s loose cannon prey on anyone in their path. A great, gorgeously gory take on the born-to-be-wild mythology of the U.S. and horror-movie archetypes, especially when a massacre at a shitkicker bar (“Finger-lickin’ good!”) lets the two forces duke it out one opened jugular at a time. —D.F.

Yes, Steven Spielberg’s ultimate summer movie is an action-adventure, particularly in the boat-bound second half. But it’s also a master class in the efficient delivery of scares, thanks to Spielberg’s meticulous compositions, Verna Field’s razor-sharp editing, and John Williams’ score, which turned a simple two-note progression into one of the most recognizable music cues this side of Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking “Psycho” violins. And though it may not be a non-stop fright machine, Jaws has two of the best jump-scares in film history. (You know the ones.) As with much of the best horror, the picture lands because the characters are so clearly defined and humanely played — the killer shark that’s terrorizing beaches of Amity Island may not have much personality (he’s a shark, after all). But we know what he can do, and we know we like Sheriff Brody and Matt Hooper and the salty Quint, so we care about them defeating that very hungry beast.—J.B.

Baltimore’s cunning cannibalistic sociopath Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins in seminal dead-eyed creep mode) hungers for the company of FBI Academy star pupil Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster). She needs a psychological profile of serial killer Buffalo Bill. He wants a cell-block room with a view — plus a chance to probe Starling’s West Virginian childhood trauma. Feminist ally Jonathan Demme mined Thomas Harris’ Grand Guignol police procedural novel for mournful misogynist gold, and walked away with an Oscar-showered pop-culture revelation that redefined fava beans, face masks, and putting lotions in baskets. Hopkins’ Welsh hiss epitomizes sophisticated depravity, but the film’s real innovation is a subversive POV technique that brilliantly complements how Foster navigates the prejudices, lusts, lies, and manipulative appetites of the countless men surrounding her.—S.G.

In an uncharted region of the South Seas, there sits an island lorded over by one Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton, never creepier). He’s been conducting experiments of a dubious nature that, he hopes, will speed up the evolutionary process. When shipwrecked sailor Richard Arlen finds himself a temporary “guest” of the good doctor, he begins to suspect what we already know: Moreau has created an army of half human, half-animal abominations. This controversial Pre-Code adaptation of the novel by H.G. Wells’ novel — who hated the movie, saying that it was way too sensationalistic — was banned in Britain for years, and with the possible exception of Freaks, it remains a strong contender for the single most unnerving horror movie to come out of the 1930s. Its cult status has only grown over the years, and you can see its influence in everything from Devo’s “Are we not men?” declarations to the name of the rap trio House of Pain. And yes, the sayer of the laws that the sadistic Moreau imposes on these creatures is indeed Bela Lugosi, on loan from Universal and hidden under one very furry facial pelt.—D.F.

Blasphemous and profane, Ken Russell’s sensational and sensationalized X-rated portrait of disgraced 17th century priest Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) sets fire to the hypocrisy of organized religion. He inflames the passions of the women around him, especially horny nun Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave). But the authorities want to squash the popular, enlightened priest, putting him on trial on invented witchcraft charges. Russell practically dared exhibitors to ban a film so lusty, bloody and unhinged in its willful desecrating of Catholic iconography; like the film’s powers that be, they called his bluff. (It’s still virtually impossible to find The Devils in its original, uncut form.) But if the scenes of torture and rape are graphic, they’re not nearly as disturbing as Russell’s clear-eyed depiction of a society at the mercy of cruel, outdated religious doctrine.—T.G.

An outbreak of a deadly virus has turned Seoul into ground zero for a pandemic, in which victims have a tendency to contort themselves, become violent and crave human flesh. And as we all know, it only takes one infected person to turn a train full of passengers en route to Busan into [dramatic pause] a one-way express to death! After that terror-at-first-bite moment, filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho sets the pace to relentless, enlivening the usual set pieces you’d expect from a zombie movie (the surging mass of walking dead, the fight through a gauntlet of ghouls, the sprinting away from a sudden influx of hungry corpses) with a real sense of flair and Grand Guignol gore. Easily one of the best zombie movies of the last decade.—D.F.

The first film adaptation of a Stephen King story (coincidentally, his first novel) immediately set the standard high. A tale of a bullied high school outcast using her burgeoning telekinetic powers to exact prom-night revenge, it’s lifted by the Oscar-nominated (!) performances of Sissy Spacek as the title character and Piper Laurie as her hidebound, Bible-thumping mother; these are real actors creating real characters and turning in real performances, in material that could have easily and unfortunately veered into camp. And then there’s Brian De Palma’s breathtaking direction: the virtuoso camerawork, the masterful split-screens, and the stunning prom sequence, which uses omniscient perspective, unbroken takes, agonizing slow-motion, and tick-tock timing to play the audience, as his hero Hitchcock used to say, like a piano.—J.B.

For a long time, it seemed like no actor donning the flowing cape could ever hope to compete with memories of Bela Lugosi. And then in strode a 6’5” former intelligence officer by the name of Christopher Lee, who played Transylvania’s thirstiest count with less alien theatricality and more brooding, predatory eroticism, like a jungle cat on the prowl. This loose, mid-century take on the Bram Stoker novel boasts not just Lee’s first of nine appearances as Dracula, but also his first sparring match with Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing — which, after The Curse of Frankenstein, helped to cement these old friends as the genre’s most prolific, popular double act. This duo of these zestfully dignified Englishmen helped British horror house Hammer revive the gothic thrills of the Universal monsters for a new era of more explicit violence and sexuality, both epitomized by a famous close-up of Lee going full vamp, his long, handsome face smeared in blood.—A.A.D.

An atmospheric overdose of shrieking metal, screeching croaks, and unsettled breathing, Jennifer Kent’s debut is the ultimate horror metaphor for grief. A recently widowed single mother (Essie Davis) and her young son (Noah Wiseman) are haunted by a ghouslish specter from a pop-up storybook, whose ratta-tat chant of “ba-BA-ba DOOK! DOOK! DOOK!” give shadows a bad name. Odes to silent film history abound, from the monster’s design of a top hat and talons taking cue from London After Midnight to the creepy usage of Georges Méliès’ shorts. But it’s Davis’ mournfulness, graduating to a delirious ecstasy that culminates in her screaming “I am your mother,” that lifts the film to another level. She walked so Hereditary‘s Toni Collette could run.—R.D.

Italian horror maestro Dario Argento combines his flair for operatic violence with the aura of a fairy tale in the story of a German ballet academy run by witches and the American student (Jessica Harper), who exposes their wicked ways. Its influential mix of Grand Guignol shocks and near-garish aesthetics turn this supernatural classic into something gloriously over the top, but it’s the score from Italian prog-rock band Goblin — one of the most famous in horror history— that really makes chests tense up and palms sweat, layering primal panic on top of Argento’s ravishing visuals.—K.R.

Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer took several shorts stories from J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly and crafted an almost free-form, fright-inducing film in which a visitor (Julian West) with an interest in the occult arrives in a small French town. In quick order, he begins to see shadows moving independently of those who cast them, witnesses both a murder and his own burial alive, and encounters an old woman who justifies the movie’s title. It’s a perfect example of how atmosphere can sometimes trump narrative when it comes to sending shivers down spines, and the way that something as simple as a darkened hallway — or a claustrophobic close-up inside a coffin — can send you screaming for the exits.—D.F.

They called him the King of the Monsters — and it’s no exaggeration to say that Ishiro Honda’s invaluable addition to the horror canon is the king of the giant-monster movies. Hydrogen-bomb testing off the coast of Japan has awakened an ancient, gargantuan reptile from his slumber at the bottom of the sea. (You don’t need to be a history scholar to understand the allegorical resonance of this particular plot point.) Soon, the giant lizard we’d come to know and love as Godzilla is chomping on commuter trains and stomping all over Tokyo. Over the next six-plus decades, Toho Co.’s MVP kaiju would be a good guy, a bad guy, cuddly, campy, and/or paternal; he’d fight against smog monsters, three-headed dragons from outer space and a robot version of himself. But whether you prefer the original version or the extra-crispy edition with added Raymond Burr footage, this very first Godzilla movie gives you the basics in the starkest, most exciting manner possible: We’ve fooled with mother nature. Now it’s time to pay the price, one crushed metropolis at a time.—D.F.

Audiences apparently shrieked and fainted en masse when Mary Philbin crept up behind her organ-playing captor, ripped off his mask, and revealed the true face of the man they dubbed “the Phantom of the Opera.” And it’s a testament to both Lon Chaney — whose facility with both an expressionistic moment and a make-up kit can’t be understated — and this early Universal horror movie’s ability to tap into a collective primal fear that, even after seeing a million stills of the character’s grotesque death-mask of a mug over the years, the sequence can still make you gasp. The blockbuster musical may have surpassed this spook-tacular telling of a disfigured composer who haunts the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera House, yet this strictly horror version remains a potent early example of how to make people scream together in the dark.—D.F.

A word of caution to traumatized TV reporters who are invited to spend a week at a therapeutic retreat in the woods: Be careful, it might actually be home to pack of werewolves. Few movies have toyed with lycanthrope-movie conventions to better effect that Joe Dante’s early ’80s classic, in which Dee Wallace Stone gets attacked by a serial killer with…let’s say “animalistic tendencies.” That experience is what leads her to join “the Colony,” which takes the New Age notion of personal transformation to a whole other level. It’s a razor-sharp satire of self-help fads left over from the Me Decade (“EST, T.M., primal screamers, Scientology, iridology…I figure another five years of real hard work and maybe I’ll be a human being”), but once make-up effects artist Rob Bottin starts working his magic, the horror elements trump everything else. And the film’s climax, in which Stone decides to do her own full-moon editorial on the air, is worth its weight in silver bullets.—D.F.

You don’t usually think “horror anthologies” when someone mentions Ealing Studios — they tended to specialize in quirky comedies featuring eccentric English types and Alec Guinness wearing fake teeth and wigs. But the British production company gave the world one of the single best examples of this format, enlisting four directors to contribute five spooky stories linked together by the loose framework of guests gathered at a country estate. Each segment has its share of chills, though the one everyone deservedly remembers the most is Alberto Calvacanti’s “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy,” which watches stage performer Michael Redgrave engage in a battle of wills with his surprisingly independent, astoundingly creepy dummy Hugo. Spoiler alert: He loses.—D.F.

Leave it to Danny Boyle to make a zombie movie that’s as optimistic as it is scary. Of course, it’s the fast zombies that made 28 Days Later, written by Alex Garland, revolutionary and frightening, but the film is so much more than its undead. While the image of Cillian Murphy in a hospital gown, walking through London’s abandoned streets after a pandemic has ravaged the city, is the moment that sticks with you, what really drives this story is the idea of community. When his survivor joins up with Naomie Harris and Brendan Gleeson, the movie becomes more interested in how people need each other to survive — especially when the scariest bad guys are the ones with working brains.—E.Z.

Behold, the Eighth Wonder of the World! Long before you couldn’t throw a rock at some gigantic beast, gargantuan alien or angry-as-hell kaiju attacking a major metropolis, there was Kong, the massive simian who ruled over Skull Island and broke the backs of dinosaurs. Which doesn’t mean this king of the jungle won’t fall head over heels for Fay Wray, or that when he’s captured and brought to New York as a novelty attraction, the lovestruck monkey won’t bust loose and swat biplanes over the Empire State Building in the name of amour. Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion visual effects have been justly praised over the years and influenced everyone who went into the industry of making miniature movie monsters seem larger than life. And both Kong’s introduction and his exit from this world remain masterclasses on how to inspire terror in audiences at the beginning and leave them heartbroken by the end.—D.F.

If Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead was a gruesomely inventive, ultra-low-budget scare-machine, the sequel was where he truly began flexing the considerable wit and filmmaking elan that cemented his status as a B-movie master (no matter how many big-budget Spider-Man flicks he’d go on to direct). In his signature performance, Bruce Campbell reprises his role as the irritable, sarcastic Ash, who’s about to have another miserable time out in the woods squaring off with evil spirits. But Evil Dead II’s gory extremes are brilliantly juxtaposed with Raimi’s gift for Looney Tunes-style comedic mayhem: Our hero’s manic-slapstick antics are as unhinged as the demented forces trying to destroy him. From the jubilant decapitations to that swirling camera that zips in and around different spaces, the whole film feels like it’s being run at double-speed, so caught up in its own creative exuberance that it doesn’t have time to slow down. You’ll shriek and giggle in equal measure.—T.G.

Robert Eggers burst onto the horror scene with a work of sublime meticulousness, quickly distinguishing himself by taking a historian’s eye to terror. His debut feature immerses viewers in the bleakness of Puritanitcal society courtesy of a meticulous production design, the use of natural light and dialogue ripped from actual witch trials; his hero, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), is a girl coming into womanhood just as the devil descends on her radically religious family. It’s a film that doesn’t beat around the bush: There’s actually a witch in the woods making a snack out of a stolen baby. And, yes, that goat is indeed Satan. Instead of going for elusiveness, which so many modern horror auteurs tend to rely on, Eggers instead uses his love of the past, which only helps make The Witch feel like a collective recollection of a shared nightmare.—E.Z.

Pus-squirting, nail-shedding fingers? ? Baboons turned inside-out? Body-horror maestro David Cronenberg engineers an unlikely popcorn hit with all the grotesque trimmings of his signature flesh-obsessed tragedies — this time by remaking one of Hollywood’s corniest Atomic-Age sci-fi fright fests into a morality play involving one very icky Icarus. Introverted genius engineer Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) meets fetching science journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) who coaxes him out of his shell while chronicling his attempts to invent teleportation. But accidental molecular-genetic fusion with a house fly turns him into an 180-lb rotting superbug. Beware those who dive into the plasma pool! And witness an AIDS-era romance where a mysterious incurable disease ravages a lover’s body and soul.—S.G.

There have been many stabs at adapting Shirley Jackson’s seminal horror novel The Haunting of Hill House for screens big and small, but Robert Wise’s take on the material is easily the best — from the moment our narrator begins listing off the tainted history of the Hill manor, there’s the sense that this property has been condemned [dramatic pause] by pure evil. A parapsychologist (Richard Johnson) wants to study the unusual amount of ghostly activity happening there, with a psychic (Claire Bloom), a young man (Russ Tamblyn) set to inherit the house and a highly disturbed woman (Julie Harris) along for the ride. It quickly becomes clear that yes, there are indeed restless spirits residing there…and they seem particularly interested in Harris’s unstable visitor. Wise pulls out all the stops here, with baroque camera angles and spookier-than-usual sound design giving you the sense that reality is warping itself around these unfortunate souls stuck within these four walls. It’s neither the first nor last haunted-house movie, just the definitive one.—D.F.

Many folks walked in to French director Julia Ducournau’s extraordinary, extreme debut expecting to test their mettle. (The movie that caused fainting at festival screenings! Mon dieu!) A little under two hours later, they exited the building having seen a genuine Grand Guignol masterpiece. Following the story of a college freshman (Garance Marillier) who slowly finds herself developing a taste for some off-the-menu delicacies, this gnarly look at a cannibal’s coming-of-age flips the script on notions of empowerment even as it turns stomachs. In terms of next-gen horror filmmaking, it’s a shock to the system that serves as an introduction to a major new talent; that shot of our heroine chomping into her arm en flagrante delicto is gorgeous, haunting and sick as fuck. In terms of using genre to tackle the female-body politic, Raw is one hell of an art-horror dirty bomb, smuggling in transgressive notions about control and womanhood under the cover of fake–Type-O splatter. Bon appetit.—D.F.

The opening disclaimer now seems quaint: Few modern viewers are likely to be “shocked” or “horrified” by this Modern Prometheus. But they might still be pulled into the tragic melodrama of James Whale’s 1931 adaptation, which supplies one milestone moment after another: a burning windmill circled by angry villagers; Colin Clive’s eponymous doctor going mad with power, hysterical as his mistake of science twitches to life; and that most timeless of entrances, when Boris Karloff — in a performance as achingly sympathetic as it is iconic — stumbles backwards into frame, then turns to reveal his disfigured face and drowsy undead stare. Nearly a century later, it’s still alive.—A.A.D.

This warped Me Decade fairy tale about broken homes and ferocious jealousy was reportedly inspired by the nasty end to David Cronenberg’s first marriage. In the movie, a divorcing couple goes through a bitter custody dispute over their only daughter, while nearly everyone involved with the case starts receiving visits from dwarf-sized creatures filled with vengeful rage. From a distance, these little ones — born from the experimental treatments of a radical psychotherapist (Oliver Reed) — look cuddly. Up close, they’re horribly disfigured and bent on destruction. That’s this film’s bitter take on domesticity: It’s a square family photo, spattered with viscera.—N.M.

There are more than a few Italian movies of ’60s and ’70s on this list that involve masked killers and murder sprees — because there’s always room for giallo — but there’s a reason this Dario Argento thriller ranks the highest. It takes a boilerplate of an innocent bystander (in this case, David Hemmings’ pianist) who witnesses a murder, which quickly makes him a target for this psychopath-at-large, and throws a ton of style, surrealistic touches, splashes of color, cinematic brio and genuine inventiveness into the mix before hitting the “Puree” button. Seriously, name another movie in which someone is attacked by a shudderingly creepy automaton doll, the toy gets a cleaver to its head, then the killer decides to strike — and that death is maybe only the third most bizarre sequence. This is what an artist at the height of powers (re: scaring the snot out of you) looks like.—D.F.

“There are spirits… they are all around us.” So go the opening lines of the oldest movie on this list, and arguably the most influential. Robert Wiene’s silent-era sensation about a hypnotist and the hulking somnambulist who does his murderous bidding has lingered like a spirit itself. There’s a little of Caligari everywhere, in the jagged expressionist architecture of blockbuster fairy-tales (especially those of Tim Burton, who would borrow the look of the dastardly doctor for his take on the Penguin in Batman Returns), the climactic twist endings of countless thrillers, and the lurching attractions of the Universal Monster movies that would arrive a decade later. Beyond the long shadow of its style, the film still looks like one of the medium’s purest plunges into the labyrinth of a disturbed mind: Every canted angle, leering iris, and leaning, twisting structure frames the events through a nightmare subjectivity.—A.A.D.

How sleazy does a horror movie have to be to derail a director’s career? Ask Michael Powell, a legend of British cinema who scandalized the critics and fell off the A-list after he made this proto-slasher film, starring Carl Boehm as a murderous cameraman who obsessively watches footage of his victims as they die. Though released the same year as Alfred Hitchcock’s similarly sicko Psycho, Powell’s picture is more sympathetic to its killer (who had a singularly hellish childhood) and is more of an unsparing indictment of the audience’s own bloodlust. The story is equal parts absorbing and upsetting, cutting so close to the bone that it’s no wonder viewers flinched.—N.M.

John Carpenter’s remake of the 1950’s watch-the-skies classic The Thing From Another World took the original’s premise — chaos is unleashed on an Antarctic research outpost in the form of a shapeshifting extraterrestrial hiding amongst the residents — and updated for the 1980s by making it unrelentingly bleak, relentlessly tense, and revoltingly gory. Paranoia threatens to become as dangerous a foe as the alien picks off a team (played by Kurt Russell, Keith David, and a collection of crusty character actors) one by one. Anybody could be taken over. Nobody can be trusted. Rob Bottin’s effects twist human (and canine) biology into nightmarish forms as the Halloween director ratchets up the film’s intensity to an almost unbearable pitch. People did not know what to make of this dour, grisly horror movie in which heads might not just roll, but also sprout crab legs and run away. It’s now rightly considered one of Carpenter’s best.—K.P.

George A. Romero didn’t come from film school, or work his way up through the studio system. He was a working class director, a gun-for-hire making industrial films and commercials in his home base of Pittsburgh, and much of the power of his feature directorial debut is how that nuts-and-bolts approach gives his zombie apocalypse story such a grounded authenticity. His hero famously wasn’t envisioned as Black — Duane Jones got the role simply by reading it best — but the casting works brilliantly, adding loaded subtext to every interaction (and a doomed inevitability to the chilling conclusion). That layer of social commentary, coupled with the off-the-cuff style, points towards the genre’s future, while the kabuki-like make-up and theatrical movements of the zombies recall the monsters of the past, Night of the Living Dead is not just the first modern zombie movie. It’s one of the key hinge points in the rich history of horror movies overall.—J.B.

It was probably around the time that Veronica Cartwright caught a faceful of spraying blood (you know the scene we’re talking about) that the audiences of 1979 realized how far away they were from the galaxy far, far away. Ridley Scott’s deep-space masterpiece has the futuristic trappings of science fiction, but its own veins run with the cold acid of another genre. What is the Nostromo really but a creaky, leaky haunted manor floating through the cosmos? And in H.R. Giger’s jet-black Xenomorph, modern cinema found its most memorable monster: a creeping, crawling intergalactic stowaway, wreaking havoc from the inside and outside. Decades of sequels, prequels, and ripoffs would trade the primal dread for bug-hunt action and dense mythology. None can match the reptilian power of the original — to quote an awed android, a “perfect organism.”—A.A.D.

“I don’t drink…wine.” The movie that made Bela Lugosi a star and firmly put a count from Transylvania on the pop-cultural map, Tod Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel is so omnipresent as both a touchstone and a punchline (how many times have you heard someone say ‘I vaaaant to suuuck your blooood“?) that it’s easy to forget one key thing: It’s genuinely fucking scary. Lugosi had already played the role on Broadway to great acclaim, so he knew how to harness the power of a seductive purr, an aggressive stare and a black cape to great effect. What Browning gave this story was the proper atmosphere of ancient, unholy evil for Count Dracula and his creatures of the night to waltz around in, and the extraordinary use of silence to create a predatory sense of terror. Even when the film leaves the castle and goes to England, the overall gloom never goes away; if anything, it just gets more Gothic. The movie would be the Rosetta stone for Universal’s domination of the genre for over a decade — not even a stake through the heart could stop the character (or the studio) from returning from the grave again, and again, and again.—D.F.

Forget about Nicolas Cage hollering about bees — Robin Hardy’s 1973 classic is folk horror at its creepiest, transforming pastoral idiosyncrasies into dread. It starts as something of a procedural, with a big-city police officer Edward Woodward investigating a tip about a missing girl within an island community. Then it quickly sprouts into something much weirder, as the newcomer is drawn into the pagan rituals of Summerisle without realizing he’s part of their plan. It’s a deliberately seductive movie, with traditional songs rearranged into unnatural lullabies by Paul Giovanni and Magnet, and a performance by Christopher Lee as the Lord of this land that reminds you why he’s the king of this genre. —E.Z.

The title of this 1964 film is taken from an antiquated word meaning “ghost story” — and director Masaki Kobayashi delivers on the word’s promises four times over. Working from Japanese folklore by way of Western writer Lafcadio Hearn, Kobayashi’s anthology film features four stories filled with alternately vengeful, playful, and mournful ghosts, and the mortals who cross their paths. Some tales end in moral lessons; some are defined by a sense of humanity’s powerlessness against the capriciousness of the spirit world; and all of them are filmed with bold colors and filled with a sense of otherworldly eeriness. Each installment is excellent in its own way, but “The Woman of the Snow” — a frosty, windswept love story as touching as it is unsettling — stands above the rest.—K.P.

Bloodsucker Count Orlok leaves the land of phantoms and his desolate Transylvanian castle for a picturesque Teutonic village, bringing along coffins full of cursed earth and his own plague-infested appetites. German Expressionism meets Gothic Horror — and the existentialist despair of a country still reeling from the Great War — in F.W. Murnau’s dread-steeped (and unauthorized) adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The film’s looming shadows, musty mansions, eerie camera tricks, and moonlit landscapes pioneered the visual grammar of vampire cinema, but it’s Max Schreck and his ghoulish portrayal of the hypnotically grotesque Count (bat-like ears, rat-like teeth, talons for fingers and perpetually bug-eyed) that still haunts filmgoer’s nightmares a century after his debut.—S.G.

Hammer Studios’ prodigious horror output in the 1950s and 1960s usually revolved around their colorful reimaginings of old-school monsters (the Dracula and Frankenstein series, The Curse of Werewolf) or odd riffs on recognizable archetypes (The Gorgon, The Plague of the Zombies). What is arguably their best movie of their heyday, however, involves nothing less than Satan himself. “The power of darkness is more than just a superstition,” declares Christoper Lee’s inquisitive duke. “It is a living force which can be tapped at any given moment…”. This is where a devil-worshipping cult enters the picture, with Lee and his companions forced to fight off the swooning disciples of the Horned One, who drops by for a cameo as a half-man, half-goat, all-demon embodiment of evil. It’s as if a boy’s adventure story was infected by some sort of pulp-lit plague (courtesy of Richard Matheson, who wrote the screenplay) that eventually consumed its host.—D.F.

James Whale’s sequel to Frankenstein broadens both the scope and ambition of the original, following the Monster (Boris Karloff) as he demands his creator (Colin Clive) fashion a mate for him — or else. After learning to speak (in Karloff’s unmistakable, disconcertingly gentle baritone voice), the creature becomes both more frightening and more pitiable. His anger grows with each new reminder that the world has no place for him, and he can only inspire fear and hate simply by existing. Whale plays the film as both a full-scale tragedy and a sly commentary on love, marriage, and “normal” society as it works toward an unforgettable climax in which the first meeting between Bride (Elsa Lanchester) and groom doesn’t…quite go as planned.—K.P.

Lawrence Talbot had it easy, going full shaggy beast over a few painless dissolves. Not like poor David Kessler (David Naughton), whose transformation into a howling creature of the night happens across two-and-a-half minutes of agony, captured in grisly, Oscar-winning detail by a young makeup wizard named Rick Baker. This tour de force of practical effects mirrors the feat of genre shapeshifting performed by John Landis, in which an amiable college dude straight out of the writer-director’s Animal House wheelhouse finds his carefree backpacking holiday rudely interrupted by talking corpses, full-moon cravings, and a disturbing nesting doll of nightmares within nightmares. The tension between the horror and comedy is like that between wolf and man; the yuks turn into yucks as a randy romp morphs periodically into a monster movie.—A.A.D.

Mia Farrow is Rosemary, a young Manhattanite who adores her struggling actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes). They’ve just moved into a new apartment building, and she soon findis herself pregnant — and more than a little concerned, since she can’t quite remember how that happened. Rosemary begins to suspect that the people around her, including a devilishly nosy neighbor (Oscar-winner Ruth Gordon), are more concerned about the unborn child than they are about her. We soon find out why. An icy commentary on women’s subservient role in society, this adaptation of the Ira Levin bestseller draws its dark power from director Roman Polanski’s increasingly claustrophobic approach, which slowly smothers the imperiled Rosemary as she tries to break free of the unseen menace around her. Farrow has never been so riveting, so haunted, so utterly fearless, her character’s steely resolve in the face of such evil a still-relevant metaphor for a country that insists it knows best about a woman’s body.—T.G.

This pioneering horror indie is presented as the recovered video shot by three aspiring filmmakers — played by Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard — who had gone missing. (Indeed, many folks who saw this ingenious thriller at its its 1999 Sundance premiere thought it actually was a documentary). We then follow them as they go out into the woods to chronicle an urban legend about a witch, only to discover that some old wives’ tales are frighteningly real. Writer-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez didn’t invent this subgenre, but their confident debut highlighted the potential of “found footage” scary movies — how a simple formal conceit could scare the living shit out of people by removing the thin “it’s just a movie” protective barrier we usually have around horror films. The shaky camera movements, the grainy images, the grippingly unpolished performances: The Blair Witch Project made you feel that something terrible could happen at any moment — and come at you from any direction.—T.G.

If it’s a mark of a great horror movie that it can be referenced, parodied, and outright ripped off — and still be completely terrifying — then Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 novel, about a family spending an eventful winter as out-of-season caretakers to Colorado’s historic Overlook Hotel, more than passes the test. Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance, a struggling writer and recovering alcoholic-turned-unhinged madman who terrorizes his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd). Was he pushed to the brink by the Overlook’s ghostly residents? Or did the isolation bring his seething anger and frustration to their breaking point? Kubrick’s film is disturbing in part because it never provides the answers. But it does provide a deeply unnerving setting in which to contemplate the questions, one in which restless spirits, or worse, might lurk behind every corner.—K.P.

Ari Aster reimagines both haunted house chillers and creepy supernatural cult movies with this generous folk-horror feast, which starts out as the small-scaled story of a deeply dysfunctional family before becoming a film about far-reaching demonic cabals and tainted legacies. Toni Collette gives a bracing and heartbreaking performance as Annie, a skilled sculptor whose domineering mother dies — followed closely by a string of shocking tragedies. The artist starts taking note of the dark spirits gathering around her home, and soon embarks on an investigation which may reveal that her whole clan has been ensnared up in a nefarious conspiracy. Hereditary doesn’t skimp on the genre basics, like the things that go bump in the night — or the kids who compulsively and nerve-shreddingly make clucking sounds. But this movie is more about the evils that are hard to shake, because they’ve been built into the very foundations of where we live.—N.M.

Tobe Hooper wasn’t trying to fashion a classic: As he said later, he simply wanted to make a movie that captured “the ambiance of death.” Mission accomplished. For all the remakes, sequels, reboots and ripoffs it has inspired, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre still reigns supreme, its grim vision of an unholy house nestled in a forgotten corner of Texas as compellingly repellant as ever. A group of heedless friends stumble upon a home out in the country, not realizing they’ve entered hell, tormented by an imposing man in a mask who systematically kills them. Before slasher films became a formula, Hooper invented their language, crafting a villain in Leatherface who was anonymous, unknowable and unstoppable, paving the way for the horror-film boogeymen who would menace teenagers for decades to come. Perhaps no horror movie has better understood that you don’t need gimmicks or high concepts to terrify people. All that matters is a disturbing, elemental grasp of a universal fear, and Hooper’s unapologetically unrelenting nightmare latches onto an all-timer, which is being trapped in the middle of nowhere with a monster who cannot be reasoned with.—T.G.

A decade after channeling the madness of the 1960s into a low-budget shocker about an America literally eating itself alive, George Romero reopened the buffet. His sequel to Night of the Living Dead extended the apocalyptic graveyard exodus of that classic into a new era of materialism, funky Italian prog rock, and full-color Tom Savini viscera. More so even than its predecessor, this film feeds the brain as surely as it turns the stomach, and the choice to barricade the harried humans within a sprawling shopping mall, surrounded by the most mindless of consumers, would inspire decades of satirical readings. But Romero never lets the social commentary swallow the thrills; today’s class of metaphorically minded genre merchants could stand to take a page from his playbook of the Dead. Dawn is a full meal, garnishing the expected courses of gut-ripping gore with breathless action, unexpected zombie slapstick, and a lonely late stretch of the survivors trying to carve out a slice of luxury heaven while the world goes to hell — a national critique as biting as the original’s bleak coda.—A.A.D.

Writer-director Jordan Peele was best known for as one half of the duo behind the sketch comedy Key & Peele — and to say he took the lessons in timing he learned as a comedian and applied them to the fundamental horror formula of tension and release would be putting it mildly. His style emerges fully formed in his inspired debut feature, a tightly wound tale of the uncanny about a Black photographer (Daniel Kaluuya) who goes on a weekend trip to meet the family of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams). Something seems a little…off to him about their friendliness. This hit movie’s “social horror” approach reinvigorated the conversation around Black horror and was the rare genre film to garner Oscar attention, but it’s not just an important movie — it’s also a terrifically creepy and well-crafted one. The sci-fi elements and striking symbolic imagery seen in Us and Nope are also present here, as is Peele’s mastery of the needle drop. And that’s not even mentioning the cast, which is exceptional from top to bottom.—K.R.

Who is the mysterious woman (Beatrice Dalle) that seems intent on terrorizing an expectant mother (Alysson Paradis) on Christmas Eve? At first, this menacing lady just wants to get inside the head of her potential victim, who isn’t sure why she’s been targeted. Then, the scissors-wielding stalker manages to gain entrance inside her home. Next stop: the soon-to-be mom’s womb. Even among hardcore horror fanatics, this movie from directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo has earned a reputation for being particularly unrelenting, unforgiving and undeniably taxing on audiences’ nervous systems. The wave of gory, Gallic horror known as the “New French Extremity” was responsible for a lot of taboo-breaking and pushing the boundaries of “good taste,” but by putting a pregnant woman in peril, the duo took their can-you-take-it? endurance test perilously near the breaking point. It not only upped the “final girl” stakes, but kept you, the viewer, constantly wondering: How far are they going to take this concept? The answer, dear reader, is right to the inevitable, extremely bloody end of the line. And believe us when we say that Dalle’s dead-eyed maniac may not have the body count of a Michael Myers or a Jason Voorhees, she most certainly earns a Horror Hall of Fame spot before the end credits starts rolling. You’ve been warned.—D.F.

John Carpenter’s Halloween did not invent the slasher, but it did redefine it. And from the tinkling of Carpenter’s keys in its indelible score to those chilling POV shots, this relentless horror movie inspired countless imitators (many of which exist in the same franchise.) Few are able to match its deceptively simple scares, and the most frightening part of Michael Myers (or, as he is otherwise known, “the Shape”; a shout out to Nick Castle in that warped Captain Kirk mask) is the unexplained bloodlust that fuels the early killing of his sister, his later slaughter of innocents and his dogged pursuit of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). He’s a slow-moving menace, methodical but unpredictable. Curtis, on the other hand, imbues Laurie with a warm innocence that makes her the ultimate final girl. Attempts to recreate Carpenter’s eerie magic have never quite worked partially because most try to muck it up with too much backstory. Halloween is always proof that what you don’t know is scarier than what you do. —E.Z.

There are many movies on this list that you could easily describe as “nightmarish.” Nicolas Roeg’s disorienting, disquieting look at grieving parents coping with the death of their daughter by taking a trip to Venice is one of the very few entries that actually make you feel like you’re witnessing an actual nightmare while you watch it. The British filmmaker had always played around with time and narrative chronology, and used color and cross-cutting to great effect in most of his films. This time, however, he dumps his bag of tricks onto Daphne du Maurier’s story and allows your own sense of instability and dislocation do the rest. You’re never sure whether Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie should be hopeful when, say, a pair of psychic sisters let them know their little girl is posthumously “peaceful,” or whether their fear that some sort of otherworldly thing is winding its way toward them is unfounded or not. Plus, what’s going on with the rash of murders in the city? Or Sutherland’s sense that the figure in the red raincoat he keeps seeing is a premonition that their child’s spirit isn’t laid to rest just yet? It’s a movie that generates terror through confusion, bewilderment and the unsettling feeling that something very, very bad is slinking through this city’s back alleys and canal ways. And, once you’ve seen the jolting, WTF climax, you understand that some nightmares stick with you even when you’ve woken up.—D.F.

It’s just a videotape, filled with seemingly random images of a man pointing on a shore, news of an eruption on an island, and a well. It cuts to static before you’ve even had time to glean what this avant-garde short even means. But once you’ve watched it, your phone will ring, and then seven days later, you’ll be dead from fright. That’s the kind of urban legend that a journalist (Nanako Matsushima) would never take seriously — until she starts looking into the mysterious death of some local teens, and happens upon a tape they were viewing during a sleepover exactly one week before their demise…. A huge hit in Japan from the get-go, Hideo Nakata’s techno-phobic update on the ol’ vengeful spirit narrative had already kicked off a J-horror resurgence in its native country. Once the movie began to make its way to the West, however (ironically, through bootleg videotapes), the original Ring would quickly become one of the single most influential horror movies of the last 30 years. Sequels, spin-offs, imitators good and not-so-good, English-language remakes: Nakata’s brilliant parable of dread ended up giving birth to both a slow-burn style of scary moviemaking and a international-genre movement. The entire notion of paranormal curses not only being communicable but downright viral — as dependent on moving from host to host as a disease or a chain letter — really starts here, and would quickly become one of the dominant concepts in 21st century horror. And we’d rank the scene in which the film’s lank-haired ghost crawls up from the well on the tape — and then out of the TV screen itself — as gamechanging a moment as Carrie White’s hand bursting out of the grave.—D.F.

Because we all go a little mad sometimes. You’d think more than 60-plus years of knowing all of this Alfred Hitchcock movie’s dirty little secrets would have dulled the shock of it — that being in on what happens to Janet Leigh once she pulls in to the Bates Motel, and who’s behind it all, and why so many people were terrified of showering after seeing this movie, had somehow robbed Psycho of its staying power. Yet Hitch’s ode to gents who love their mothers not wisely too well has not only endured, it now seems like the major pivot point in horror cinema — the first truly modern scary movie, in which not all monstrosities wore capes, looked grotesque or rose from the dead. Some of them resembled the boys next door, albeit ones that lived in towering Gothic houses right off the highway, with long staircases and swinging lightbulbs in basements….

Hitch had already made movies about serial killers (see 1927’s The Lodger) and honed his skills in audience manipulation by this point, and you can see the Master of Suspense combining his experience with the subject and his facility with the art of misdirection here to such jolting, nerve-jangling effect. No one expects a marquee-name actor to just “disappear” before the halfway point (the reason, the director always said, that he didn’t want folks to be sat after the film started). Audiences were shocked not just by what happens in the notorious shower scene but the by sheer attack of its presentation, from Bernard Hermann’s SKREE-SKREE-SKREE string section to the expert use of short, sharp cutting (in more ways than one). The climactic “surprise” is now public knowledge, and it’s universally acknowledged that the coda takes some of the wind out of the movie’s sails. Yet go back to Perkins’ facial expressions in both scenes, and you still get goosebumps. In the first, he looks maniacal. In the second, he appears so eerily calm, even when Hitch superimposes a skull over him before the final fade-out. Monster movies never went away. But this is what horror looked like now.—D.F.