The 200 Best Horror Movies of All Time

“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (Robert Wiene, 1920)

Putting the expression in German Expressionism, this seminal horror silent has remained a definitive achievement in spooky storytelling by creating a nightmarish world where nothing is certain. As lanky somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) commits a series of murders at the behest of the titular hypnotist (Werner Krauss), director Robert Wiene sets the drama in the confines of a labyrinthine environment that makes the upside-down look downright homey. Shadowy buildings hover in the background at awkward angles and roads veer off in dizzying directions. The ceilings often look as though they might close in on these frantic characters — and, with the brilliant plot twist of the final act, that’s essentially what they do. Told within the confines of a flashback, the movie presents itself as the story of a young man (Friedrich Feher) whose world falls apart as he becomes aware of the doctor’s evil scheme; with time, however, it’s clear that this unreliable narrator may be a victim of his own confusion, and the brilliance of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” is that it places us right there at the center of his insanity. Nearly a century later, the final twist still comes as a surprise to new audiences. —EK

“The Golem: How He Came in the World” (Paul Wegener, 1920)

Paul Wegener was among the first and the most influential filmmakers of the German expressionist movement, producing a trilogy of silent films with Henrik Galeen inspired by European and Jewish folklore featuring a clay statue brought to life. Sadly, the first two films in Wegener and Galeen’s trio have been lost. “The Golem” (1915) reportedly told the story of an envious mud monster going on a murderous rampage and was followed by the filmmakers’ parody of their own work in “The Golem and the Dancing Girl” (1917). The feature-length third title “The Golem: How He Came into the World” (1920) remains in tact and chronicles the aftermath of a rabbi prophesying disaster for his people. —AF

“The Phantom Carriage” (Victor Sjöström, 1921)

The most profound horror movies aren’t just about death, but about wasted life. David Holm (Sjöström) has led about as worthless a life as you can imagine. Putting his love of the bottle before all else, he pushed away his wife and children, he led his brother into alcoholism also (resulting in his brother becoming a murderer), and he almost deliberately infects a Salvation Army worker with tuberculosis. He’s a dirtbag. On New Year’s Eve, he chooses to ring in midnight in a church cemetery with two fellow hobos, when he gets word that the dying Salvation Army girl wants to see him before drawing her final breath. He refuses. The other two hobos are so appalled one smashes a bottle over his head, killing him.

You know this movie has an extra degree of realism because it’s one of the few films to accurately suggest how damaging being smashed in the noggin with a bottle would be! That realism makes the supernatural elements that follow all the more tangible: Death’s Coachman comes to collect David, not just to spirit him off to Hell, but for David to take up his job. Whosoever dies at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve has to drive Death’s coach for a year before passing to the beyond. What follows is some combination of “A Christmas Carol” and “The Seventh Seal” (on which “The Phantom Carriage” was clearly a huge influence) and powerful enough that you can see why Sjöström quickly became an MGM contract director. —CB

“Häxan” (Benjamin Christensen, 1922)

This four-part essay film was the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made, and it shows. Well, at least in parts. Some of the reenactments of medieval times and historical accusations of witchcraft are lavish in their scope and texture… other segments, including much of the beginning, feel like a 1920s version of a Ken Burns doc, with the camera trained on drawings and lithographs to represent a history of witchcraft and how these supernatural occurrences can be explained through modern medicine and psychology. Sometimes a wooden pointer, presumably attached to director Benjamin Christensen’s hand, protrudes into the frame to draw your eye to a particular detail of the drawing in question.

Alas, the Ken Burns zoom was still not technically possible. (To suggest the film that follows is, at least to some degree, a work of scholarship, Christensen appears in close-up in the opening credits, an effect which comes across more like Tommy Wiseau’s poster for “The Room” than anything professorial.) There’s plenty here to satisfy the ghoulish, however, and for cinephiles the film is particularly striking for the way it makes horror iconography from centuries past connect to the frights we’ve received from the movies: a few tweaks to the demon in the image above and you have the creature in “Sputnik.” —CB

“Nosferatu” (F. W. Murnau, 1922)

In many ways, “Nosferatu” is the “Citizen Kane” of horror. Bram Stoker’s estate tried, fairly successfully, to bury the film — winning a copyright case that called for all prints to be destroyed and bankrupting the studio (Prana) that produced the film. Yet F. W. Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation of “Dracula” was an imaginative revision of the vampire story that helped define the genre and was so technically awe-inspiring that it launched one of film history’s most storied and influential directing careers. More than anything, though, it is Max Schreck’s inimitable performance as Count Orlok that a century later makes this film a marvel. —CO

“The Phantom of the Opera” (Rupert Julian, 1925)

Creature actor Lon Chaney stuck a literal hook up his nose to pull off the title role in “The Phantom of the Opera” in Rupert Julian’s groundbreaking silent horror film. Known to his contemporaries as “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” Chaney previously appeared in Wallace Worsley’s 1923 “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and is visibly more confident in the 1925 fright fest. This early exploration of the Paris Opera House-set story — one many would come to know and love thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical — is a genuinely disquieting tale of voyeuristic lust driven by Chaney’s dauntless performance. —AF

“Dracula” (Tod Browning, 1931)

The first thing you notice is his stillness. The chilling effect of Bela Lugosi’s performance as the undead Transylvanian count lies in his uncanny ability to stare into the camera… and into you. The opening 15 minutes is all that’s set in this courtly vampire’s home country, but director Tod Browning delivers a masterpiece of mood. One that’s pretty accurate, too: When Bram Stoker published “Dracula” in 1897, Transylvania was part of the Kingdom of Hungary — hence, all the peasants you see say their prayers in Hungarian, and of course Lugosi himself, 48 when he donned the cape and fangs onscreen, was Hungarian.

He was only 6’1″ but he somehow seems much taller. His eyes sharply lit by a spotlight from cinematographer Karl Freund, Lugosi looks striking, even handsome. His protracted delivery set the stage for countless horror films to come (and even more parodies): “I do not drink… wine.” “We will leave tomorrow… even-ing.” But in context it also suits a character for whom English is far from a first language, and lends itself to a story about twee English folk fearing this exotic foreigner with his strange appetites. Most of Browning’s chills come from simple shot-reverse-shot edits, all powered by Lugosi’s unwavering gaze. He commands the camera. So much so, you think he’ll command you next. —CB

“Frankenstein” (James Whale, 1931)

It’s only fitting that a novel as influential and forward-thinking as Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” would inspire a similarly unique and enduring big-screen classic. James Whale’s take on the tale of a striving doctor and the freakish creature he cobbles together from the dead contributed mightily to how people envision the monster, with Boris Karloff’s big-headed and lumbering portrayal still serving as the gold standard. But while Frankenstein’s monster (always “Frankenstein’s monster,” never just “Frankenstein”!) is an object of terror in the film, Whale also made sure to overlay all that understandable horror with Shelley’s own message about the beastliness of humanity itself. —KE

“Freaks” (Tod Browning, 1932)

“One of us, one of us!” As sad as it is scary, Tod Browning’s career-ending pre-Code masterpiece is not at all the movie you expect it to be. Its title gives the impression of an exploitative sideshow attraction, and though “Freaks” is certainly carnivalesque in the way it showcases its cast — including conjoined twins, a bearded lady, and the famous “pinheads” — it’s ultimately most notable for the empathy it shows them at the expense of the “normal” characters who mistreat them. Endlessly controversial when it was first released, with one woman even threatening to sue MGM after claiming the movie was responsible for her having a miscarriage, it has since been reevaluated as the one-of-a-kind classic it is. Better late than never. —MN

“Bride of Frankenstein” (James Whale, 1935)

“Science, like love, has its little surprises…” Frankenstein’s monster is an abstraction, a blank canvas onto which viewers can project just about anything they like — namely, and most obviously, man’s propensity for violence and a tendency to violently reject that which reflects our worst qualities back at us. The townsfolk in “Frankenstein” and its superior sequel turn ugly upon first sight of this particular abyss, never even taking the time to actually gaze into it; here, the Bride would appear to represent a welcome opportunity for companionship despite not actually appearing until the last few minutes and thus never fulfilling that role. Almost no one gets their just deserts in “Bride of Frankenstein,” which is part of why it’s more notable some 80-odd years later for its ability to evoke pity than for what few scares it still produces. Someone certainly belongs dead, but I’m not sure it’s them. —MN

“Cat People” (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)

Producer Val Lewton’s films were about creating low-budget B-movie horror with cinema, and Jacques Tourneur was his greatest practitioner, adding a layer of evocative style that few A-pictures of the day could match. Tourneur’s “Cat People” uses the camera and sound to create the presence of a supernatural force without even showing it. Take this example of the pool scene and how its sense of an ominous, lurking presence is built with framing, subjectivity, and editing. Then, like with his classic noir “Out of the Past,” Tourneur employs cinematography that takes an eerily and sexually charged atmosphere that brings the film’s unusual premise — a Serbian woman (Simone Simon) who is convinced she descends from cats and transforms into one when aroused or angered — to life. —CO

“I Walked with a Zombie” (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)

Do you believe the lies you tell? Producer Val Lewton’s masterful film says that when you finally do believe your own falsehoods, well, anything can happen. In this most philosophical of classic Hollywood films, a young nurse (Frances Dee) travels to the Caribbean isle of St. Sebastian to look after the wife of a wealthy planter (Tom Conroy). She can walk and stare off plaintively into the distance, but in no other way does she seem to be conscious. The Afro-Caribbean community thinks she’s a “zombie,” per voodoo lore — she was cursed because she had an affair with her husband’s brother. And the nurse comes to believe that too. What follows is one of Hollywood’s earliest looks at what happens when white people try to co-opt black culture. A sense of profound melancholy suffuses “I Walked With a Zombie,” the melancholy of the colonized: “That’s why they still weep when a child is born and make merry at a burial.” —CB

“The Ghost Ship” (Mark Robson, 1943)

Kind of like John Ford’s “The Long Voyage Home” by way of “The Shining,” “The Ghost Ship” is Val Lewton’s slow-burn study of how passive-aggression can boil over into murderousness. Sailor Tom Merriam (Russell Wade) of the merchant vessel Altair come to suspect that something’s wrong with Captain Stone (Richard Dix) — at key moments he seems to go into a negative panic, at others he likes to bore the crew with dry, lengthy explanations of his views on authority. After one crewman, Louie (a young Lawrence Tierney), questions one of Stone’s orders, the captain replies, “You know, there are captains who might hold this against you, Louie.” Shortly thereafter, Louie is crushed to death by the anchor chain. Coincidence? Obviously not. But even if the rest of the crew suspect Stone’s a killer, they’d rather ignore his crimes or explain them away rather than get on his bad side while at sea — it’s up to Wade’s Merriam to play the part of a high-seas Will Kane, shake them out of their apathy, and recognize that the captain’s behavior should not be normalized. No one else wants to rock the boat. —CB

“The Leopard Man” (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)

It can’t be stated enough how influential the films of producer Val Lewton remain, the true auteur behind an extraordinary run of horror films for RKO in the 1940s. In their lo-fi ingenuity they suggested that more personal visions could be afforded to independent filmmakers — the smaller the budget the less scrutiny from the financiers. But their reliance on suggestion over shock would prove an important influence on even blockbuster filmmaking — Spielberg took Lewton’s lesson to heart with “Jaws” that what you don’t see can be scarier than what you do. “The Leopard Man” may be on the lesser end of the Lewton canon, but in the hands of one of his go-to directors, Jacques Tourneur, this whodunit about a rash of killings is dripping with rich detail in its unique New Mexico setting. Oh, it also has as chilling a murder scene as you’ll ever see. —CB

“The Seventh Victim” (Mark Robson, 1943)

Val Lewton usually gave the horror films he produced a unique setting: a Greek island in “Isle of the Dead,” a Caribbean island in “I Walked With a Zombie,” 19th century Edinburgh in “The Body Snatcher.” A greater challenge is to mine eeriness and menace from a perfectly quotidian setting, such as the New York City subway. That’s what did in “The Seventh Victim,” which, more than “Cat People,” which was also set in Manhattan, dives into the dread of the ordinary in New York City life. A young girl goes in search of her missing sister with the help of a craggy PI — he’s stabbed to death and she runs from the scene, so terrified she ends up doing a complete circuit on the subway. When it stops at the station where she got on — right near the private detective was murdered — two men board, propping him up, trying to act like he’s still alive. They’re obviously the ones who killed him and they’re counting on New Yorkers’ indifference to their surroundings as their cover to dispose of him. It’s so chilling because this actually could happen. Turns out a Satanic cult is involved — clearly a prototype for the devil-worshipping Manhattanites in “Rosemary’s Baby” — but “The Seventh Victim” stays with you because it reveals an essential truth: personal demons are always scarier than literal ones. —CB

“The Lodger” (John Brahm, 1944)

In Hitchcock’s silent version of “The Lodger” from 1927, the (not-quite-yet) Master of Suspense inaugurated a version of his “wrong man innocently persecuted” formula he’d later perfect in “The 39 Steps” and “North by Northwest.” John Brahm’s remake goes in a decidedly different direction: it’s no spoiler to say that Mr. Slade (Laird Cregar), who’s taken a room in the London home of a middle-aged couple (Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood), is in fact the killer. Obsessed with his late brother, who died after drinking himself to death following a broken heart, Mr. Slade blames the female sex in its entirety for his untimely passing. So he’s taken to murdering random women as payback. Cregar is 6’3” and over 300 pounds but, as physically imposing as he is, his Slade is the fragile male ego on two legs. Particularly threatening to him is female sexual empowerment, and so when he watches the music-hall performer daughter (Merle Oberon) of his landlord and landlady prance about the stage, his face becomes a contorted masque of toxic masculinity: he’s attracted to her but hates her, lusts after her but wants to kill her. The male gaze has never been more weaponized than in this scene, and it’s a testament to Brahm’s sophistication that he understood, in 1944 no less, how the act of looking could be an act of violence — with the actual killing that follows almost an afterthought. —CB

“Dead of Night” (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Robert Hamer, Basil Dearden, 1945)

When the Ealing Studios anthology film “Dead of Night” opened on September 9, 1945, it was the first horror movie to play in the U.K. in years: the British Board of Film Censors had banned horror movies during World War II. But what a great one to revive the genre: a man is invited to a country house in Kent for a party, and when he meets his fellow guests he has the disturbing feeling he’s seen all of them before. In fact, he has: in his dreams — nightmares all.

He proceeds to relate his nightmares, which begins a series of short horror films, some admittedly better than others. The best is Cavalcanti’s “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy,” which sets the stage for Chucky and “Magic” with the story of a ventriloquist (Michael Redgrave) who’s bullied into submission by his wooden puppet, who very much appears to have a personality of his own. Mixing scares with laughs, or at least dread with laughs — the moment Redgrave begs his dummy not to break off their partnership and go off on his own as a solo act and the dummy scornfully replies “Like hell I will!” is golden — “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy” mines some real pathos, appealing to the universal fear of abandonment. —CB

“Hangover Square” (John Brahm, 1945)

Watch almost any Laird Cregar performance and you’ll instantly become a fan. One of the finest character actors of the early 1940s, he was poised to have the horror movie career that Vincent Price ultimately had until tragedy struck: over 300 pounds for most of his adulthood, and thus limited to character roles in Hollywood, he wanted to be a leading man. Therefore, through extreme dieting and exercise he lost 100 pounds in less than a year, which so strained his heart that he died at age 31 before his last film could be released: “Hangover Square.” And it’s a masterpiece. Cregar plays a sensitive pianist who suffers from sleepwalking and, while doing so, kills women. When he wakes up he has no memory of the killings at all. Can he be held responsible for the murders since he’s literally unconscious when committing them? But, he is still committing them. It taps into a deep fear that no matter how good a person we think we may be, there may be some horrible dark side just waiting to crawl out. —CB

“The Spiral Staircase” (Robert Siodmak, 1946)

“There’s no room in the whole world for imperfection,” the main villain declares. He’s a serial killer who’s been on a spree murdering women who are disabled. And now he’s targeting a young maid (Dorothy Maguire) who’s mute — we know she’s in his sights because we see her from his point-of-view. When he looks at her, he sees her face without a mouth entirely, much like the image of Keanu Reeves with his mouth sealed shut in “The Matrix.” Director Robert Siodmak conceived a visual language for murderous hate here — the villain is so intolerant of anyone he views as less than “perfect” that he literally sees them differently. In this case, targeting the disabled calls to mind Nazi persecution of people with physical and mental disabilities — World War II had ended just a year earlier, and Siodmak himself had fled the Nazis due to his Jewish heritage. The result is that “The Spiral Staircase” is a work of Gothic Horror for a world still reeling from the Holocaust. —CB

“The Thing from Another World” (Christian Nyby, 1951)

John Carpenter’s “The Thing” is masterful with its serpentine scripting and paranoia-inducing cinematography. But 1952’s “The Thing from Another World” scores serious points for expanding the popularity of science fiction among moviegoers — not to mention seriously scaring some — and creating a lasting metaphor for fear-fueled finger-pointing. It’s based on John W. Campbell, Jr.’s 1938 novel “Who Goes There?” which would also influence Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” —AF

“Creature from the Black Lagoon” (Jack Arnold, 1954)

Jack Arnold’s “Creature from the Black Lagoon” may be unpleasantly wishy-washy in its final act, creating uneven tension with repetitive reveals that undercut its more rewarding rising action. That said, the unmistakable visuals of Gill-man — an amphibious monster imagined in the vein of the Phantom of the Opera — and the beautiful Kay (Julie Adams) have aged well as crystallized remnants of the ’50s monster movie fad that have since grown only more compelling in the wake of Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water.” —AF

“Godzilla” (Ishirō Honda, 1954)

A stirring metaphor for nuclear weapons in post-World War II Japan, the first “Godzilla” kicked off the mammoth creature’s legendary onscreen history. Director Ishirō Honda continues the legacy of kaiju films, first established by 1933’s “King Kong,” with this cleverly rendered action adventure about a hulking dinosaur-like monster played by groundbreaking creature actor Haruo Nakajima. —AF

“The Night of the Hunter” (Charles Laughton, 1955)

What if you can’t trust the people who’re supposed to protect you? If you’re a kid, there’s nothing scarier than if the protectors in question are your parents. Young John and Pearl’s father (Peter Graves) is a bank robber and murderer who hid the $10,000 he stole in a location only his kids know. His deranged cellmate, a serial killer (Robert Mitchum) who poses as a preacher to marry women, take their money, and then kill them, learns that these tykes know where the loot is. Upon release, he moves to their town, courts their weak-willed mother (Shelley Winters), and starts menacing his new stepchildren. What follows becomes a chase thriller more than an actual horror movie — in a list of just great films, “Night of the Hunter” might appear at a loftier ranking than just 105 — but it does capture a unique strand of kid horror.

You know kid horror. It’s the fear you felt when you saw the Huntsman prepare to plunge a dagger into Snow White’s heart, and then (at least in the Disney version) her expressionistic flight through the woods. It’s the chill that ran down your spine when it dawned on you what happened to Bambi’s mother. Once the chase is under way, director Charles Laughton deploys fairy-tale-like imagery: the kids, on a raft, pass a bullfrog in closeup. There’s a sense of clarity and wonder to these images (photographed by “Magnificent Ambersons” DP Stanley Cortez) like we’re in a Disney animated film come to life… with all the sense of dread that entails. Then Mitchum can be heard in the distance singing “Leanin’” and you know death is near. Chilling. —CB

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (Don Siegel, 1956)

What’s worse than death? A lot of horror movies try to answer that — just dying, which every single person who’s ever lived experiences, can’t be the scariest thing facing us. Siegel suggests that losing your individuality is indeed something worse. Small town doctor Kevin McCarthy begins to suspect something is off in his community — some people are starting to act suspiciously robotic. Then a friend shows him a perfect doppelganger — a “pod person” — that’s growing on a pool table in his home. It seems some sinister force, possibly aliens, are quietly taking over by replacing people with exact duplicates. A metaphor for conformity and loss of free will that’s influenced everything from “The Stepford Wives” to “Get Out,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is a powerful dramatization of the fear and alienation that results when you think something is wrong that everyone else thinks is right. —CB

“Night of the Demon” (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)

Horror can be at its most effective when it adheres to a rigid set of rules, when there’s a dastardly logic to the grisly doings onscreen. The British chiller “Night of the Demon” (originally released in the U.S. as “Curse of the Demon”) demonstrates just such a schematic precision. A professor in England cowers before his rival, a Satanic cult leader named Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). Karswell has unleashed a demon to take down the tweedy fellow, who had been determined to expose his cult. Of course, the poor guy bites it. But if you’re leading an evil cult, there will always be someone else to take you down.

Enter Dana Andrews, who teams up with the niece (Peggy Cummins of “Gun Crazy” fame) of the murdered man, to expose the bad guy. Karswell will not be stopped before he unleashes all the forces of hell in what unfolds as something like “Hellboy” meets the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies. His m.o. is to write a curse on a piece of paper, and what happens to the little scrap determines how it will play out. Which is to say that there’s a scenario where the very curse you wish on others can rebound upon you, and the way that it’s twisted around becomes one of Tourneur’s very best horror endings. —CB

“Horror of Dracula” (Terence Fisher, 1958)

Universal’s original 1931 telling of the Bram Stoker chiller is far more a masterpiece of mood than Hammer Film’s take on the material, with Christopher Lee stepping into Bela Lugosi’s cape. But the Universal film has a rushed cop-out of an ending, and that’s something the Hammer remake very much corrects. Grislier throughout — a bloody shot of one of Dracula’s brides with a stake through her chest is more violent than anything you’d have seen in a Hollywood film at the time — the British film turns the vampire into more or less an English gentleman. Until suddenly you have that iconic shot of Lee’s fangs dropping blood.

Peter Cushing stars as Doctor Van Helsing, eternally out to get Dracula. Their final showdown, inspired by “Nosferatu” far more than the 1931 version, is one of the great climaxes in any horror film: a breathless convergence of Lee’s physicality, staccato editing, and some ahead-of-their-time makeup effects as Dracula battles both Van Helsing and the approaching dawn. —CB

“House on Haunted Hill” (William Castle, 1959)

William Castle’s love of gimmickry added a spooky touch to the end of the filmmaker’s classic haunted house thriller, as an actual skeleton would be rigged in the theater to take flight over a (hopefully stunned) audience just as something similar was unfolding within the film itself. As was so often the case with Castle’s films, the addition of that extra bit of horror and humor only increased the impact of a film that, flying skeletons notwithstanding, is as well-crafted as they come. Knowing the plot — and this is a plot that has been mercilessly cribbed by lesser films for decades — doesn’t dilute its power, and the twists that follow one particularly bad dinner party, set over the course of one particularly bad night, are fresh as ever. Bolstered by star Vincent Price as an appropriately secretive millionaire who invites a mixed group to his house for an evening of thrills, chills, and murder revelations, Castle’s best film is also a seminal addition to the genre itself. Hell, even Hitchcock was said to be a fan. —KE

“Plan 9 from Outer Space” (Ed Wood, 1959)

You won’t find the likes of Thunder Levin’s “Sharknado” on this list, but to ignore the legacy of Ed Wood would be to discredit the silliness that makes some technically speaking “bad” horror movies into something special. “Plan 9 from Outer Space” is at once an ambitiously elaborate alien invasion saga and a metaphoric dumping ground for the ’50s filmmaker’s erratic creative process. What it lacks in cohesion it makes up for in camp, justifying its spot on this list as a historic flop that entertains nevertheless.

“My favorite horror films are the old ones, the cheesy ones,” Cassandra Peterson — yes, the Elvira — told IndieWire in a 2022 interview. “I’m all about the old cheesy campy ones. My absolute number one would be “Plan 9 from Outer Space.” Sadly, this film marks Bela Lugosi’s last performance. Two days after the shoot, he died…of embarrassment. If you like grave robbers from outer space, terrible acting (including legendary horror hostess Vampira’s turn as a walking towel rack), and special effects that are anything but special, this flick’s for you! This is the worst movie ever made and I’d stake my reputation on it, if I had one.” —AF

“Black Sunday” (Mario Bava, 1960)

In 1960, Italian horror maestro Mario Bava catapulted his career with “Black Sunday,” a loose adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story “Viy,” which would also later be adapted into one of the only horror movies ever made in the Soviet Union. The film also launched the career of Barbara Steele, who starred as Asa Vajda, a witch burnt at the stake, who returns from the dead hundreds of years later to seek revenge of the descendants of her killers. Asa’s torment is palpable and appropriately horrific. She has a death mask, studded with spikes, nailed onto her face before she is burned alive. In one of the film’s best scene, as Asa comes back to life, the mask is peeled away from her face, still preserved after centuries, but bloated with nail marks. Although the film is a stunning example of Italian Gothic horror, it was banned in the U.K. until 1968 because of its violence, with some of the film’s gore censored in the U.S. as well. Despite years of censorship, “Black Sunday” is wonderfully atmospheric and moody, with foggy graveyards and dripping dungeons that seem lifted from some of the best horror films of the 1930s. Bava would soon move on to the technicolor world of gialli, but “Black Sunday” remains one of his best. —JR

“Eyes Without a Face” (Georges Franju, 1960)

Fairy tales can often tap into the same primal fears as horror films: fears of rejection, loneliness, aging, the loss of beauty. In Georges Franju’s telling of a plastic surgeon father obsessed with saving his daughter’s looks — her face was disfigured in an accident — “Eyes Without a Face” is a horror movie in the guise of a twisted fairy tale, right down to its tinkly, child-like Maurice Jarre score. The father’s only solution is a face transplant: which means killing women so he can steal their faces. But his daughter’s body inevitably rejects the skin grafts. There’s so much at work here: the idea that a loss of beauty is the same as death itself (the father has held a funeral for his daughter and he keeps her hidden away from the world) and that beauty is worth killing for (with lab attendant Alida Valli as the “huntsman” archetype in this cockeyed Snow White story, going out and abducting young women). “Eyes Without a Face” says that the ultimate sadness is when happiness itself becomes inequity: that in order to gain something for yourself the only solution is to take from another. —CB

“Psycho” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

“Psycho” is practically the anno domini of cinema — there’s a before and an after, in which nothing has ever been the same. Perhaps all to today’s collective hand-wringing about “what’s a film? and what’s TV?” goes back to “Psycho,” which Hitchcock shot with the crew of his TV show “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” the Paramount logo at the beginning bearing the grainy lines of TV interlace as an in-joke affectation. Who cares about the medium? It’s the vision that matters — and Hitchcock proved with “Psycho” how impossible it would be for all his many imitators to capture his style. For all the scares and shocks — and that shower scene — it’s the humor that sticks with you in Psycho: the “oh, my God” moment when Norman subtly freaks out as Marion Crane’s car briefly stops sinking into the swamp, the sheriff’s wife recalling how she picked out Mrs. Bates’s burial dress (“periwinkle blue”), the “come at me” challenge to believe the pseudoscientific nonsense the psychiatrist spouts at the end to try to “explain” everything that’s happened — when it’s clear no explanation could ever suffice. There are some things in life that are just like that, and “Psycho” is Hitchcock’s cinematic smirk at our futile attempts to make sense of the senseless. —CB

“Village of the Damned” (Wolf Rilla, 1960)

What if the children aren’t our future? That’s the dastardly question facing George Sanders as a professor in the small English village of Midwich whose wife was impregnated by an extraterrestrial force along with all the other nearby women of child-bearing age. Sanders’ character is learned, sophisticated, and tolerant, and he believes the young alien children who are born — all with platinum blonde hair and glowing eyes — deserve the benefit of the doubt. He quickly realizes he’s wrong — even about his own “son” — ultimately arriving at a Stalinist solution. Dripping with dread, “Village of the Damned” suggests that the paranoia we dismiss may not always be unfounded. Rather than history’s arc bending toward progress and justice, the future may hold only entropy and decline. —CB

“The Innocents” (Jack Clayton, 1961)

Do they ever return to possess the living? That’s the question asked in the hilariously misleading trailer for Jack Clayton’s unnerving adaptation of “The Turn of the Screw,” which stars screen royalty Deborah Kerr as a young governess hired to look after two children on a rural estate. The home is large yet claustrophobic, the kids as off-putting as they are cherubic; you can surely tell where this is going if ever you’ve seen a haunted-house movie, but rest assured you’ve never seen one quite like “The Innocents.” A true exercise in less-is-more horror, the script — adapted from Henry James’ novel by Truman Capote and William Archibald — privileges brief glimpses and hard-to-place sounds over anything overt. As for the question posed by the trailer, it’s hardly a spoiler to say that yes, they do return to possess the living. —MN

“Carnival of Souls” (Herk Harvey, 1962)

A waking nightmare that’s every bit as ghoulish as its title suggests, Herk Harvey’s “Carnival of Souls” — a singular one-off as storied as “Night of the Hunter” and twice as eerie — is an indelible tour through a funhouse of our deepest fears. Shot for a measly $33,000, and imbued with the morbid unease of a rediscovered snuff film, this micro-budget classic stars Candace Hilligoss as Mary, the sole survivor of an ill-fated drag race. Dredging herself out of the water and re-entering a world that feels ominously shadowed by her near-death experience, Mary finds herself trapped in a stretch of American nowhere that’s as inescapable as the Twilight Zone, and twice as dark. Once upon a time, this was the kind of nameless movie you might stumble upon at 2 A.M. on TCM; the kind of thing you felt you shouldn’t be watching. Today, even though you can watch it on a Criterion Collection Blu-ray or stream it on your laptop, Harvey’s unnerving masterpiece still retains every last drop of its delirious power. —DE

“What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (Robert Aldrich, 1962)

The best horror movies include both surface-level scares for an escapist jolt and deeper fears we can all relate to. Robert Aldrich’s adaptation of Henry Farrell’s pulp novel could’ve been just shock and schlock in its depiction of two sisters, one a former child star Jane (Bette Davis) whose fame was eclipsed by the later success of her movie star sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), who will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair following an accident for which Jane is blamed. These two have been forgotten by the world and when we join them it seems they’ve been living out the same daily routine for decades — Jane slouches up the stairs taking meals up to Blanche with a sneer and a snide remark. Their lives are already over: they’re doomed to just rehash the same grievances from ages ago ad infinitum. The only thing that could change is if Jane’s resentment curdles into murderous rage. It does. The real fear Davis and Crawford tap into so urgently is fear of regret, building up to a final scene of ennui set on a beach that rivals the far more self-consciously arty beach-set ending notes of contemporaneous ennui in “The 400 Blows” and “La Dolce Vita”: “You mean this whole time we could have been friends?” —CB

“The Birds” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

For one, it’s the only Hitchcock film ever to imply its ending is the end of the world — a reading reinforced by Robert Boyle’s original concept art showing the Golden Gate Bridge covered in birds, even San Francisco lost to our new avian overlords. For another, it’s as pure an expression as any ever put on film of how much we take normalcy for granted. We’re going along, all seems fine. You may be a San Francisco socialite (Tippy Hedrin) looking to pull an elaborate prank on a smug denizen of Bodega Bay (Rod Taylor). And suddenly, stunning disaster strikes — in this case, as one of the characters puts it, “the bird war” — and your life may be changed forever, no going back, say goodbye to normal. All our lives are lived on a razor’s edge but we just choose, for the most part, not to think about it. The second half of Hitchcock’s film is almost beat for beat perfect, including a stunning scene set in a diner in which townfolks bring many different views to the table about how to deal with the crisis: there’s the evangelist who quotes Scripture to make sense of what’s happening; the scientist who thinks reason holds the answer; the drunk just passing through who thinks wholesale slaughter is the solution; the conspiracy theorist who decides to blame Hedrin’s character: “I think you’re evil! Eviiiiillll!!!” The scariest question to ask is: would any of us handle the end any better? —CB

“The Haunting” (Robert Wise, 1963)

Adapted by Nelson Gidding from the 1959 novel “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson (who suggested the film title), “The Haunting” stars Julie Harris as Eleanor, a shy woman who once experienced poltergeists. She joins a group organized by a paranormal investigator (Richard Johnson), including a mod lesbian psychic (Claire Bloom), and the son of the house’s current owner (Russ Tamblyn), to study a death-plagued abandoned haunted mansion. The filmmaker made the most of a much lower budget than “West Side Story” by taking the shoot to England. He used an experimental 30 mm wide-angle Panavision camera to unsettling effect to portray the film’s most memorable character — the house — from odd, jarring, dislocated angles, often showing Eleanor’s mentally unstable point-of-view. The crew bent walls, destabilized a spiral staircase, applied photo-sensitive makeup to make the actors look pale when they stood in a “cold spot,” delivered a jump scare when a missing woman’s head pops out, and most disturbing, “morphed” a woman from childhood to old age by photographing four actresses at different ages and uniting them with dissolves. While the movie received mixed reviews on release, it has built a cult following and is considered by many — including Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg — to be one of the scariest horror films of all time. Having seen it when it first came out, I for one am scarred for life. —AT

“Kwaidan” (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964)

Known for his epic war and samurai films, “Kwaidan” director Masaki Kobayashi brings an intoxicating specificity and impressive scope to writer Yoko Mizuki’s adaptation of four famous Japanese folktales. First, a samurai regrets parting ways with his former wife in “The Black Hair.” Second, a snow spirit — or yuki-onna — tests a man’s promise in “The Woman of the Snow.” Third, a musician is lured into an ancient trap in “Hoichi the Earless.” Finally, a writer tells a ghostly tale of a haunted face that suddenly appears “In a Cup of a Tea.” —AF

“Strait-Jacket” (William Castle, 1964)

The director, producer and showman William Castle is often remembered for his barnstorming gimmicks: like sticking vibrating buzzers in theater seats, or offering life-insurance policies in case patrons were literally scared to death. But he was a superb B-movie craftsman too, who understood that when audiences were paying for violence and shocks, he had to deliver. For “Strait-Jacket,” Castle worked with “Psycho” novelist Robert Bloch on a lurid Lizzie Borden riff, with Joan Crawford playing a wronged wife who hacks up her husband and his mistress with a hatchet. And that’s just in the picture’s first scene. What follows is a high-pitched psychodrama, with Crawford’s character Lucy Harbin trying to reintegrate into society after a prison stint, and finding herself haunted by her past. Will there be more killing? The movie’s poster answers that in big letters: “Warning! ‘Strait-Jacket’ Vividly Depicts Ax Murders!” —NM

“Onibaba” (Kaneto Shindo, 1964)

You will remember “Onibaba” for its climactic scene with an oni mask: its wearer wrestling to remove the dramatic costume suddenly stuck — no, fused — to her face. But it’s not just that gruesome scene that makes the impression left by writer-director Kaneto Shindo’s 1964 jidaigeki (that’s a period drama set during the Japanese Edo period) so lasting. Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura maintain a taut dynamic in this two-hander about a woman and her daughter-in-law robbing soldiers amid a civil war. —AF

“Repulsion” (Roman Polanski, 1965)

Roman Polanski’s portrait of an introverted woman (Catherine Deneuve) who loses her mind while left alone in her apartment is a disturbing portrait of an abused, alienated woman whose experiences with assault and loneliness driver her to the brink of insanity. Deneuve’s disquieting performance finds the poor Belgian woman enduring a series of hardships — living in close quarters with her promiscuous sister, then trapped at home, where she endures horrific assaults both real and imagined — until finally she lashes out, with bloody, devastating consequences. Polanski’s gritty, stripped-down black-and-white storytelling keeps the tension high throughout; there’s no big revelation or unexpected twist, but this masterful look at the pratfalls of gender imbalance was ahead of its time in many ways. Polanski himself may be a tarnished name, but “Repulsion” has only grown more valuable with age: It highlights the horrors of abuse by proving that even isolated incidents can have terrible long-term impacts, and escape is not an option when the horror lingers in the mind. —EK

“Spider Baby” (Jack Hill, 1967)

Evil, twisted children will never not be scary, but Jack Hill’s cult classic takes the creepy horror trope to another level. The pitch-black comedy tells the story of a family with “Merrye Syndrome,” a fictional condition that essentially causes children to devolve into animals as they hit puberty. Horror comedy can be a difficult needle to thread, but “Spider Baby: or, the Maddest Story Ever Told” manages to be genuinely funny, truly scary, and 100 percent fucked up. If you haven’t seen it yet, rectify that immediately. —CZ

“Viy” (Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov, 1967)

Based on a story by Nikolai Gogol, “Viy” is one of the rare horror movies made in Russia during the Soviet era. A group of seminary student wandering the countryside spend a night in the company of a witch, who is murdered by one of the students. In the morning, they discover the witch was actually the daughter of a wealthy landowner, and now the men must pass three nights locked in the local church, protecting her body from evil spirits. The horrors the men encounter over the three nights could rival some of Guillermo del Toro’s best monsters: goblins with melting flesh, pointy demons, and jagged skeletons, disarticulated hands breaking through the walls of the church, and the spirit of the young witch, clad in an etherial white gown and daisy-chain flower crown, bloody tears in her eyes, alternatively beautiful and terrifying. Some of the scares in “Viy” are outdated, but it remains a fascinating glimpse at the type of filmmaking once hidden behind the Iron Curtain. —JR

“Hour of the Wolf” (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)

Before this 1968 outing, Ingmar Bergman had occasionally dabbled with horror elements in his career, particularly with 1957’s “The Seventh Seal” and 1960’s “The Virgin Spring,” but “Hour of the Wolf” found the esteemed director fully giving into the genre with haunting results. An artist and his wife live on a remote island, where the artist is troubled by his past and what he believes to be demons haunting him. During the “hour of the wolf,” the time where most births and deaths occur, the artist opens up to his wife about the darkness in his past, his childhood traumas, and a former lover, before realizing that the past might not be as far away as he once believed, and might instead be waiting for him across the island. “Hour of the Wolf” feels like a surreal fever dream (or nightmare), raising plenty of questions about what is really happening and what is imagined. It wouldn’t be a Bergman film without Liv Ullman, Max von Sydow, and a lot of existential questions, but “Hour of the Wolf” also features a creepy mini-opera, foreshadowing Bergman’s later take on “The Magic Flute.” It might be the director’s only horror film, but it’s an eerie and truly unforgettable one. —JR

“Kuroneko” (Kaneto Shindo, 1968)

Kaneto Shindo directed 48 films in his 100 years on this planet, none more unsettling than “Kuroneko.” Much of the Japanese auteur’s work was haunted by the atomic bomb dropped on his hometown of Hiroshima, making this masterful film something of an exception: An enigmatic ghost story set during Japan’s Heian period, it features murderous samurai, the baleful ghosts of two women seeking revenge on the soldiers who raped and killed them, and a black cat whose presence portends death. “Kuroneko” is more frightening for what it doesn’t show than for what it does, which isn’t to say that what’s on display isn’t terrifying in its own right; rarely have spirits been so justifiably angry. Getting vengeance beyond the grave is better than nothing, but it’s also cold comfort — after all, they’re still dead. —MN

“Night of the Living Dead” (George Romero, 1968)

George Romero’s subversive independent black-and-white film is a classic of horror and zombie lore, almost single-handedly inventing the modern zombie. Made for peanuts, the special effects are simple and sparse and the actors non-professional – the film’s grittiness works in its favor, giving it a raw realism that’s all-the-more disturbing. Romero has said that the role of Ben wasn’t written for a black actor, and that any perceived racial commentary in the film was coincidental. However, one can’t ignore the symbolism in Duane Jones’ casting — at the time, a very rare heroic role for a black actor in a film surrounded by white actors — against the backdrop of a racially-charged America undergoing significant social change, as a result of the Civil Rights Movement. Race is never a spoken issue in the film, but Romero’s casting choice opened it up to various interpretations and analyses, especially its incredibly bleak, unforgettable ending. The film spawned several sequels, and remakes, notably a 1990 reboot that starred Tony Todd playing the role of Ben. —TO

“Rosemary’s Baby” (Roman Polanski, 1968)

Unsettling from the moment Mia Farrow starts singing over those haunting opening credits, Roman Polanski’s masterpiece digs its claws into you and leaves as ghastly a mark as it does on Rosemary herself. Evil isn’t an unknowable entity in this still-timely tale of a woman being gaslit by her husband and neighbors; it’s the Satanist next door. Pregnancy is stressful enough when there isn’t a coven of witches chanting in the night, and it’s made doubly distressing by poor Rosemary’s suspicions that they’ve made a pact with Lucifer involving her unborn child. So cerebral in its approach to psychological horror that it deserves a PhD, “Rosemary’s Baby” has only grown more uncomfortable with time — and not just because we know more about Polanski now than we did 50 years ago. —MN

“A Bay of Blood” (Mario Bava, 1971)

In 1963, Mario Bava released “The Girl Who Knew Too Much,” kickstarting the giallo subgenre that would dominate Italian horror for years to come. In 1971, Bava reinvented the genre once again with his early slasher “A Bay of Blood,” where the murder of a wealthy heiress kicks off a greed-fueled murder spree, which also targets a group of innocent teenagers camping out nearby. “A Bay of Blood” would serve as a key inspiration for “Friday the 13th” and its subsequent sequel, with the franchise copying two murders from Bava’s film nearly shot for shot. It remains a vital watch for horror fans, and a reminder of how Bava continued to push horror into new and interesting realms, the reverberations of which are still felt today. —JR

“The Blood on Satan’s Claw” (Piers Haggard, 1971)

One of the “Unholy Trinity” of films that gave birth to the folk horror sub-genre (a cinematic realm that Kier-La Janisse’s recent documentary “Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched” compellingly positions as a storytelling mode unto itself), Piers Haggard’s “The Blood on Satan’s Claws” continues to feel ancient and otherworldly even as its entire manner screams the 1970s. Haggard’s unfamiliarity with the horror genre lends a strange instability to this bucolic tale of demonic possession in 18th century England, as if the movie itself is a bit nervous and unsure about the sexually charged witchcraft that seems to be spreading throughout the pious little village where the movie takes place, and why some of the locals are growing patches of animal fur out of their backs. 

“Beware the wiles of women” warns Patrick Wymark in the second-to-last role he shot before his death, but there’s no defense against the sinister Angel Blake, who an unforgettable Linda Hayden embodies as the smirking personification of every patriarchal anxiety the church has ever had. What “The Blood on Satan’s Claw” lacks in spine-tingling scariness it more than makes up for in elemental dread and the pervasive (even psychedelic) dread that nature cannot be tamed, only shrouded in darkness. —DE

“The Devils” (Ken Russell, 1971)

Ken Russell tackled history in 1971 with “The Devils,” an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudon.” The film depicts the real-life account of Urbain Grandier, a 17th century priest accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun, the hunchbacked Sister Jeanne. Russell dives deep into the religious hypocrisy and sacrilegious imagery, turning history into infamy, and singlehandedly giving birth to the Nunsploitation genre. One of the film’s most divisive scenes, nicknamed the “rape of Christ” shows the abbey’s nuns running rampant with sexual ecstasy, turning the church into a brothel, as orgies break out, priests masturbate into pages of the bible, and a bevy of naked nuns begin molesting a giant crucifix in orgasmic pleasure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “The Devils” was banned, rated X, and heavily censored upon release, and while versions of the film have finally become available to watch, the true director’s cut has never been released. Still, it remains a fascinating rumination on the corruption of power and the danger when sexual repression bleeds into hysteria. —JR

“Willard” (Daniel Mann, 1971)

They just don’t make rat-infested emotional breakdowns like they used to. In Daniel Mann’s 1971 horror flick, adapted from Stephen Gilbert’s 1968 novel “Ratman’s Notebooks,” Bruce Davison plays the titular Willard: an outcast man with rats for pets who finds himself floundering in the wake of his father’s death. Traumatized by his cruel mother and terrible boss, Willard snaps mid-way through the film and, thus, the rat revenge begins. Although not outright scary, “Willard” is undeniably menacing and wildly entertaining for its practical effects. It was followed-up with the sequel “Ben” — so named for Willard’s meanest rat — one year later. —AF

“Don’t Look Now” (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

Why are there so many horror movies about the grieving process? It’s a big question, but “Don’t Look Now” is as comprehensive an answer as you’re likely to find. For one thing, Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece — a splintered and unshakeable portrait of two parents (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) in mourning over the death of their young daughter — has inspired a zillion lesser films to explore the same terrain. For another, this morbid Daphne du Maurier adaptation complicates Hitchcockian psychology with Borges-inspired surrealism to illustrate how genre language can tap into trauma more directly than standard dramas might allow. Spooky twin sisters, spectral visions, the murk of Venetian canals, one infamous sex scene, and the most disturbing reveal in all of cinema combine to articulate the isolating madness that follows loss, and the consequences that come from surrendering to it. —DE

“Ganja & Hess” (Bill Gunn, 1973)

An original treatise on sex, religion and African-American identity, iconoclastic filmmaker Bill Gunn’s 1973 allegorical classic subverts the vampire genre. Anthropologist Hess Green is stabbed with an ancient ceremonial dagger by his unstable assistant, endowing him with the blessing of immortality and the curse of an unquenchable thirst for blood. When the assistant’s wife Ganja comes searching for her vanished husband, she and Hess form an unexpected partnership. Gunn uses vampirism as a proxy for addiction, although the complexity of the plot makes it nearly impossible to reduce the film to any one simple metaphor. Drastically recut by distributors unhappy with Gunn’s highly stylized version that flirts with the conventions of blaxploitation and horror cinema, it was re-released under other titles. And so, for many years, what was essentially a bastardized version of the film (re-edited without Gunn’s involvement) was all that was available. Forty years later, Kino Lorber made the film gods happy by re-releasing the film, restored to Gunn’s original vision. —TO

“Messiah of Evil” (Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, 1973)

“Messiah of Evil” is an underseen gem that manages to creep under the skin despite its very low budget. When a woman heads to a seaside town to look for her missing father, she finds the creepy hamlet has been infiltrated by an undead cult. It’s never quite clear if the undead are zombies or vampires, but their presence is unshakably ominous. While “Messiah of Evil” is lesser known, it’s full of iconic and memorable scenes (a victim being devoured in a supermarket, another surrounded by the undead at the movies) that recall to mind some of George A. Romero’s best work. Co-written and co-directed by husband-and-wife team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who would later co-write “American Graffiti” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Messiah of Evil” is worth seeking out. —JR

“Sisters” (Brian De Palma, 1973)

Brian De Palma has always worn his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock on his cinematic sleeve, and 1973’s “Sisters” puts his own twist on “Rear Window.” Grace, an investigative journalist, accidentally witnesses her neighbor murdering a man, but when the police arrive, there’s no evidence of the crime. Although everyone is convinced she’s crazy, Grace tries to uncover the truth about her neighbor, who may or may not be hiding her murderous twin sister from the world, but the dark secrets Grace ultimately destroy her in the end. “Sisters” is simultaneously the kind of lurid thriller one has come to expect from De Palma, but it’s also a surprisingly prescient film that shows the detrimental fallout of gaslighting and not believing women. —JR

“The Exorcist” (William Friedkin, 1973)

Nearly half a century after its release, “The Exorcist” remains one of the scariest movies ever made for one reason — there is a primal discomfort from the contrast between an innocent young girl and the demon possessing her soul. Linda Blair’s seminal performance as 12-year-old Regan, whose head twists around and spews vomit as she unleashes disturbing laughter and unfiltered vulgarities, embodies the idea that nothing is sacred. Even the prospects of a Bbible-toting Max von Sydow doesn’t guarantee that everything will turn out rosy for poor Regan and her family. Friedkin, who was hardly exclusive to the horror genre, approaches William Peter Blatty’s novel with the same sophistication he brought to innumerable other genres at the height of his career. One of the most profitable movies in history, “The Exorcist” gave birth to has birthed several sequels and a television series, but none of them have matched the clarity with which the original unravels the mythology of upper-middle-class America with in such profound, disturbing moments so credible that even Friedkin came out of the experience as a true believer. Decades later, his exorcism documentary “The Devil and Father Amorth,” about the inspiration for the character in the movie, proved just how much this seminal achievement continues to haunt its maker — and generations of moviegoers as well. —EK

“The Wicker Man” (Robin Hardy, 1973)

“Shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent,” says the Lord of Summerisle in Robin Hardy’s bonkers classic. And who, you ask, is the Lord of Summerisle? Not telling. Even more than most horror movies, “The Wicker Man” demands to be seen with as little foreknowledge as possible — stories about cops arriving on tiny islands to investigate a little girl’s disappearance rarely end well, but there’s little preparing oneself for this one. The 2006 remake was regrettable — aside from Nicolas Cage’s performance, which was pleasingly bizarre — but the original remains a must-see for the way it continually subverts your expectations. —MN

“Black Christmas” (Bob Clark, 1974)

Bob Clark is perhaps best known for his other holiday-themed film, “A Christmas Story,” but 1974’s “Black Christmas” deserves just as much attention. Set in a sorority house over Christmas break, a group of college women are stalked and slowly picked off by a deranged killer hiding inside the abode. The plot sounds formulaic, but “Black Christmas” remains timeless thanks to its terrifying and elusive killer, “Billy,” whose backstory is never revealed, as well as a foreboding ending that doesn’t offer much hope for the film’s Final Girl, Jess. But beyond this, “Black Christmas” is also remarkably feminist for its time, as Jess chooses an abortion and a career over being locked into a loveless relationship. Likewise, the terror felt by the women as they are plagued by obscene phone calls makes it clear that some horrors are all too common, and don’t require a boogeyman in a mask. —JR

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (Tobe Hooper, 1974)

The 1970’s changed the horror genre forever, and Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was the catalyst. A group of friends stumble upon a literal house of horrors in Texas, filled with a deranged family of cannibals led by one of horror’s most terrifying villains, Leatherface, clad in a mask stitched together from human skin. By escaping the clutches of the chain saw-wielding Leatherface, Sally became horror’s first Final Girl, a survivor who emerges from a chrysalis of terror to become a blood-soaked angel of vengeance. Although Final Girls have undergone several empowering transformations over the years, the trope remains one of horror’s greatest feminist accomplishments. Like J.R.R. Tolkein’s Éowyn, who defiantly declares “I am no man” before slaying the seemingly indestructible Lord of the Nazgûl, Final Girls have destroyed some of horror’s biggest boogeymen, thanks to the path paved by Hooper’s Sally. —JR

“Deep Red” (Dario Argento, 1975)

Dario Argento didn’t create the giallo genre, that honor goes to Mario Bava, but he perfected it with 1975’s “Deep Red,” often referred to as the greatest giallo of all-time. The film kicks off with a psychic who sense the dark thoughts of a murderer in the audience, one who later targets and kills her. David Hemmings stars as a pianist who witnesses the murder, which draws him into a dark mystery that puts his life at risk. Argento employs many of the genre’s signature trades, a black-gloved, knife-wielding killer; deliciously over the top death sequences; twists, turns, and false reveals; and a wonderfully warped backstory that eventually reveals the killer’s identity. Argento would soon gain international acclaim with 1977’s “Suspiria,” but “Deep Red” remains a thrilling murder mystery and Argento’s very best. —JR

“Jaws” (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Humans think they’ve conquered the planet. Humanity reigns so completely supreme that people are shocked when nature bares its teeth and shows who is really in charge. That’s the underlying horror of what’s otherwise more a late-20th century riff on Melville in Steven Spielberg’s epochal blockbuster. And sometimes when imminent nature-related disaster is staring you in the face, it’s more politically convenient, as Amity’s mayor (Murray Hamilton) finds, to just deny that any danger is present at all. As I’ve written here before, “Jaws” is a Manifest Destiny film, about the particularly American impulse to inhabit all spaces we desire to inhabit — if people just stayed out of the water, or chose to swim in Amity pools instead, we’d have no story. —CB

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (Jim Sharman, 1975)

Director Jim Sharman’s long-celebrated “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” is best known for packing midnight showings with costumed theater kids alternately doing the “Time Warp” and belting out the suggestive lyrics of songs like “Sword of Damocles,” “Touch-A-Touch-A-Touch Me,” and “Rose Tint My World.” But there’s no denying the musical horror comedy, created and adapted for the screen by playwright Richard O’Brien (aka Riff Raff), is profoundly unsettling.

Kidnapping, murder, cannibalism, implied incest: This science-fiction double feature boasts it all. Sure, it’s not outright scary in the traditional sense; sequins tend to cut tension that way. And yes, it’s a bit schlocky; that’s half the fun. But “The Rocky Horror Picture” show is indeed a horror show and to leave it off a best horror ranking is to deny the legacy of Dr. Frank-N-Furter: the sexiest mad scientist the world has ever known. —AF

“Carrie” (Brian De Palma, 1976)

Your prom night may have been bad, but it wasn’t “Carrie” bad. Sissy Spacek is among the few performers to earn an Oscar nod for starring in a horror film, and with good reason: Her chilling turn is the main reason Brian De Palma’s killer adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is thought of as a justified revenge saga instead of something even darker. Pig blood and telekinesis remain its most attention-grabbing elements, neither of which would amount to much were “Carrie” not so devastating in its depiction of an especially traumatic adolescence. De Palma was on fire during this period — “Sisters,” “Blow Out,” and “Dressed to Kill” were all made within five years of “Carrie” — but this supernatural horror flick is still his crowning achievement. —MN

“The Omen” (Richard Donner, 1976)

The first installment of “The Omen” trilogy still holds up as one of the eeriest movies of all time. It tells the story of an “innocent” young boy who, unbeknownst to himself and everyone around him — including his diplomat father and his wife— just might be the Antichrist. Preferring mood and atmosphere over shock and awe, and boasting some genuinely chilling scenes, including grisly death sequences — by hanging, decapitation and impalement — and a famously foreboding Oscar-winning score (led by its theme song “Ave Satani,” composed by Jerry Goldsmith) — the film presents a scenario that would be any parent’s worst nightmare. “The Omen,” aided by a solid cast led by an outstanding Gregory Peck, treats its subject seriously, which adds to its believability. The pale-faced Harvey Stephens as the devil child is sufficiently sinister. The film spawned two sequels, and a 2006 remake that should be avoided — at least not without seeing the original first. —TO

“The Tenant” (Roman Polanski, 1976)

The third film in Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” is less well-known than the previous two (“Repulsion” and “Rosemary’s Baby”), but utilizes the same subtle breaks with reality to capture the director’s unique brand of psychological horror – never making it clear if what we are seeing is imagined or really happening. Polanski himself stars as the unassuming new tenant who is made to feel unwelcome by his new Parisian neighbors as the memory of the previous tenant — who attempted suicide by throwing herself out the window — hovers over the film. In “The Tenant,” Polanski, who spent most of his life as an immigrant, captures the feeling of what it feels like to never quite fit in and experience reality in different way than others. —CO

“Alucarda” (Juan López Moctezuma, 1977)

Alucarda has lived at a convent her whole life, but her world changes with the arrival of Justine, another young orphan. The two girls become inseparable, with their friendship often bordering on a sexual relationship. While out in the woods, they come across a strange burial ground and accidentally unleash a demonic force, which soon possesses them and threatens to tear apart the entire convent and everyone in it. Much like Ken Russell’s “The Devils,” “Alucarda” is rife with sexual ecstasy in a religious setting, where iconography turns sacrilegious. The young girls pledge their bodies both to each other and to the devil, shown in his most beastly form, with cloven hooves and curled horns, a furry nightmare that undoubtedly served as the inspiration for some of Guillermo del Toro’s most fantastic monsters. As the coven gathers to pray, the girls, now fully possessed, cannot stand anything holy, and the entire chapel descends into chaos, making for an unforgettable finale. “Alucarda” might not be as well known as “The Exorcist,” but it’s a possession film unlike any other, one that doesn’t fall back on the genre’s tired tropes, allowing it to truly shock. —JR

“Eraserhead” (David Lynch, 1977)

David Lynch may never have completely captured the “where are they? are they even on this planet?” dislocating terror of “Eraserhead” until “Part 8” of “Twin Peaks: The Return” 40 years later. “Eraserhead” is pure immersion: in some strange world a lonely schlub (Jack Nance) suddenly finds himself taking care of a weird, phallic, alien baby creature. Baby Yoda this ain’t (thank God). A metaphor for the sheer horror of parenthood follows: this baby just does nothing but lay there and demand constant care and attention without producing any apparent return on investment. Something’s gonna break — maybe the world itself? Nance’s coiffed hero (his follicular achievement is the reason for the title) starts hallucinating more and more terrors: the baby all grown up and in a business suit, that he’s in a strange theater in which a cutesy vaudeville singer performs while giant-sized sperm cells fall around her. Things aren’t going to end well. But until that apocalyptic climax, you’re in for a sensual immersion of sonic textures the likes of which the cinema has barely given us since. —CB

“Hausu” (Obayashi Nobuhiko, 1977)

The story goes that Japanese movie studio Toho was tired of losing money on movies that made sense, and so they greenlit Obayashi Nobuhiko’s “Hausu” — a potentially career-ending script that no in-house director would touch — thinking that it was time to lose money on a movie that didn’t. They only got half of what they bargained for: An utterly delirious (and strangely cheerful) ghost story about a teen girl named Gorgeous (Ikegami Kimiko) who takes a group of friends to her aunt’s haunted house, Obayashi’s magnum opus is a demented funeral parade of phantasmagoric delights. A killer mattress, a carnivorous piano, and a demonic cat are just the tip of the iceberg of a wild, super fun, and disarmingly playful movie in which even the smallest moments are touched with madness. A forgotten gem until the Criterion Collection rescued the film from obscurity and turned it into a cult phenomenon, “Hausu” may not make a lick of sense, but it was a hit in its own time, and an even bigger one in ours. —DEThe story goes that Japanese movie studio Toho was tired of losing money on movies that made sense, and so they greenlit Obayashi Nobuhiko’s “Hausu” — a potentially career-ending script that no in-house director would touch — thinking that it was time to lose money on a movie that didn’t. They only got half of what they bargained for: An utterly delirious (and strangely cheerful) ghost story about a teen girl named Gorgeous (Ikegami Kimiko) who takes a group of friends to her aunt’s haunted house, Obayashi’s magnum opus is a demented funeral parade of phantasmagoric delights. A killer mattress, a carnivorous piano, and a demonic cat are just the tip of the iceberg of a wild, super fun, and disarmingly playful movie in which even the smallest moments are touched with madness. A forgotten gem until the Criterion Collection rescued the film from obscurity and turned it into a cult phenomenon, “Hausu” may not make a lick of sense, but it was a hit in its own time, and an even bigger one in ours. —DE

“Suspiria” (Dario Argento, 1977)

After perfecting the giallo with 1975’s “Deep Red,” Dario Argento tackled the supernatural with “Suspiria,” the first installment in his Three Mothers Trilogy. American ballet student Suzy lands a spot at a prestigious dance academy in Germany, but the school is home to an ancient evil that Suzy must find and destroy before it devours her. With the exception of his follow up film, 1980’s “Inferno,” Argento has never quite made anything as jaw-dropping as “Suspiria.” Resplendent with garish set pieces and dazzling pops of red, blue, and green, “Suspiria” counters the film’s absolutely brutal and iconic death scenes with true beauty. It’s nearly impossible to do justice to “Suspiria” with words; it’s a piece of cinema that must truly be experienced, which is perhaps why Luca Guadagnino didn’t dare remake the film, but instead tried to convey how Argento’s version made him feel in his 2018 take. —JR

“Dawn of the Dead” (George A. Romero, 1978)

George A. Romero’s particular genius was to reacquaint his audience with familiar spaces by making them seem alien. “Dawn of the Dead” is set in a Monroeville, PA shopping mall, where a number of survivors of the zombie apocalypse have barricaded themselves from the undead hordes. Of course, a mass slaughter of the zombies still inside is required first — an explosion of violence being a necessary prelude to any consumerist binge. But once our survivors have finished their purge, they go a little crazy: it’s like living in this mall and having the run of it is as good as living in paradise. They go nuts playing arcade games, stocking up on the mall’s seemingly bottomless reserves of food and candy — who cares if those reserves are actually finite or if no one can ever go outside again? It can’t last, of course. The end of the world has rarely been less a tragedy and more a farce. —CB

“Halloween” (John Carpenter, 1978)

There were plenty of horror movies before John Carpenter’s iconic slasher debuted in 1978, but “Halloween” found the perfect formula to transform the spooky holiday into an unforgettable one. With a pulsing theme, the perfect Final Girl in Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode, and boogeyman who can’t seem to die, “Halloween” changed the genre forever. After inexplicably murdering his older sister on Halloween when he was just six, Michael Myers has spent most of his life in an asylum, but on a fateful Halloween night in 1978, he returns home to Haddonfield for a murderous rampage that terrorizes Laurie and her friends. With his disfigured face hidden behind a ghoulish white mask, Myers stalks and stabs his way through the film, impervious to both bullets and blows. Though Carpenter would technically kill him off in 1980’s “Halloween II,” Myers proved so popular he resurrected once more in 1988 to spawn an entire franchise still beloved by horror fans. —JR

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (Philip Kaufman, 1978)

Philip Kaufman’s 1978 spin on “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” abandons the B-movie armature of Don Siegel’s 1956 original (as glorious as that film may too be) to wade in the waters of oozing 1970s paranoia. With a script from W.D. Richter, this one fits snugly alongside the films of Alan J. Pakula like “The Parallax View” and “Klute” as a ‘70s slice of Cold War chilliness. It’s rounded out by a terrific cast including Donald Sutherland as a cooly collected scientist, Jeff Goldblum as his dweeby pal, plus Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, and Veronica Cartwright. The gelatinous set pieces and alien pod bodies that seem to bloom are an icky delight, but the film also evocatively captures the Bay Area, as a rare reminder of how great a 1970s movie set in San Francisco could look. —RL

“Magic” (Richard Attenborough, 1978)

Underrated as both an Anthony Hopkins horror vehicle and top-tier creepy puppet movie, “Magic” follows a magician and his new ventriloquist dummy Fats on a psychological downward spiral spectacular enough to merit a “ta-daaa!” Based on William Goldman’s novel of the same name — and adapted for the screen by the author himself — director Richard Attenborough’s 1978 thriller is occasionally challenged in its pacing and structure but boasts must-see perfromances from Hopkins and co-star Ann-Margret whose chemistry is instant. —AF

“Martin” (George A. Romero, 1978)

George Romero will always be synonymous with zombies, but his take on vampires deserves to be regarded as a horror classic in its own right. The story of a man who believes that he is a vampire is a slow-burning subversion of the standard Dracula story, but once it gets going, it really gets going. While the main character is not actually a vampire, the idea of a real man drinking blood is both horrifying and an interesting commentary about society’s relationship with fictional horror characters. Romero himself called “Martin” his favorite film that he made, and praise does not get much higher than that. —CZ

“The Shout” (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1978)

Jerzy Skolimowski’s “The Shout” is a uniquely unsettling plunge into a sound engineer’s descent into madness. Already, Anthony Fielding, played by John Hurt, is primed for madness. In his rickety studio in England’s North Devon coastline, he crafts sounds from unusual sources, striking a violin bow across scrap metal, rolling wet marbles across a sheet pan, or chain-smoking into his microphone to create eerie aural soundscapes. Then there’s the Francis Bacon paintings lining the walls.

The provincial life he shares with his wife Rachel (played by the always-excellent Susannah York) is seriously disturbed by the arrival of a mysterious vagrant (Alan Bates) who claims a Shaman has taught him to deliver a scream so deafening that it can kill a person. That shout —staged impeccably in a windy dune as Hurt pummels down a sandy hill to uncertainty and lambs topple to their death by sound — doesn’t kill Anthony. But the consequences are much direr, as a complete psychosexual breakdown of his marriage ensues. Skolimowski’s under-seen film is a masterclass in psychological horror. There are no jump scares, no monsters in the dark, but this adaptation of a short story by British writer Robert Graves is most disturbing for its unpeeling of a marriage already doomed. The sounds in the aftershock ring through your head. —RL

“Alien” (Ridley Scott, 1979)

You can survive “Alien,” but you can never truly escape it — and not just because Ridley Scott will probably never stop making sequels and/or prequels. “Alien” has drifted so far from its origins since its violent birth nearly 40 years ago that it can be difficult to remember how terrifying the original film is, so here’s a reminder: USCSS Nostromo and its crew wake up early from hypersleep after receiving a distress signal. John Hurt meets a not-so-friendly creature called a facehugger. Said creature gives birth to something even worse that kills everyone onboard the Nostromo not named Ellen Ripley. In space no one can hear you scream, but those of us on earth aren’t so lucky. —MN

“The Brood” (David Cronenberg, 1979)

The big reveal in the Canadian auteur’s breakout movie “The Brood” is Samantha Eggar lifting her white drape to show Art Hindle the multiple “babies” growing from her torso, opening the biggest sac to lick the blood off her newborn. Following “Rabid” and “Shivers,” “The Brood” signaled the arrival of a cerebral filmmaker with icky ideas about the hazards of science, from armpits with sex organs and veined penis-shaped parasites with ears and mouths crawling in and out of body cavities, to psycho-plasmic hives that become humans, born out of anger and forming an army. Made for about $1 million with a tiny crew of seven, “The Brood” used a mix of analog prosthetics and clever manipulation of light and dark in a pre-CGI world to create believable, naturalistic menace. When Roger Corman picked up the movie stateside, horror mavens Joe Dante and John Carpenter helped to cut the trailer. Cronenberg’s “Videodrome,” “Scanners,” and “The Fly” came later. —AT

“Dressed to Kill” (Brian De Palma, 1980)

Brian De Palma was at the height of his powers as the master of pastiche when he made this riveting Hitchcockian horror tale about elevator murderers and people insecure in their own bodies. At first the story of a promiscuous woman (Angie Dickinson), “Dressed to Kill” borrows a page from “Psycho” by taking its apparent protagonist out of the picture after the first act. From there, the specter of a mysterious trans woman named Bobbi on a killing spree hovers throughout the story, as she stalks Liz (Nancy Allen) while a psychiatrist (Michael Caine) makes frantic attempts to warn the police about the threat at hand. The twist about Bobbi’s real identity is obvious to any engaged viewer, but De Palma’s stylish riff on slasher tropes uses the familiarity of its winding plot to deliver a brilliant meditation on fluid sexual identity — and the frustrations of being forced to suppress it — long before the concept had much visibility in popular culture. It’s a brilliant, risky examination of femininity, the terror involved in being the object of an insatiable male gaze, and what happens when latent desires remain underserved. No horror movie made today has the guts to go there. —EK

“Friday the 13th” (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980)

Anyone looking for the origin of how ill-fated Camp Crystal Lake camper Jason a) became a murdering machine and b) got that kicky hockey mask he so loves to sport while on his rampages will likely be at least somewhat disappointed by Sean S. Cunningham’s surprise smash hit “Friday the 13th.” Hell, Jason isn’t even the killer in what would become the first film in a sprawling, unwieldy, and often very confusing franchise (no, we’re not talking about that time Jason went to space, not now, not ever), but that shouldn’t prohibit any enjoyment of this (quite literally) campy, kooky indie hit.

And, yes, it was an indie hit! Understandably inspired by the success of John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” Cunningham and writer Victor Miller started shopping around their script — which leaned heavily into similar ideas, from the unseen stalker and the horny teens in peril, to gory kills and a seemingly “safe” atmosphere in which they are carried out — before it was even complete. A bidding war ensued, and ultimately the film was picked up by Paramount Pictures, who carried it to an almost $60 million box office run. Filmed on location at an old Boy Scouts camp and with a cast of young rising stars (including Kevin Bacon, Adrienne King, and even Bing Crosby’s son, Harry Crosby), this first entry into the series is a wacky, gory delight all on its own, independent of the scads of follow-up features.

You surely know the shape of it already: a bunch of horny camp counselors attempt to clean up a previously disused summer camp (something bad happened there so many years ago, but who can even remember what), and when they’re not busy getting down, they’re being killed off by a particular brutal unseen killer. There are things that go bump in the night and scary thunderstorms and axes and arrows, oh my! Mostly, though, there are stupid teenagers running facefirst into danger and not ever having the good sense to get away from it — believable! — and a truly unexpected villian with a very special axe to grind. While it’s scary and gory and amusing enough on its own, “Friday the 13th” does nattily set up more chills to come, and while it would take nearly two more films for Jason to get his mask, from the start, we at least know why he kills, and who could ask for more? —KE

“The Changeling” (Peter Medak, 1980)

From “The Uninvited” to “The Innocents,” horror loves a good ghost story, and 1980’s “The Changeling” remains one of the genre’s very best. After the tragic death of his family, a composer moves into an historic mansion in Seattle, but the idyllic home also harbors the spirit of a distressed child, one who was hidden away in the home before being killed, and who is ready to seek revenge on the family who erased him from their past. “The Changeling” also packs on plenty of scares, especially the film’s unsettling séance scene, which undoubtedly inspired 2001’s “The Others.” Although “The Changeling” isn’t as well known as some of horror’s other ghost stories, it’s a favorite of both Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who is rumored to have screened it during the production of “Poltergeist.” Featuring a powerhouse performance by George C. Scott and well as a compelling mystery at its core, “The Changeling” is an understated horror gem worth discovering. —JR

“The Fog” (John Carpenter, 1980)

“A celebration of our past!” declares the triumphal banner hanging over the town square of Antonio Bay, California in honor of its centennial celebration. Director John Carpenter, in his first film after the landmark “Halloween,” makes us ask an important question: who wrote that history we’re celebrating? The ghosts that are coming out of the mists rolling in off the Pacific have a very different perspective on Antonio Bay and its residents, and if they can’t write their own story in the history books, they will write a tale of present-day revenge instead — in blood. With a setting much like “The Birds,” “The Fog” is a masterpiece of mood. And it features both Jamie Lee Curtis and her mother Janet Leigh — but this is no escapist horror pastiche. How much do the people of today bear guilt for the crimes of their forebears? Are reparations owed? Carpenter examines the crushing weight of the past and suggests that history may be the ultimate horror story. —CB

“The Shining” (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

The fault lies not in the ghosts that haunt us but in ourselves. Wouldn’t Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) have ended up going down his psychotic path in “The Shining” no matter what? When we first meet him, he’s already been involved in an incident of domestic abuse with his son. Nicholson certainly plays Jack like he’s demented from almost the very beginning — cue chills: “You see? It’s alright. He saw it on the television.” “The Shining” has a certain dream logic to it, much like that of Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” nineteen years later — it suggests everything you fear but dismiss may actually be true. That dread in the pit of your stomach isn’t lying. If your instinct is telling you that your husband may try to kill you and your son, there’s probably a very good reason for that instinct. Denial is necessary a lot of times just to get through life, to make it through each day — but horror movies always invariably show that denial is also what may kill you. It certainly almost kills Wendy and Danny in “The Shining,” but they wake up and change and see the reality of their situation without making any more excuses, and so they get to live. A lot of us don’t — marching blindly through life so rigidly we might as well be frozen in the snow, doomed to keep repeating our mistakes over and over again like we really have always been the caretaker after all. —CB

“An American Werewolf in London” (John Landis, 1981)

Of the four (!) werewolf movies released in American theaters in 1981, writer-director John Landis’s “An American Werewolf in London” was the biggest box office hit, and the most like a throwback to the classic Hollywood horror of the ‘30s and ‘40s… albeit with more gore and nudity. David Naughton and Griffin Dunne play yankee tourists, who are backpacking through England when they get attacked on the moors by a man-beast. Stuck in a foreign land and mutually affected by a terrible curse, the pair argues over what their next move should be: taking care of their personal survival, or keeping the innocent safe? With its still-impressive Rick Baker makeup effects, its evocations of Old World eeriness, and its sly commentary on both American and English provincialism, this “Werewolf” has become an enduring classic itself, from one of horror’s most bountiful decades. —NM

“My Bloody Valentine” (George Mihalka, 1981)

Ranking among Quentin Tarantino’s favorite slasher films, director George Mihalka’s “My Bloody Valentine” tells the terrifying tale of hard-partying young people in a mining town who are ruthlessly stalked by a pickax-wielding murderer on — you guessed it — Valentine’s Day. The oozing, dimly-lit slasher stems from an unprecedentedly nightmarish workplace accident years before this story, which is pitch-perfect for the sometimes melodramatic subgenre or overly contrived depending on your tastes. Regardless, there’s no denying the vision behind this wildly confident killing spree. “My Bloody Valentine” was originally lambasted for its guts and gore, but has since become a celebrated staple of ’80s slasher cinema. —AF

“Possession” (Andrzej Zulawaki, 1981)

The demise of a marriage has often made lent heft to some of the best dramas, but it’s not often that it makes for an unforgettable horror movie. When Anna reveals to her husband, Mark, that she is having an affair, it sends him to the brink of madness. Although he is struggling to keep it together, Mark hires a private investigator to follow Anna, while also having an affair with his son’s teacher, who could pass for Anna’s double. Tucked away inside of a shabby apartment halfway across a war-torn Berlin, Anna is hiding with a secret lover lifted straight out of H.P. Lovecraft’s worst nightmares. Bolstered by a tour-de-force performance by Isabelle Adjani, who won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival after the film’s 1980 premiere, and her unforgettable subway breakdown, “Possession” is a film like no other, and one that still manages to truly shock over thirty years later. —JR

“The Evil Dead” (Sam Raimi, 1981)

The ultimate in cabin-in-the-woods terror, the franchise starter still impresses for its unrelenting pitilessness. Lacking the humor that defined “Evil Dead II” — and definitely did make that sequel the better film — this is a pretty monochromatic experience. Five college friends head to a rustic retreat where the porch swing ominously keeps banging into the side of the cabin until the moment the keys to the front door are retrieved from their hiding place. Pro tip: if that ever happens to you, rethink your vacation plans. A bevy of Sumerian demons lurk in these woods and the terrifying possessions that occur marries the supernatural terror of “The Exorcist” with the onslaught of dismemberment common in a zombie movie. Raimi calibrates every grisly happening to be as wince-inducing as possible: in his hands, a pencil can be as gruesome an instrument of terror as an axe.

A paragon of DYI filmmaking, Raimi schmoozed his way into raising the $375,000 budget himself, most of which surely went into the viscerally detailed makeup effects by Tom Sullivan, and had a crew made up largely of Raimi and star Bruce Campbell’s friends and family. Thirteen of the crew actually slept in the cabin itself, located near Morristown, Tennessee, in what by any standard sounds like a grueling shoot. But discomfort led to invention, and the dutch angles, inverted overhead shots, and home-made camera rigs Raimi and DP Tom Philo came up with resulted in an unusually absorbing movie. —CB 

“The Howling” (Joe Dante, 1981)

After spending much of the 1970s apprenticing in Roger Corman’s B-movie stable, director Joe Dante established his own oddball voice and his command of genre filmmaking with “The Howling,” written by John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless (adapting a Gary Brandner novel). Dee Wallace plays a TV journalist whose investigation into a dangerous stalker eventually leads her to a hippie-ish wilderness retreat, which doubles as a werewolf cult. Rob Bottin’s werewolf-transformation effects are visually striking and just funky enough to fit with Dante’s warped sense of humor — which also sees the director seeding random shots with wolf references, from books by Thomas Wolfe to cans of Wolf Chili. “The Howling” delivers a wonderfully sick punchline for an ending too, as Dante and company skewer the public’s fascination with crime and violence on the nightly news. —NM

“Poltergeist” (Tobe Hooper, 1982)

“The Shining” and other ghost stories have used the conceit of building on a Native American burial ground leading to supernatural unrest: Manifest Destiny as both original sin and inciting incident. “Poltergeist” gives that notion a Reagan-era twist: the problem here is that a new gated community has been built over what was formerly the town cemetery. “They’re just… people,” the real estate developer behind the project says, as direct an indictment of corporate inhumanity as served up by any film ever. The ghosts of the no-longer-resting-in-peace invade one family’s house through the pacifying trappings of suburbia: the toys for the kids and the TV for the adults. Considering how many people believe their TV sets are haunted — Northwestern University professor Jeffrey Sconce even wrote a book on the subject titled “Haunted Media” — it’s surprising electronic apparitions haven’t been explored even more onscreen. Or maybe it’s just that “Poltergeist” did it so definitively. —CB

“The Thing” (John Carpenter, 1982)

John Carpenter creates paranoia, fear, and isolation in “The Thing” with an intensity few filmmakers have ever matched. When Antarctic researchers cross paths with an alien life form with the ability to imitates other life forms, mistrust and terror is built shot by shot until it explodes. The practical effects and creature design are some of the best in film history. A film that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. —CO

“Sleepaway Camp” (Robert Hiltzik, 1983)

“Sleepaway Camp” ranks high on many horror fans’ lists of the all-time greatest hidden gem slashers, though it’s worth recommending with a word of caution. Robert Hiltzik’s ludicrously over-the-top murder fest is campy, strange, and decidedly queer but with a notorious ending that is undeniably problematic. (Light spoiler alert: A last-act reveal propagates the harmful stereotype that gender nonconformity inspires violence.) That said, it’s those rough edges that have made the franchise starter a beloved head-scratcher among LGBTQ film theorists with a cult following just as loyal. —AF

Read IndieWire’s guide to the Best Queer and Homoerotic Horror Movies.

“The Hunger” (Tony Scott, 1983)

It’s hard to imagine anyone ever wanting to leave David Bowie behind, but that’s just what Catherine Deneuve does as the ethereal vampire Miriam in “The Hunger.” Although he was turned over 200 years prior and promised eternal life, Bowie’s John begins to age rapidly, causing him to realize eternal life doesn’t mean eternal youth. Repulsed by his appearance, Miriam spurns him and begins looking for a new conquest, which she soon finds in Sarah (Susan Sarandon), a doctor specializing in aging who was looking to help John. But Sarah isn’t as compliant as Miriam’s former lovers, and as Sarah struggles to adapt to her new way of life, it puts her in direct conflict with Miriam, threatening to expose her centuries-old secret. “The Hunger” is an atmospheric vampire film unlike any other. While much has been made about Sarandon and Deneuve’s steamy lesbian sex, the film is also known for its opening sequence, where John and Miriam are on the prowl for lovers they can turn into a meal. The iconic sequence later served as the inspiration for Lady Gaga’s introduction on “American Horror Story: Hotel.” —JR

“Videodrome” (David Cronenberg, 1983)

Toward (if not at the top) of any David Cronenberg ranking worth its salt, the 1983 body horror “Videodrome” is as prolific as it is petrifying. James Woods stars as Max Renn, a television station exec whose foolish re-airing of mysterious snuff films mutates into an ill-fated investigation into an unseen network of sadistic mind control. The film explores the inherently horrific themes of thought policing and privacy invasion, and has only grown more disturbing in the years since its release with Cronenberg’s enduring surrealist images underline by a story that could just as well swap television for social media and feel modern as ever. —AF

“A Nightmare on Elm Street” (Wes Craven, 1984)

Whatever meta rabbit holes the subsequent “Elm Street” installments may have navigated, Freddy Krueger’s original tale is decidedly old-fashioned. Simply, it’s about how young people always have to pay for the mistakes of preceding generations: when the parents of Elm Street took justice into their own hands and burned their neighbor Krueger alive after discovering he was a pedophile, he comes back as a ghost to menace their children. Craven’s message is clear: Krueger needed to be brought to justice, but people taking the law into their own hands is never justice. Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy is the finest Final Girl since Laurie Strode in her quest to both defeat Krueger and grapple with her parents’ sin. You feel her vulnerability and identify with her so strongly as horrible frights await her: Krueger’s hateful telephone calls (somehow even literally lashing his tongue out through the phone receiver) and his claw-like hand emerging from the bathwater when she’s soaking in the tub. Those are indelible images, but it’s to Craven’s credit that they work not to dehumanize Nancy, but to cause you to identify and empathize with her all the more. —CB

“Aliens” (James Cameron, 1986)

James Cameron’s ambitious sequel to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece is nothing short of extraordinary. Where lesser filmmakers might merely rehash the beats of Ellen Ripley’s harrowing saga from the 1979 original, Cameron reinvents: twisting the bare-bones terror of the Xenomorph race into a labyrinthian house of alien horror with new frights around every pressurized corner. Though the first film reigns supreme as a matter of artistic merit — the desolate desperation of the Nostromo is all but impossible to match emotionally — “Aliens” went faster and further, with massive set pieces, sprawling enemies, and heroes who made us want to hold on until bitter end. —AF

“Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” (John McNaughton, 1986)

Shot on 16mm in less than a month, this chilly $110,000 indie built its X-rated cult reputation on the film festival circuit and made a name for curly-haired Michael Rooker, who magnetically anchors the movie as the eponymous murderer Henry. The bloodthirsty slasher moves doggedly from town to town, changing his modus operandi to avoid detection by local police. He is briefly joined by an old prison buddy Otis (Tom Towles) on a Chicago killing spree; the duo not only annihilate an entire family but put it on video for their later enjoyment. When Otis’s hard-luck sister Becky falls for Henry, it can’t be good. —AT

“The Fly” (David Cronenberg, 1986)

David Cronenberg takes mid-century genre fun, injects it with gruesome gore and a truly warped point-of-view, and somehow still makes a film that was so good it became a mainstream hit. Jeff Goldblum plays a scientist who tests his teleportation breakthrough on himself and becomes a horsefly. Through incredible practical effects, the very graphic film is the peak of Cronenberg’s exploration of what became known as “body horror,” as the film meditates on disease and aging in ways that are as unsettling as the themes themselves. While the film pushes boundaries, underneath is a conventional monster film that positions us to search for and find the human buried beneath the horror. —CO

“Evil Dead II” (Sam Raimi, 1987)

While ’80s horror franchises like “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” stumbled through underdeveloped sequels, director Sam Raimi had the gall to bring something totally fresh to the sequel to his breakout cabin-in-the-woods shocker “The Evil Dead” — punchlines. As the sole survivor of the ghoulish threats from the previous film, Bruce Campbell’s kooky party boy Ash returns to the scene of the earlier events, where the monstrous spirits once again hurl themselves at him from every direction. As a wild-eyed Ash attempts to vanquish the demonic presence surrounding him in the walls from every angle, Raimi merges the gruesome intensity of the splatter genre with the surreal comedic heights of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Yes, there’s a famous amputation scene that unites Ash with his iconic chainsaw arm, but “Evil Dead II” is more than just a gory playground. In one defining moment, the camera veers close to Ash’s face as he cracks up in deranged laughter, while everything around him — including a lamp shade — join in. It’s a brilliant illustration of the thin line between comedy and horror that this movie walks so well, right up until the surprise twist of an ending that establishes a third entry in this original horror franchise that heads in a whole new direction altogether. Few examples of the genre have burst through so many expectations while remaining satisfying the whole way through. —EK

“Near Dark” (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)

Kathryn Bigelow couldn’t get her revisionist Western funded, so she rode the 1980s vampire wave to make this unique genre-hybrid. A gorgeous, gory, and (romantically) gooey film set in small midwestern town, “Near Dark” is a complicated love story about a vampire Mae (Jenny Wright) and Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), the boy she falls in love with and bites one very eventful evening, but whose essence proves to be non-violent, making her fall for him that much more. Bigelow’s nomadic vampire tribe, however, is violent and the director brings the visceral brutality in a bar scene that is anything but romantic. All of this capped off with one of those ’80s-inflected Tangerine Dream scores that transports audiences to an entirely different headspace. For those who wish Bigelow never left genre for prestige, this film is a reminder of how dense her “less serious” films were right from the start. —CO

“Predator” (John McTiernan, 1987)

An unsuspecting Arnold Schwarzenegger leads a top-notch rescue squad into an alien visitor’s human hunting grounds in the aptly named “Predator.” Written by brothers Jim and John Thomas, the 1987 Best Visual Effects Oscar nominee follows hero Dutch into the shadowy jungles of Val Verde, where he must outsmart the towering creature killing off his crew members. Director John McTiernan’s original may not be the scariest the “Predator” franchise would get, but the filmmaker’s smart manipulation of action tropes and the Thomas’ singular dialogue (“You are one ugly motherfucker…”) laid the blood-soaked groundwork on which “Prey,” “Predators,” and even the “Alien” crossovers build. —AF

“The Monster Squad” (Fred Dekker, 1987)

“The Monster Squad” bombed at the box office, perhaps because it arrived a couple of years too late for the “Goonies”/”E.T.” wave that director Fred Dekker was hoping to ride. But this teen-friendly horror-comedy became a hit on home video; and it’s now beloved both by ‘80s kids and fans of the old Universal monster movies. Co-written by Dekker and Shane Black (whose first big hit “Lethal Weapon” also hit the big screen in 1987), the film follows a group of adolescent misfits whose obsession with Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon pays off when those legendary creeps rise and conspire to conquer the world. Short and snappy — and filled with Black’s colorful vulgarities, tamed just enough for a PG-13 rating — “The Monster Squad” is a fun adventure, tailor-made for viewers who are a lot like the youngsters in the picture. —NM

“Hellraiser” (Clive Barker, 1987)

Although Pinhead is routinely lumped in with second-string slasher villains like Chucky and Lubdan the Leprechaun, “Hellraiser” is far from your formulaic scary movie. Dancing on the razor’s edge of pleasure and pain, Clive Barker’s first big screen outing with the Cenobites — sadomasochistic characters from a dimension akin to hell, who were ripped from Barker’s short novel “The Hellbound Heart” — ebbs and flows with the passions of its anti-heroine. As Julia, Clare Higgins explores what limits one woman will push to be reunited with her foolishly hedonistic lover (Sean Chapman). Meanwhile, her daughter — final girl Kirsty Cotton, as played by Ashley Laurence — must escape the consequences of her mother’s actions. —AF

“The Lost Boys” (Joel Schumacher, 1987)

Kiefer Sutherland turns on the vampiric charm as the villainous David Powers in director Joel Schumacher’s “The Lost Boys.” Set in the fictional beach town of Santa Carla, California, this 1987 horror comedy follows new-in-town brothers Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) on the road to accepting the supernatural as one of them is rapidly turned into a blood-thirsty predator. What makes this vampire transformation arc worth revisiting is its combination of genuine cinematic thrills (the rush of those motorbikes on the beach!) and hilarious mixing and matching of monster tropes (“Garlic don’t work, boys!” “Try holy water, death breath!”) Plus, Dianne Wiest as the boys’ mother — who just wants to go on a date with Edward Herrmann! — setting up a perfect last-act surprise that’s still satisfying on the umpteenth rewatch. —AF

“Child’s Play” (Tom Holland, 1988)

Director Tom Holland gifted audiences the creepy doll movie to end all creepy doll movies with “Child’s Play.” The 1988 supernatural slasher centers on single mom Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks) and her 6-year-old son Andy (Alex Vincent), who are forced to face-off with a cruel toy named Chucky, possessed by a serial killer following an impromptu voodoo ritual. The cult favorite is responsible for creating a bonafide horror icon out of the red-headed menace and spurred six sequels, a reboot, and a TV series. —AF

“The Vanishing” (George Sluizer, 1988)

There are unhappy endings, and then there’s “The Vanishing.” Not at all for the faint of heart — or even the normal of heart, really — this dispiriting Dutch thriller proved such a sensation that George Sluizer remade it in English five years later (which went about as well as when Michael Haneke did the same with “Funny Games”). Few missing-person movies are so viscerally upsetting, with the simple case of a man searching for his girlfriend after she, well, vanishes from a gas station without a trace packing a gut-punch that’s rarely been equaled in the three decades since Sluizer’s film was made. To say any more would be to give far too much away, but let it be known that you, too, may leave “The Vanishing” feeling as though you’ve lost something that can’t be found again. —MN

“They Live” (John Carpenter, 1988)

“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass…and I’m all out of bubblegum.” It’s with those stupidly entertaining words that actor Roddy Piper cemented the nameless, glasses-wearing hero of John Carpenter’s “They Live” as an all-time great action hero.

When an aimless drifter arrives in Los Angeles — only to discover a pair of sci-fi spectacles that let him see alien invaders living among humanity — he begins a quest to root out the mind-controlling, parasitic visitors. Ranking on IndieWire’s collection of the scariest alien movies, “They Live” was critically panned upon release but has since become appreciated as a hidden gem akin to “Prince of Darkness” (another of Carpenter’s alien romps). —AF

“Beetlejuice” (Tim Burton, 1988)

Tim Burton and Michael Keaton’s superlative collaborative work (I said what I said, Batman!), “Beetlejuice” chronicles the immediate afterlife of a Connecticut couple killed in a car crash. Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin are the heart of the lovable horror comedy, along with teenage Winona Ryder as the “strange and unusual” Lydia Deetz: a ghost-whispering goth girl who unknowingly moves into the couple’s newly haunted house with her awful parents, played by Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara (who would bring much of the art-loving city slicker energy seen here to the iconic Moira Rose on “Schitt’s Creek.”) Keaton pops up as the titular “Beetlejuice” — actually spelled Betelgeuse, FYI — an undead, self-proclaimed bio-exorcist whose larger-than-life showmanship made Burton’s third feature film one of his most fondly remembered and impactful among horror heads. —AF

“Pet Sematary” (Mary Lambert, 1989)

Stephen King books have inspired some of the greatest films ever made, but plenty of bombs as well. The irony is that his most iconic horror novels seldom produce the best films. Many of the most acclaimed movies adapted from his work were either based on non-horror stories (“The Shawshank Redemption,” “Stand By Me”) or horror novels that were poorly received (“The Shining”). But the original “Pet Sematary” film finds a happy medium, turning one of King’s scariest books into an excellent horror movie. The story of a man discovering a burial ground in his own yard that has the power to resurrect the dead is a perfect horror setup: simple, and yet full of potential scares. Mary Lambert’s film drives a train through that premise, anchored by an excellent performance by Dale Midkiff. A remake starring John Goodman was released in 2019, but nothing can touch the original. —CZ

“Santa Sangre” (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1989)

Take a dip in the surreal waters of “Santa Sangre” (also known as “Holy Blood”) and you’ll find even the most tired horror movie lover miraculously restored. Director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal story of a troubled circus performer (Axel Jodorowsky) achieves dreamlike dread with hypnotic audio-visual work that’s delivered by a reassuringly steady hand: one that seems not to revel in the gruesome events the film depicts, but accept them as heartbreaking inevitabilities of a timeless story doomed to be retold. The thorny relationship between our hero and his mother (Blanca Guerra) is an agonizing indictment on the manipulations carried out by those we hope to love most. —AF

“Tetsuo: The Iron Man” (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)

Shinya Tsukamoto’s cyberpunk gore fest “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” is widely regarded as his best film, though it was followed by two sequels (“Tetsuo II: Body Horror” and “Tetsuo: The Bullet Man”) that are worth checking out if you appreciate the Japanese filmmaker’s singular, hand-crafted approach to body horror. The feat of indie ingenuity sees Tsukamoto not only acting in the film’s unforgettable opening scene — in which a pre-“Crimes of the Future” fetishist inserts a large metal rod into his leg — but also includes a stop-motion style that will make your skin crawl. —AF

“Jacob’s Ladder” (Adrian Lyne, 1990)

That filmmaker Adrian Lyne is best-known to mainstream audiences for his erotic thrillers like “Unfaithful” and “9 1/2 Weeks” shouldn’t deter horror fans from experiencing his bracing, stomach-churning “Jacob’s Ladder.” After all, Lyne’s sexier work provides a window into his ability to center stories on the human body, a concept twisted to hallucinogenic ends in this Tim Robbins-starring story. Essentially a film about the after-effects of the Vietnam War, Lyne skillfully builds the tension and terror as Robbins’ Jacob attempts to navigate through the “normal” world after living through the hell of battle. While the film doesn’t shy away from the nerve-shredding visions that plague Jacob (from pre-war memories to a party scene that sees him almost totally given over to his monsters, real or imagined), it also offers up compelling evidence that the true terrors of this world aren’t just boogeymen — and that’s far worse. —KE

“Misery” (Rob Reiner, 1990)

Among the best Stephen King adaptations to date, Rob Reiner’s “Misery” is a teeth-gnashing tale of literary obsession. Kathy Bates kills as the hot-tempered Annie Wilkes: a neurotic fan of romance novels whose favorite author Paul Sheldon, played by a sympathetic but still steely James Caan, metaphorically stumbles onto her doorstep following a snowy car crash. “Misery” won Bates the statuette for Best Actress at the 63rd Academy Awards. —AF

“Nightbreed” (Clive Barker, 1990)

“Nightbreed” was criminally misunderstood upon its initial release, but Clive Barker’s horror fantasy has fortunately come to be seen as the masterpiece that it is. The twisted story of a mental patient who is manipulated into believing he is a serial killer works as a psychological thriller, but the monster-filled realm of his hallucinations adds a creature feature element to the film, resulting in an addition to the modern horror canon that is truly unique. —CZ

“The Silence of the Lambs” (Jonathan Demme, 1991)

Hannibal Lecter was already a known cultural quantity when Jonathan Demme came on board to direct the second film to feature the murderous Thomas Harris creation, but the canny pairing of Anthony Hopkins as the serial killer and Jodie Foster as the bright-eyed FBI agent on his tail turned him into nothing less than a cultural touchstone. Aided by chilling catchphrases (surely, fava bean stock dropped after the film debuted, right?) and a cadre of natty prison duds (plus human-flesh face-mask), Hopkins poured his prodigious talents into every inch of Lecter’s chilling frame. It’s never entirely clear what he’s thinking, and while Demme kits out his film with enough other elements to keep it chugging right along, from Foster’s full-bodied turn to Buffalo Bill doing his own thing with literal full bodies, it’s always clear that he’s the one pulling each string. The film would be formidable enough if it was just another serial killer thriller, but Demme, Hopkins, and Foster push it to go deeper at every moment, eventually finding that real terror doesn’t always have a reason, but it does have a taste. —KE

“Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)

Francis Ford Coppola unleashes the sexuality that was always lurking underneath Bram Stoker’s original “Dracula” in sumptuous color and delicious visuals. Created on a soundstage with no visual effects, the film has been criticized for its mannered performances and ornate extravagance, but few films in Hollywood’s modern era have used color and costume so expressively, as designer Eiko Ishioka’s work takes center stage in revealing the burning internal emotions of the characters. As 26 years have passed, it’s impossible to not feel the film’s heartbeat come pouring through Coppola’s precision, as the film has aged like a fine a wine. —CO

“Candyman” (Bernard Rose, 1992)

A boogieman terrorizing a public housing project? The film’s setting alone separates it from many of its slasher movie brethren. Based on Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden,” director Bernard Rose relocates the story from Barker’s native Liverpool to the dilapidated, “scary” buildings of the Cabrini-Green projects in Chicago. It was an inspired decision that amended the original story’s classist undertones into explicitly racial ones, turning this into more of a subversive meditation on race. The unsettling legend about the hook-handed terror focuses on a skeptical white doctoral candidate working on a thesis on urban legends, who learns of the Cabrini-Green Candyman legend and goes to investigate. Starring Virginia Madsen as an atypical slasher movie heroine, the film boasts one of the more intriguing horror-movie villains, with a complexity rooted in a tragic backstory that makes him sympathetic: a famous black artist and son of slaves who pays a steep price, amputation and a grisly death, for falling in love with a white man’s daughter who hires him to paint her portrait. Digging a little deeper than your average horror film, the film stars the physically imposing Tony Todd as Candyman, whose sonorous, chilly voice haunts long after the movie ends. —TO

“Dead Alive” (Peter Jackson, 1992)

Peter Jackson’s “Dead Alive” — also known as “Braindead” — is a (literally) side-splitting zombie comedy that pushed the limits of gore for the filmmaker and the genre writ large. It’s gained a cult following for its “Psycho”-esque tale of a young man navigating the apocalypse with his zombie mom in tow. —AF

“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (David Lynch, 1992)

Conceived as both a prologue to — and a postscript for — the original “Twin Peaks” television series, David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” has since been renovated into something of a bridge between the old and new iterations of the show; the dark nexus of that particular universe. But to focus on its function within Lynch’s mythology is to overlook “Fire Walks with Me” as an experience unto itself; even in a vacuum, it’s one of the most emotionally harrowing movies ever made. Lynch has said that he “was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside.” This film, which mostly follows Laura (Sheryl Lee) in the days leading up to her murder, crystallizes how this story has always swung between the intractable trauma of abuse and the overwhelming power of love. Positioning Laura’s father (a scarring Ray Wise) as the pit beneath that pendulum, “Fire Walk with Me” shines a light into the void beneath a quaint Washington town, and finds that heaven and hell might be a lot closer together than they seem from street level. The scares will get under your skin, and the residue they live behind will stay under your fingernails. —DE

“Cronos” (Guillermo del Toro, 1993)

Before the fantastical vision of “Pan’s Labyrinth” jettisoned him to international prominence and his emotional monster story “The Shape of Water” won Best Picture, Guillermo del Toro established some of the key ingredients for his brand of magical realism in his 1993 debut feature “Cronos.”

The film’s mythology begins in the 16th Century, when an alchemist develops a device that provides him with eternal life. It’s discovered in the 1990s by an antiques dealer (Federico Luppi), whose name bears an unsubtle similarity to one Christian savior. Jesús Gris is soon afflicted with a resurrection of his own during a battle for the device waged by a dying businessman (Claudio Brook) and his nephew-henchman (Ron Perlman).

While the canvas of “Cronos” is more compact than those afforded to del Toro later in his career, a smaller budget couldn’t constrain the filmmaker’s voice. In a movie that skillfully balances gore and heart along with fantasy and reality, del Toro’s first monster is a man, one caught between a supernatural thirst for blood and the humanity he retains through his love for his granddaughter. —CL

“Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” (Wes Craven, 1994)

“Scream” reigns supreme as the late Wes Craven’s wittiest meta masterpiece. But “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” is unabashedly brilliant as a companion to the “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise. Heather Langenkamp plays herself alongside Robert Englund returning as Freddy Krueger, delivering a more sinister performance than his previous appearances as the dream-invading slasher villain in this story of Krueger haunting Los Angeles and hunting down the cast and and crew who make movies about him. —AF

“Safe” (Todd Haynes, 1995)

Set in an arid stretch of California at the height of the AIDS epidemic that it never mentions by name, Todd Haynes’ oblique and beguiling “Safe” continues to resonate through the horrors of our public-health crises. Julianne Moore gives an all-in, body-and-soul performance as Carol White, an unremarkable homemaker trying to go through life without taking up too much space. Her voice is meek and muted, every utterance a struggle not to consume too much oxygen; her small world is at once both airless and toxic. And then she gets sick with an “environmental illness” that eludes diagnosis — in the wake of a violent anaphylactic attack at a dry-cleaning facility, Carol is hospitalized in a new age desert community where people with similar conditions hide out from a supposedly contaminated civilization. For them, isolation is both the answer to their problem and the problem itself. What is the cause of Carol’s illness? Could she be allergic to the 20th century, itself?

The scariest thing about Haynes’ film is how insidiously it cocoons Carol away from those questions, and us along with her. Watching Carol’s life get torn apart by an invisible, malevolent force is oddly soothing, as the movie maintains a constant, cool temperature while an off-kilter hum similar to an air conditioner or white-noise machine invites you to sink trancelike into the slow-boiling horror of it all. But the movie’s dead calm finds terror in the corners of silence, until the promise of safety becomes a sinister trap unto itself. —RL

“Tales from the Hood” (Rusty Cundieff, 1995)

An updated twist on the British Amicus Production anthology horror films, popular during the ’60s and ’70s, Cundieff’s cult classic uses satire to tackle race and racism (among other themes), while also staying true to horror genre conventions. It unfolds in much the same style as the Amicus films, which typically followed a group of strangers who come together to face some evil soothsayer, and in a series of flash-forward or flashback sequences, learn how they will die, or how they died. In “Hood”, three wanna-be hoodlums visit a funeral parlor run by a kooky, creepy mortician (played with verve by Clarence Williams III), with the intention of buying “found” drugs from him to then sell on the street. Of course, they each get more than they bargained for when Williams instead recites four grim horror stories that spook them, after which the mortician reveals his true self, and the delinquent trio come to learn their ultimate fate. Not only does “Hood” effectively lampoon the Amicus anthology premise, but it also makes potent commentary (sometimes with biting humor) on a range of issues specific to the black experience, like police brutality, institutional racism and gang violence. Certain aspects might feel dated 23 years later, but “Hood” still packs a wallop. Cundieff produced a lesser sequel in 2018. —TO

“Scream” (Wes Craven, 1996)

A horror maestro in his own right, Wes Craven’s decision to send up the very genre that made him a household name could have been a messy, dumb disaster — instead, he made “Scream,” which is both very funny and very scary, and functions just fine as a slasher film, even as it unpacks typical slasher fare. The Neve Campbell-starring feature first satirizes horror films in general, then slasher films in particular, as the tiny town of Woodsboro, California is held hostage by a masked killer with no clear motives, beyond slicing and dicing teenagers in increasingly amusing ways. But while that concept would go on to breed a whole other franchise in the form of “Scary Movie” (fun fact: “Scream” was originally titled “Scary Movie”), Craven added a special twist: what if this whole thing could be scary, too? Eventually the film reveals itself to be a genuinely gruesome, seriously clever horror outing that still doesn’t shy away from poking holes in the genre. And poking holes in plenty of teens, too. —KE

“The Craft” (Andrew Fleming, 1996)

A surprisingly sinister staple of witchy teen cinema, “The Craft” examines the heavenly highs and hellish lows of betrayal in girlhood friendships. When new-in-town Sarah (pitch-perfect Robin Tunney) falls in with an outcast trio of magic enthusiasts at school, mousy introvert Bonnie (Neve Campbell), fired-up athlete Rochelle (Rachel True), and goth ringleader Nancy (an utterly iconic Fairuza Balk) pull her into their dangerous spiritual ambitions.

Directed by Andrew Fleming, this 1996 flick struggles with pacing and a plot that ultimately doesn’t go very far. But it qualifies among the best of the horror genre because of its all-star cast, who, in tandem with well-written dialogue, make the coven-turned-clique into a believable and compelling anchor for the film’s action. Balk and Tunney achieve especially electric chemistry in their shared scenes, but Campbell and True also deliver stirring performances in solo beats that show off their apptitudes for acting out internal conflict. —AF

“Eve’s Bayou” (Kasi Lemmons, 1997)

Writer-director Kasi Lemmons first dazzled audiences with her filmmaking talents through the heartbreaking coming-of-age tale “Eve’s Bayou”: a lush Southern Gothic horror that’s not often outright scary, but most definitely qualifies as haunting given its supernatural elements and painful exploration of familial betrayal and manipulation. A young Jurnee Smollett plays the titular Eve, whose belief that her father (Samuel L. Jackson) is having an affair blooms into a nightmare involving voodoo ritual, Eve’s older sister (Meagan Good), and a disturbing mystery. The film won Lemmons the Indie Spirit Award for Best First Feature. —AF

“Funny Games” (Michael Haneke, 1997)

A family must withstand the sadistic tortures of two young men (Arno Frisch, Frank Giering) seemingly motivated by nothing in the unflinching “Funny Games.” Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke revels in this outstandingly cold-hearted abduction horror story, notable for not only the tremendous cruelty of its antagonists, but also the bizarre meta moments that rip the rules of filmmaking out from beneath an already unnerved audience. Haneke directed a near shot-for-shot American remake of the movie, starring Naomi Watts among others, but the original reigns supreme as an artistic act of unbridled brutality that hangs with you as a haunting, unexplained display of viciousness that’s truly terrifying. —AF

“I Know What You Did Last Summer” (Jim Gillespie, 1997)

Flaunting the sudsy soap opera quality some of the best ’90s slashers are known for, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” chronicles the morally questionable aftermath of a Fourth of July hit-and-run accident involving four teenagers. When the would-be manslaughter defendants are stalked by a hook-handed fisherman, they’re forced to run from not only the shadowy figure but also the searing guilt he symbolizes. —AF

“Ringu” (Hideo Nakata, 1998)

Gore Verbinski’s “The Ring” appeared on a wave of American aughts remakes of Japanese horror films that also included “The Grudge,” “Pulse,” and “Dark Water.” Also known as “Ringu,” Hideo Nakata’s “The Ring” tells the same story as the 2002 version starring Naomi Watts. But this twisted imagining of a cursed video tape signaling the deaths of those unlucky enough to view it is more stark in its terror. Where Verbinski offers jump scares, Nakata dangles the terror-stricken face of star Nanako Matsushima. It’s timelessly haunting. —AF

“Audition” (Takashi Miike, 1999)

Kiri, kiri, kiri. Either these words haunt you or you’ve never heard them — there isn’t much of an in between. Takashi Miike recently released his 100th film, though it’s unlikely that it or any of his 98 other works could ever reach the same vaunted status as “Audition.” An adaptation of Ryū Murakami’s novel of the same name, it begins and ends in such profoundly different ways that anyone watching with no foreknowledge of its plot wouldn’t even know it’s a horror movie for a good long while. (The somewhat misleading premise involves a widower who holds auditions for a new wife.) By the time you realize what’s really at work, it’s far too late to turn back — not only because it’s so immersive, but because it’s as difficult to walk away from as the femme fatale at its center. —MN

“The Blair Witch Project” (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)

Few movies have been as parodied and intimated in the last 20 years as “The Blair Witch Project”; fewer still are as scary. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s endlessly influential exercise in found-footage horror has been hotly debated since before it even premiered — is it real or is it not? — and remains polarizing even now. Lost in that debate is how terrifying it still is. Getting lost in the woods has never looked so scary, especially as seen through a trio of film students’ grainy camcorder; Myrick and Sánchez maximized their notoriously tiny budget by having most of the action occur offscreen and forcing us to mentally fill in the details. That it introduced both found footage and viral marketing to the general public may be a mixed blessing, but don’t hold that against it: “The Blair Witch Project” brings new meaning to the phrase “often imitated, never duplicated.” —MN

“The Sixth Sense” (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)

M. Night Shyamalan’s breakout feature earned the filmmaker the reputation of being beholden to his big narrative twists, and while that may still be the case (his latest twist went so far as to inspire an entire new movie), it’s hard to question the power of his biggest reveal. The Bruce Willis-starring feature is creepy enough without its final act jaw-dropper, with the actor as a hangdog child psychologist palling around with a terrified young kid (Haley Joel Osment) who comes armed with one of modern cinema’s most indelible catchphrases (it’s hard to beat “I see dead people,” and who would want to try?). What a pair they make, and Shyamalan skillfully guides the film so it seems as if they’re working towards one conclusion, before veering into an entirely different one that’s as jarring as they come. It’s a film that begs for an instant rewatch, all the better to pick up all the tiny, terrifying clues that Shyamalan has laid out along the way. —KE

“Final Destination” (James Wong, 2000)

Originally conceived as a spec script for “The X-Files,” screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick struck supernatural gold with the concept for “Final Destination.” Across each of the franchise’s (so far) five films, a gifted protagonist inexplicably predicts a mass casualty event before helping a handful of would-be fatalities escape their horrific fates. Then the survivors must fight for their lives anyway when the unseen force of death comes for the souls one by one.

Directed by James Wong, the 2000 original stars Alex Browning as a high schooler who, along with classmates played by Ali Larter, and Kerr Smith among others, narrowly avoids a devastating plane crash. Flight 180 kicked off what would become a fiendishly fun franchise known for its Rube Golderberg machine-like “accidental” deaths. Sure, there were diminishing returns from the infamous tanning bed slaughters onwards. That doesn’t mean we’re not still waiting on “Final Destination 6.” —AF

“Ginger Snaps” (John Fawcett, 2000)

Canadian writer-director John Fawcett and his “Ginger Snaps” co-writer Karen Walton were way ahead of their time with this clever werewolf thriller, which has a lot to say about teen angst, feminine identity and gender-specific power-dynamics — all even more relevant today than it was two decades ago. Katharine Isabelle plays Ginger, an unpopular high schooler who gets mauled by a wild animal and abruptly changes her personality. She becomes more seductive and boy-crazy, alarming her nerdy kid sister, Brigitte (Emily Perkins), who idolizes her. Mimi Rogers plays the girls’ mother, who mistakes Ginger’s supernatural transformation with “becoming a woman,” and insists to Brigitte that her day will come soon. Fawcett and Walton weave a knowing character study into their fun, bloody action sequences, examining how maturing into adulthood can seem like becoming a monster, especially to a young girl who wants no part of it. —NM

“Scary Movie” (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2000)

Regina Hall and Anna Faris claimed their crowns as bonafide scream queens in the Wayans brothers’ “Scary Movie”: a schlocky 2000 spoof of the horror genre that kicked off a decade of lesser parodies made in the same style (see everything from the painful “Date Movie” to the borderline cruel “Disaster Movie.”) Smashing together the silliest parts of “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” the first and best “Scary Movie” took primary aim at ’90s slashers, but also incorporated jabs about vampire TV titan Buffy and other horror classics such as “The Shining” and “Halloween.” It’s shock-based and gross-out approach to the genre defanged scary movies for the masses and won big at the box office.

“When it came out it was the highest grossing R-rated film of all time, and I believe it was the highest grossing Black or African American film of all time,” cast member Jon Abrahams said in a 2020 Variety interview. “That really set off an amazing legacy, in terms of investment in Black or African American productions. I don’t think by any means we’re 100% there yet. But it definitely helped.” —AF

“Brotherhood of the Wolf” (Christophe Gans, 2001)

Adapted from the David Farland novel about the 18th century French urban legend of the giant Beast of Gévaudan, the $29 million horror martial-arts actioner was shot at the Chateau de Roquetaillade and stars Samuel Le Bihan as Knight and royal naturalist Grégoire de Fronsac, who investigates a mysterious giant wolf-beast with metal claws terrorizing the French countryside. Fronsac figures out that the beast is an instrument of a secret society, The Brotherhood of the Wolf, which is trying to undermine the king and take over the country. He and his Iroquois companion Mani (Mark Dacascos) try to capture the beast who may be more lion than wolf. The stylish Sergio Leone-inspired entertainment scored over $70 million worldwide. —AT

“Pulse” (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)

Movies about how we live with (and on) the internet weren’t as common in 2001 as they are now, but few have made as lasting an impression as “Pulse.” Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s best film is terrifying not only for its ghosts but for its insights as well — ideas can’t be exorcised. Otherworldly spirits are akin to a computer virus in the film, which slowly veers toward the apocalyptic as the living vanish and ghosts take their place to say things like “death was eternal loneliness”; as with a lot of great horror, “Pulse” transcends its genre roots to become something more. It, too, is like a computer virus in that sense — it grows and changes at an almost imperceptible rate, affecting you in ways you never could have anticipated. —MN

“The Devil’s Backbone” (Guillermo Del Toro, 2001)

The magic of Guillermo Del Toro’s filmmaking is his ability to mix terror and wonder in a way that heightens both emotions without ever feeling trite. Set during the Spanish Civil War (it was shot in Spain and backed by Pedro Almodovar), this ghost story is told from the perspective of Carlos (Fernando Tielve), a 12-year-old boy who is a new arrival at an ominous orphanage after his father was killed in the war. Carlos, haunted by visions of a mysterious apparition, tries to piece together the mystery of what happened the night a bomb hit the orphanage’s courtyard (but strangely didn’t explode) and a young boy (who now haunts the house) was killed. The film is more unsettlingly creepy than edge-of-your-seat scary, revealing the true horror is being a child during wartime. Del Toro has called “Backbone” his most personal film. —CO

“The Others” (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001)

Arguably the most satisfying gothic horror movie since “The Innocents,” Alejandro Amenábar’s fogbound delight is more than just a loving homage to Jack Clayton’s undying ghost story, it’s also a bonafide classic in its own right. Gleefully inverting age-old genre tropes in order to explore the subject of grief from the inside out, the film stars Nicole Kidman (in one of her finest leading roles) as a harried mother who retreats to a haunted manor on the Channel Islands in the aftermath of World War II. Waiting in vain for her husband to return from the battlefield and help care for their photosensitive children, the woman begins to unravel. Is she having a breakdown, or is it possible that the phantom of an old lady really did possess her daughter? The truth is only revealed after more than 100 minutes of richly atmospheric chills, as “The Others” building to one of the great twists in movie history. It’s a rug-pull done right — one that recasts everything that came before it in the cold light of day, and suggests that people can be as haunted as the houses they call home. —DE

“Trouble Every Day” (Claire Denis, 2001)

Connecting sex and violence in a vampire movie is hardly new terrain, but through the lens of director Claire Denis — and the way her camera studies of bodies in motion — it becomes a natural extension of her quieter dramas and a somber look at man’s nature. Normally Paris is the perfect romantic city for a honeymoon, but our groom, an American scientist (Vincent Gallo), is there to search for his ex-lover Coré (Béatrice Dalle), with whom he shares a desire for blood when aroused. Coré has become an “Under the Skin”–like seductress, luring men to hidden locations with the promise of sex, before ripping them to shreds. Eventually, Coré’s keeper Léo (Alex Descas) – another scientist of sorts – tracks her down, buries the bodies, and locks her back up in his basement laboratory. It’s a pattern that defines their relationship. “Trouble Every Day” was somewhat panned following its Cannes premiere, but has been reexamined quite a bit over the years as Denis’ work looks more intentional and layered with each passing year. —CO

“28 Days Later” (Danny Boyle, 2002)

Danny Boyle’s dynamically-directed visionary take on zombie horror is absolutely terrifying. Set 28 days after a viral epidemic ravages Britain, the film follows survivors struggling to make sense of the aftermath, while seeking safety. Moving beyond the typical zombie thrills and onto something even more horrifying — as a survival mechanism, human beings are forced to lose their humanity — the film presents a gripping representation of a country totally crippled by a mysterious new disease. The hideously virulent and incurable sickness leaves its hosts in a permanent and appalling state of aggression, filled with incredible rage. The film questions whether this kind of blinding, violent fury is something that already exists inside us, and the virus simply brings it out. Boyle’s decision to shoot the film on consumer grade digital video cameras, gives the film an effective grit and grime, and a necessary realism, although it’s not without moments of surreal beauty. What’s maybe scariest about “28 Days Later” is that the scenario it presents isn’t at all unrealistic. —TO

“Ju-On: The Grudge” (Takashi Shimizu, 2002)

If you thought 2004’s Sarah Michelle Gellar-starring remake of “The Grudge” was scary, then you won’t know what hit you with the original “Ju-On: The Grudge”: an even grittier exploration of a rage-fueled curse terrorizing a family. Takashi Shimizu directed both the Japanese and American versions of the supernatural horror film (though he only wrote the former). The film was met with a lukewarm reception, but took the “Ju-On” franchise from its straight-to-video beginnings and made its iconic imagery into a theatrical franchise that has continued on TV and film into the 2020s. —AF

“May” (Lucky McKee, 2002)

Lucky McKee’s quirky-creepy feature debut “May” follows Angela Bettis as an emotionally tormented veterinary assistant whose lazy eye has kept her from feeling like she can fit in with her peers or form meaningful connections. Her only “friend” is a doll named Suzie who’s kept behind a case of glass. But when a mechanic played by Jeremy Sisto enters the picture, so does a predilection for cannibalism and dismemberment, as May’s first relationship awakens unusual erotic tendencies in her. With elements of slasher film and body horror, the oddball “May” serves up plenty of gory scares while also managing to be strangely moving, as May eventually realizes her ideal companion through disturbing methods. —RL

“Signs” (M. Night Shyamalan, 2002)

M. Night Shyamalan gave 2002 audiences the jump-scare of a lifetime (you know the one!) with “Signs”: an edge-of-your-seat alien invasion horror told by way of an intimate family drama. Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix portray brothers coming to terms with Earth’s realization that the crop circles appearing around the globe aren’t from human vandals. Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin appear as young children in the film, adding essential heart to a semi slow-burn that otherwise might feel shallow. What’s more, Shyamalan smartly avoids the type of twist-ending that has since become his calling card and delivers a straight-forward last act that’s immensely satisfying (if not especially scary). —AF

“The Ring” (Gore Verbinski, 2002)

Gore Verbinski’s supernatural tale is a remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film “Ringu,” based on the novel of the same name by Koji Suzuki. A journalist investigates the legend of a videotape comprised of disturbing, mystifying images which when watched, leads to a phone call foretelling the viewer’s death in seven days. Led by an impassioned performance from Naomi Watts, this enigmatic ghost story is heavy on atmosphere — thanks in part to it’s gloomy, isolated Seattle setting — and offers up some genuine scares. Dark, unsettling, and deliberately paced, several thrilling twists that gradually reveal the film’s mystifying plot will hold the audience’s attention. The first American “J-Horror” remake, fans of the original should find this remake nearly as compelling. It spawned 3 sequels and paved the way for more American remakes of Japanese horror films, including “The Grudge.” —TO

“A Tale of Two Sisters” (Kim Jee-woon, 2003)

Korean horror has provided some of the greatest scares in recent years, and “A Tale of Two Sisters” is another wonderfully warped and terrifying entry, filled with vengeful ghosts and surprising twists. A young girl, Su-mi, returns home to her father’s secluded estate after a stay in a mental institution. She is happy to be reunited with her younger sister, Su-yeon, but less than pleased to see her stepmother, Eun-joo. Eun-joo was once a nurse for the girls’ dying mother, and there is mutual resentment between the girls and their stepmother. When Eun-joo begins lashing out at the girls, targeting Su-yeon especially, their father is blind to the abuse, setting up a brutal conflict that will cause painful secrets to surface, threatening to drive a wedge between the two sisters for good. “A Tale of Two Sisters” is a psychological thriller that pulls the rug from beneath viewers more than once, foregoing the more obvious twists and reveals for a truly heartbreaking ending that will make you want to rewatch the film all over again. —JR

“High Tension” (Alexandre Aja, 2003)

One of the most divisive and best known New French Extremity entries, “High Tension” put director Alexandre Aja on the map with American audiences with his brutal psychological thriller. Marie heads to her classmate Alex’s secluded country home to study for final exams, but the idyllic country retreat becomes a bloodbath when a vicious serial killer slaughters the entire family, taking Alex hostage. Marie then transforms into the ultimate Final Girl, fighting to rescue her Alex before she meets a devastating end… except not everything is what it seems. The film’s big twist has divided audiences since its premiere in 2003, but “High Tension” still remains a thrilling slasher, packed with plenty of scares and gore to satisfy even the most skeptical horror fans. —JR

“Saw” (James Wan, 2004)

“Saw” franchise creators Leigh Whannell and James Wan, who respectively directed and wrote the 2004 original, got their breakouts thanks to the brutally simple story of a serial killer with a thing for creepy puppets, deadly traps, and ominous recordings. Shot in less than three weeks, the first “Saw” is a barebones panic attack played close to the vest that’s leagues better than any chapter to come after it. Whannell acts alongside Cary Elwes in a cast that also includes Danny Glover, Ken Leung, and Shawnee Smith as well as introduces Tobin Bell as aughts slasher icon Jigsaw. So far, “Saw” has received seven sequels and one spin-off: Darren Lynn Bousman “Spiral” starring Chris Rock. —AF

“Shaun of the Dead” (Edgar Wright, 2004)

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost lead every installment of writer-director Edgar Wright’s “Three Flavours Cornetto” trilogy, but even then “Shaun of the Dead” is an unabashed standout. The 2004 film is an uproariously funny horror comedy about two London friends fighting to survive the zombie apocalypse, which delivers some decently strong scares along the way. “Shaun of the Dead” is not only a perfect crystallization of Wright’s sense of humor and knack for pacing, but brings Pegg and Frost together for the first time in an explosively joyful two-hander that makes every beat of “Hot Fuzz” and “The World’s End” feel even more fun. —AF

“Three…Extremes” (Fruit Chan, Park Chan-wook, and Takashi Miike, 2004)

In this anthology film, which technically doubles as a sequel to 2002’s “Three,” filmmakers Fruit Chan (“Made in Hong Kong”), Park Chan-wook (“Joint Security Area”), and Takashi Miike (“Audition”) whip up a trio of increasingly bizarre horrors. First, there’s the abortion horror “Dumplings,” in which a vain woman learns a disturbing truth. Second, enjoy “Cut”: a bloody descent into madness about a jealous film extra going after his former director. Finally, “Box” sees an old circus performer plagued by guilt from a past misdeed. —AF

“Hostel” (Eli Roth, 2005)

Where Eli Roth’s rapidly diminishing “Hostel” franchise ended up belongs nowhere near this list. (Seriously, the second sequal – which was not directed by Roth — is an embarrassment to the genre.) Still, there’s merit in honoring the 2006 original film for its no-holds-barred approach to the simple story of two American backpackers (Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson) abducted and sold on the black market as would-be torture victims. // The premise is about as smart as the title’s hostile/hostel wordplay (call it a C+), but the execution has a gnawing ruthlessness that’s practically impossible to forget. Producer Quentin Tarantino reportedly likened the premise to Takashi Miike’s “Audition” and is credited with encouraging Roth to make the film. That decision was good or exceptionally bad, depending on your appetite for guts, gore, and gratuitous sexual violence. —AF

“The Descent” (Neil Marshall, 2005)

One year after a tragic accident, six adventurous girlfriends meet in a remote part of the Appalachians for their annual spelunking trip. After an accident traps the group deep below, they unexpectedly come face to face with a race of monstrous humanoid creatures lurking under the earth. Neil Marshall’s tense, thrilling, and claustrophobic survival horror film stars a rare all-female cast who bludgeon their way through thrilling scene after scene in this deftly-directed and well-acted cinematic nightmare, that also serves as a meditation on issues of morality and vengeance. One of the more exhilarating creature features of the 21st century, it spawned a lesser sequel, although without Marshall’s involvement. —TO

“The Devil’s Rejects” (Rob Zombie, 2005)

Rob Zombie made his directorial debut with the grotesquely zany “House of 1000 Corpses,” but the filmmaker’s Firefly trilogy — so named for the series’ sadistic antagonists — peaked with its second installment: “The Devil’s Rejects.” As profane and crusty as the original but with an even grittier meanness, the 2005 sequel offers Zombie’s most intriguing and layered villains with a solid cast convincingly committed to Zombie’s hyper-violent hicksploitation aesthetic. Plus, it’s entirely shot in 16mm to tremendous, authentic effect. —AF

“Inside” (Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury, 2007)

The best pregnancy thriller since “Rosemary’s Baby” is also, frankly, one of the most unnerving slasher movies ever made. French directing duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury (whose comparatively understated gothic followup “Livid” is totally different) held nothing back for this tale of a pregnant woman fending off a home invader who wants the child in her womb. Never released in American theaters, “Inside” contains some seriously demented imagery, but not before setting up the scares with a technical efficiency that’s downright Hitchcockian.

For the most part, “Inside” revolves around the efforts of expectant single mother Sarah (Alysson Paradis) to prevent an intruder from literally ripping a child from her abdomen. Knives and scissors fly freely, but the elegant camerawork makes it clear that the filmmakers aren’t aiming for pure shock value. Instead, “Inside” is a classic home invasion story with the suspense turned up to 11 and the bloody punchlines turned up to 12. Watch it once and ever slasher movie you see afterwards will have to work a little harder to prove its worth. —EK

“Paranormal Activity” (Oren Peli, 2007)

Sorry, “Paranormal Activity”: The best found footage horror movie of the new millenium is this relentless Spanish take on the zombie genre from co-directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, which finds a news reporter trapped in a building with doomed firefighters and fending off hordes of demonically possessed undead. Sony picked up the rights and buried it on DVD, only to release the shot-for-shot remake “Quarantine.” One can get the idea from the English language version, but the original retains its visceral immediacy, which is so jam-packed with terror that the directors sped right into a sequel that picks up where the earlier one left off. “REC 2” is worth watching for a similar thrill ride, but “REC” stands alone as a tense example of how the ambiguity of shaky cam footage isn’t an excuse for shoddy storytelling; “REC” delivers a steady stream of frights because its camera man never knows quite where to look — and by the time he figures it out, it might be too late. —EK

“[Rec]” (Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza, 2007)

Sorry, “Paranormal Activity”: The best found footage horror movie of the new millenium is this relentless Spanish take on the zombie genre from co-directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, which finds a news reporter trapped in a building with doomed firefighters and fending off hordes of demonically possessed undead. Sony picked up the rights and buried it on DVD, only to release the shot-for-shot remake “Quarantine.” One can get the idea from the English language version, but the original retains its visceral immediacy, which is so jam-packed with terror that the directors sped right into a sequel that picks up where the earlier one left off. “REC 2” is worth watching for a similar thrill ride, but “REC” stands alone as a tense example of how the ambiguity of shaky cam footage isn’t an excuse for shoddy storytelling; “REC” delivers a steady stream of frights because its camera man never knows quite where to look — and by the time he figures it out, it might be too late. —EK

“Teeth” (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007)

When the pious Dawn O’Keefe (Jess Weixler) discovers her previously unexplored labia are lined with razor-sharp fangs, the incomparable antics of writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein’s “Teeth” take hold. Although not funny in your traditional laugh-out-loud sense, the snarky and cynical feminist commentary from 2007 takes some impressive swings at areas most films shy away from. Not only does “Teeth” explore topics such as sexual assault, but it also thoroughly lambasts the policing of women’s bodies through religion as well as consensually with intimate partners. —AF

“The Host” (Bong Joon Ho, 2007)

Bong Joon Ho’s monster movie draws on a real-life horror for all the genre mayhem that follows. In 2000, a Korean mortician in the employ of the U.S. military was ordered to dump large quantities of formaldehyde down the drain — which led directly to the Han River. The outrage around the incident inspired the near-recreation that’s the opening of Bong’s film. He was inspired by strange reports in the years after, such as of fish found with S-shaped spines, to imagine this as the origins of a monster that comes to terrorize Seoul. The beast, the Gwoemul, captures the middle-school-age daughter (Go Ah-sung) of a down on its luck family, prompting her father, a blond, lazy shop vendor (Song Kang-ho) to lead a quest to rescue her. Combining horror with dark comedy — the scene where her family mourns her at a public vigil is full of tongue-in-cheek histrionics — Director Bong somehow got ahead of (or inspired) the archery craze that spread across Hollywood cinema in the early 2010s. Bae Doona as the missing girl’s aunt is also a national archery competitor, who despite her family calling her “too slow,” eventually brings her skills to bear against the monster. —CB

“The Mist” (Frank Darabont, 2007)

There are two kinds of Stephen King adaptations: The ones that disgrace their source material, and the ones that elevate the author’s novels and short stories to stunning new heights. Frank Darabont’s “The Mist,” much like Frank Darabont’s “The Shawshank Redemption,” is unmistakably one of the latter. The action is confined to the sterile confines of a Maine supermarket, where local shoppers find themselves trying to make sense of the thick fog that has enveloped their town (and survive the nightmare-ready monsters that live inside the impenetrable haze, some of the most terrifying movie creatures this side of “The Thing”). As the tension grows between Thomas Jane’s decent-hearted painter and Marcia Gay Harden’s lunatic doomsayer, the film curdles into a uniquely harrowing portrait of hope, and — in the unforgettable final scene that King himself sees as an improve on his novella — the horror of losing it. With our own future growing foggier by the day, those anguished last minutes somehow manage to hit even harder. —DE

“The Orphanage” (J.A. Bayona, 2007)

Merging the gothic storybook quality of “Pan’s Labyrinth” with maternal dread, Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona’s debut finds a woman returning to the orphanage where she grew up and confronting the literal ghosts of her past; while there, her young adopted son goes missing on the desolate beach nearby. The ’70s-set drama is a classically spooky drama that veers into morbid territory as the woman grows increasingly despondent and the very foundations of her reality start to collapse.

The finale, a shadowy confrontation with supernatural forces, is distinguished by one of the great haunting scenes of all time — a slow countdown in the darkness that finds a group of ghostly children steadily approaching in the darkness. Bayona singlehandedly rejuvenated the elegant possibilities of the horror genre with this first-rate compendium of fears. From the minimalist setting to the scary children and invisible forces, the movie delivers a hodgepodge of ingredients that make this genre such an essential medium for grappling with scary things that go bump in the night. —EK

“Trick ‘r Treat” (Michael Dougherty, 2007)

Writer-director Michael Dougherty’s “Trick ‘r Treat” gives John Carpenter’s “Halloween” a run for its money as the most festive feature to watch on October 31. The anthology film explores beloved American Halloween traditions, from pumpkin carving and ghost stories to pranking and partying, all through the eyes of a silent (strangely adorable?) creature named Sam (Quinn Lord). With a cast that boasts Anna Paquin and Brian Cox among others, the charmingly sinister hidden gem from 2007 only became a shelf staple for horror fans after garnering a cult following over several years without a proper theatrical release. —AF

“Let the Right One In” (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

At the exact time “Twilight” was being mainlined into our cultural veins, this quiet and beautiful Swedish film was the exact antidote audiences do desperately needed. Director Tomas Alfredson doesn’t always seem concerned with genre convention in his intimate story of a bullied 12-year old and the vampire he befriends. In the digital age, horror films are too often reliant on a flavorless shadowy look, but in Hoyt Van Hoytema’s cinematography not only can we see into the darkness, it is filled with one of the most unique color palettes in modern cinema. While creating an atmosphere in which we sense a lurking presence in the dark haze, the gorgeous and muted colors create an intimacy with the young characters. —CO

“Martyrs” (Pascal Laugier, 2008)

The New French Extremity movement that dominated French horror during the ’90s and early aughts came to an appropriate close with 2008’s “Martyrs.” Two young women, both of whom suffered extreme abuse as children, seek out revenge on the people they believe to be their captors, and in the process uncover ties to a religious cult darker than they could ever imagine. Imbued with the genre’s proclivity for extreme, graphic, and incredibly shocking violence, “Martyrs” lives up to its title and then some, provocatively blurring the lines between extreme pain and ecstasy. “Martyrs” features some of the most jaw-dropping shocks horror has ever offered, and it’s worth going in knowing very little, but be warned, it’s not for the faint of heart. —JR

“The Strangers” (Bryan Bertino, 2008)

Bryan Bertino’s directorial debut is one of the smaller-scaled films on this list, but its simplicity is also its greatest virtue. The premise is so unnerving because — unlike a zombie apocalypse or a Texas chainsaw massacre — it could happen to anyone, anywhere. And in “The Strangers” it does. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman play a very ordinary couple whose very ordinary relationship drama is interrupted by a knock at the door; three masked villains, empowered by nothing but some knives and their sadistic desires, have dropped by to ruin their night. The wicked games they play are carried out with vivid rage and raw brutality, but this is the rare horror movie that only gets scarier with its final reveal. Why did these maniacs target this particular couple, and what neighborhood will they be in tomorrow? The answers to those questions continue to keep us awake at night. —DE

“Antichrist” (Lars von Trier, 2009)

The first film in master provocateur Lars von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy,” it drew much controversy, and generated a myriad of theses and analyses, as with every other von Trier film. Beautifully stylized, dense with mourning and despair, telling the story of a couple who, after the death of their child, retreat to a cabin in the woods where the man has bizarre visions and the woman engages in increasingly violent sexual behaviour, “Antichrist” is said to have been influenced by von Trier’s own struggles with depression at the time of its writing. It is evident. Certainly divisive when it was released, it can ultimately be regarded as a meditation on human responses to psychological trauma. Prepare to be confronted by its at times graphic cruelty. At the very least, audiences will be captivated by its striking tableaux and strong performances from Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. “Melancholia” and “Nymphomaniac” complete von Trier’s trilogy. —TO

“Drag Me to Hell” (Sam Raimi, 2009)

Sam Raimi’s horror legacy may be dominated by discussions of the “Evil Dead” duology, but to overlook “Drag Me to Hell” would be a grave mistake. In the 2009 supernatural fright fest, Alison Lohman stars as Christine Brown: an ill-fated bank loan officer who fights to survive an insidious curse after an unhappy patron is denied her loan extension. Lorna Raver is outright terrifying as Sylvia Ganush and Raimi’s minute-per-scare ratio hits an all-time high. Plus, scream king Justin Long appears in his first horror role since the 2003 sequel to “Jeepers Creepers.” —AF

“Jennifer’s Body” (Karyn Kusama, 2009)

Cruelly overlooked at its release in 2009, it didn’t take long for Karyn Kusama’s subversive feminist possession flick to receive its rightful reevaluation. As too often happens to movies about women and girls, “Jennifer’s Body” was originally written off as fluff, despite a killer script from Diablo Cody, fresh off the success of “Juno.” The movie revolves around two best friends, one popular (Megan Fox) and one not (Amanda Seyfried), and plays with the blurred lines of the intense bond that can develop between teenage girls. Offered as a virgin sacrifice to serve the male ego’s needs, Megan Fox’s Jennifer becomes possessed due to, well, not actually being a virgin.

With satirical aplomb, Cody transformed the iconography of possession into an allegory for the way women’s sexuality is demonized in the service of patriarchy. Add to that some explicitly Sapphic overtones and Kusama’s expert direction, and it’s no surprise that “Jennifer’s Body” became a cult hit. Now if we could only relaunch Megan Fox’s career, that would be the final but of justice served. —JD

“The House of the Devil” (Ti West, 2009)

Jocelin Donahue turns in one of the all-time great “final girl” performances in Ti West’s ‘80s-set 16mm chiller. Made when the director was still in his twenties, “The House of the Devil” translates the sensibility of “Rosemary’s Baby” to the Satanic panic of the Reagan years. College girl Donahue needs money to move off-campus, so she accepts a babysitting job. But she finds out its not to take care of a child, but an elderly parent, a bait-and-switch that prompts her to ask for more money: $400 specifically.

That the job poster (a creepily elegant Tom Noonan) is willing to pay that much (in 1980s dollars, remember) should give her pause. But it doesn’t, of course. Much of the film, then, features Donahue doing her job in the eerie house (without ever seeing her charge) without dialogue, an extremely difficult task to ratchet up the suspense purely through the filmmaking and Donahue’s quietly assured performance. But West is up to the task, and draws you in until you’re identifying with Donahue to an overwhelming degree. Also on hand, Greta Gerwig as Donahue’s schlubby best friend, who has one of the funniest voicemail greetings in movie history. —CB

“Shutter Island” (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

Even the heaviest Martin Scorsese movies are infinitely rewatchable — there’s just a centrifugal pull to the focus and kineticism of his filmmaking, as anyone who’s spent the last 25 years being sucked into random parts of “Casino” on HBO could tell — but “Shutter Island” is one of the few that feels like it shapeshifts before your eyes during repeat viewings. A briny Dennis Lehane adaptation that masquerades as a dark and stormy crime thriller in order to disguise the psychological horror that’s churning below the surface, Scorsese’s pulpfest has been largely overshadowed by a twist ending that relies on the “Spellbound”-level brain science of the story’s post-war setting (spoiler alert: Leonardo DiCaprio, feverish with conviction, isn’t the “duly appointed federal marshal” he claims to be).

It’s a rug pull for the ages, one that so crudely peels back the movie’s central mystery that you might feel a bit cheated by its contrivances. Dare to revisit the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, however, and it becomes a different thing altogether. So too does the film itself — what once seemed like a puzzle with an easy solution blurs into a tragedy with no escape. On a list full of indelible ghost stories, few characters are more painfully haunted than DiCaprio’s “Teddy,” a man who’s been trapped in a prison of his own trauma for so long, he can no longer bear to live with himself. It’s hard to imagine a fate much scarier than that. —DE

“I Saw the Devil” (Kim Jee-Woon, 2011)

A visually canny director with a sharp sense of humor, Kim adeptly plays with genres, from his sixth film, the wacky Oriental western hit “The Good, The Bad, and the Weird” to serial killer thriller “I Saw the Devil,” which also stars Lee Byung-hun. This time, Lee is a homicide detective on the hunt for a brilliant serial killer who whacked his pregnant wife in a haunting opening sequence. This movie is not for the squeamish — Kim takes the violence about as far as anyone ever has, bringing you along for the ride via intricate tracking cameras as the detective starts to emulate the insane devil he is chasing. This vengeance plot, with all its gore and evil, is in the service of art. And it’s funny, too, as the detective and the killer engage in a strange game of one-upmanship. Despite being hit with restrictive ratings for violence in Korea, cutting some of the violence and limiting the theaters where it could play, the movie was a monster hit. Kim was able to keep more horror in the international version. —AT

“The Cabin in the Woods” (Drew Goddard, 2011)

Directed by Drew Goddard, “The Cabin in the Woods” is best known for its jaw-dropping last act featuring too many spoiler-ific set pieces to count. But rewatching the laugh-out-loud horror-comedy masterclass (ranked on IndieWire’s list of the Best Horror Comedy Movies of the 21st Century), it’s hard to overstate the unimpeachable performances that bring Goddard and Joss Whedon’s brilliant script about a so-called haunted cabin to life. Kristen Connolly leads as a final girl-type in a stacked cast including early “Thor”-era Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, and Jesse Williams. Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins also appear in a stupidly funny two-hander that frames the rest of the silly, yet shocking film. —AF

“The Skin I Live In” (Pedro Almodovar, 2011)

Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar is in full Hitchcock mode for this twisty, sexy medical revenge thriller adapted from Thierry Jonque’s 2005 crime novel, “Tarantula.” Reunited with his protegé Antonio Banderas (“Matador”) after two decades, Almodovar digs into an offbeat plastic surgeon who pursues the far reaches of transgenic therapy, using pig genes to create impenetrable human skin. He also is keeping gorgeous Vera (Elena Anaya) captive in his home, refreshing her epidermis behind a white face mask. Housemaid Marilia (Maris Paredes) is also one of many mysteries to be revealed — his wife’s face was burned in an accident, for one thing — in a strange world where anything can (and does) happen. —AT

“Sinister” (Scott Derrickson, 2012)

There is no hope in Scott Derrickson’s wall-to-wall bleak, miserable “Sinister,” one of the loneliest horror movies ever made. It’s about a true crime writer named Ellison Oswalt, played by a bespectacled Ethan Hawke, who after moving into a new home, where a family was formerly murdered, for research, starts isolating himself in the attack watching horrifying Super 8 footage left for him seemingly by a ghost. The footage captures the gruesome, and increasingly elaborate, murders of different families in bone-chilling fashion, including, perhaps most famously, a lawnmower ride to hell. That the film spawned a successful sequel is no surprise, though the utterly soulless ending of the film (turning the thought of infanticide on its head) would’ve been a pretty powerful conclusion to this story regardless. —RL

“The Conjuring” (James Wan, 2013)

A well-polished fictionalized account of the real-life cases of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, Wan’s film shows the supernatural seekers taking on the case of the Perron family, new owners of a Rhode Island home that appears to be haunted. An offspring of “The Exorcist,” set on an isolated, vast, animated compound, if it feels familiar it’s because the film relies on old-school horror film motifs for its scares. But it’s still effective, thanks in part to believable performances by its cast, notably stars Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as Ed and Lorraine, who have a natural on-screen chemistry. And Wan’s decision to limit his use of computer generated effects is wise. The first film in what has come to be called “The Conjuring Universe,” it’s spawned a sequel and three spin-offs which have collectively earned over $1.5 billion at the box office worldwide, making this the highest-grossing horror movie franchise in history. —TO

“Goodnight Mommy” (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, 2014)

There’s horror that you see and horror that you can feel. A slow psychological build from unassuming start to fiery end, this is unnerving filmmaking — and not just because of the fierce bodily harm on display. It’s drenched in the insidious, unsettling feeling buried within: the idea that your own family’s inability to recognize you can metastasize into something so brutal. Featuring the rare twist that’s improved by a straightforward, matter-of-fact reveal, “Goodnight Mommy” is a harsh spin on the fear of the unknown that permeates so many of the stories on this list. Yes, it may feel like an endurance test. But there’s an extraordinary element of control here, in which each fresh affront is carefully doled out with masterful precision. —SG

“It Follows” (David Robert Mitchell, 2014)

“It’s right behind you!” is a common, and cheesy, horror refrain, but David Robert Mitchell’s lyrical coming-of-age vision gave it entirely fresh currency. A murderous creature visible only to the afflicted pursues its prey with a slow, relentless march forward, manifesting as their worst fears; the only solution is to have sex with someone to pass the threat forward. But if one person dies, the monster makes its way back down the line. This brilliant gimmick enables “It Follows” to assemble a series of frantic teenagers in a desperate attempt to figure out a solution to their conundrum. B, but the body count is fated to rise, and Mitchell’s evocative storytelling makes it clear that nothing can totally rescue them from the shocking physical transformations of young adulthood. Sex, which often dooms characters in horror movies, has never been such a menacing cinematic threat. —EK

“The Babadook” (Jennifer Kent, 2014)

In the last 20 years, no director has come to her first feature so fully formed as both a storyteller and a master of cinema as actress-turned-writer/director Jennifer Kent. Kent’s tale of a widowed mother (Essie Davis) battling her son’s fear of a storybook character come to life is hide-under-your-seat terrifying, but instead of relying on lazy scare tricks that have come to define the genre in recent years, Kent uses precise compositions and clockwork-like precision to build tension and draw viewers into a scene. Kent is not simply a master technician, but one who uses the horror genre to tackle a subject (the burden of motherhood) that doesn’t get discussed in polite company and creates something that is for more hard-hitting than any “important” piece of Oscar bait. —CO

“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

Ana Lily Amirpour transports audiences to the fictional Bad City for her smooth as silk genre-blend “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” Touted as “the first Iranian vampire Western,” this black-and-white Sundance standout upends the familiar fear its title inspires to explore the personal — sometimes melancholic — limits of desire. Star Sheila Vand is breathtaking as the (unnamed) titular protagonist, whose blood-thirsty prowling is accompanied with a knowing romanticism that’s not as flashy as what most vampires are known for but offers something even better: a quiet respite from the unending despair of a cityscape where someone is always wanting something and perpetually coming up short. —AF

“The Invitation” (Karyn Kusama, 2015)

Painfully slow at the start, but building to a uniquely effective last act, “The Invitation” is your basic mystery-dinner-invitation movie. But with a realistic set of characters and serpentine plot, director Karyn Kusama’s 2015 flick makes a lasting impression in a crowded horror category. Following the death of his young son — which, in turn, was followed by a messy divorce — the tortured Will (Logan Marshall-Green) agrees to dinner at the house of his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband David (Michiel Huisman). At first, Will and girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) mingle with a few bottles of wine and a cast of very Los Angeles characters. But our hero’s gut feeling that something is going wrong can’t be explained by bad hors d’oeuvres. —AF

“The Witch” (Robert Eggers, 2015)

Robert Eggers’ astonishingly confident New-England Folktale is not fucking around. And, just to make sure you know that right from the start, one of its first scenes finds a demonic hag — the skin on her back painted with the light of a full moon — stealing a baby from the Puritan family that’s been exiled to the fringe of her woodland domain and crushing the child into bits with a pestle and mortar. There are any number of reasons why “The Witch” is such a giddily perverse experience (the director’s Kubrickian rigor and his fetish for period details not least among them), but the film is ultimately such a startling sight to behold because of Eggers’ straight-faced commitment to the bit. He leans into the fears and fascinations of 17th century life and he leans into them hard, and that unflinching approach makes it possible for modern-day viewers to believe in the power of the devil, and the goat that might serve as his messenger. Tie it together with a go-for-broke finale, throw in a star-making Anya Taylor-Joy performance into the mix, and you’ve got a new American classic that trembles with the echoes of the first horrors visited upon this country. —DE

“10 Cloverfield Lane” (Dan Trachtenberg, 2016)

Mary Elizabeth Winstead leads Dan Trachtenberg’s “10 Cloverfield Lane”: a claustrophobic psychological thriller set in the world of Matt Revees’ 2008 “Cloverfield” and Julius Onah’s 2018 “The Cloverfield Paradox.” When a young woman awakes following a car crash in a bunker with a menacing man (John Goodman) and his adult son (John Gallagher Jr.), she’s told an alien invasion is keeping all three of them below ground. But as the clues and her suspicions mount, our heroine must decide whether she’s safer outside or in. —AF

“Raw” (Julia Ducournau, 2016)

First-time director Julia Ducournau terrified and titillated Cannes audiences with her gruesome coming-of-age tale, combining classic cannibalism scares with a distinctly female perspective. The film follows a young student (Garance Marillier) who discovers some uncomfortable truths about herself (and the world) when she heads off to vet school (truly, the ideal setting for a body horror film). Marillier’s Justine is a dedicated vegetarian, so when she’s forced to endure a revolting hazing ritual that involves lots of blood and raw liver, she’s shocked to discover just how much she enjoys the taste of flesh. As Justine’s hunger for consuming meat grows, so does her desire to experience the pleasures of the flesh in different ways. It’s visceral, challenging, and often just plain jaw-dropping. —KE

“Get Out” (Jordan Peele, 2017)

Writer-director Jordan Peele catapulted beyond his sketch-comedy roots for a category-bursting work about race and privilege in American society that moviegoers had never truly wrestled with before. The outrageous premise — rich white liberals brainwashing black people to be their mind slaves — finds its match in the legitimate foundations of a psychological thriller, as well as the sobering portrait of a black man grappling with a troubled past and uncertain present. Its creepiest aspects sneak up on you: The movie’s observations about awkward race relations are funny because they’re true (even as the plot takes its wildest turns) and terrifying for the same reasons, often leaving viewers uncertain if they should laugh or contemplate the scarier implications of the punchlines. That’s the zeitgeist in a nutshell. Any history book on the American mood in 2017 will forever take its cues from “Get Out.” —EK

“Happy Death Day” (Christopher Landon, 2017)

Christopher B. Landon’s deliciously campy “Happy Death Day” doesn’t break out its first “Groundhog Day” joke until well into its third act, but the Jason Blum-produced 2017 horror film wears its cinematic pedigree with seeming pride. You can practically hear the pitch that sold the film: it’s the classic Bill Murray comedy, but as a horror outing — and all centered on a bratty co-ed (the charismatic Jessica Rothe) who gets brutally murdered every night, only to be forced to relive the whole ordeal the next day. The only real surprise: how well this wacky horror comedy has aged, how delightfully it inspired a sequel, and how very much fans are still awaiting a final entry.

The most basic of building blocks are in place from the start, including an initially unlikable protagonist and generous serving of montages, even an overarching message about the power of being a good person (at one point, a character screams, “love is love!” and it’s both totally endearing and hilariously out of place). Teresa (Rothe) — or “Tree” as she likes to be called — isn’t a nice person. She’s a spoiled sorority girl mostly interested in partying and keeping all of her relationships at a very safe distance (cue tragic backstory). When she wakes up in an unfamiliar dorm room the morning after a wild night out, she’s disgusted by the adorably dweeby Carter (Israel Broussard) and his good-natured attempts to keep their apparent one-night stand going. She’s off with a shot, out the door and thrust into a day that we’re about to become very familiar with, one that always, always wraps up with her vicious murder (funny as the film is, it never skimps on the clever kills).

Scott Lobdell’s script and Landon’s sharp directing ably introduce key scenarios and important characters immediately — that first walk through Tree’s repeated day provides a number of hints of things to look out for and people to pay attention to — before routinely twisting certain elements to keep the plot moving along. When Landon moves away from the darker parts of the film, opting to play up the campier elements of a mostly silly story, “Happy Death Day” is the kind of dizzy fun the horror comedy genre was made for, complete with a Final Girl worth cheering for, again and again and again. —KE

“One Cut of the Dead” (Shin’ichirō Ueda, 2017)

Even in the crowded zombie apocalypse space, writer-director Shin’ichirō Ueda delivers a one-of-a-kind undead horror comedy with “One Cut of the Dead.” The 2017 Japanese found footage (sorta?) film is mandatory viewing for fans of meta mise en scène, chronicling an ambitious director’s ill-advised attempts to spice up his cast’s lackluster performance. Also known as “Kamera o Tomeru na!” or “Don’t Stop the Camera!” it stars Takayuki Hamatsu, Kazuaki Nagaya, Yuzuki Akiyama, Manabu Hosoi, Hiroshi Ichihara, and more. —AF

“Tigers Are Not Afraid” (Issa López, 2017)

There’s a sobering sadness to Issa López’s “Tigers Are Not Afraid,” which many critics found hard to shake. The horror fantasy film combines visions of childhood make-believe with a punishing presentation of kids caught in the crossfires of the Mexican drug war. It imagines a world where kids can try to wish away hell, but then confines that fantastical promise to the painfully tragic truth that some traumas are inescapable. —AF

“Halloween” (David Gordon Green, 2018)

Co-written by Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride, and director David Gordon Green, “Halloween” (2018) permanently raised the bar for franchise reboots. Jamie Lee Curtis returns to her most iconic role as Laurie Strode in this revisionist sequel, picking up 40 years after the first film and cheekily explaining away the John Carpenter classic’s smattering of not-so-stellar sequels. Even with its frustrating title, “Halloween” managed to feel fresh: injecting its unlucky with victims with intense likability, building on the ever-evolving legend of Michael Myers, and smartly teasing out the final girl epic scream queen Curtis has long deserved. —AF

“Hereditary” (Ari Aster, 2018)

A masterfully crafted meditation on inherited trauma, inescapable legacies (the kind that tend to fester in the attic darkness like heirlooms you’re too afraid to look for let alone throw away), and the guilt that so many parents feel about bringing a child into this sick, sad world, Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” douses an intergenerational drama in unleaded nightmare fuel until a single spark is enough to make an entire family self-immolate. Toni Collette gives a career-best performance as the fraying Annie Graham, a Utah artist whose mother’s death ignites a chain reaction of tragedies that unfold with almost genetic predetermination; her preteen daughter’s decapitation, a transgressive jolt in a film that’s full of unforgettable scares, is just the first sign of an unstoppable curse.

Aster’s debut feature so beautifully melts family strife into Satanic horror that it enflamed a lot of needless chatter about the semantics of its genre, but the only “elevated horror” worth talking about is Collette hiding in the shadows along the top of the frame like a demonic spider. If movie theaters ever truly go extinct, it’s that kind of moment — each member of the audience spotting it at their own speed with an uncontrollable gasp — that will haunt us for letting them die. —DE

“Mandy” (Panos Cosmatos, 2018)

“Mandy,” Panos Cosmatos’ follow-up to his bold science-fiction debut “Beyond the Black Rainbow,” is an unforgettable tidal wave of psychedelia and derangement. Nicolas Cage stars as a man forced on a rampage of revenge after a cult of demon-biker henchmen breaks his marriage apart. Working off the template of a horror-revenge thriller, Cosmatos gives Cage the perfect vehicle to unleash his most psychotic extremes. The thrill of “Mandy” is in watching the dance of insanity between Cage’s performance and Cosmatos’ unrelenting vision. The director and actor push each other into such hypnotic, gory extremes that sequences of “Mandy” feel downright expressionistic. Cage has spent years searching for the kind of gonzo material that best serves his style, and he found his crazed match in “Mandy.” —ZS

“Suspiria” (Luca Guadagnino, 2018)

There are many horror films in which the filmmaking transcends its B-movie script, but Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” remake is manages to do the exact opposite — this dense and erudite script at times requires Cliff’s Notes and a Witches 101 college-level course to understand, but the filmmaking is so intense and virtuoso that it serves as its own exposition. A movement elicits violence, a cut its supernatural connection. Compositions become lust, while sound embodies the world’s discord. Even for Guadagnino devotees, the depths of his raw filmmaking skill demonstrated in this film will astound, as much as the bone-crunching violence will unsettle. —CO

“The House That Jack Built” (Lars von Trier, 2018)

Leave it to Lars von Trier to make a serial killer human. After he made his audience sympathize with a pedophile in “Nymphomaniac: Vol. II,” naturally all that was left was to turn his sadistic humanistic lens to a child killer. Aided by an inspired performance by Matt Dillon as the titular Jack, the protagonist in Von Trier’s darkest epic is plagued by Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, making his messy hobby as a murderer extra difficult. Von Trier mines this dichotomy for black humor, as we sympathize with Jack’s obsessive quirks while he talks his confessor, Virgil, through the details of his most heinous crimes. At just over two and a half hours, the tension of each gruesome scene helps the film sail along at a grotesque pitch. As each murder becomes more outlandish, the viewer is implicated in Jack’s transgressions, descending further into the circles of hell alongside this maniacal Dante. Sickeningly grotesque and utterly absorbing, “The House That Jack Built” is Von Trier at his most devilish artistic heights. —JD

“Midsommar” (Ari Aster, 2019)

“Midsommar” begins with a traumatic event and ends on a perverse sex scene, capped by devious, vengeful circumstances at once cathartic and macabre. It’s mad-science filmmaking worth rooting for: Aster refashions “The Wicker Man” as a perverse breakup movie, douses Swedish mythology in Bergmanesque despair, and sets the epic collage ablaze. 

Perhaps the first bonafide horror movie to take place exclusively in daylight, “Midsommar” unfolds against a blinding whiteness of the midnight sun and bucolic vistas at odds with the psychological disturbances in play. Florence Pugh is stunning as Dani, who attempts to recover from a recent loss by following her terrible boyfriend (Jack Reynor) on a trip to the Swedish countryside. All kinds of bizarre cultish mayhem ensues, as the movie builds to riotous May Queen ritual that reaches phantasmagoric heights in its psychedelic finale. “Midsommar” illustrates the potential of a filmmaker both enamored of classic horror-movie tropes and eager to transform them into savvy instruments for dissecting intimate problems. We all go a little mad sometimes, especially when it comes to bad breakups, but the subversive kick of Aster’s climax suggests that sometimes that madness can feel just right. —EK

“Ready or Not” (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, 2019)

Part “Clue,” part “Purge,” “Ready or Not” turns a boardgame on its head in a deadly game of hide and seek. Bride Grace (Samara Weaving) is inaugurated into the wealthy Domas family after marrying eligible bachelor Alex (Mark O’Brien). Yet the eccentric family of board game fame force Grace into a not-so-playful party trick: Survive the night by hiding in the mansion if you dare. Siblings Adam Brody and Melanie Scrofano set out to kill Grace, at the request of parents Andie MacDowell and Nicky Guadagni. Yet the commentary on wealth, marriage, and domesticity endures thanks to Weaving’s dedication to the “comedy of terrors,” as IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote. “She never lets us forget that this was supposed to be the best day of Grace’s life,” Ehrlich penned in his review, citing Grace’s descent into survival mode in lieu of newlywed bliss. Sure, the Domas family can hunt Grace down, but Weaving’s spiral into flight or fight paranoia makes “Ready or Not” worth playing. —SB

“Us” (Jordan Peele, 2019)

For his 2019 followup to the zeitgeist lightning-rod “Get Out,” Jordan Peele builds a fascinating mythology in “Us.” What starts as an eerie drama about a family (led by Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke) on a bad vacation quickly unravels into a doppelgänger nightmare. Are we really the people we think we are, or are the darkest versions of ourselves living in the ground below?

Nyong’o does an exceptional double bill as devoted mother Adelaide and her deranged, scratchy-voiced double who emerges from beneath the surface of civilization, along with many others, to wreak havoc on the privileged, oblivious living. Elisabeth Moss is predictably marvelous as the wine-guzzling Kitty, who is most certainly that woman we all know on a beachside vacation, but the actress quickly subverts that performance to play her monstrous, murderous double. As Peele’s dark demimonde expands, not everything checks out, especially as the film swells to include the 1986 Hands Across America human chain against poverty, but his wild swing at the fences is impossible to look away from. —RL

“Relic” (Natalie Erika James, 2020)

Echoes of David Cronenberg abound in Natalie Erika James’ chilling feature debut, “Relic.” Starring Emily Moritmer, Bella Heathcote, and Christian White, the film centers on three generations of women in a family that could be cursed by dark forces. With her 85-year-old mother spiraling into dementia, Mortimer’s Kay returns to her childhood home accompanied by her daughter, Sam (Heathcote). Not all is as it seems. “Relic” exists firmly in the realm of allegory, so if you’re looking for answers to the film’s spooky ambiguities and uncanny set pieces, you won’t find them. James is more concerned with creating an atmospheric rumination on intergenerational trauma, death, and dying that also happens to be a striking horror movie. In that sense, “Relic” belongs on the shelf next to “The Babadook” and “Hereditary” as highbrow, female-led horror movies that dwell in the slow burn. The movie concludes with easily one of the most disturbing, enigmatic, and strangely touching final scenes you’re likely to experience all year, a real showstopper that finds mother, daughter, and granddaughter coming together to bridge an ineffable gap. —RL

“Saint Maud” (Rose Glass, 2020)

An unholy cross between “First Reformed” and “The Exorcist,” Rose Glass’ taut and trembling “Saint Maud” transmutes a young woman’s spiritual crisis into such a refined story of body horror that watching it almost feels like a religious experience. A palliative care nurse in a dreary town somewhere along the British coast, the intensely devout Maud (a divine Morfydd Clark) is doing her best to seal the area around her soul. That seems to be one hell of a struggle. Soft-spoken but vibrating with serial killer intensity, Maud seldom opens her mouth when she’s not talking to God inside her acetic little apartment, and reminding her lord and savior that she was meant for something greater. Maud’s bitter new patient (Jennifer Ehle) doesn’t, uh, share quite the same faith.

Like most secular films about the fervor of devout religious faith, Glass’ severe and wickedly crafted debut feature is wary of its protagonist’s conviction; “Saint Maud” isn’t in a hurry to define its terms, but there’s no mistaking that Maud is a horror movie unto herself. She’s like if the alien from “Under the Skin” disguised herself as a nun. It’s not just the streaking red scars across her abdomen or the ever-shredding rumble of cellos that follows her wherever she goes, but also how she walks through Glass’ delicate frames like she’s afraid of shattering them, and how she clenches everything that she can whenever someone tries to speak to her.

Is it really possible that one of those voices belongs to God? Will Maud be granted a ticket to heaven if she can save her patient’s soul? Glass refuses to hedge her bets. In her own way, the filmmaker is as much of a hardliner as her heroine, and “Saint Maud” is all the more terrifying for how it refuses to back down from its truth. —DE

“She Dies Tomorrow” (Amy Seimetz, 2020)

This smartly titled outing from Amy Seimetz (“The Girlfriend Experience” TV show) turns that sinking feeling that something bad is going to happen into a feature-length study of fatalism and paranoia. Kate Lyn Sheil plays the titular “she,” a reformed alcoholic who inexplicably senses she is doomed at the film’s start. Amy’s friend Jane, portrayed by a scene-stealing Jane Adams, tries to calm her down. But as both women’s concerns mount — with limited evidence — Amy’s loosening grip on reality somehow starts to make sense. Chris Messina, Katie Aselton, Josh Lucas, Michelle Rodriguez, and more round out the stellar cast, exquisite in its subtle multitudes by necessity. “She Dies Tomorrow” may not be an especially adrenaline-pumping title, but its eerie melancholia will hang with you long after the credits roll. —AF

“The Night House” (David Bruckner, 2020)

David Bruckner’s tense and atmospheric Sundance Film Festival premiere taunts the ever game and intensely focused actress Rebecca Hall with a haunted house that’s both literal (an eerie feat of set design) and of the mind. Her character, Beth, is a grieving widow tormented not only by the loss of her husband (Evan Jonigkeit), an architect with a bounty of secrets of his own, but also by a particular episode from her past. When Beth starts seeing (hallucinating? conjuring?) phantom women coming in and out of her house (and all of whom look just about an inch from being Beth’s complete doppelganger) in agony, the ground beneath her starts to shift and Beth uncovers what could possibly be her husband’s secret life. The sound design and slight but nifty visual effects in this film stir up a chilling vibe punctured by genuine jump scares that feel earned. —RL

“Malignant” (James Wan, 2021)

James Wan’s viral hit “Malignant” is almost not worth mentioning. Why? Because without knowing the twist, it’s difficult to describe just how fantastic the film is. Madison (Annabelle Wallis) is hit by her husband Derek (Jake Abel) and starts being able to see murders before they happen—starting with Derek himself. Half home invasion thriller, and half detective story, “Malignant’ is all horror…until it’s not. Madison is forced to investigate her own past and come to terms with the fact that she may not be who (or what) she thinks she is. “Malignant” relies on the absurd and thrives in the ridiculous; it would be a horrific shame if we didn’t get more. —SB

“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” (Jane Schoenbrun, 2021)

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun makes their feature-length drama debut with the scary yet beautiful “We’re All Going to The World’s Fair.” Released at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, this 2021 Sundance darling stars newcomer Anna Cobb as Casey, an isolated teenager whose tortured sense of self grounds the cyber-coming-of-age saga. After a creepypasta-esque fad called “The World’s Fair challenge” goes viral online, Casey decides to try it. She’s been warned by countless participants online that the experience may change her, permanently. Spooky stuff indeed starts happening. But as audiences spend more time with the teen, her laptop, and her room, a poignant reflection on identity and community sets in. That clever blending of genres and some exquisite sound design creates an unusual intimacy with this film’s protagonist that helps elevate her story to the status of horror great. —AF

“Titane” (Julia Ducournau, 2021)

Arguably superior even to the squeamish excellence of her earlier “Raw,” Julia Ducournau’s “Titane” serves as a high-octane vehicle for Agathe Rousselle’s Alexia: an anti-heroine for the horror ages who begins as a serial killer — wielding a stylish hairpin as a lethally exacting dagger — but slowly becomes a melancholic symbol of defiance under the weight of expecting motherhood and in the face of danger. Vincent Lindon delivers a heartbreaking supporting perfromance as a grieving firefighter who, having lost his son some time prior, semi-wittingly takes Alexia in under the name Adrien. “Titane” made Ducournau the second ever woman to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. —AF

“Barbarian” (Zach Cregger, 2022)

There was no way to prepare for Zach Cregger’s debut film, “Barbarian.” For one thing, the marketing for 20th Century’s finger-licking weird haunted house remix was an intentional misdirect, positioning Georgina Campbell opposite Bill Skarsgård for what looked like a case of basic stranger danger.

But when the two singles arrive at the same Airbnb, seemingly double-booked by mistake in the first act, the menace of film’s most famed Pennywise portrayer (hey, Tim Curry was TV!) buckles under genuinely enjoyable rom-com beats. Those in turn crumble under a nightmare far freakier, anchored in a stomach-churning survival tactic Campbell sells with scary stoicism.

It’s not just the desperation of the “Barbarian” victims or the brutality of their tormenter(s) that shocks. Following one of the year’s most memorable title cards, Justin Long arrives as the property’s landlord midway through for a laugh-out-loud funny cancel culture aside. Cregger makes wickedly specific use of the buzzy themes mirrored in 2022 heavyweight “TÁR,” letting bonafide scream king Long once again steal scenes with a contemptible character many viewers — particularly those well-versed in Hollywood politics — will want to see killed off.

Though it didn’t rank among IndieWire’s best films of the year (notably, “Resurrection” and “Nope” did), “Barbarian” earns the top spot on IndieWire’s best of 2022 horror curation because of its decidedly brilliant structure; Creggers’ decisive and assured first-time feature direction; an arresting (and twisted) focal point challenging a tired gender trope; revelatory reactive horror acting from Campbell and Long; and the only scene to genuinely scare this writer in years. —AF

Read IndieWire’s list of The Best Horror of 2022.