Of course you do! Freaking out with your fellow audience member when something shocking happens, or jolting together as one during a primo jump scare, is one of the great pleasures of going to the movies. And over the past 100-plus years, the art form has figured out almost every possible way to frighten us, unnerve us, make our hair stand on us, chill us, thrill us and touch upon our most primal of fears. Then, just when you think it’s safe to go back to the theater, something else comes along that reminds us that there are always new ways to come us screaming in the dark. If you can count on the movies for anything, it’s that there seems to be an exhaustible supply of scares.
Naturally, everyone who helped cobble together the 101 best horror films of all time like scary movies. A lot. So we’ve gathered all of the old-school monster movies and modern serial-killer thrillers, the creature features and the slasher flicks, the canon-worthy creepfests from Universal and Hammer and A24, and come up this definitive list (or our definitive list, at least) of the greatest the genre has to offer. Just remember, as you read this list: It’s only a movie. Say that 101 times in a row, and you may just it make through this list…alive!
‘The Abominable Dr. Phibes’
Part The Phantom of the Opera, part The Ten Commandments, this revenge fantasy follows a disfigured concert organist (the inimitable Vincent Price) as he exacts biblical vengeance on the doctors he thinks killed his wife by reenacting Egypt’s Old Testament plagues. Playing opposite Joseph Cotten, Price gives a memorably sinister performance, since for most of the movie Phibes is wearing a mask to look like his face so he can’t move his lips — and when he takes the mask off, he’s a fleshless ghoul … with Vincent Price’s unforgettable voice. A rare horror movie aware of its own camp value, The Abominable Dr. Phibes was marketed with an anti-Love Story tagline: “Love means never having to say you’re ugly.”—K.G.
‘Ganja & Hess’
Long before Black horror became the primary conduit for Black folks to interrogate the daily traumas associated with organized religion, identity and assimilation, writer-director Bill Gunn dared to fit these weighty subjects in one extremely alluring, ahead-of-its-time film. Dr. Hess (Duane Jones) is an anthropologist who becomes a vampire after his assistant, George Meda (Gunn), stabs him with an ancient African dagger. Hess ultimately murders his assistant and takes Meda’s widow, Ganja (Marlene Clark), as a lover. The pair embark on steamy, sticky sex scenes lathered in blood, and some lusty killing sprees. Nearly 50 years since its release, it still feels strikingly modern.—R.D.
‘Cronos’
There’s is a device — a sort of clockwork scarab — that, should you unlock it and its spindly, metal legs clamp onto you, may give you the gift of immortality. There’s a catch, however, as the antique store owner (Federico Luppi) who’s stumbled across this ancient artifact soon finds out. It involves the regular consumption of blood. A unique spin on the vampire movie (something you would have thought near-impossible by this point), Guillermo del Toro’s debut movie plays fast and loose with religious iconography, horror-movie tropes, pulp-lit tales of mystery and imagination, and mythology in the most exciting of ways. It’s a perfect introduction to his mix-and-match sense of the macabre, as well as proof that nobody plays a genre-movie heavy better than Ron Perlman.—D.F.
‘Blood and Black Lace’
Mario Bava has given the world the prototype for the giallo movie in 1963, with his black-and-white thriller The Girl Who Knew Too Much. The next year, he’d give the subgenre it’s first bona fide masterpiece. After a female model is murdered, her bosses and peers begin to fret over a diary the woman kept, and that detailed everyone’s most sordid secrets. Everyone is trying to find the book before its revelations are discovered — including her killer, who is more than willing to slay everyone at the modeling agency in the process. The mix of graphic violence with lurid, eye-popping color and an abundance of stylish touches (the killer’s outfit of fedora, trenchcoat and eerie faceless mask is tres slasher chic) would become staples of these pulpy Italian horror movies into the 1970s, but Bava got there first. And, many would argue, did it best.—D.F.
‘Martin’
Martin believes he’s an 84-year-old vampire, though he looks 25. He swears he needs to drink blood to survive, but is he just another psycho killer? Much as his victims try, garlic and crucifixes just don’t keep him away. Throughout the movie, Martin asks for help and understanding but receives little, driving him to kill more often — and thus making a statement about mental health a time when people would say, “get over it” to people with problems. “What I’m trying to show in Martin is that we can’t expect the monster to be predictable,” filmmaker George A. Romero once said. That uncertainty, coupled with gory scenes of Martin sedating people and imbibing their blood, engineered by special-effects wiz Tom Savini, is what made the low-budget film an instant cult hit.—K.G.
‘The Blob’
Director Irvin Yeaworth’s kitschy, low-budget creature feature about an amorphous, man-eating hunk of Jello from outer space is pure B-movie heaven. A romping teen flick with beach movie vibes — there’s even a catchy theme song by Burt Bacharach and Mack David — it kicks off with Steve Andrews (a still very green Steve McQueen) and his girlfriend Jane (Aneta Corseaut) cruising the Pennsylvania countryside. Then they see a comet streak across the sky, at which point the title “character” emerges to consume a man in front of them,. Despite their pleas to the town’s jaded adults, they aren’t believed until it’s too late. Similar to most 1950s movies, the air of the Cold War hangs heavy above this one. (So it’s a force that keeps spreading and consuming everything in its path? Hmm.). Even more chilling to modern audiences, however, is the dire ecological ending: The blob can be contained if Antarctica remains frozen and intact.Uh-oh.—R.D.
‘The Black Cat’
Having already made horror-movie stars out of Bela “Dracula” Lugosi and Boris “Frankenstein’s Monster” Karloff, Universal decided: Why not pair these icons together for double the shrieks? Like its unofficial companion piece The Raven (1935), this inaugural team-up is based loosely — very loosely — on an Edgar Allan Poe work, and finds Lugosi accompanying newlyweds David Manners and Julie Bishop to a castle in Hungary, owned by his old “friend” Karloff. It seems the latter sent his thick-accented buddy to a Siberian gulag after World War I and married the man’s wife; the estate’s master may also dabble in what Manners dubs “supernatural baloney” in his spare time. (“Supernatural, perhaps,” intones Lugosi. “Baloney…perhaps not!”) Revenge, black masses, a hom*oerotic skin-flaying sequence and some of the most Expressionistic set design this side of Doc Caligari’s office are on deck, with director Edgar G. Ulmer finding exactly the right blend of campiness and creepiness.—D.F.
‘The Descent’
As a rule, no good ever comes from trekking out into nature in a horror movie. But writer-director Neil Marshall’s second feature took that truism to disturbing new depths, sending his all-female ensemble down into a cave far beneath the earth’s surface. Long before modern horror fixated on the notion that a film’s terrors ought to be a reflection of the main character’s hidden trauma, The Descent gave the idea teeth, casting Shauna Macdonald as an emotionally scarred widow mourning the tragic deaths of her husband and child — she processes that pain by trying to outwit and outrun the hideous creatures that dwell underground, hungry to feast on her and her friends. Brutally effective and mercilessly paced, the film boasts the funhouse frights of an expert midnight movie. Yet it’s constantly accentuated by the pathos undergirding the scares: Even if this woman makes it out alive, she’ll never get back the part of herself she’s lost forever.—T.G.
‘Trouble Every Day’
Ostensibly, Claire Denis’ 2001 movie is about a newly married couple, Shane (Vincent Gallo) and June (Tricia Vessey), on their honeymoon in Paris. But a growing body count and almost sickening quantities of blood hint at the film’s dark heart, intertwining romance with cannibalism as Shane’s secret reason for visiting the City of Lights is eventually revealed. Despised upon its release and (inaccurately) accused of inspiring audience members to faint from the severity of the onscreen violence, Trouble Every Day is a mesmerizing, grisly meditation on passion and commitment in an age of sexually transmitted diseases. Beneath its gruesome imagery and fixation on pulverized human flesh, however, this horror film comes bearing a touching message: Even monsters need love. Just be careful not to get too close, lest they sink their teeth into you.—T.G.
‘Friday the 13th’
Two years after Halloween rewrote the rules for teen terror, Friday the 13th upped the ante (and the body count) with a slasher whodunnit. As counselors (including Kevin Bacon) arrive at Camp Crystal Lake, they ignore well-intentioned warnings from Crazy Ralph, and go about carousing and [gasp!] having sex on the campground. That’s when the bodies start piling up. When the murderer finally appears, it’s not who any of the counselors thought it would be. And no, in the original Friday the 13th, it wasn’t Jason Voorhees. Unlike the rip-offs (Sleepaway Camp, The Burning), which revel solely in bloody kills, or the later Jason flicks, Friday the 13th played up suspense as much as the blood. It’s a shame how a hockey mask made people lose sight of that.—K.G.
‘Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’
Henry (Michael Rooker) has a routine: wake up, go to work, murder a woman, pound some beers, repeat. This drifter in the Henry Lee Lucas mold soon introduces his roommate/accomplice, Otis (Tom Towles), to his homicidal lifestyle. Set in a Chicago redolent of John Wayne Gacy, the Chicago Rippers and unspeakable violence behind wholesome Midwestern facades, director John McNaughton’s debut is sometimes a depraved buddy comedy, sometimes a perverse domestic drama, and 100-percent a nightmare. All of its modes are unrelentingly bleak, however, as this movie reveals the banal face of a real multiple murderer. Serial killers are not semi-supernatural evil geniuses — they’re dangerous, dim-witted losers, like these two jagoffs.—K.R.
‘Pet Sematary’
Nestled by the most dangerous road in America — where semi-trucks zoom at seemingly supersonic speeds and turn animals into road kill – lies a most peculiar burial ground. Louis (Dale Midkiff), his wife, Rachel (Denise Crosby), and their young family are recent arrivals to a country home located uncomfortably close to that perilous stretch of asphalt. When their cat dies, their neighbor (Fred Gwynne), however, tells Louis of another site, founded by Indigeous people where things have a tendency to return to life. A Frankenstein myth mixed with zombie-movie tropes and blessed with stunning practical effects and gruesome makeup, director Mary Lambert’s film of Stephen King’s novel isn’t just one of the best of the legendary author’s works. It instinctively understands what makes his work such endlessly potent nightmare fuel: Find a relatable story, add one bit of the fantastic (and maybe three bits of the ironic), notch up the dread to an unbearable level…then find a pressure point and push hard.—R.D.
‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’
Long before Jaws made folks think twice about swimming in open water, there was Jack Arnold’s ’50s favorite about a scientific expedition in the Amazon that comes across the skeletal remains of a primitive half-man, half-fish creature. What they don’t realize is that there’s also a very-much-alive “Gill-Man” swimming beneath those same murky rivers and lagoons, and he’s got his eyes on ichthyologist Julie Adams. It’s the scenes of Adams swimming while the Creature hovers right below her kicking legs, ready to pounce, that set the movie’s original audiences on edge (what was going on beneath us when we obliviously doing the backstroke?). Yet it’s the iconic design of the Creature, courtesy of former Disney artist Milicent Patrick and Chris Mueller (he sculpted the mask), that’s kept this drive-in classic permanently in the Famous Monsters of Filmland pantheon.—D.F.
‘The House of the Devil’
Ti West’s slow-simmering “Beware of Satanists!” cautionary tale looks and feels like an artifact from the early 1980s, found in a dusty corner of an abandoned video store. A naive college student takes a babysitting job at a creaky Victorian house, working for a couple of shady characters (played by veteran cult movie weirdos Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov). Before the literal all-hell-breaks-loose third act, The House of the Devil plays up the spooky atmosphere and retro style — right down to a scene involving a cranked-up Walkman, a song by the Fixx, and our sick fear that everything’s about to go very wrong.—N.M.
‘Black Christmas’
Four years before Halloween hit the screens, a mysterious murderer terrorized a sorority in Bob Clark’s proto-slasher. Far more upsetting than any of this homicidal maniac’s kills? The misogynistic invective he spouts over the phone. It would be easy for Black Christmas itself to become an outgrowth of its villain’s lurid, predatory gaze, but instead the movie (from the director of Porky’s, of all things) is a surprisingly progressive tale of what happens when women aren’t listened to and their choices aren’t respected. The bonus? The assembled cast including Olivia Hussey, Andrea Martin, and Margot Kidder.—E.Z.
‘Saint Maud’
A born-again Christian named Maud (Morfydd Clark) pines for a mission — and for her sins, she’s given one, in the form of a being a caretaker for a terminally ill choreographer (Jennifer Ehle). The longer she tends to her sick employer, the more she worries about saving this woman’s soul. But is Maud capable of offering salvation to the sick? Does this pious heroine really have a direct line to divinity? Or perhaps that voice in her head belongs to some other, less heavenly messenger? Director Rose Glass’ feature debut can be savored as a welcome, disquieting new addition to that old time religious-horror canon. (There will be back-bending levitation shots.) Or you can look at it as a portrait of young woman finding a warped sense of empowerment in her madness… which makes this “possession” story twice as unnerving.—D.F.
‘The Wolf Man’
“Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night/May be become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms, and the autumn moon is bright.” Universal had already dabbled with those fated to get a little harrier and toothier during full moons with 1935’s The Werewolf of London, featuring Henry Hull as the title character. But it was Lon Chaney Jr.’s portrayal of doomed sad sack Lawrence Talbot, who returns to his ancestral home in Wales only to be bitten by a you-know-what, that would help sell these mythical half-man, half-animal creatures as horror-movie staples. Say “werewolf,” and several generations immediately imagined Jack Pierce’s make-up on Chaney’s face. He’d play many victims and monsters over the years, including several other Universal horror legends, but the wolf-man remains the cornerstone of his legacy. And the rest of this subcategory’s mythology, from folkloric curses to silver bullets, gets minted right here as well.—D.F.
‘Us’
For his follow-up to Get Out, Jordan Peele pierces deeper into questions of racial and cultural identity, coming up with something terrifying both in a “monsters jumping out of the dark” way and a “man, the entire social order is messed up” way. Lupita Nyong’o gives an all-time great horror performance in a dual role: as an anxious middle class wife and mother; and as the leader of an army of murderous doppelgängers. The movie doesn’t hammer too hard on any particular political point, rather, it’s more a succession of well-staged scenes of freaky tension and explosive violence, all riffing on the idea that whenever one group of people are living well, there’s almost always another group suffering in their shadow.—N.M.
‘The Strangers’
This stripped-down shocker rewrites the rules for home invasion thrillers, dispensing with any kind of motivation or backstory for the masked killers at the door. Instead, writer-director Bryan Bertino focuses tightly on the victims: a young couple (played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) on the brink of breaking up before their already miserable night at a house deep in the woods gets interrupted by three blade-wielding sad*sts. The Strangers plucks away at the audience’s rawest nerves for 85 minutes, always keeping us aware of who might be lurking around any darkened corner or outside any window, waiting to torment these nice people when they’re at their most vulnerable.—N.M.
‘Final Destination’
It’s difficult to think of a more decidedly pre-9/11 text than this teen horror flick from director James Wong, which kicked off a franchise that’s become something like the Mission: Impossible series of the horror world. It opens on airport security pulling a group of high schoolers off a plane bound for Italy when their classmates experience a premonition of the plane crashing. The jet explodes. The teens have somehow managed to cheat death — only for an extremely angry Grim Reaper to then elaborately kill them off one-by-one. What makes Final Destination so unforgettable is the way it stages its murders around a perfect storm of mundane events: One person dies by slipping in the bathroom, another by a kitchen knife. It’s the type of endlessly inventive horror flick that, by the end, makes you want to accident-proof your entire house.—R.D.
‘God Told Me To’
It’s starts as a Horror City NYC thriller, with Tony Lo Bianco’s world-weary detective investigating a wave of murders sweeping the city; the crimes are connected because every perpetrator claimed they committed the homicides when “God told me to.” It ends deep in horror-movie territory, with the cop and a half-alien messiah fighting for the soul of humanity. Director Larry Cohen never met a crazy premise he could not make a thousand times nuttier, and his blend of Christian iconography, supernatural scares, urban paranoia, Chariots of the God-style origin stories and exploitation-cinema griminess is arguably the best example of the madness behind his methods. It’s truly a rough-cut gem of ’70s genre-movie insanity, made all the more disturbing by the fact that so many people would be driven to violence simply because a charismatic blond gentleman who claimed to be divine commanded them.—D.F.
‘Poltergeist’
Co-written and produced by Steven Spielberg, Poltergeist arrived in theaters a few weeks before E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial — and it now plays like a dark counterpoint to that film’s twinkly suburbia. There’s something rotten, literally and figuratively, beneath the surface of the idyllic, newly constructed sprawl that’s home to Steven (Craig T. Nelson) and Diane Freeling (JoBeth Williams). Which may be why their seemingly ordinary ranch house becomes a site of wonder and terror after malevolent spirit kidnaps their young daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke). Directed by Tobe Hooper (with some unmistakably Spielbergian touches), the film is filled with one scary moment after another as everything from trees to toys turn against the Freelings. But it’s just as rich in subtly biting commentary: The parents are ’60s dreamers-turned-Reagan era achievers raising their kids in a world that now looks less like than a dream come true than a materialistic nightmare.—K.P.
‘Martyrs’
Within the first 15 minutes of Martyrs, someone kicks in the front door of a cozy upper-middle-class home in the French suburbs and blows away two people with a shotgun. Spoiler: It doesn’t let up from there. The film follows two women, both seeking revenge for the psychological and physical torture inflicted on one of them by a secretive, moneyed cult. The group believes that the secret of immortality can be found at the intersection of religious ecstasy and extreme suffering, and the pain endured by its unwilling martyrs — all of them young women — is almost beyond human comprehension. Pascal Laugier’s 2008 New French Extremity shocker has more on its mind than mere sadism, however: The discomfort of sitting through the film’s intense violence eventually gives way to a more profound, but equally nihilistic, statement on religion.—K.R.
‘House of Wax’
When a new wax museum opens up in turn-of-the-century New York, patrons are amazed at how lifelike so many of the exhibits are. Too lifelike, in fact. We’re sure it has nothing to do with the recent spate of murders, or the mysterious man in the black hat and cloak who’s been stalking Phyllis Kirk. The fact that this attraction is run by Vincent Price — in his first horror movie — suggests that something highly unsavory is going on, even if you’re not familiar with Charles Belden’s short story “Wax Works” (the same source material for the equally great 1932 film Mystery of the Wax Museum). It was one of the first scary movies to effectively utilize 3-D (watch out, that corpse is falling right toward you!), and the big reveal scene remains highly unsettling. You won’t believe the sight of wax melting off a statue’s face could be so eerie.—D.F.
‘Haxan’
Horror filmmakers have been innovating and experimenting since the very beginning of the genre, as firmly evidenced by this 100-year-old Swedish groundbreaker. The title translates to “The Witch,” and it is, per the opening credits, “a cultural and historical presentation in moving pictures in six parts.” Documentary cinema may have been in its infancy (this was the same year as Nanook of the North), but writer-director-star Benjamin Christensen was already aware of the value of its appropriation, opening the film with background, acknowledgements, and history, wrapping his dramatizations of the history of witchcraft within a genuine scholarly framework. Christensen understood that the prism of fact would give his narrative fictions extra punch. And if there’s any doubt that he was right, it’s worth noting that the directors of The Blair Witch Project named their production company Haxan Films.—J.B.
‘Candyman’
You need only say his name five times in a mirror for him to appear, or so the legend goes. Candyman gives us the legend of Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd) — a wealthy Black artist whose right hand was severed, his body smeared with honey for bees to feast on, and his corpse burned on a pyre for falling in love with a white woman — that initially draws graduate student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) to the Chicago housing projects known as Cabrini Green, where rumor says his spirit still lurks. An adaptation of a Clive Barker short story from writer-director Bernard Rose, Candyman is generational trauma. Candyman is racism, over-policing and the affordable housing crisis. Candyman is systematic inequality. And this gory, sociopolitical slasher is equal parts menacing and introspective, causing viewers who’ve just finished watching Candyman to quickly look in their own mirror and pray that there isn’t someone with a hook for a hand, standing right behind them….—R.D.
‘The Last House on the Left’
The elevator pitch reads like every parent’s worst nightmare: A kid goes with a friend to a concert in the city where depraved hippies abduct and torture them, eventually driving them back near where the parents live. But courtesy of a twist, by the end the film has become every parent’s greatest revenge fantasy leading up to a bloody climax. Half a century since it came out, Wes Craven’s ultraviolent film (written by Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham) is still one of the most unsettling movies ever made, as well as one of the greatest exploitation flicks ever, right down to its goofy bluegrass soundtrack recorded by the film’s actor who plays the main creep.—K.G.
‘A Girl Walks Home at Night’
As spellbinding and visionary a first feature as you’re likely to see, Ana Lily Armipour’s melding of spaghetti Westerns, John Hughes teen-misfit odes, black-and-white art movies and vampire stories definitely announced a major new talent. But the fact that horror is but one of the film’s many flavors doesn’t dilute the thrills or chills at all; you can swoon to its Type-O–craving heroine dancing with her crush one second and then shudder as she goes fangs-first ballistic on someone several scenes later. Consider this the punk-rock, girl-power Twilight you didn’t know you needed.—D.F.
‘Scream’
Has any horror movie nailed its opening sequence like the original Scream? Look, we know you like scary movies, because you’re reading this list. So don’t answer that. But Kevin Williamson’s cheeky screenplay is the perfect match for Wes Craven’s finely tuned understanding of how to manufacture scares. The Scream movies run the gamut from pretty fun to very fun, but none match the first with its sheer meta-ingenuity about the way slasher flicks work and the people who love them. When Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and her pals start to be terrorized by horror hall-of-famer Ghostface, they realize exactly what kind of story they are in — and try to use the wits of their genre knowledge to outsmart the killer. It’s funny. It’s silly. It’s bloody as hell.—E.Z.
‘Night of the Demon’
Whether you think the giant hellspawn at the center of Jacques Tourneur’s haunting noble-doctor-versus-devil-worshipping-cult procedural should have remained hidden in the shadows, or that its appearance adds to the uncanny flavor of this ’50s horror flick, is a matter of opinion. (It’s a debate that’s raged for years.) What we do know is that this seemingly normal movie drops Dana Andrews and Gun Crazy‘s Peggy Cummins right into the middle of a landscape in which evil wears a perfectly respectable face, which only makes the things they conjure out of the shadows that much more sickening. It’s the constant detouring into the weird that keeps you on your toes, not to mention the film’s balance of the paranormal and the slightly perverse. And for the record, we’re definitely Team Show-the-Demon.—D.F.
‘The Bird With the Crystal Plumage’
“It seems very clear to me that there is a dangerous maniac at large in this city.” Dario Argento wasn’t just launching his feature directorial career with this story of an American in Italy who witnesses a brutal murder and tries to solve it. He was injecting a new sense of style and danger into the Italian giallo. Building off the innovations that Blood and Black Lace‘s Mario Bava built, he took the main ingredients of the subgenre — the black-gloved killer, the sharp (and often phallic) knives penetrating skin, the deliriously overwrought score, the ruthless, chilling “kills” — and quickly proved he was a master of the form. One movie in, and you can already tell Argento’s staging is precise and his set pieces are ingenious, particularly the inciting incident, in which our hero can’t help the victim…but he can’t look away either.—J.B.
‘Let the Right One In’
This quiet tale — about Eli (Lina Leandersson), a decades-old vampire child, and Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), the human boy she falls in love with — is, on its surface, as chilly as the Swedish landscapes. But there’s sweetness underneath all the neck biting and mutilation, and ultimately, the admittedly blood-soaked story is about what people, be they mortal or otherwise, will do to protect one another. You can see why American filmmakers and TV showrunners have gravitated toward to Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 film, as well as trying to recapture its spirit. The fact that it’s so brutal is what keeps it from sliding into the saccharine.—E.Z.
‘Repulsion’
Glassy-eyed manicurist Catherine Deneuve navigates London’s Swinging-Sixties suitors with stone-faced indifference, then stolen-kiss disgust, followed by harrowing delusions and an unnerving knack for murder. Carnal aggression triggers mental derangement in Roman Polanski’s shivery psychological portrait, made even more unnerving with his deft mix of subjective surrealism and deadpan verisimilitude. It’s a chronicle of ravaged innocence, and the kind of horror that can emerge from even the most banal places. Sidewalk cracks, apartment fissures, overheard carnal moans, that relentlessly tick-tick-ticking clock, and a rotting rabbit corpse are the external expressions of a troubled mind, the debilitating deficiencies of an on-the-spectrum woman surrounded by lusty pigs blind to her feelings—and to their own doom.—S.G.
‘Midsommar’
Day-lit dread abounds as a band of opportunistic anthropology-major broheims fly to Sweden for a remote village’s nine-day summer pageant. Fifth-wheel girlfriend Dani (Florence Pugh), struggling with devastating, and still-very-fresh deaths in her family, turns to passive-aggressive lover Christian (Jack Reynor) for solace, but all he can offer her is weak boyfriend vibes and a craven interest in exploiting ritual life for a good grade. No worries: Scandinavian folk horror will soon give them ample relationship clarity. Emotional torture artist Ari Aster’s follow-up to his supernatural domestic trauma-drama Hereditary mines some shocking pagan rites and disturbingly illustrated tapestries, framing a Midnight Sun community’s sacred life-cycle beliefs right next to its with its veiled xenophobia and clan-sanctioned sacrifices. The ultimate in cult-ish impulses, or a beautiful expression of dark devotion? Exactly.—S.G.
‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’
Within the heart of every man lurks a beast — and Dr. Henry Jekyll has the potion to prove it. There have been numerous adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella over the years, starring everyone from John Barrymore to Spencer Tracy to Michael Caine. Yet it’s this 1932 Paramount version, trying to hone in on Universal’s monster-movie territory, that everyone remembers the most vividly. It’s partially because of Frederic March’s Oscar-winning performance as both Jekyll and his brutish, animalistic counterpart Mr. Hyde, played as the personification of maniacal toxic masculinity decades before the term was coined. It’s partially because of Rouben Mamoulian’s inspired direction (no horror movie would use P.O.V. shots better until Halloween) and his ability to take advantage of pre-Code salaciousness. And it’s largely because of the transformation scene, which is still astounding to watch even once you know how the trick was done.—D.F.
‘Black Sunday’
With his background in special effects and cinematography, Mario Bava’s horror films are among the most breathtaking the genre has ever seen. And although he’s well known for his use of color, his 1960 debut feature accomplishes startling beauty in high-contrast black and white, filing Gothic atmosphere with rolling fog and inky darkness. Star Barbara Steele brings a ferocity to her dual role as a defiant 17th-century Moldavian witch and her naive 19th-century descendant; her witch creeps out of her tomb like Freud’s return of the repressed, eyes burning and cheeks pierced where inquisitors once strapped the “Mask of Satan” to her face. It’s bombastic, ghastly, a little kinky, and metal as hell.—K.R.
‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’
Slashing teens was bloody good business by 1984, when filmmaker Wes Craven conjured the original Nightmare. His villain was Freddy Krueger, a lascivious (and often hilarious) deceased school janitor hellbent on exacting revenge, one razor-tipped finger at a time, in the dreams of the children of Elm St. Actor Robert Englund, who played the fedora-sporting burn victim, was a natural ham — but it’s the way Krueger united the kids (including a young Johnny Depp) against him that made the original work. Less schticky than the sequels, the original Nightmare feels genuinely scary and its special effects, like a bed gushing blood up to the ceiling and a slimy tongue phone, rival Dalí for surrealism.—K.G.
‘The Masque of Red Death’
The seventh (and best) of the eight films in Roger Corman’s drive-in horror movies based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, this retelling of the author’s 1842 short story casts his rep-company regular Vincent Price as Prince Prospero, a 12th century Satanist. After burning a village during a plague, this arrogant royal throws a masked ball for his fellow aristocrats in defiance of the pandemic. Things quickly take a turn for the macabre. It’s a perfect blend of high-culture ambition and low-culture accessibility, along with a presciently psychedelic color palette from cinematographer Nicolas Roeg that is so radiant it practically vibrates. And the film’s timeless feeling of a fable gained chilling new resonance when COVID-19 brought America its own Prince Prospero in the form of Donald Trump.—K.R.
‘The Innocents’
The most exquisite of all cinematic ghost stories, this adaptation of the Henry James story “The Turn of the Screw” stars Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, a dutiful, inexperienced governess who starts to suspect something sinister is inhabiting the bodies of the children she’s been hired to safeguard. Where other horror directors seek to shock or petrify, filmmaker Jack Clayton very meticulously chills your blood, crafting an atmosphere of perpetual clammy unease inside the film’s central locale, a supremely spooky castle. Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens give uncommonly good child performances, but it’s Kerr as the overwhelmed governess who brings intelligence and grownup gravitas to the proceedings. Though set in the 19th century, this shimmering black-and-white classic feels timeless, residing in its own elegantly crafted universe — one in which every shadow hums with menace and the spirits of the dead never let go of the living.—T.G.
‘Possession’
Welcome to the body-horror answer to Kramer vs. Kramer. Long-estranged couple Isabelle Adjani and Sam O’Neil have decided to end their marriage once and for all, yet before they can part ways, they must scream, display fits of rage, and physically attack each other in the streets of Berlin. And then Polish director Andrzej Zulawski psychodrama takes a hard left into psychotronic territory. Electric carving knives are put to self-harming use. A private detective meets a grisly end. Both characters get their own doppelgängers. Some 40-plus years later, it’s still impossible to tell whether the tentacled creature who shows up, courtesy of Alien and E.T.‘s special effects guru Carlo Rambaldi, is a real manifestation of one woman’s torment or merely a product of a warped imagination. What we can say is that Adjani’s freak-out in a subway station — the scene that gives this film its name — lives up to its reputation as one of the most visceral, go-for-broke moments of acting ever committed to film.—D.F.
‘The Birds’
A metaphor for the then-prevalent fear of nuclear holocaust? A commentary on the myopia of human beings and the primacy of Mother Nature? Just a fun excuse to freak out moviegoers? Whatever your interpretation of this Alfred Hitchco*ck thriller, it’s a stunningly efficient delivery device for escalating terror. An aborted meet-cute between Mitch (Rod Taylor) and Melanie (Tippi Hedren) leading to a potentially romantic rendezvous in picturesque Bodega Bay. Then their tentative love affair quickly takes a backseat to some sinister happenings within the town’s bird population. Soon enough, chaos reigns as the winged creatures start wreaking havoc, their lethal attacks as inexplicable as they are frightening. In his unparalleled career, the Master of Suspense gave us plenty of things to be afraid of, but The Birds fiendishly weaponized nature itself, suggesting that, any moment, our fine feathered friends might turn against us. Never again would the sound of seagulls be considered soothing.—T.G.
‘The Mummy’
The third of Universal’s quartet of horror O.G.s (Lon Chaney, Jr.’s Wolf Man wouldn’t join the gang until 1941), Boris Karloff’s ancient, walking-dead Egyptian is only seen in the classic mummy-bandage get-up briefly; he spends most of the film unwrapped and playing Imhotep, the resurrected high priest in search in the Scroll of Thoth. Luckily, resident handsome square David Manners and Edward Van Sloan, a.k.a. Dracula‘s Van Helsing, put a stop to him sacrificing Zita Johann, a dead ringer for the priest’s long-deceased love. And while some have complained that this monster movie is as slow as its title character, German director Karl Freund’s addition to the canon contains what may be the single most chilling sequence in any Universal horror film: As Van Sloan’s assistant translates the scrolls, we see Karloff’s mummy gradually open his eyes and silently comes to life. When the man realizes what’s happening, he screams — and then begins uncontrollably laughing in a fit of hysteria and madness. —D.F.
‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’
The ultimate paranoid ’70s thriller is the one that says you really can’t trust anyone: Even your nearest and dearest could be one of them. In moving Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers out of the Red Scare era and into the San Francisco of the post-Nixon years, this terrifying remake shifts the allegorical function of the emotionless alien imposters, who this time represent nothing less than the sea change of America’s soul — an overnight transformation of hippies into yuppies. Yet the true horror of Philip Kaufman’s pod people, newly equipped with a bloodcurdling, ear-splitting vocal alarm, runs past topical anxiety to the existential variety, writ large across the changing facial expressions of Donald Sutherland. It’ll make you afraid to sleep, though after that pitiless ending, you won’t be able to anyway.—A.A.D.
‘Eyes Without a Face’
You could approach Georges Franju’s arty serial-killer thriller purely as an intellectual exercise, meant to make an argument against the shallowness of beauty standards and the callousness of scientists, via a story about a surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) who kidnaps women and slices off their faces to transplant onto his disfigured daughter (Edith Skob). But to be fair, it’s hard to take that view when said doctor is calmly peeling off a young lady’s skin. This is a surprisingly graphic film for 1960, about a man so icily obsessed with righting wrongs that he makes appalling choices, shown to the audience in such detail that it jolts the gut as well as the mind.—N.M.
‘The Curse of Frankenstein’
From the vibrant and lush hues of the technicolor compositions to the mutilated green face of Christopher Lee’s monster — stirringly revealed in one jagged jackknife of a zoom — director Terence Fisher’s reimagining of Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic novel didn’t just set it apart from Hollywood. This was the movie that set the standard for future Hammer Horror retellings of classic horror I.P. like Horror of Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959) as well as establishing the British studio as the place to go for garish, gore-soaked Goth-terror. It also gave us the pairing of Lee and Peter Cushing, who played the cold-blooded Baron Victor Frankenstein with a Godlike complex and, later, a guilty conscience. Before Hammer released this shot across the bow, Shelley’s groaning creature was strictly the purview of Universal Pictures. By the end, it was all theirs.—R.D.
‘Freaks’
“Offend one and you offend them all,” cautions a carnival barker as he describes his menagerie of misfits: Half Boy, Bird Girl, Human Skeleton, the Living Torso. Society’s outcasts and ostracized medical marvels find home in a traveling circus — from the he/she gender dysmorphia of the half-man/half-woman to the Siamese twin sisters and the bearded lady. Legless guys and armless ladies happily coexist, until a comely gold-digging trapeze artist seduces a secretly wealthy little person and incurs the group’s wrath. The so-called “mangy freaks” are director Tod Browning’s beautiful people, othered and repelled in life’s circles; despite the controversial reputation of this legendary cult classic, his film is unexpectedly tender proof that the true horror show really comes from the normies. One of us, one of us!—S.G.
‘Carnival of Souls’
The sole feature directed by Herk Harvey is a one-of-a-kind low-budget thriller that plays like a cross between a Twilight Zone episode and a piece of outsider art. Candace Hilligoss stars as Mary, a woman who escapes a car accident and tries to start a new life in a new city, only to encounter everything from a sexually threatening neighbor to terrifying otherworldly visions. A Kansas-based filmmaker who otherwise worked in educational and industrial films, Hervey shot the film while on an extended leave from his day job. He made a virtue of his limited budget, using atmospheric lighting and a creepy organ score to make everyday locations like a department store feel haunted and dangerous, as well as turning an abandoned resort on the shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake into a nightmare within a nightmare. It’s one of movies’ great one-offs. Hervey might have understood he could never have topped it.—K.P.
‘Village of the Damned’
One afternoon, in a quiet town in the English countryside, everyone suddenly loses consciousness. When the population awakes several hours later, a series of mass “immaculate conceptions” appear to have occurred. Years later, these children have grown up to be near-identical blond, blue-eyed kids who have a penchant for being extremely quiet, very well-mannered, super-intelligent and able to communicate telepathically. Oh, and they’re also willing to kill anyone who might do them harm or threaten their quest for world domination. An absolutely top-shelf adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, director Wolf Rilla’s movie starts off as pure science fiction (with the military attempting to penetrate the town’s perimeters and not fall under its spell) and ends up in a hybrid SF/horror sweet spot, especially once these moppets’ eyes start glowing and some unfortunate townspeople learn the extent of the brood’s powers. A great reminder to never, ever trust anyone under the age of 12.—D.F.
‘It Follows’
Writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s ingenious supernatural thriller centers around a mysterious force that relentlessly stalks its intended victims until they either die or pass the curse along by having sex. The viral evil common to J-horror films like The Ring is mutated here into something that’s like a combination STD and chain letter. The malevolence infects a group of undeserving youngsters, who slowly and sickeningly realize they’re dealing with something they may just have to endure — and never conquer.—N.M.
‘Audition’
A lonely, middle-aged widower holds fake auditions for a fake television show, hoping to surreptitiously meet the new woman of his dreams. If that sounds like the setup for a whimsical romantic comedy, then you’re already stepping right into the bear trap laid by prolific Japanese genre madman Takashi Miike. To even include his notorious shocker on this list is to let the cat (or mute, mutilated prisoner) out of the bag; part of the movie’s brilliance lies in the way its horror erupts suddenly from its tranquility, shattering expectations to make a point as sharp as acupuncture needles. The ending is unforgettable — for the outrageous extremity of the violence, yes, but also for its tricky ambivalence. Miike was ahead of his time on both counts, simultaneously anticipating “torture p*rn” and Time’s Up.—A.A.D.
