A horror movie has one job, and you know what it is before the lights go down. That makes it hard to fake. A comedy with weak jokes can still coast on charm, but a horror film that doesn't frighten you has nothing else to offer, so the good ones are put together with real care, right down to how long a shot holds before the cut. Psycho is the classic example. Hitchcock spends the opening of the film getting you invested in Janet Leigh's Marion Crane, then kills her in the shower well before the halfway mark, and you have to watch the rest of the movie without the person you thought it was about.
This ranking of the best horror movies covers a century of the genre, from German Expressionism to the films still selling out multiplexes. It is organized around one idea we call the Five Sources of Fear: the Monster, the Supernatural, the Human, the Body and the Mind.
A film's rank tells you how good it is. Its source of fear tells you what kind of night you are in for, and that second fact is usually the one you need when you are choosing what to watch.
What Makes a Horror Movie Great? The Criteria Behind the Rankings
A great horror movie frightens you in a way that outlasts its running time, and it does so with craft that other filmmakers go on to copy. Every film in this ranking was judged on five criteria, and the best horror films of all time score high on all five rather than leaning on one.
1. Fear: The first test is whether the film still frightens a first-time viewer today. Shock value fades and special effects date, so this criterion rewards dread, atmosphere and suspense over the jump scare that only works once.
2. Craft: Horror is the most technical genre there is, because fear depends on timing. This criterion looks at direction, editing, sound design, score and production design, the tools that decide whether a scare lands or falls flat.
3. Influence: Some horror films invent a form that everyone else then works inside. A film that created the modern slasher, the zombie apocalypse or the found-footage boom earns weight here that a polished imitation cannot.
4. Endurance: The best horror movies hold up on a second and third viewing, when you know what is coming. A film that only works as a surprise ranks below one that grows more unsettling the better you know it.
5. Idea: The horror films that last are about something beyond the scare: grief, faith, sex, class, race, the body, the family. This criterion rewards films whose fear carries a meaning you keep thinking about after the lights come up.
How Were the 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time Ranked?
The 100 best horror movies of all time are ranked here by how well each film scores on the five criteria above, with Fear and Craft weighted most heavily, and every film is then tagged by its source of fear. Influence and Endurance separate the classics from the merely good, and Idea decides the close calls. Where two films scored evenly, the one that still frightens a first-time viewer today ranks higher.
The Five Sources of Fear
Every horror movie frightens you through one main source, and naming it tells you what kind of experience a film will be before you press play. Each film in the ranking carries one of these five tags.
- The Monster: a creature with a body you can see and run from, such as a vampire, a zombie, a werewolf or a shark. Examples: Alien, The Thing, Nosferatu.
- The Supernatural: ghosts, curses, demons and possession, the threats you cannot fight with your hands. Examples: The Exorcist, Ringu, Hereditary.
- The Human: killers, cults and ordinary cruelty, the fear that the danger is another person. Examples: Psycho, Halloween, Get Out.
- The Body: transformation, mutilation, and the flesh turning against its owner. Examples: The Fly, Videodrome, The Substance.
- The Mind: madness, grief, and reality coming apart, where the threat may be inside the main character. Examples: The Shining, Repulsion, The Lighthouse.
At a Glance: What Are the 100 Best Horror Movies?
The table below is the quick reference for the full ranking: rank, year, director, source of fear, where it streams in the US from 1 November 2026, and one verified fact per film. "Rent or buy" rows name where to rent or buy a film that has no US subscription or free streaming.
| # | Film | Year | Director | Source of fear | US streaming | Key fact |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Psycho | 1960 | Alfred Hitchcock | Human | Netflix | $32.2M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 2 | The Exorcist | 1973 | William Friedkin | Supernatural | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, Plex | $430.9M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 3 | The Shining | 1980 | Stanley Kubrick | Mind | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, Plex | $50.3M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 4 | The Texas Chain Saw Massacre | 1974 | Tobe Hooper | Human | Netflix, Prime Video, Peacock | $30.9M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 5 | Alien | 1979 | Ridley Scott | Monster | Netflix | $109.7M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 6 | Rosemary's Baby | 1968 | Roman Polanski | Supernatural | Paramount+, AMC+ | Oscar win, Ruth Gordon |
| 7 | Night of the Living Dead | 1968 | George A. Romero | Monster | HBO Max, Peacock, Shudder | National Film Registry, 1999 |
| 8 | The Thing | 1982 | John Carpenter | Monster | Prime Video, AMC+ | $20.1M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 9 | The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari | 1920 | Robert Wiene | Mind | Shudder | Painted Expressionist sets |
| 10 | The Innocents | 1961 | Jack Clayton | Supernatural | fuboTV | Cannes competition, 1962 |
| 11 | Halloween | 1978 | John Carpenter | Human | Shudder, AMC+ | $47.2M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 12 | Nosferatu | 1922 | F. W. Murnau | Monster | Prime Video, Shudder, AMC+ | Court ordered prints destroyed |
| 13 | Don't Look Now | 1973 | Nicolas Roeg | Mind | Free: Kanopy, YouTube | BAFTA, Best Cinematography |
| 14 | The Wicker Man | 1973 | Robin Hardy | Human | Prime Video | Saturn Award, Best Horror Film |
| 15 | The Fly | 1986 | David Cronenberg | Body | Hulu | $40.5M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 16 | Dawn of the Dead | 1978 | George A. Romero | Monster | Rent or buy: Prime Video | Released unrated after X rating |
| 17 | The Silence of the Lambs | 1991 | Jonathan Demme | Human | MGM+ | $273.1M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 18 | Suspiria | 1977 | Dario Argento | Supernatural | Free: Tubi, The Roku Channel | Late Technicolor dye-transfer print |
| 19 | The Haunting | 1963 | Robert Wise | Supernatural | AMC+ | Golden Globe nomination, Robert Wise |
| 20 | Ringu | 1998 | Hideo Nakata | Supernatural | Shudder, AMC+ | Remade in Korea and the US |
| 21 | Martyrs | 2008 | Pascal Laugier | Body | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Fandango at Home | French rating cut from 18+ to 16+ |
| 22 | Jaws | 1975 | Steven Spielberg | Monster | Netflix | $490.7M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 23 | Carrie | 1976 | Brian De Palma | Human | HBO Max, Prime Video | $33.8M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 24 | Possession | 1981 | Andrzej Żuławski | Body | Shudder, AMC+ | Cannes Best Actress, Isabelle Adjani |
| 25 | A Nightmare on Elm Street | 1984 | Wes Craven | Supernatural | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home | $25.6M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 26 | Bride of Frankenstein | 1935 | James Whale | Monster | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home | Oscar nomination, Sound Recording |
| 27 | Frankenstein | 1931 | James Whale | Monster | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home | National Film Registry, 1991 |
| 28 | Peeping Tom | 1960 | Michael Powell | Human | Free: Tubi, Kanopy | BFI: 78th-greatest British film |
| 29 | The Birds | 1963 | Alfred Hitchcock | Monster | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home | Oscar nomination, Special Effects |
| 30 | Carnival of Souls | 1962 | Herk Harvey | Supernatural | HBO Max, Prime Video, AMC+ | Herk Harvey's only feature |
| 31 | Deep Red | 1975 | Dario Argento | Human | Shudder, AMC+ | Shot mainly in Turin |
| 32 | Eraserhead | 1977 | David Lynch | Mind | HBO Max | National Film Registry, 2004 |
| 33 | The Changeling | 1980 | Peter Medak | Supernatural | Free: Tubi, Pluto TV | Eight Genie Awards |
| 34 | The Evil Dead | 1981 | Sam Raimi | Supernatural | Free: Xumo Play | $2.4M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 35 | An American Werewolf in London | 1981 | John Landis | Monster | Prime Video, AMC+ | $30.6M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 36 | Videodrome | 1983 | David Cronenberg | Body | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home | $2.1M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 37 | Hellraiser | 1987 | Clive Barker | Body | Prime Video | $14.6M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 38 | Evil Dead II | 1987 | Sam Raimi | Supernatural | HBO Max | $5.9M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 39 | Candyman | 1992 | Bernard Rose | Supernatural | Prime Video | $25.8M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 40 | Audition | 1999 | Takashi Miike | Human | Hi-YAH, AsianCrush | FIPRESCI Prize, Rotterdam |
| 41 | The Blair Witch Project | 1999 | Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez | Supernatural | HBO Max | $248.6M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 42 | Ju-On: The Grudge | 2002 | Takashi Shimizu | Supernatural | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home | $3.7M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 43 | 28 Days Later | 2002 | Danny Boyle | Monster | Apple TV | $74.9M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 44 | The Descent | 2005 | Neil Marshall | Monster | Shudder, AMC+ | $57.2M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 45 | Pan's Labyrinth | 2006 | Guillermo del Toro | Monster | Rent or buy: Prime Video | Three Oscar wins |
| 46 | [REC] | 2007 | Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza | Monster | Free: Tubi | $32.5M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 47 | The Conjuring | 2013 | James Wan | Supernatural | HBO Max | $321.3M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 48 | The Babadook | 2014 | Jennifer Kent | Mind | Shudder, AMC+ | AACTA Best Film |
| 49 | Midsommar | 2019 | Ari Aster | Human | Hulu, Prime Video | $48.6M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 50 | Sinners | 2025 | Ryan Coogler | Monster | HBO Max | $371.6M worldwide (Box Office Mojo, Oct 2026) |
| 51 | Kwaidan | 1964 | Masaki Kobayashi | Supernatural | Criterion Channel, HBO Max, TCM | Cannes Special Jury Prize |
| 52 | The Return of the Living Dead | 1985 | Dan O'Bannon | Monster | AMC+, MGM+ | $14.2M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 53 | The Witch | 2015 | Robert Eggers | Supernatural | Prime Video | Sundance Directing Award |
| 54 | Martin | 1977 | George A. Romero | Mind | Not available digitally | First Savini and Romero collaboration |
| 55 | Jacob's Ladder | 1990 | Adrian Lyne | Mind | Paramount+ | $26.1M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 56 | The Autopsy of Jane Doe | 2016 | André Øvredal | Supernatural | Paramount+, Shudder, AMC+ | $6.2M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 57 | The Cremator | 1969 | Juraj Herz | Mind | Criterion Channel | Best Film, Sitges 1972 |
| 58 | Dracula | 1958 | Terence Fisher | Monster | Free: Hoopla | First vampire film in colour |
| 59 | The House of the Devil | 2009 | Ti West | Human | Prime Video, AMC+ | $101,215 domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 60 | Train to Busan | 2016 | Yeon Sang-ho | Monster | Peacock | $94.1M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 61 | Black Christmas | 1974 | Bob Clark | Human | Prime Video, Peacock, Shudder | Canadian Film Award, Margot Kidder |
| 62 | Eyes Without a Face | 1960 | Georges Franju | Body | HBO Max | Seven fainted at Edinburgh, 1960 |
| 63 | Let the Right One In | 2008 | Tomas Alfredson | Monster | Prime Video, Peacock | $11.2M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 64 | The Brood | 1979 | David Cronenberg | Body | HBO Max | First Howard Shore score for Cronenberg |
| 65 | The Lighthouse | 2019 | Robert Eggers | Mind | HBO Max | $18.2M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 66 | The Skin I Live In | 2011 | Pedro Almodóvar | Body | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home | BAFTA, Film Not in English |
| 67 | It Follows | 2014 | David Robert Mitchell | Supernatural | Paramount+ | $14.7M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 68 | The Invisible Man | 1933 | James Whale | Monster | Free: Plex | National Film Registry, 2008 |
| 69 | Poltergeist | 1982 | Tobe Hooper | Supernatural | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home | $77.2M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 70 | Night of the Demon | 1957 | Jacques Tourneur | Supernatural | Free: Tubi, YouTube | Demon shots made over director's objection |
| 71 | Vampyr | 1932 | Carl Theodor Dreyer | Monster | HBO Max | Financed by its lead actor |
| 72 | Repulsion | 1965 | Roman Polanski | Mind | Free: Tubi | Silver Bear, Berlin 1965 |
| 73 | Scream | 1996 | Wes Craven | Human | Hulu, Paramount+ | $103.0M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 74 | Hausu | 1977 | Nobuhiko Obayashi | Supernatural | HBO Max, Criterion Channel | $209,765 domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 75 | Diabolique | 1955 | Henri-Georges Clouzot | Human | HBO Max | Louis Delluc Prize |
| 76 | The Masque of the Red Death | 1964 | Roger Corman | Supernatural | Prime Video, MGM+ | Reused sets from Becket |
| 77 | The Boxer's Omen | 1983 | Kuei Chih-Hung | Supernatural | Shudder, AMC+ | Shot at Swayambhunath, Kathmandu |
| 78 | The Sixth Sense | 1999 | M. Night Shyamalan | Supernatural | Netflix, Hulu | $672.8M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 79 | Witchfinder General | 1968 | Michael Reeves | Human | Prime Video, MGM+ | Budget of £83,000 |
| 80 | In the Mouth of Madness | 1994 | John Carpenter | Mind | Free: Tubi, The Roku Channel | $8.9M domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 81 | Cure | 1997 | Kiyoshi Kurosawa | Mind | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home | Tokyo Best Actor, Koji Yakusho |
| 82 | Session 9 | 2001 | Brad Anderson | Mind | Shudder, AMC+ | Shot in Danvers State Hospital |
| 83 | Under the Shadow | 2016 | Babak Anvari | Supernatural | Netflix | BAFTA, Outstanding Debut |
| 84 | I Walked with a Zombie | 1943 | Jacques Tourneur | Supernatural | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home | Structured on Jane Eyre |
| 85 | The Vanishing | 1988 | George Sluizer | Human | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video | Disqualified from the Oscars |
| 86 | Hereditary | 2018 | Ari Aster | Supernatural | Hulu, Prime Video | $90.4M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 87 | The Substance | 2024 | Coralie Fargeat | Body | Hulu | $77.3M worldwide (Box Office Mojo, Oct 2026) |
| 88 | Get Out | 2017 | Jordan Peele | Human | Rent or buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home | $259.7M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 89 | Pulse | 2001 | Kiyoshi Kurosawa | Supernatural | AMC+ | $389,009 worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 90 | The Platform | 2019 | Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia | Human | Netflix | TIFF Midnight Madness award |
| 91 | Noroi: The Curse | 2005 | Koji Shiraishi | Supernatural | Free: Tubi, Hoopla | First Blu-ray in 2024 |
| 92 | The Addiction | 1995 | Abel Ferrara | Monster | Criterion Channel | $307,308 domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 93 | Talk to Me | 2022 | Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou | Supernatural | Free: Tubi, The Roku Channel | $92.2M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 94 | Tetsuo: The Iron Man | 1989 | Shinya Tsukamoto | Body | AsianCrush, Midnight Pulp | Top award, Fantafestival |
| 95 | The House That Jack Built | 2018 | Lars von Trier | Human | Shudder, AMC+ | $3.1M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 96 | Stage Fright | 1987 | Michele Soavi | Human | Prime Video | Michele Soavi's directing debut |
| 97 | Seeding of a Ghost | 1983 | Chuan Yang | Supernatural | Shudder, AMC+ | Late Shaw Brothers black-magic film |
| 98 | Cemetery Man | 1994 | Michele Soavi | Monster | Shudder, AMC+, Criterion Channel | $253,986 domestic (Box Office Mojo) |
| 99 | Insidious | 2010 | James Wan | Supernatural | Shudder, AMC+, MGM+ | $100.1M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
| 100 | Raw | 2016 | Julia Ducournau | Body | Rent or buy: Apple TV | $3.2M worldwide (Box Office Mojo) |
What Are the 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time? The Complete Ranked List
The 100 best horror movies are ranked below from No. 1, Psycho (1960), to No. 100, Raw (2016). Each entry gives the official trailer, director, cast, runtime, source of fear, where to watch in the US and one verified fact, followed by the Screendollars Take.
Top 10 Horror Movies: The Unassailable Greats
The top 10 horror movies of all time are Psycho, The Exorcist, The Shining, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Alien, Rosemary's Baby, Night of the Living Dead, The Thing, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Innocents.
These are the films that score at or near the top on all five criteria, and every one of them still frightens a first-time viewer today.
1. Psycho (1960)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles
Country: United States
Runtime: 109 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Netflix (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Psycho earned $32,181,230 at the US domestic box office over its lifetime, according to Box Office Mojo.
Psycho (1960) is Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of Robert Bloch's 1959 novel, in which a secretary on the run stops for the night at a roadside motel kept by a shy young man named Norman Bates.
Psycho sits at number one because no horror film has changed how movies frighten people more. Its source of fear is the Human: there is no monster in it, only a man who seems polite, and nearly every slasher that followed borrowed that idea. It scores on all five criteria, Fear, Craft, Influence, Endurance, and Idea, which very few films made before 1970 can claim.
The Screendollars Take
Psycho is not a film about a killer. It is a film about how easily an audience can be made to switch loyalties halfway through a story. Hitchcock made it on a $806,947 budget, largely with the crew from his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the black-and-white thrift gives it the flat, unglamorous look of a crime you might read about in a local paper. Bernard Herrmann's score does the work your nerves would otherwise have to do on their own. You have been checking into that motel ever since.
Best for: A first horror night with someone who claims nothing scares them.
2. The Exorcist (1973)
Director: William Friedkin
Starring: Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Linda Blair
Country: United States
Runtime: 122 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): No subscription streaming from 1 November 2026. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, and Plex.
Key fact: The Exorcist has grossed $430,872,776 worldwide across all releases, including $233,005,644 domestic, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Exorcist (1973) is William Friedkin's film of William Peter Blatty's novel, about a young girl whose mother turns to two priests when doctors cannot explain what is happening to her daughter.
The Exorcist was the first horror film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it remains the benchmark for Supernatural horror because it treats possession as a medical, domestic, and spiritual crisis at once. Of its ten nominations, it won two, for Blatty's adapted screenplay and for Best Sound. Its craft has barely aged, and its central idea, a mother running out of rational options, is the reason it still lands.
The Screendollars Take
The Exorcist is not a film about the devil. It is a film about a mother exhausting every institution she trusts before she reaches the last one. Principal photography was scheduled for 85 days and ran past 200, and that patience shows in how long the film stays with medical tests before it turns to faith. Friedkin found Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" in a studio music library, and a piece that sounds harmless on its own became the sound of dread for a generation. The scariest scenes are the ones with doctors in them.
Best for: A cold November night when the house feels too quiet.
3. The Shining (1980)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd
Country: United Kingdom, United States
Runtime: 146 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): No subscription streaming from 1 November 2026. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, and Plex.
Key fact: The Shining has grossed $50,339,292 worldwide across all releases, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Shining (1980) is Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's 1977 novel, in which a struggling writer takes his wife and young son to spend the winter as caretakers of an isolated mountain hotel.
The Shining's source of fear is the Mind. The Overlook may well be haunted, but the film never lets you settle whether the ghosts are real or whether Jack Torrance was always going to break. That ambiguity, joined to craft that feels engineered down to the frame, is why it rewards repeat viewing more than almost any horror film ever made, and why it ranks third.
The Screendollars Take
The Shining is not a haunted-house film. It is a film about a family trapped inside one man's resentment, and the hotel simply gives that resentment room to grow. Kubrick built the Overlook interiors at EMI Elstree Studios, the largest set ever built at Elstree at that time, and Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown helped glide the camera through it so smoothly that the building seems to be watching. Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind's electronic score hums underneath like a structure that breathes, and even the film's most quoted line, an echo of Ed McMahon's Tonight Show introduction, was Nicholson's improvisation. The hotel wins because it never has to try.
Best for: A snowed-in weekend, watched with the heating turned up.
4. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Director: Tobe Hooper
Starring: Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal
Country: United States
Runtime: 83 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Netflix, Prime Video, Peacock, and Shudder (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi, Pluto TV, and Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre earned $30,859,000 at the US domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is Tobe Hooper's film about five young friends who stray onto the wrong rural Texas property and meet the family living there.
Made for under $140,000, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ranks this high because it still feels less like a movie than like evidence. Its source of fear is the Human, in the form of a family, and its raw style shaped decades of backwoods horror. The film now sits in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, which shows how far a scrappy independent production can travel.
The Screendollars Take
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not a gore film, whatever its title promises. It gets its effect from heat, noise, and exhaustion rather than from what it shows you. Daniel Pearl's cinematography gives the farmhouse a sun-bleached documentary flatness, and the score by Hooper and Wayne Bell sounds less like music than like machinery someone forgot to switch off. Gunnar Hansen remembered the shoot near Round Rock running at "95, 100 degrees every day," and you can see that heat on every face. You leave it wanting a shower.
Best for: A sweltering summer night with the windows open.
5. Alien (1979)
Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt
Country: United Kingdom, United States
Runtime: 117 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Netflix (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Alien has grossed $109,726,643 worldwide, including $84,206,106 domestic, according to Box Office Mojo.
Alien (1979) is Ridley Scott's science-fiction horror film about the crew of a commercial spaceship who answer a distress signal on a distant planet and bring something back on board.
Alien is the purest Monster film ever made: a haunted-house story moved into deep space, built around a creature designed to frighten from every angle. It won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and was nominated for Best Art Direction. Its craft, from H. R. Giger's creature designs to the grimy working spaceship, still sets the standard for how a movie monster should look and move.
The Screendollars Take
Alien is a slasher whose killer came from H. R. Giger's drawing board and whose victims clock in for a shift. Giger's creature and environments make the ship feel organic and wrong, while Jerry Goldsmith's score keeps the emptiness of space pressing against the hull. The chestburster scene was shot in one take; the cast knew the creature was coming but not about the blood jets. Veronica Cartwright fell over, and Tom Skerritt later said, "When we reacted, it was real." Their shock was real, and yours will be too.
Best for: A late-night double bill with every light switched off.
6. Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Director: Roman Polanski
Starring: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon
Country: United States
Runtime: 137 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Paramount+ and AMC+ (subscription). Free with a library card on Kanopy, and free with ads on YouTube. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Ruth Gordon won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Rosemary's Baby, and Roman Polanski was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Rosemary's Baby (1968) is Roman Polanski's adaptation of Ira Levin's 1967 novel, in which a young wife moves into an old Manhattan apartment building, becomes pregnant and slowly begins to suspect her neighbors.
Rosemary's Baby is Supernatural in origin but social in practice: the danger arrives dressed as kindly neighbors, an attentive husband, and a trusted doctor. Produced by William Castle, it brought paranoid horror into the respectable mainstream, and its influence runs through every later film about a woman nobody will believe. It ranks sixth because the dread has not dated by a single day.
The Screendollars Take
Rosemary's Baby is a film about a young woman whose every instinct is overruled by people who claim to know her body better than she does. Polanski's script follows Levin's dialogue closely, and the Dakota building's exteriors stand in for the fictional Bramford, giving the horror a real New York address. Polanski's obsessive finish makes every friendly gesture look rehearsed, while Krzysztof Komeda's score keeps the tone sweet enough that you notice the rot as late as Rosemary does. Kindness is the weapon here.
Best for: Watching with anyone who has just moved into a new apartment.
7. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Marilyn Eastman
Country: United States
Runtime: 96 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max, Peacock, Shudder, and AMC+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi, Pluto TV and Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Night of the Living Dead was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 1999.
Night of the Living Dead (1968) is George A. Romero's black-and-white film about a group of strangers barricaded inside a Pennsylvania farmhouse while the dead rise outside.
Every zombie film you have seen descends from Night of the Living Dead, which makes its place in the top ten an argument about Influence as much as Fear. Its source of fear is the Monster, yet its ending lands on something human and political. Shot mainly near Evans City, Pennsylvania, with money raised by the production company Image Ten, it proved that a regional independent could change the whole genre.
The Screendollars Take
Night of the Living Dead is not just a simple monster movie. It is a film about people who cannot cooperate long enough to survive the night. Romero and John Russo wrote the lead for a white actor, and Romero cast Duane Jones without changing the script because Jones was "the best actor we met," a choice that turns the final minutes into an indictment. The blood was Bosco chocolate syrup, and a dropped copyright notice put the film into the public domain on release, which is why it has been playing somewhere ever since. The dead move slowly because the living do the real damage.
Best for: A Halloween night when the power might go out.
8. The Thing (1982)
Director: John Carpenter
Starring: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, T. K. Carter
Country: United States
Runtime: 109 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Prime Video and AMC+ (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Thing earned $20,063,820 at the US domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Thing (1982) is John Carpenter's adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.'s 1938 novella "Who Goes There?", about an Antarctic research team that encounters an organism able to imitate any living thing it absorbs.
The Thing belongs in the top ten as a Monster film in which the monster could be anyone, so the fear spreads from the creature to the men. Its modest domestic gross shows how little it earned on release, which makes its place this high a verdict delivered by the years rather than the box office. Its practical effects remain the high-water mark of the craft.
The Screendollars Take
The Thing is a creature feature. But it is also a film about trust running out in a room full of men who have nowhere else to go. Rob Bottin's creature effects took $1.5 million of the $15 million budget, and every transformation looks as though it was built to hurt the person watching it. Ennio Morricone's score pulses under the ice, and the interior sets on the Universal lot were chilled to 28 degrees Fahrenheit, so the cold on screen was real. By the end, nobody trusts anybody, and that includes you.
Best for: A winter night with the whole group crowded into one room.
9. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Director: Robert Wiene
Starring: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Fehér
Country: Germany
Runtime: 76 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi, Plex, and The Roku Channel, and free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent on Apple TV for $2.99 or buy for $4.99.
Key fact: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was shot entirely in a studio, on sets by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig with shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the scenery.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is Robert Wiene's silent German film about a sinister showman and the sleepwalker he exhibits at a fairground, as recounted by a young man named Francis.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari's source of fear is the Mind, and it turns madness into a place you can walk through. Its crooked, painted sets turn a whole town into a symptom. A century-old silent film earns a top-ten place here on Influence and Idea alone, and it still unsettles a modern viewer because nothing in its world stands up straight.
The Screendollars Take
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is not a museum piece. It is a century-old lesson in distrusting the person telling the story. Because the light and shadow are painted directly onto the sets, the world itself looks ill, and Willy Hameister's camera simply records the sickness. The prologue and epilogue frame the tale as a flashback, and the final twist recasts Francis from narrator to asylum patient. The streets are crooked because the mind describing them is.
Best for: A rainy afternoon with strong coffee and no distractions.
10. The Innocents (1961)
Director: Jack Clayton
Starring: Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave, Megs Jenkins
Country: United Kingdom, United States
Runtime: 100 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on fuboTV (subscription). No digital rent or buy option.
Key fact: The Innocents competed at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, and screenwriters William Archibald and Truman Capote won the 1962 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay.
The Innocents (1961) is Jack Clayton's adaptation of Henry James's 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, starring Deborah Kerr as a governess who comes to believe the two children in her care are being visited by the dead.
The Innocents is the finest ghost story in English-language cinema because it never tells you whether the ghosts are there. Its source of fear is the Supernatural, or possibly the governess's own imagination, and the film's refusal to choose is exactly why it endures. It belongs in the top ten on Craft and Endurance, and it may be the most frightening film here that contains almost no violence.
The Screendollars Take
The Innocents is not a costume drama with ghosts. It is a study of how a frightened mind fills an empty frame. Freddie Francis shot in CinemaScope because 20th Century Fox insisted, then aimed light narrowly at the center of the image so the edges of every room drop away into darkness. Truman Capote reworked William Archibald's draft, and Daphne Oram's uncredited synthesized sounds give the house an electronic hum no Victorian ghost should have. Watch the edges of the frame, because that is where the film lives.
Best for: A quiet Sunday evening alone in an old house.
Ranked 11–25: The Genre-Defining Classics
The horror movies ranked 11 to 25 are the genre-defining classics, led by Halloween (1978) at No. 11. Each one created or perfected a form that later horror still uses, from the holiday slasher to the cursed videotape.
11. Halloween (1978)
Director: John Carpenter
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, P. J. Soles
Country: United States
Runtime: 91 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder and AMC+ (subscription). Free with ads on Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Halloween earned $47,160,000 at the US domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
Halloween (1978) is John Carpenter's film about Michael Myers, who escapes from a psychiatric institution and returns to his hometown to stalk a teenage babysitter played by Jamie Lee Curtis.
Halloween builds its fear from patience rather than gore. Its source of fear is the Human, though a faceless one, and its success on a budget of about $300,000 is proof that suspense costs far less than spectacle. It was shot in Southern California over 20 days in the spring of 1978.
The Screendollars Take
Halloween is not a film about a killer. It is a film about a suburb that assumes it is safe. Carpenter scored it himself, and Dean Cundey's camera keeps finding the empty spaces of ordinary streets where someone might be standing. The mask that became a horror trademark was a $1.98 Captain Kirk mask bought on Hollywood Boulevard and altered by production designer Tommy Lee Wallace, which tells you how much of the film runs on nerve rather than money. The emptiest frames are the ones to watch.
Best for: October 31, after the trick-or-treaters stop knocking.
12. Nosferatu (1922)
Director: F. W. Murnau
Starring: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder
Country: Germany
Runtime: 94 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Prime Video, Shudder and AMC+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi, Plex and The Roku Channel. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula; Stoker's widow, Florence, sued, and a court ordered all copies of the film destroyed.
Nosferatu (1922) is F. W. Murnau's silent vampire film, in which a young estate agent travels to the castle of Count Orlok and unwittingly brings the vampire back to his hometown.
Nosferatu's source of fear is the Monster, and Max Schreck's Count Orlok remains the most unsettling vampire ever put on film, closer to vermin than to aristocracy. The film survived a court order for its destruction, and its imagery has shaped vampire cinema for more than a century. It ranks in the top fifteen on Influence and Endurance, and its shadow-play still works on viewers raised on digital effects.
The Screendollars Take
Nosferatu is not the Dracula adaptation that got away with it. It is the version that understood the vampire as a plague rather than a seducer. Murnau shot on real locations, with Wismar's streets, Lübeck's abandoned Salzspeicher as Orlok's house in Wisborg, and Orava Castle in northern Slovakia standing in for Transylvania, so the horror arrives in places that look lived in. Fritz Arno Wagner's photography makes daylight feel as exposed as night. A court ordered it destroyed, and it outlived the order.
Best for: A late night with the lights low and the volume up.
13. Don't Look Now (1973)
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Starring: Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland
Country: United Kingdom, Italy
Runtime: 110 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): No current paid subscription streaming. Free with a library card on Kanopy, and free with ads on YouTube. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Anthony B. Richmond won the BAFTA for Best Cinematography for Don't Look Now, which was also nominated for Best Film, Direction, Actor, Actress, Soundtrack, and Film Editing.
Don't Look Now (1973) is Nicolas Roeg's adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's 1971 short story, starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland as a grieving couple in Venice who meet two sisters claiming to have seen their dead daughter.
Don't Look Now's source of fear is the Mind, and specifically grief, which Roeg's fractured editing turns into a series of warnings you are not equipped to read. It ranks in the top fifteen on Craft and Idea, and its final minutes remain one of the most discussed endings in horror. Few films have used a real city so completely against its characters.
The Screendollars Take
Don't Look Now is not a thriller set in Venice. It is a film about how grief rearranges time. Graeme Clifford's editing cuts between past, present, and premonition until you stop trusting the order of anything, and Pino Donaggio's score mourns in advance. The church scenes were shot at San Nicolò dei Mendicoli while it was already under renovation, so the scaffolding on screen was real. Venice has never looked less like a postcard.
Best for: A rainy autumn evening when you want to sit with something.
14. The Wicker Man (1973)
Director: Robin Hardy
Starring: Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland
Country: United Kingdom
Runtime: 88 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Prime Video (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi and Plex, and free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Wicker Man won Best Horror Film at the 6th Saturn Awards.
The Wicker Man (1973) is Robin Hardy's film about a devout police sergeant, played by Edward Woodward, who travels to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a girl and finds a community that will not give him a straight answer.
The Wicker Man is folk horror at its most complete. Its source of fear is the Human: an entire community, smiling and singing, organized around a belief you do not share. Its shadow falls across a great deal of later folk horror, and it ranks in the top fifteen because its ending is one of the most perfectly built in the genre.
The Screendollars Take
The Wicker Man is not a horror film for most of its running time. It is a musical about a pagan island, right up until the moment it is not. Paul Giovanni's songs make Summerisle feel warm and open, and Anthony Shaffer's script, drawing on David Pinner's 1967 novel Ritual, lets Christopher Lee play the island's lord as a charming host. The story is set in spring but was shot from October 1972, so the blossoms on the trees were glued on, and that artificial bloom is the whole film in miniature. Prayer will not save the sergeant, and he is the last to know.
Best for: May Day, or any bright spring weekend.
15. The Fly (1986)
Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz
Country: United States
Runtime: 96 minutes
Source of fear: The Body
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Hulu (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Fly earned $40,456,565 at the US domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Fly (1986) is David Cronenberg's reworking of George Langelaan's 1957 short story and the 1958 film, starring Jeff Goldblum as a scientist whose teleportation experiment fuses his body with a housefly's, and Geena Davis as the journalist who loves him.
The Fly's source of fear is the Body, and it is the rare body horror film in which the gore serves tragedy rather than shock. Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis won the Academy Award for Best Makeup, and the slow, staged transformation reads today as a portrait of any illness that takes a person apart in front of the people who love them. That depth of Idea is why it ranks this high.
The Screendollars Take
The Fly is a monster movie, and it is a love story in which one partner watches the other disappear piece by piece. Walas and Dupuis stage the scientist's decay in steps, so the horror accumulates the way illness does, through small losses noticed one at a time. Howard Shore's score treats the story as tragedy rather than shock, which is Cronenberg telling you exactly what kind of film this is. Be afraid, but mostly be heartbroken.
Best for: A date night with someone who can handle a sad ending.
16. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: David Emge, Ken Foree, Gaylen Ross
Country: United States, Italy
Runtime: 127 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): No current subscription streaming. Rent or buy on Prime Video.
Key fact: After the MPAA gave Dawn of the Dead an X rating for graphic violence, George A. Romero and his producers refused the rating and released the film unrated.
Dawn of the Dead is George A. Romero's 1978 sequel to Night of the Living Dead, in which four survivors of a zombie outbreak barricade themselves inside a suburban shopping mall. It takes the premise of the first film and gives it room, color, and a sense of humor sharp enough to cut.
The film belongs among the best horror movies because it proved the zombie could carry an epic. Its source of fear, the Monster, is used here as a mirror: the dead keep coming to the mall because it is the place they remember wanting to be.
The Screendollars Take
Dawn of the Dead is a zombie film with satire attached. It is a satire that happens to need zombies to finish its argument. Romero shot at the real Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania during the Christmas shopping season, so the escalators and storefronts carry the weight of actual commerce rather than a set designer's idea of it. Tom Savini's make-up effects give the violence a bright, almost comic physicality, which is exactly why the film's refusal of an X rating mattered: Romero would rather go unrated than trim the joke. The mall is still open, and we are still shopping in it.
Best for: A late-night double bill after Night of the Living Dead.
17. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Director: Jonathan Demme
Starring: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn
Country: United States
Runtime: 118 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on MGM+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi. Free with a library card on Kanopy and Hoopla. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Silence of the Lambs grossed $273,138,318 worldwide, including $131,138,318 domestically, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Silence of the Lambs follows FBI trainee Clarice Starling as she seeks help from the imprisoned psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter to catch a serial killer who is still at large. Jonathan Demme adapted it with screenwriter Ted Tally from Thomas Harris's 1988 novel.
It earns its place in a ranking of the best horror movies because its fear is entirely Human. The film won the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Adapted Screenplay, and it did so without softening a single scene.
The Screendollars Take
The Silence of the Lambs is a film about a young woman being looked at by everyone and choosing to look back. Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto keep pushing faces straight into the lens, so Clarice's conversations with Lecter feel less like interviews than like contests of nerve that you are forced to take part in. Howard Shore's score stays low and patient, refusing to tell you when to be frightened. The cage was never the thing keeping you safe.
Best for: A Sunday night in, with every door double-locked.
18. Suspiria (1977)
Director: Dario Argento
Starring: Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Alida Valli
Country: Italy
Runtime: 99 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Free with ads on Tubi and The Roku Channel. Free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Prime Video.
Key fact: Suspiria was one of the last feature films processed in Technicolor's dye-transfer process, using the last remaining machine in Rome.
Suspiria is Dario Argento's 1977 film about an American ballet student who arrives at a prestigious dance academy in Germany and discovers that its staff hides something far older than ballet. Jessica Harper plays the student, and Joan Bennett, in her final film role, plays the academy's Madame Blanc.
Suspiria belongs here because it treats the Supernatural as a sensory assault rather than a mystery to be solved. In Suspiria, the color and the noise are the story.
The Screendollars Take
Suspiria is not a film you follow. It is a film you are trapped inside. Cinematographer Luciano Tovoli shot it with anamorphic lenses and pushed the primary colors, red above all, until the walls of the academy look like they are bleeding light. Goblin had composed early versions of many of the themes before shooting began, and Argento played them on set, so the music is not underlining the images but driving them. You do not watch Suspiria so much as survive its volume.
Best for: Watching alone, lights off, sound turned up uncomfortably loud.
19. The Haunting (1963)
Director: Robert Wise
Starring: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson
Country: United States
Runtime: 112 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on AMC+ (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Robert Wise received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Director, Motion Picture, for The Haunting.
The Haunting is Robert Wise's 1963 adaptation of Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, in which an investigator of the paranormal invites a small group to stay in a house with a violent history. Julie Harris plays Eleanor, the fragile guest the house seems to want most.
It ranks among the best horror movies because it frightens you with almost nothing on screen. The Supernatural in The Haunting is a noise behind a door and a woman's growing suspicion that the house understands her better than anyone alive.
The Screendollars Take
The Haunting is not a ghost story. It is a story about loneliness that a house learns to exploit. Wise shot with an unfinished Panavision anamorphic lens with known distortions, signing a memo that acknowledged its flaws, and those warped edges make every room at Hill House feel slightly wrong in a way you register before you can name. Humphrey Searle's score and the clattering sound design do the rest, so that a closed door becomes more frightening than any apparition. Nothing in Hill House needs to be seen to be believed.
Best for: A stormy night in an old house with creaky floors.
20. Ringu (1998)
Director: Hideo Nakata
Starring: Nanako Matsushima, Hiroyuki Sanada, Miki Nakatani
Country: Japan
Runtime: 96 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder and AMC+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi. Free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Fandango at Home, and Prime Video.
Key fact: Ringu was remade in South Korea as The Ring Virus (1999) and in the United States as The Ring (2002).
Ringu is Hideo Nakata's 1998 adaptation of Koji Suzuki's 1991 novel Ring, about a journalist investigating a cursed videotape that seems to kill anyone who watches it within a week. Nanako Matsushima plays the reporter racing the deadline.
Ringu belongs in the top 25 because its quiet, procedural approach to the Supernatural makes a curse feel like paperwork you cannot finish, and the original remains colder and more patient than the remakes it inspired.
The Screendollars Take
Ringu is not about a curse. It is about the terror of a medium that keeps playing whether you want it to or not. Nakata stages most of the film as an investigation, which lulls you into treating the threat as a puzzle with a solution. Kenji Kawai's score hums under those scenes like electrical interference, and by the time the film reaches its final images you have stopped expecting a scare and started dreading a fact. Few films have made a television screen this unwelcome in your own living room.
Best for: A weeknight when you have a TV in the bedroom.
21. Martyrs (2008)
Director: Pascal Laugier
Starring: Morjana Alaoui, Mylène Jampanoï, Catherine Bégin
Country: France, Canada
Runtime: 99 minutes
Source of fear: The Body
Where to watch (US): No current subscription streaming. Rent or buy on Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: France's classification board first gave Martyrs an 18+ rating, which was lowered to 16+ in July 2008 after a review requested by the Minister of Culture.
Martyrs is Pascal Laugier's 2008 French film about a young woman who, years after escaping captivity as a child, goes looking for the people responsible. It begins as a revenge story and becomes something much harder to describe.
Martyrs belongs here because it is one of the most extreme films in this ranking and also one of the most serious. Its fear lives in the Body, and Laugier uses that suffering to ask a philosophical question that the film refuses to answer cheaply, which is why it remains so hard to sit through.
The Screendollars Take
Martyrs is torture horror. It is a film that asks what suffering is for, and then makes you sit with the question long after you would rather leave. Special make-up designers Benoît Lestang and Adrien Morot, who won Best Makeup at Sitges, render the damage with a clinical precision that denies you the distance of spectacle. The film prompted walkouts at its Cannes market screening, and its two-act structure explains why: the first half is a thriller, the second is an ordeal. You will not want to see it twice, and you will not forget it once.
Best for: A seasoned horror fan's night, never a first date.
22. Jaws (1975)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss
Country: United States
Runtime: 124 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Netflix (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Jaws has grossed $490,736,300 worldwide, including $280,083,300 domestically, according to Box Office Mojo.
Jaws is Steven Spielberg's 1975 adaptation of Peter Benchley's 1974 novel, in which a great white shark terrorizes a summer resort town and three very different men go to sea to kill it. Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss play the police chief, the fisherman and the scientist.
Jaws ranks among the best horror movies because it is a Monster movie built with the rigor of a suspense thriller. Its craft is what keeps it this high: the film won Academy Awards for Verna Fields's editing, John Williams's score, and its sound.
The Screendollars Take
Jaws is technically a film about the shark you cannot see. A fear that’s approaching but isn’t visible. The Martha's Vineyard shoot was scheduled for 55 days and ran to 159, and the finished film holds its mechanical shark, nicknamed Bruce after Spielberg's attorney, back for most of its running time. John Williams's score fills that absence, and Verna Fields cuts the water so that every empty frame of ocean feels occupied. The beach has never looked the same since.
Best for: The night before a beach holiday, if you are brave.
23. Carrie (1976)
Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving
Country: United States
Runtime: 98 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max and Prime Video (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Carrie grossed $33,800,000 at the domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
Carrie is Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation of Stephen King's first published novel, about a bullied high school girl with telekinetic powers and a religious zealot for a mother. Sissy Spacek plays Carrie White, and Piper Laurie plays her mother, Margaret.
Carrie belongs in the top 25 because its fear is Human before it is anything else. The powers are the payoff, but the horror is cruelty: classmates, teachers, and a mother who each fail Carrie in their own way. Both Spacek and Laurie earned Academy Award nominations for their performances.
The Screendollars Take
Carrie is not a revenge fantasy. It is a tragedy about a girl who was never allowed one good night. De Palma builds the prom like a romance, and Pino Donaggio's swooning score lets you hope, against everything you know, that she might get to keep it. Spacek plays Carrie with a stillness that makes every humiliation land twice, once on her and once on you for watching. The blood is not the horror. The horror is how close she came to happiness.
Best for: A slumber party with friends who survived high school.
24. Possession (1981)
Director: Andrzej Żuławski
Starring: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Heinz Bennent
Country: France, West Germany
Runtime: 124 minutes
Source of fear: The Body
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder and AMC+ (subscription). Free with a library card on Kanopy and Hoopla. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Isabelle Adjani won Best Actress at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, cited for both Possession and Quartet.
Possession is Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 film about a married couple in West Berlin whose separation spirals into madness when the husband discovers what his wife has been hiding. Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani play the couple at war.
Possession ranks here because it is the most extreme marriage story ever filmed, and its fear lives in the Body. A divorce becomes a physical event, and Adjani's performance, which won her Best Actress at Cannes and later the César, is the most ferocious piece of acting in this ranking.
The Screendollars Take
Possession is not a monster movie. It is a breakup filmed from inside the nervous system. Żuławski shot in West Berlin in 1980, mostly near the Wall in Kreuzberg, and Bruno Nuytten's restless camera turns the divided city into a picture of the divided couple. The tentacled creature that Carlo Rambaldi helped build is less a monster than a symptom, the shape a marriage takes when it stops being human. Its original US release was cut to 81 minutes, which tells you how long American distributors could stand to look at it.
Best for: The week after a breakup, when you want company in misery.
25. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Director: Wes Craven
Starring: Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Robert Englund
Country: United States
Runtime: 91 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): No subscription streaming from 1 November 2026. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: A Nightmare on Elm Street grossed $25,624,448 domestically, according to Box Office Mojo.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is Wes Craven's 1984 film about a group of teenagers stalked in their dreams by Freddy Krueger, a burned killer who can murder them while they sleep. Heather Langenkamp plays Nancy, and the film also marks Johnny Depp's screen debut.
It earns a top 25 place because it gave the slasher a Supernatural engine. Craven took the masked killer of the late 1970s and removed the one safe place every audience assumed it had, which is sleep, and the idea proved strong enough to earn a place in the National Film Registry.
The Screendollars Take
A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the best slasher films of its time. It was a film that defined the genre. A film about parents who lie, and children who have to stay awake to survive their lies. Craven lets the boundary between waking and dreaming blur until you stop trusting any scene, and the production's practical effects push that unease into the physical: the blood-geyser death reused the revolving room built for an earlier killing, and the production used over 500 gallons of fake blood. Charles Bernstein's score gives the whole film the texture of a half-remembered dream. You will think about it the next time you feel your eyes closing.
Best for: A sleepover, right before everyone tries to fall asleep.
Ranked 26–50: Essential Horror Films Every Fan Must See
The horror movies ranked 26 to 50 are the essential films every horror fan should see, led by Bride of Frankenstein (1935) at No. 26 and closing with Sinners (2025) at No. 50.
They run from Universal's monster cycle to the 2020s, in release order within the group.
26. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Director: James Whale
Starring: Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester, Colin Clive
Country: United States
Runtime: 75 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): No subscription streaming from 1 November 2026. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Bride of Frankenstein received an Academy Award nomination for Sound Recording.
Bride of Frankenstein is James Whale's 1935 sequel to Frankenstein, in which Dr. Frankenstein is pressured into building a mate for his creature. Boris Karloff returns as the Monster, and Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley in the prologue and the Bride.
The film belongs here because it is the rare sequel that deepens its original. Whale turns the Monster into the most sympathetic figure on screen, and the film's mix of gothic dread, camp humor, and real sadness turns the monster movie into a story about outsiders.
The Screendollars Take
Bride of Frankenstein is a sequel that works. It is a love story about a creature who learns, too late, that he was never going to be loved. Lanchester's dual role turns the film into a joke with a sting, since the author who dreamed the Monster up becomes the woman who rejects him. Franz Waxman's score, John J. Mescall's photography, and the Bride's look, which Jack Pierce created with Whale, give the climax a grandeur the first film never reached. The Bride arrives only at the climax and has owned the film ever since.
Best for: A rainy Saturday afternoon with old-movie fans.
27. Frankenstein (1931)
Director: James Whale
Starring: Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, Boris Karloff
Country: United States
Runtime: 70 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): No subscription streaming from 1 November 2026. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Frankenstein was selected for the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1991.
Frankenstein is James Whale's 1931 Universal film about a scientist who assembles a man from dead bodies and brings him to life. It was based on Peggy Webling's 1927 play, itself drawn from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, and Boris Karloff plays the creature.
Frankenstein ranks here because Jack Pierce's makeup gave the movie Monster a face that, more than ninety years later, is still the one most people picture.
The Screendollars Take
Frankenstein is simply about a man who wanted to play God and did not stay to see what he had made. Jack Pierce's makeup gives Karloff a face that is frightening and helpless at once, and Kenneth Strickfaden's crackling electrical effects make the creation scene feel like a real experiment rather than a fairy tale. The censors cut Henry's line about knowing what it feels like to be God, which is the clearest proof the film had found its target. At 70 minutes, it has not wasted a scene in nine decades.
Best for: Introducing a curious kid to classic horror.
28. Peeping Tom (1960)
Director: Michael Powell
Starring: Karlheinz Böhm (credited as Carl Boehm), Moira Shearer, Anna Massey
Country: United Kingdom
Runtime: 101 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Free with ads on Tubi. Free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Key fact: The British Film Institute ranked Peeping Tom the 78th-greatest British film of all time.
Peeping Tom is Michael Powell's 1960 film about a shy London camera assistant who films women at the moment he kills them. Karlheinz Böhm plays the young man, and Anna Massey plays the neighbor who befriends him.
It belongs among the best horror movies because it is about watching, and so it is about you. Released the same year as Psycho, it was savaged in Britain, and its reception was a major factor in ending Powell's directing career there. Time has turned it into one of the most respected Human horror films ever made.
The Screendollars Take
Peeping Tom is not a film about a killer. It is a film about the audience, and it does not let you off the hook. Leo Marks wrote it as an original screenplay, and Otto Heller's camera keeps putting you behind the killer's own lens, so the act of looking and the act of harming become hard to separate. Brian Easdale's score, played on solo piano by Gordon Watson, sounds lonely rather than menacing, which makes the young man more pitiable and the film more disturbing. Martin Scorsese helped bring it back to American screens, and it has been staring back at viewers ever since.
Best for: A film club night that ends in a long argument.
29. The Birds (1963)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy
Country: United States
Runtime: 119 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): No subscription streaming from 1 November 2026. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Ub Iwerks received an Academy Award nomination for Special Effects for The Birds.
The Birds is Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film, loosely adapted by Evan Hunter from Daphne du Maurier's 1952 short story, about a coastal California town where birds begin to attack people without warning or explanation. Tippi Hedren, in her film debut, plays the visitor who arrives just before it starts.
The Birds ranks here because it is still the strangest nature-attack film of them all. Its Monster has no motive and no ending, and Hitchcock never explains it, which is precisely why the film continues to unsettle audiences who have seen everything else.
The Screendollars Take
The Birds is an interesting film about animals and horror. It is a film about the moment ordinary life stops making sense, and nobody can tell you why. Hitchcock gave it no conventional score at all: Oskar Sala and Remi Gassmann built an electronic soundtrack of shrieks and wingbeats, with Bernard Herrmann as sound consultant, so the attacks arrive with no music to warn you. Robert Burks's photography keeps the town bright and pretty, which only makes the silence between attacks heavier. The film ends without an answer, and that missing answer is the scariest thing in it.
Best for: A quiet afternoon, then a long look out the window.
30. Carnival of Souls (1962)
Director: Herk Harvey
Starring: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger
Country: United States
Runtime: 78 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max, Prime Video, MGM+ and AMC+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi, Pluto TV and The Roku Channel. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Carnival of Souls is the only feature film Herk Harvey directed; he and screenwriter John Clifford were industrial filmmakers at the Centron Corporation in Lawrence, Kansas.
Carnival of Souls is Herk Harvey's 1962 film about a young church organist who survives a car accident, moves to a new town, and finds herself followed by a pale man no one else seems to see. Candace Hilligoss plays Mary Henry, and Harvey himself plays the man.
It belongs here because it shows how little money great horror needs. Made outside Hollywood by two industrial filmmakers, Carnival of Souls turned its limits into atmosphere and its approach to the Supernatural into something closer to a dream.
The Screendollars Take
Carnival of Souls is not a cheap horror film. It is a film that makes its cheapness feel like a dream you cannot wake from. Harvey shot key scenes at the Saltair resort on the Great Salt Lake, and that lakeside setting gives the film a location no studio could have built. Gene Moore's organ score drifts somewhere between church and carnival, matching a heroine who no longer quite belongs anywhere. The pale ghoul is the director himself, and you will remember his face longer than most monsters with budgets.
Best for: A midnight watch when you want something eerie, not gory.
31. Deep Red (1975)
Director: Dario Argento
Starring: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia
Country: Italy
Runtime: 127 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder and AMC+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi, Pluto TV and Plex. Rent on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home, or buy on Apple TV for $9.99.
Key fact: Deep Red was shot mainly on location in Turin over sixteen weeks, with additional scenes filmed in Rome and Perugia.
Deep Red, released in Italy as Profondo rosso, is Dario Argento's 1975 giallo about a musician who witnesses a murder and cannot stop investigating it. David Hemmings plays the witness, and Daria Nicolodi and Gabriele Lavia complete a cast of people who each know a little more than they say.
The giallo is the Italian murder mystery built around a gloved killer, and Deep Red is the most complete example the form ever produced. It belongs under the Human source of fear because every threat in it is a person with a motive, and it ranks this high on craft: its look and sound are as worked out as its plot.
The Screendollars Take
Deep Red is not a whodunit horror. It is a film about how badly people see what is in front of them. Argento first commissioned a jazz score from Giorgio Gaslini, was unhappy with it, failed to secure Pink Floyd, and handed the job to the band Goblin, whose music now carries most of the film. The dialogue was shot without sync sound and dubbed afterward, which gives every conversation a faint, unsettling distance from the faces speaking it. Goblin's score arrives before the knife does, and you learn to dread the music first.
Best for: A late-night solo watch with the volume turned up.
32. Eraserhead (1977)
Director: David Lynch
Starring: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joseph
Country: United States
Runtime: 89 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi, Plex, and YouTube. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Eraserhead was selected for the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2004.
Eraserhead is David Lynch's black-and-white nightmare about an anxious young man left to care for a malformed newborn in a bleak industrial city. Jack Nance plays Henry with a stunned, upright stillness that never breaks.
The film sits under the Mind source of fear because nothing in it attacks Henry from outside. The horror is his own dread of responsibility, sex, and adulthood, made physical. It earns its rank on craft, above all a sound design that never lets Henry, or you, have a quiet moment.
The Screendollars Take
Eraserhead is not strange for the sake of being strange. It is the most precise film ever made about the terror of becoming a parent before you are ready. Lynch and sound designer Alan Splet spent almost a year on the audio, layering as many as fifteen sounds at once, so an industrial drone never leaves the room. Lynch made the film as a student at the AFI Center for Advanced Film Studies, and funding gaps stretched the shoot over several years, with Frederick Elmes replacing Herbert Cardwell behind the camera. Every frame hums, and the hum is the fear.
Best for: 2 a.m., when you were not going to sleep anyway.
33. The Changeling (1980)
Director: Peter Medak
Starring: George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas
Country: Canada
Runtime: 107 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Free with ads on Tubi, Pluto TV and Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Changeling won eight awards at the inaugural Genie Awards, Canada's national film honours, including Best Motion Picture and Best Foreign Actor for George C. Scott.
The Changeling is Peter Medak's 1980 ghost story about a composer, grieving the deaths of his wife and daughter, who rents a vast old mansion and finds that something in the house wants to be heard. George C. Scott plays him with a heavy, exhausted dignity.
The film belongs under the Supernatural source of fear and ranks this high on endurance. It frightens through sound, empty rooms, and patience rather than effects, so it plays as well on a fifth viewing as on the first.
The Screendollars Take
The Changeling is not a haunted-house film so much as a detective story whose investigator happens to be a widower. Medak was the third director attached, after Donald Cammell and Tony Richardson left, and he shot mainly in Vancouver and Victoria, with Hatley Castle standing in for the senator's home. John Coquillon's camera, which won the Genie for cinematography, treats the mansion's corridors as evidence to be searched. The story, credited to Russell Hunter, grew from his claims about a Denver mansion, claims the Denver Public Library disputes. A ghost asks for justice, and only a grieving man is willing to listen.
Best for: A rainy weekend afternoon with the curtains drawn.
34. The Evil Dead (1981)
Director: Sam Raimi
Starring: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker
Country: United States
Runtime: 85 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): No current subscription streaming. Free with ads on Xumo Play. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Evil Dead grossed $2,400,000 at the US domestic box office and $2,900,891 worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Evil Dead is Sam Raimi's film in which five friends at a remote cabin play a recording that wakes something in the woods. It premiered in Detroit in October 1981 and reached US theaters in 1983.
The film sits under the Supernatural source of fear and ranks here for influence and fear. It turns a tiny budget into relentless intensity.
The Screendollars Take
The Evil Dead is not a film held back by its budget. It is a film whose makers turned every limitation into a style. Raimi raised money from investors by first shooting a 1979 proof-of-concept short, Within the Woods, for about $1,600, then took his cast to a remote cabin in Morristown, Tennessee. At the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Stephen King called it "the most ferociously original horror film of 1982," and that praise helped secure New Line's US distribution deal. In Britain, it was branded a video nasty and was not passed uncut until 2000.
Best for: A Friday night with friends who insist nothing shocks them.
35. An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Director: John Landis
Starring: David Naughton, Jenny Agutter, Griffin Dunne
Country: United Kingdom, United States
Runtime: 97 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Prime Video and AMC+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi. Free with a library card on Kanopy and Hoopla. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: An American Werewolf in London grossed $30,565,292 at the US domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
An American Werewolf in London is John Landis's 1981 film about two American backpackers attacked by a wolf on the English moors, one of whom survives and begins to change. David Naughton plays the survivor, and Griffin Dunne plays the friend who will not stay dead.
The film belongs under the Monster source of fear, and it ranks this high on craft and idea. It is funny and frightening at once, and the comedy makes the horror land harder, because the film makes you like these people before it hurts them.
The Screendollars Take
An American Werewolf in London is not a horror comedy. It is a tragedy with jokes in it, and the jokes are how it gets past your guard. Rick Baker won the Academy Award for Best Makeup for the transformation effects, and Landis chose not to use the music Elmer Bernstein wrote for that scene. The production became the first film permitted to shoot in Piccadilly Circus in 15 years, working under a two-night police permit between 1 and 4 a.m. Baker made the change look like it hurts, and Landis refuses to look away.
Best for: A late October night with someone who prefers comedy.
36. Videodrome (1983)
Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: James Woods, Debbie Harry, Sonja Smits
Country: Canada
Runtime: 87 minutes
Source of fear: The Body
Where to watch (US): No subscription streaming from 1 November 2026. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Videodrome grossed $2,120,439 at the US domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
Videodrome is David Cronenberg's 1983 film about a Toronto cable television executive who goes hunting for edgier programming and finds a broadcast that begins to rewrite his body and his mind. James Woods plays him with a smirk that slowly curdles into panic.
The film belongs under the Body source of fear and ranks here on idea and influence. Cronenberg imagined media that gets inside you, decades before the screens in our pockets made the idea feel obvious, and he made the metaphor literal and wet.
The Screendollars Take
Videodrome is a film about television. A very meta film. It is a film about appetite, with the screen as the place appetite goes to feed. Rick Baker created the makeup effects, and the production used Betamax cassettes for the slit in Max's abdomen because VHS tapes were too large to fit. Howard Shore wrote his score for orchestra, then programmed it into a Synclavier II synthesizer, and the fictional CIVIC-TV was modelled on Toronto's CITY-TV. Cronenberg won the Genie Award for Best Direction for it. He saw the streaming age coming and gave it a wound to plug into.
Best for: An evening after too many hours of doomscrolling.
37. Hellraiser (1987)
Director: Clive Barker
Starring: Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence
Country: United Kingdom
Runtime: 94 minutes
Source of fear: The Body
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Prime Video (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi, Plex, and Prime Video. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Hellraiser grossed $14,564,027 at the US domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
Hellraiser is Clive Barker's directorial debut, adapted from his own 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart, about a puzzle box that opens a door to the Cenobites and a woman who helps her dead lover rebuild himself. Clare Higgins plays her with frightening calm.
The film belongs under the Body source of fear, since its horror is flesh opened, peeled and remade. It ranks here on idea and craft: few horror films treat desire this seriously, and fewer give their monsters such a strict, ceremonial logic.
The Screendollars Take
Hellraiser is a movie where its villains are a married woman and her lover, and the Cenobites are only the consequence of what they want. The film's working title was Sadomasochists from Beyond the Grave, which tells you Barker knew exactly what he was making. Christopher Young wrote the score after New World rejected a planned score by the band Coil, and the London shoot was relocated to an American setting after filming, so some accents had to be overdubbed. Pleasure and pain share one box, and Barker never lets you forget who opened it.
Best for: A midnight double bill with Videodrome.
38. Evil Dead II (1987)
Director: Sam Raimi
Starring: Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks
Country: United States
Runtime: 84 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max (subscription). Free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Evil Dead II grossed $5,923,044 at the US domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
Evil Dead II, also released as Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn, is Sam Raimi's 1987 return to the cabin, where Ash is trapped for a second night with the forces his recording woke. Bruce Campbell carries most of the film alone, and his body becomes the special effect.
The film sits under the Supernatural source of fear and ranks here on craft and idea. It reinvents its own original as slapstick gore, with a rhythm of pain and punchline all its own.
The Screendollars Take
Evil Dead II is not a sequel in any ordinary sense. It retells the first film as physical comedy, and the comedy hurts. Distributor DEG never submitted it to the MPAA and released it unrated through a shell company, Rosebud Releasing Corporation, after a DEG executive said an R-rated cut would have run about 62 minutes. Most of the film was shot in Wadesboro, North Carolina, with the cabin interior built inside J.R. Faison Junior High School. Raimi co-wrote it with Scott Spiegel. Bruce Campbell takes a beating for 84 minutes and turns it into a star performance.
Best for: A Saturday night when you want screams and laughs equally.
39. Candyman (1992)
Director: Bernard Rose
Starring: Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd, Xander Berkeley
Country: United States
Runtime: 101 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Prime Video (subscription). Free with ads on Prime Video. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Candyman grossed $25,792,310 at the US domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
Candyman is Bernard Rose's 1992 film about a Chicago graduate student researching urban legends who becomes entangled with the one she does not believe in. Virginia Madsen plays the researcher, and Tony Todd gives the legend a voice of deep, sorrowful authority.
The film belongs under the Supernatural source of fear and ranks this high on idea. It asks who a city's ghosts are and why they were made, and the question makes the scares heavier.
The Screendollars Take
Candyman is a slasher. It is a ghost story about who a city chooses to forget. Rose adapted Clive Barker's short story "The Forbidden" and moved it from Liverpool to Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing development, where the production filmed for three days. Philip Glass wrote the score, which won Best Music at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival, where Madsen also won Best Actress. The production used more than 200,000 real honeybees, and Tony Todd negotiated a $1,000 bonus for each of the 23 stings he received. Glass scored the monster like a saint, and the film lets the choice stand.
Best for: A late night alone, after someone dares you to say his name.
40. Audition (1999)
Director: Takashi Miike
Starring: Ryo Ishibashi, Eihi Shiina, Jun Kunimura
Country: Japan
Runtime: 115 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Hi-YAH and AsianCrush (subscription). Free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Audition won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 29th International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Audition is Takashi Miike's 1999 film about a widower who stages a fake casting call to find a new wife and becomes fixated on one quiet young woman. It premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in October 1999 and opened in Japan in 2000.
The film belongs under the Human source of fear because its threat is one person and the secrets behind her calm. It ranks here on fear and endurance: its slow first half is the reason the last act is so hard to sit through, and knowing what is coming does not make it easier.
The Screendollars Take
Audition is not a torture film, though its final act has made it famous as one. It is a romance that slowly reveals what the romance was built on. Daisuke Tengan adapted Ryu Murakami's 1997 novel after the production company Omega Project bought the rights, hoping for another horror hit after Ring. Miike shot in Tokyo in about three weeks, and Eihi Shiina, a model making her acting debut, plays the woman at the center with a stillness that gives nothing away. The patience of the first hour is the trap.
Best for: A date night with someone who swears nothing rattles them.
41. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Director: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez
Starring: Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, Joshua Leonard
Country: United States
Runtime: 81 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Blair Witch Project grossed $248,642,260 worldwide, including $140,539,099 domestically, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Blair Witch Project is the 1999 found-footage film about three student filmmakers who walk into the Maryland woods to document a local legend and never walk out. The film presents itself as their recovered footage.
The film belongs under the Supernatural source of fear and ranks here on idea above all. It proves that what you never see can frighten an audience more than anything a budget could buy.
The Screendollars Take
The Blair Witch Project is a film about three people realizing they are lost and that nobody is coming. Principal photography lasted eight days from 23 October 1997, mostly in Seneca Creek State Park in Montgomery County, Maryland, with a few scenes in Burkittsville. The directors wrote a 35-page outline, the actors improvised their dialogue, and they found their instructions with satellite navigation units, in film cans left inside milk crates. Artisan Entertainment bought the distribution rights for $1.1 million after its midnight Sundance premiere. The scariest thing in it is never filmed.
Best for: The night before a camping trip you would rather cancel.
42. Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Starring: Megumi Okina, Misaki Ito, Takako Fuji
Country: Japan
Runtime: 92 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): No subscription or free streaming in the US. Rent or buy on Apple TV (rent from $3.99), Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Ju-On: The Grudge grossed $3,661,430 worldwide across all releases, according to Box Office Mojo.
Ju-On: The Grudge is Takashi Shimizu's 2002 film about a curse born in a Tokyo house that passes to everyone who steps inside. It premiered at Screamfest in Los Angeles in October 2002 and opened in Japanese theaters in 2003.
The film belongs under the Supernatural source of fear and ranks here on fear and craft. Its ghosts still unsettle audiences who have seen every imitation since.
The Screendollars Take
Ju-On: The Grudge does not have a single story. It is a contagion, told out of order. Shimizu splits the film into non-chronological segments, each introduced by a title card bearing a victim's name, so you always know who is next and never know when. It is the third film in the Ju-On series and the first released theatrically, after two direct-to-video features, and it was filmed entirely in Tokyo, with Takako Fuji playing the ghost Kayako Saeki. Shimizu went on to direct the 2004 US remake. The house does not keep its ghosts. It hands them out.
Best for: A sleepover, as long as nobody walks upstairs alone.
43. 28 Days Later (2002)
Director: Danny Boyle
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Christopher Eccleston
Country: United Kingdom
Runtime: 113 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Apple TV (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, and Plex.
Key fact: 28 Days Later grossed $74,945,045 worldwide across all releases, including $45,064,915 domestically, according to Box Office Mojo.
28 Days Later is Danny Boyle's 2002 film about a man who wakes from a coma into an empty London, four weeks after a virus has turned most of the population into raging killers. Cillian Murphy plays him.
The film belongs under the Monster source of fear and ranks here on fear and craft. Its infected run rather than shamble, and its empty-city images make collapse look like an ordinary morning with the people taken out.
The Screendollars Take
28 Days Later is a complicated zombie film, strictly speaking. Its infected are alive, which makes them faster, angrier, and harder to pity. Anthony Dod Mantle shot most of it on Canon XL1 digital video cameras, switching to 35mm only for the final rural sequence, and the grainy video makes the apocalypse look like news footage. The empty-London scenes, including Westminster Bridge and Piccadilly Circus, were shot during brief early-morning road closures, usually on Sundays, lasting a minute or two each. Alex Garland wrote the script, and John Murphy wrote the score. London empties in a minute, and the film fills it with dread.
Best for: A quiet Sunday morning in a big city.
44. The Descent (2005)
Director: Neil Marshall
Starring: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid
Country: United Kingdom
Runtime: 100 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder and AMC+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi, The Roku Channel, and Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Descent grossed $57,232,855 worldwide, including $26,024,456 domestically, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Descent is Neil Marshall's 2005 film about six women on a caving expedition who become trapped underground and discover they are not alone. Shauna Macdonald plays a woman still carrying grief from the year before.
The film belongs under the Monster source of fear, though its first hour frightens with nothing but darkness and narrow rock. It ranks here on fear and craft, because it builds claustrophobia so thoroughly that the creatures arrive as a second layer of terror rather than the only one.
The Screendollars Take
The Descent is not a creature feature first. It is a film about grief and guilt that becomes a creature feature when the dark finally fills up. The cave interiors were sets built at Pinewood Studios, designed by Simon Bowles, because shooting in a real cave was judged too dangerous and slow. Sam McCurdy shot those sets, and David Julyan's score stays low and close until the film no longer needs it to. The US theatrical release cut about a minute from the ending, later restored on DVD as the Original Unrated Cut. Watch that version; the shorter one lets you out too early.
Best for: A night when you want the walls to feel close.
45. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú
Country: Spain, Mexico
Runtime: 118 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): No current subscription streaming. Rent or buy on Prime Video.
Key fact: Pan's Labyrinth won three Academy Awards for Art Direction, Cinematography (Guillermo Navarro), and Makeup, from six nominations.
Pan's Labyrinth, released in Spain as El laberinto del fauno, is Guillermo del Toro's 2006 film about a girl in Franco's Spain who escapes her brutal stepfather into a labyrinth ruled by a faun. Cineverse returned it to US theaters for its 20th anniversary from 9 October 2026.
The film belongs under the Monster source of fear and ranks here on craft and idea. It is a dark fantasy as much as a horror film, but its creatures frighten in earnest, and del Toro sets them beside a human cruelty that is worse.
The Screendollars Take
Pan's Labyrinth is not a fairy tale with horror in it. It is a war film in which the fairy tale is the only exit, and the exit has teeth. Doug Jones plays both the Faun and the Pale Man, seeing out of the Pale Man's nostrils, and the two performances make the magical world feel as dangerous as the real one. Del Toro shot from June to October 2005 in a Scots pine forest in the Guadarrama mountains, Javier Navarrete built the score around a lullaby, and Del Toro wrote the English subtitles himself. The Pale Man frightens you, but the captain is worse.
Best for: A theater seat while the anniversary re-release is running.
46. [REC] (2007)
Director: Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza
Starring: Manuela Velasco, Pablo Rosso, Ferrán Terraza
Country: Spain
Runtime: 78 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Free with ads on Tubi. Rent or buy on Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: [REC] grossed $32,493,296 worldwide, almost all of it outside the US, according to Box Office Mojo.
[REC] is a Spanish found-footage horror film in which a television reporter and her cameraman follow a night-shift fire crew into a Barcelona apartment building that is then sealed shut with everyone inside. The building becomes a cage, and the camera becomes the only light anyone has.
At 78 minutes, [REC] is one of the leaner films in this ranking and one of the fiercest Monster films of its century. It earns its place on Fear and Craft: the found-footage frame is not a gimmick here but a working limitation that decides what you are allowed to see, and when.
The Screendollars Take
[REC] is a zombie film with a camera as the central unit in it. It is a film about the camera, and about what happens when the person holding it is too frightened to keep it steady. Balagueró and Plaza handed the cast a false ending and shot in chronological order, so the panic you watch was built scene by scene rather than performed on cue. There is no musical score, and Pablo Rosso, who plays the cameraman Pablo, also shot the film, which means the operator's fear and the image's fear are the same thing. The finale was shot on an amateur MiniDV camera in night vision. Darkness has rarely been this specific.
Best for: A late weeknight, every light in the apartment switched off.
47. The Conjuring (2013)
Director: James Wan
Starring: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Lili Taylor
Country: United States · Runtime: 112 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, and Plex.
Key fact: The Conjuring grossed $321,293,998 worldwide, including $137,446,368 domestic, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Conjuring is James Wan's haunted-house film about paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren and their reported case of the Perron family, who moved into a Rhode Island farmhouse in 1971.
The Conjuring belongs here because it proved that classical haunted-house technique, the slow pan, the empty doorway, the held breath- could still fill multiplexes in 2013. It is the Supernatural at its most carefully engineered, and it scores on Craft and Fear in equal measure.
The Screendollars Take
The Conjuring is not a throwback. It is a demonstration that the old tools still work when someone knows exactly how to hold them. Wan shot the film in chronological order in Wilmington, North Carolina, and you can feel the dread accumulate in sequence rather than arrive in set pieces. Joseph Bishara's score and John R. Leonetti's camera keep the frame patient while the house does the work. When the MPAA gave it an R, executive producer Walter Hamada said the board cited how scary it was, not gore or language. Fear alone earned the rating.
Best for: A family-free Saturday night with the hallway light left on.
48. The Babadook (2014)
Director: Jennifer Kent
Starring: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall
Country: Australia
Runtime: 94 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder and AMC+ (subscription). Free with ads on The Roku Channel, Pluto TV and Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Babadook won Best Film, Best Direction and Best Original Screenplay at the 4th AACTA Awards in Australia.
The Babadook is Jennifer Kent's film about a widowed mother and her troubled young son, whose lives start to unravel after a sinister pop-up book appears in their house. It draws its fear from grief, exhaustion, and love curdling into resentment.
The Babadook earned its place on Idea above all. Its monster is real enough to frighten you and symbolic enough to keep you arguing about it for years, which is exactly the balance the best Mind films strike.
The Screendollars Take
The Babadook is not about a monster in the house. It is about a mother who cannot say out loud what grief has done to her. Kent expanded the film from her own 2005 short Monster, and part of the money came from a Kickstarter that hit its US$30,000 goal with 259 backers, which tells you how small and personal this production was. The pop-up book, illustrated by Alexander Juhasz, is the most frightening prop in modern horror because it looks like something a real child would own. Jed Kurzel's score stays low and close. You do not defeat grief here. You learn where to keep it.
Best for: Watching alone after a hard week, with tissues nearby.
49. Midsommar (2019)
Director: Ari Aster
Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper
Country: United States, Sweden
Runtime: 148 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Hulu and Prime Video (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi. Free with a library card on Kanopy and Hoopla. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Midsommar grossed $48,582,493 worldwide, including $27,426,361 domestic, according to Box Office Mojo.
Midsommar is Ari Aster's folk horror film about a grieving young woman who travels with her emotionally distant boyfriend and his friends to a midsummer festival in a remote Swedish commune. Nearly all of it happens in broad daylight, and none of that helps.
Midsommar belongs among the Human films because its threat is a community with a plan, not a creature. It ranks on Idea and Craft: Aster has described it as "a breakup movie dressed in the clothes of a folk horror film," and every formal choice serves that double reading.
The Screendollars Take
Midsommar is a cult-ish film that happens to involve a breakup and grief. It is a breakup film in which the cult is catalysing the pain. Aster shot this Swedish story mostly around Budapest, building a commune so bright and orderly that the horror comes from how welcoming it looks. Bobby Krlic's score swells where you expect dread and soothes where you expect relief. A 171-minute director's cut also exists. The flowers are the scariest thing in it.
Best for: A summer afternoon screening, curtains open, phone in another room.
50. Sinners (2025)
Director: Ryan Coogler
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton
Country: United States
Runtime: 137 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, and Plex.
Key fact: Sinners has grossed $371,568,759 worldwide as of October 2026, according to Box Office Mojo, and won four Academy Awards from a record 16 nominations.
Sinners is Ryan Coogler's vampire film set in 1932 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, open a juke joint for one night and attract the wrong kind of guest. It is a blues musical, a gangster picture, and a siege film before it is anything else.
Sinners is the newest film in this ranking and already one of its most important. It belongs on Idea and Craft: the vampires carry a story about music, ownership and who profits from Black art, and the film's scale shows that original horror can still draw a crowd.
The Screendollars Take
Sinners has horror, scares, vampires, and a banger soundtrack. It is a film about music that discovers vampires are the logical end of its argument. Coogler shot on 65mm with IMAX 15-perf and Ultra Panavision 70 cameras, so the image changes shape as the night escalates. Autumn Dural-Caray became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for this film, and Ludwig Göransson won for the score, Michael B. Jordan for Best Actor, and Coogler for Original Screenplay. Coogler also negotiated for ownership to revert to him after 25 years. The film practices what it preaches.
Best for: The biggest screen you can find, volume up, friends beside you.
Ranked 51–75: Modern Greats and International Breakouts
The horror movies ranked 51 to 75 mix modern greats with international breakouts, led by Kwaidan (1964) at No. 51. This is where the ranking widens to Japan, Korea, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and France, alongside American independents like It Follows and The Witch.
51. Kwaidan (1964)
Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Starring: Tatsuya Nakadai, Rentarō Mikuni, Keiko Kishi
Country: Japan
Runtime: 183 minutes (the original cut)
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on the Criterion Channel, HBO Max, and TCM (subscription). Rent on Apple TV for $3.99 or buy for $14.99.
Key fact: Kwaidan won the Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Kwaidan is Masaki Kobayashi's anthology of four Japanese ghost stories adapted from the collections of Lafcadio Hearn: "The Black Hair," "The Woman of the Snow," "Hoichi the Earless," and "In a Cup of Tea."
Kwaidan earns its place on Craft and Endurance. It is the most beautiful horror film in this ranking, and that beauty is the source of its chill: the Supernatural here is not something that bursts out of the dark but something already woven into the landscape.
The Screendollars Take
Kwaidan is not a very jump-scare type of horror film. It is one that wants you to sit very still and listen. Tōru Takemitsu's score does more to unsettle you than any image, and Yoshio Miyajima's photography makes the world itself look like a dream someone else is having. Criterion's release restores Kobayashi's original 183-minute cut, which had never been released in the US. Every minute of it is patient on purpose.
Best for: A rainy Sunday afternoon with nowhere to be.
52. The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Director: Dan O'Bannon
Starring: Clu Gulager, James Karen, Thom Mathews
Country: United States
Runtime: 91 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on MGM+ and AMC+ (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Return of the Living Dead grossed $14,237,880 domestically on its 1985 Orion Pictures release, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Return of the Living Dead is Dan O'Bannon's punk zombie comedy, in which two bumbling medical supply warehouse workers accidentally release a gas that brings the dead back to life. The dead then turn out to be faster, smarter, and hungrier than anyone expected.
The Return of the Living Dead belongs on Influence. It is credited with introducing zombies that eat brains specifically, and it shows how a Monster film can be scary and very funny at the same time.
The Screendollars Take
The Return of the Living Dead is not a parody of zombie films. It is a zombie film that knows the rules well enough to break them deliberately. This was O'Bannon's directing debut, after Tobe Hooper left the project to make Lifeforce, and it plays like a writer finally getting to stage his own jokes. The soundtrack of Los Angeles deathrock and punk, including The Cramps, 45 Grave and T.S.O.L., gives the film a sneer that Romero's work never had. Jules Brenner's photography keeps it grimy. The brain-eating zombie became folklore for a reason.
Best for: A Friday night with friends who laugh at the wrong moments.
53. The Witch (2015)
Director: Robert Eggers
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie
Country: United States, Canada, United Kingdom
Runtime: 92 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Prime Video (subscription). Free with ads on Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Robert Eggers won the Directing Award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival for The Witch, his feature debut.
The Witch, stylized as The VVitch: A New-England Folktale, is Robert Eggers's debut about a Puritan family banished from their settlement in the 1630s, who build a farm at the edge of a forest and begin to come apart.
The Witch belongs on Craft and Idea. It refuses to modernize anything, and it treats faith itself as the Supernatural threat, a family whose belief in the devil makes them the devil's easiest prey.
The Screendollars Take
The Witch is not a film about whether witchcraft is real. It is a film about a family so certain it is real that the question stops mattering. Eggers lit the interiors with natural light and candles only, and Jarin Blaschke's camera shows you exactly as much as a candle would. Mark Korven's score sounds like strings being stretched past their limit. The title's double V came from a Jacobean-era pamphlet, the kind of detail that makes the whole film feel unearthed rather than made. Black Phillip will stay with you longer than you want.
Best for: A cold autumn evening, ideally somewhere near trees.
54. Martin (1977)
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: John Amplas, Lincoln Maazel, Christine Forrest
Country: United States
Runtime: 95 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): No current streaming or digital rent or buy in the US.
Key fact: Martin was Tom Savini's first collaboration with George A. Romero; Savini handled the special effects and also played Arthur.
Martin is George A. Romero's film about a shy young man in a declining Pennsylvania steel town who believes he is a vampire. He has no supernatural powers that anyone can see, only a story he tells himself.
Martin is a Mind film disguised as a Monster film, and that disguise is its achievement. It ranks on Idea: Romero asks whether a vampire is someone who drinks blood or someone who has convinced himself he must, and he never gives you an easy answer.
The Screendollars Take
Martin is a film about a lonely kid who needs to be a vampire because the alternative is being nobody at all. Romero shot it in Braddock, Pennsylvania, in colour, but filmed Martin's fantasies in black and white, so the gothic legend in his head literally looks older than the town he lives in. Donald Rubinstein's score is gentle where you expect menace. Romero called Martin his favourite of his own films, and the affection shows. It is the saddest film he made.
Best for: A muggy summer night with the windows open.
55. Jacob's Ladder (1990)
Director: Adrian Lyne
Starring: Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, Danny Aiello
Country: United States
Runtime: 113 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Paramount+ (subscription). Free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Jacob's Ladder grossed $26,118,851 domestically on its 1990 TriStar Pictures release, according to Box Office Mojo.
Jacob's Ladder is Adrian Lyne's psychological horror film about Jacob Singer, a Vietnam veteran in New York whose daily life starts to fracture into visions of demons, hospitals, and a past he cannot trust. The question of what is real drives every scene.
Jacob's Ladder belongs on Influence. Its plot and its jittering, head-twitching imagery strongly influenced the Silent Hill games, especially Silent Hill 2. It is the Mind at its most disorienting.
The Screendollars Take
Jacob's Ladder is not a war film or a conspiracy thriller. It is a film about a man's mind negotiating with something it does not want to accept. The famous jittering heads came from filming an actor shaking his head at a low frame rate, so playback looks rapid and wrong, a cheap trick that still looks like nothing else. Lyne drew on the paintings of Francis Bacon, and the faces carry that smeared, unfinished violence. Bruce Joel Rubin's screenplay had been named one of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood. It waited for the right director.
Best for: A sleepless night when you can handle an ending that lingers.
56. The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)
Director: André Øvredal
Starring: Brian Cox, Emile Hirsch, Olwen Kelly
Country: United Kingdom, United States
Runtime: 86 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder, AMC+, and Paramount+ (subscription). Free with ads on The Roku Channel and Plex. Free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Autopsy of Jane Doe grossed $6,170,178 worldwide, with just $10,474 from its US theatrical release, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe is André Øvredal's first English-language film, in which a father and son who run a small-town morgue are asked to examine an unidentified young woman's body overnight. The deeper they cut, the less sense she makes.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe is the best single-location Supernatural film of its decade. It ranks on Fear and Craft, turning a mortuary procedure into a mystery and then into a siege, and it barely made a dent in US cinemas, so most viewers will meet it at home.
The Screendollars Take
The Autopsy of Jane Doe is not a ghost story. It is a detective story in which the evidence keeps looking back at you. Olwen Kelly played the corpse for most of the shoot, and Øvredal cast her partly because her yoga training let her control her breathing, which is why the body on the table never once reads as an actor holding still. Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch play the coroners with a working familiarity that makes the slow loss of control land harder. The film never leaves the building. It never needs to.
Best for: A stormy night in, two people, one couch.
57. The Cremator (1969)
Director: Juraj Herz
Starring: Rudolf Hrušínský, Vlasta Chramostová, Jana Stehnová
Country: Czechoslovakia
Runtime: 100 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): Streaming on the Criterion Channel (subscription). No digital rent or buy option.
Key fact: The Cremator won Best Film at the 1972 Sitges Film Festival, with further awards for star Rudolf Hrušínský and cinematographer Stanislav Milota.
The Cremator is Juraj Herz's black comedy about Karel Kopfrkingl, a fastidious crematorium director in 1930s Prague whose devotion to his work slides into something monstrous as the Nazi occupation draws near. He speaks softly and believes himself kind.
The Cremator belongs among the Mind films because its horror is a man talking himself into atrocity one reasonable sentence at a time. It ranks on Idea and Craft, and on Endurance: it was withdrawn from circulation in 1973 and not seen again until 1990, and it has lost none of its menace.
The Screendollars Take
The Cremator is not a Holocaust drama. It is a portrait of the polite, tidy personality that makes one possible. Herz adapted it with Ladislav Fuks from Fuks's own novel, and Stanislav Milota's black-and-white photography keeps pushing the camera too close, so Kopfrkingl's gentle face fills the screen until it becomes unbearable. Zdeněk Liška's score has the sweetness of a lullaby and the weight of a funeral march. Rudolf Hrušínský never raises his voice. That is the most frightening choice in the film.
Best for: A winter evening, watched straight through with the lights low.
58. Dracula (1958)
Director: Terence Fisher
Starring: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough
Country: United Kingdom
Runtime: 82 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on TCM (with a pay-TV login). Free with a library card on Hoopla. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Hammer made Dracula for a recorded budget of £81,412 at Bray Studios, and it was the first vampire film shot in colour.
Dracula, released in the US as Horror of Dracula, is Hammer Film Productions' version of Bram Stoker's novel, with Christopher Lee as the Count and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. In 82 minutes, it reinvents a story that Universal had seemingly settled in 1931.
Dracula belongs on Craft and Idea. It shows that the Monster film could be sensual, quick and bloody rather than stately, and it makes Lee's Count and Cushing's Van Helsing a perfectly matched pair.
The Screendollars Take
Dracula is not a remake of the Universal film. It is a rebuttal of it. Jimmy Sangster's screenplay strips Stoker down to a duel between two men, and Terence Fisher stages it at a pace the 1931 version never attempted. Jack Asher's colour photography makes the blood an event, and James Bernard's score announces the Count like a fanfare for something you should run from. Footage cut from the British version was rediscovered in a Japanese print in Tokyo and restored in 2013. The Count was never fully dead.
Best for: A Halloween double bill, popcorn first.
59. The House of the Devil (2009)
Director: Ti West
Starring: Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov
Country: United States
Runtime: 95 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Prime Video and AMC+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi, Pluto TV, and Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The House of the Devil grossed $101,215 domestically on its 2009 Magnolia Pictures release, according to Box Office Mojo.
The House of the Devil is Ti West's slow-burn horror film about a broke college student who takes a babysitting job in a remote house on the night of a lunar eclipse, and slowly realizes the job description was not honest. It is set in the 1980s and looks like it was made there.
The House of the Devil belongs on Craft. West wrote, directed and edited it, and it remains the purest example of patient horror in this ranking: much of the running time is a young woman alone in a house, and every minute of it tightens.
The Screendollars Take
The House of the Devil is a pastiche of 1980s horror. It is a film that commits to that era's pace so fully that it becomes a new kind of tension. West shot on 16mm in Connecticut, and Eliot Rockett's grainy images make the house feel like a found artifact. The opening text claims the story is true, a device borrowed from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Jeff Grace's score waits as long as the heroine does. Tom Noonan's towering, too-friendly host is the film's warning sign. Patience is the scare.
Best for: A babysitting night, if you are feeling brave.
60. Train to Busan (2016)
Director: Yeon Sang-ho
Starring: Gong Yoo, Jung Yu-mi, Ma Dong-seok (Don Lee)
Country: South Korea
Runtime: 118 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Peacock (subscription). Free with a library card on Hoopla. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, and Plex.
Key fact: Train to Busan grossed $94,145,035 worldwide, including $80,466,363 in South Korea, according to Box Office Mojo.
Train to Busan is Yeon Sang-ho's zombie thriller about a workaholic father and his young daughter trapped on a high-speed train from Seoul to Busan as a viral outbreak spreads through the carriages and across South Korea. The train never stops long enough for anyone to breathe.
Train to Busan belongs on Fear and Idea. It is the most emotional Monster film in this ranking, a disaster movie about selfishness and sacrifice, and it reached audiences far beyond the horror crowd after premiering in the Midnight Screenings section at Cannes in 2016.
The Screendollars Take
Train to Busan is a zombie film set on a train. But it’s also a film about a father learning what he owes other people, with the zombies as the deadline. Yeon and screenwriter Park Joo-suk build the film carriage by carriage, so every door becomes a moral choice as much as a physical one. Lee Hyung-deok's camera keeps the corridors narrow and the stakes close. By August 2016 it was the first Korean film of the year to pass 10 million admissions. It earned every one of them.
Best for: A long-haul flight home, if you can handle the irony.
61. Black Christmas (1974)
Director: Bob Clark
Starring: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder
Country: Canada
Runtime: 98 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder, Prime Video, Peacock, and AMC+ (subscription). Free with ads on Pluto TV and The Roku Channel, and free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent on Apple TV for $3.99 or buy for $7.99, or rent on Prime Video.
Key fact: At the 1975 Canadian Film Awards, Margot Kidder won Best Performance by a Lead Actress and Kenneth Heeley-Ray won Best Sound Editing for Black Christmas.
Black Christmas is the 1974 Canadian thriller in which a sorority house, emptying for the holidays, starts receiving obscene phone calls from someone much closer than anyone realizes. Bob Clark made it four years before Halloween, and much of the slasher grammar later associated with Carpenter is already in place.
It ranks under The Human because the threat is a person you never properly see, and it scores heavily on Influence: the killer's-eye camera and the holiday setting are both fully formed here. It also holds up on Endurance, since the dread comes from sound and waiting rather than gore.
The Screendollars Take
Black Christmas is not a proto-slasher. It is the finished article, released before anyone knew the form existed. Camera operator Bert Dunk built a head-mounted rig and climbed the side of the house wearing it, which is why the killer's point of view feels physical rather than staged. The phone voices were performed by several actors, including Nick Mancuso, who recorded upside down to compress his chest, and Clark himself, so the caller never sounds like one man. Kenneth Heeley-Ray won an award for the sound editing, and you can hear why in every ring of that phone.
Best for: A December night when everyone else has already left.
62. Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Director: Georges Franju
Starring: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Édith Scob
Country: France, Italy
Runtime: 90 minutes
Source of fear: The Body
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max (subscription). Free with ads on Plex, and free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: When Eyes Without a Face screened at the 1960 Edinburgh Film Festival, seven audience members fainted.
Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) follows a surgeon who abducts young women in an attempt to restore the face his daughter lost in an accident. Georges Franju shoots it as a fairy tale told in a clinic, and the result is the most elegant body horror film ever made.
It belongs under The Body because its central fear is the face as something that can be removed and replaced. It ranks on Craft for Eugen Schüfftan's cinematography, and on Influence, since Pedro Almodóvar later named it as a source for The Skin I Live In, which sits at No. 66 in this ranking.
The Screendollars Take
Eyes Without a Face is a mad-scientist picture done well. It is a film about a daughter imprisoned by her father's guilt. Boileau-Narcejac reworked Jean Redon's novel to shift its focus from the doctor to the girl, and that one choice turns Édith Scob's masked Christiane into the film's moral center. Maurice Jarre's score plays like a carousel tune, light and wrong at the same time, while Schüfftan keeps the operating scenes clean and bright enough that you cannot hide in the shadows. Seven people fainted at Edinburgh, and the film had not raised its voice once.
Best for: A late, quiet night with subtitles and no distractions.
63. Let the Right One In (2008)
Director: Tomas Alfredson
Starring: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar
Country: Sweden
Runtime: 114 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Prime Video and Peacock (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi and The Roku Channel, and free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Let the Right One In grossed $11,227,336 worldwide, including $2,122,065 domestically, according to Box Office Mojo.
Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) is the Swedish story of a bullied boy who befriends the strange girl who has moved in next door and who only comes out at night. It is a vampire film and a first-love story, and it refuses to choose between them.
It ranks under The Monster because Eli is a predator, however tender the film is about her. It scores on Idea, for what it says about loneliness and loyalty, and on Craft, for Hoyte van Hoytema's Guldbagge-winning cinematography of snow, concrete and sodium light.
The Screendollars Take
Let the Right One In is not a vampire romance. It is a film about the price of having one person on your side. John Ajvide Lindqvist adapted his own novel, and the script keeps the adult world almost entirely at the edges, so the snowbound housing estate belongs to the children and whatever is living among them. Eli's voice is not Lina Leandersson's: all her dialogue was dubbed by Elif Ceylan to make her sound older, and that small displacement makes every line Eli speaks feel slightly out of time. The film is gentle with its monster and merciless with everyone else.
Best for: A snowy evening when you want horror with a heartbeat.
64. The Brood (1979)
Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle
Country: Canada
Runtime: 92 minutes
Source of fear: The Body
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi and Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Brood was the first David Cronenberg film with an original score, composed by Howard Shore, who went on to score most of Cronenberg's later films.
The Brood follows a man trying to protect his young daughter while his estranged wife undergoes an experimental therapy that makes her rage take physical form. Cronenberg wrote it after a bitter divorce and custody battle, and it is the angriest film he ever made.
It belongs under The Body because the therapy turns emotion into flesh, which is Cronenberg's founding idea. It ranks on Idea, as horror built directly from a real marriage ending, and on Influence, as the film where the Cronenberg and Howard Shore partnership began.
The Screendollars Take
The Brood is not a monster movie. It is a custody battle filmed from the inside of a wound. Cronenberg called it his more realistic version of Kramer vs. Kramer, and the joke lands because the film is so sincere about how families tear. Oliver Reed's psychiatrist presides over the experiment with total confidence, which makes Samantha Eggar's final scene all the worse. US censors cut a long close-up of Nola licking her newborn, and Cronenberg said the cut led viewers to believe she was eating the baby, which tells you how far the film had already pushed them. Divorce has never looked this contagious.
Best for: A night after a family argument you are still replaying.
65. The Lighthouse (2019)
Director: Robert Eggers
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe
Country: United States, Canada
Runtime: 109 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Lighthouse grossed $18,208,587 worldwide, including $10,867,104 domestically, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Lighthouse traps two keepers on a remote rock, where isolation, drink, and a storm that will not lift slowly dissolve the line between what is real and what is not. Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe play it as a two-hander that turns into a fistfight with sanity.
It sits under The Mind because the horror lives in two men losing their grip, not in anything that crawls out of the sea, or at least not only. It ranks on Craft above almost every recent film, and on Endurance, because its language and images reward a second viewing.
The Screendollars Take
The Lighthouse is not a full sea monster story. It is a film about what happens to men when nobody is watching except each other. Jarin Blaschke shot it in black and white on 35mm at a near-square 1.19:1 frame, and that narrow box presses the two keepers together until there is no room left in the image to escape. The production could not find a suitable real lighthouse, so it built a 70-foot tower at Cape Forchu, Nova Scotia, with a replica Fresnel lens at the top. That light is the thing both men want, and the film never lets you forget it is a machine.
Best for: A stormy night with something strong in your glass.
66. The Skin I Live In (2011)
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes
Country: Spain
Runtime: 120 minutes
Source of fear: The Body
Where to watch (US): No current subscription streaming. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Skin I Live In won the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language, and from 16 Goya nominations won four, including Best Actress for Elena Anaya.
The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) follows a plastic surgeon who keeps a young woman captive in his mansion while he perfects a new, indestructible skin. Pedro Almodóvar plays it as melodrama, which makes the horror arrive slowly and land hard.
It belongs under The Body because the film is about a body remade against its owner's will. It ranks on Idea, for what it asks about identity and control, and it earns its place in a horror ranking through Craft: Almodóvar's polish makes the clinic more frightening than any dungeon.
The Screendollars Take
The Skin I Live In is not a thriller with a twist. It is a horror film disguised as a perfume advertisement. Almodóvar cited Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face as an influence, and you can feel it in the sealed, immaculate rooms where Antonio Banderas works, reunited with the director for the first time in 21 years. José Luis Alcaine's camera treats every surface as something polished, and Alberto Iglesias's Goya-winning score keeps insisting this is a romance. Elena Anaya won Best Actress for a performance built almost entirely on stillness. The surgery is clean, and that is the most disturbing thing about it.
Best for: A late night after the dinner guests have gone home.
67. It Follows (2014)
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Starring: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto
Country: United States
Runtime: 100 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Paramount+ (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: It grossed $14,674,076 domestically and $21,994,539 worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.
It Follows is about a young woman in suburban Detroit who, after a sexual encounter, is stalked by an entity that walks slowly toward her and can look like anyone. The premise is simple enough to explain in one breath and impossible to forget once you have seen it.
It belongs under The Supernatural because the curse has rules but no explanation. It scores highest on Fear, because the slow walker turns every background figure into a threat, and on Craft, for how wide shots and an anxious synth score keep you scanning the edges of the frame.
The Screendollars Take
It Follows is not a film about sex. It is a film about the anxiety dream that never quite ends. David Robert Mitchell based the premise on recurring dreams from his youth about being followed, and the film keeps that dream logic intact: the thing never runs, so you never get to stop watching for it. Disasterpeace's synth score pulses like a migraine, and Mike Gioulakis frames Detroit so wide that anyone crossing a lawn in the distance could be the end of you. Shot on $1.3 million around Detroit, with interiors in the shell of the Packard plant, it finds terror in empty space. You will check doorways for a week.
Best for: A weeknight in a quiet suburb, curtains drawn.
68. The Invisible Man (1933)
Director: James Whale
Starring: Claude Rains, Gloria Stuart, William Harrigan
Country: United States
Runtime: 71 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Free with ads on Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Invisible Man was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2008.
The Invisible Man (1933) is James Whale's Universal adaptation of H. G. Wells, about a scientist whose invisibility formula slowly drives him mad with power. It is the Universal monster film with the sharpest sense of humor and the meanest streak.
It ranks under The Monster because Jack Griffin becomes a creature of pure appetite once no one can see him. It earns its place on Craft, for effects that still look clever, and on Endurance, because its mix of comedy and cruelty has not dated.
The Screendollars Take
The Invisible Man is not a special-effects showcase. It is a film about what a man does once he is sure nobody can catch him. Claude Rains does much of his acting with his voice, and Whale cast him after seeing a screen test that Rains himself called terrible. John P. Fulton's invisibility effects, built in close collaboration with Whale, still play as tricks rather than technology, which is part of their charm. R. C. Sherriff's script lets the comedy run long enough that the cruelty, when it comes, catches you laughing. The bandages come off, and the man underneath is worse than nothing.
Best for: A short double-feature night with another Universal classic.
69. Poltergeist (1982)
Director: Tobe Hooper
Starring: JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Heather O'Rourke
Country: United States
Runtime: 114 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): No subscription streaming from 1 November 2026. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Poltergeist grossed $77,177,301 domestically across its releases, according to Box Office Mojo.
Poltergeist follows a suburban California family whose youngest daughter is taken by spirits that speak to her through the television. Tobe Hooper directed, and Steven Spielberg produced and co-wrote from his own story, and the film carries both men's fingerprints.
It belongs under The Supernatural as the defining suburban haunting. It ranks on Craft, with three Academy Award nominations including Jerry Goldsmith's score, and on Idea, because its warm family home turns on its owners.
The Screendollars Take
Poltergeist is not a ghost story. It is a film about the suburbs discovering that the ground they were sold has a history. The MPAA first rated it R, and Spielberg and Hooper appealed and won a PG, which is how a film this frightening ended up with a rating meant for families. Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-nominated score plays the family's love completely straight, so the terror registers as a theft rather than a jolt. The film lost all three of its Oscar nominations to E.T., which feels right: one suburb got the friendly visitor, and this one got the other kind.
Best for: A family movie night with kids old enough to handle it.
70. Night of the Demon (1957)
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Starring: Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins, Niall MacGinnis
Country: United Kingdom
Runtime: 96 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Free with ads on Tubi and YouTube. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Jacques Tourneur opposed showing the demon on screen and said the scenes where it is clearly visible were shot without him, at producer Hal E. Chester's insistence.
Night of the Demon, released in the US as Curse of the Demon, sends a skeptical American psychologist to England, where he crosses a cult leader who may be able to summon a demon by passing a slip of parchment. It is adapted from M. R. James's story Casting the Runes.
It belongs under The Supernatural because the whole film is an argument about whether the curse is real. It ranks on Craft, for Tourneur's mastery of suggestion, and on Endurance, since the scenes built on doubt still work long after the monster shots have dated.
The Screendollars Take
Night of the Demon is not a monster movie, whatever its producer wanted. It is a film about a rational man running out of rational explanations. Tourneur fought against showing the demon, and the scenes he controlled prove his point: the threat lives in a slip of paper, a passing wind, a man who cannot quite believe what he is feeling. Ken Adam's production design and locations, including Stonehenge and the British Museum Reading Room, give the occult a respectable address. Kate Bush later sampled its dialogue for Hounds of Love, which is the right kind of afterlife for a film this good at whispering.
Best for: A rainy Sunday afternoon in a creaky old house.
71. Vampyr (1932)
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Starring: Julian West (Nicolas de Gunzburg), Maurice Schutz, Sybille Schmitz
Country: Germany, France
Runtime: 73 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max (subscription). Free with ads on Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Vampyr was financed by Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg in exchange for the lead role, which he played under the pseudonym Julian West.
Vampyr follows a young traveler who arrives at a country inn and finds himself drawn into a village under the influence of an elderly vampire. Carl Theodor Dreyer made it as a dream rather than a story.
It belongs under The Monster because a vampire drives it, though the film cares more about atmosphere than fangs. It ranks on Craft and Endurance: its images remain stranger than almost anything made since, and they reward the patience they ask of you.
The Screendollars Take
Vampyr is not a Dracula picture. It is the closest cinema has come to filming the moment just before you wake. After a blurry test shot, cinematographer Rudolph Maté filmed the rest through gauze held about three feet from the lens, and that milky haze makes every room look half remembered. Most of the cast were non-professionals, and no sound was recorded on set, so the faces carry a stillness trained actors would struggle to fake. Drawn loosely from Sheridan Le Fanu, the plot barely matters. You do not follow Vampyr so much as sink into it.
Best for: 1 am, lights off, when you are not quite awake yourself.
72. Repulsion (1965)
Director: Roman Polanski
Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, John Fraser
Country: United Kingdom
Runtime: 105 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): Free with ads on Tubi. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Repulsion won the Silver Berlin Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival in 1965.
Repulsion follows a young manicurist in London whose fear and revulsion deepen into breakdown when her sister leaves her alone in their flat for a few days. It was Roman Polanski's first English-language film and the first of his Apartment Trilogy.
It belongs under The Mind because the flat becomes a picture of Carol's collapse. It ranks on Craft, for Gilbert Taylor's black-and-white photography, and on Influence, since its idea of an apartment as a mind falling apart runs straight through Rosemary's Baby, at No. 6 in this ranking.
The Screendollars Take
Repulsion is not about a madwoman. It is about a city that never notices one woman disappearing in plain sight. Polanski and Gérard Brach keep the camera locked to Catherine Deneuve so closely that you lose the outside world when she does. Gilbert Taylor's photography makes the flat physically change around her, and the hallway sequence in which hands burst out of the walls to grab Carol is one of horror's great images of a mind turning on its owner. Chico Hamilton's jazz score drifts in like sound from a party next door. Every rented room in London looks smaller afterward.
Best for: A night alone in an apartment that suddenly feels too quiet.
73. Scream (1996)
Director: Wes Craven
Starring: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette
Country: United States
Runtime: 111 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Hulu and Paramount+ (subscription). Free with ads on YouTube, and free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, and Plex.
Key fact: Scream grossed $103,046,663 domestically and $173,046,663 worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.
Scream follows a small-town high school student, a year after her mother's murder, as a masked killer who knows every rule of horror movies starts picking off her friends. Wes Craven directed Kevin Williamson's script.
It belongs under The Human because the killer is a person, and the film keeps reminding you so. It ranks on Idea, for a killer who knows the rules as well as the audience does, and on Fear too: the knowing jokes never get in the way of the chases, and the opening still grips.
The Screendollars Take
Scream is not a parody. It is a slasher that learned to talk and still remembered how to kill. Drew Barrymore asked to play Casey Becker rather than Sidney, and marketing sold her as the lead, so her opening scene became a promise that nobody in this film is safe. Kevin Williamson's script, written under the title Scary Movie, lets characters list the rules of horror and then breaks them in front of you. Marco Beltrami's score plays it straight while everyone on screen is winking. It remained the highest-grossing slasher until Halloween in 2018, and it earned every dollar of that record.
Best for: A Friday sleepover with friends who think they know horror.
74. Hausu (1977)
Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi
Starring: Kimiko Ikegami, Miki Jinbo, Kumiko Oba
Country: Japan
Runtime: 88 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max and Criterion Channel (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi and Plex, and free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Janus Films' North American release of Hausu, more than three decades after its Japanese debut, grossed $209,765 domestically, according to Box Office Mojo.
Hausu, also known as House, sends a schoolgirl and her friends to visit her aunt's country house, which proceeds to eat them one by one. Nobuhiko Obayashi made it for Toho with the logic of a children's drawing.
It belongs under The Supernatural because the house itself is the ghost. It ranks on Craft, for effects that are deliberately artificial and endlessly inventive, and on Endurance, because no amount of rewatching makes it less strange.
The Screendollars Take
Hausu is not a bad film made good by time. It is a film that saw ahead to how strange cinema could be. Toho asked Obayashi for a script after Jaws became a hit, and he took many ideas from his young daughter Chigumi, including a watermelon from a well that looks like a severed head and a house that eats girls. That child's logic is the key: every effect looks handmade, and every death plays like a nightmare described the next morning. Godiego's bright pop songs keep cheerfully insisting that this is fun. It is fun, and that is what makes it unnerving.
Best for: A late-night watch with friends who have seen everything.
75. Diabolique (1955)
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Starring: Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse
Country: France
Runtime: 117 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on HBO Max (subscription). Free with ads on The Roku Channel and Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Les Diaboliques won the 1954 Louis Delluc Prize and was named Best Foreign Film by the New York Film Critics Circle in 1955.
Diabolique (Les Diaboliques) is about the wife and the mistress of a cruel boarding-school headmaster, who join forces to kill him, and then find that his body will not stay where they left it. Henri-Georges Clouzot made it after The Wages of Fear, and it remains the definitive French thriller of dread.
It belongs under The Human because every horror in it comes from what people do to one another. It ranks on Craft and Idea: its patience and its final turn are as sharp as ever, and Hitchcock wanted the same novel.
The Screendollars Take
Diabolique is a film about guilt doing the work a ghost would do. Clouzot optioned Boileau-Narcejac's novel only hours before Alfred Hitchcock tried to, according to historian Susan Hayward, and Psycho, at No. 1 in this ranking, plays like Hitchcock's answer. Véra Clouzot, who brought her husband the book, gives the wife a fragility that keeps the dread rising, while Simone Signoret plays the mistress with absolute calm. The closing titles ask you not to spoil the ending for anyone, and the request still works seventy years later. Honor it.
Best for: A slow Sunday evening when you want suspense over gore.
Ranked 76–100: Hidden Gems, Cult Classics, and Rising Nightmares
The horror movies ranked 76 to 100 are the hidden gems, cult classics, and rising nightmares, led by The Masque of the Red Death (1964) at No. 76 and closing with Raw (2016) at No. 100.
Many of these are the films horror fans recommend to each other, and several are the best entry points to Hong Kong and Italian horror.
76. The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
Director: Roger Corman
Starring: Vincent Price, Hazel Court, Jane Asher
Country: United States, United Kingdom
Runtime: 90 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Prime Video and MGM+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi and YouTube. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Shot at Elstree Studios as an AIP and Anglo-Amalgamated co-production, The Masque of the Red Death reused castle sets left over from Becket (1964) and took five weeks to shoot instead of the usual three for an AIP picture.
The Masque of the Red Death is Roger Corman's adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 story, starring Vincent Price as a prince who hosts a decadent ball inside his castle while a plague kills the peasants beyond his walls. Screenwriters Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell fold in a subplot from Poe's "Hop-Frog" and another from Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "Torture by Hope," so the film plays like a compact anthology of cruelty.
It belongs to the Supernatural because the threat at the gate is death itself, given a robe and a color, and no stone wall can keep it out. Of all of Corman's Poe films, this is the one where the craft finally matches the ambition, which is why it is the one from his cycle in this ranking.
The Screendollars Take
The Masque of the Red Death is not a cheap Poe quickie. It is the one Corman film that looks like it cost what it was worth. Nicolas Roeg photographed it, in one of the first films he shot in color, and he gives the castle a saturated richness that black-and-white horror of the period could never reach. The production even left designer Daniel Haller uncredited so the film would qualify as British, and the extra weeks on borrowed Becket sets show in every corridor. Price plays Prospero as a host who is already bored with damnation. The plague arrives last, and it is the best-dressed guest at the party.
Best for: A rainy Sunday afternoon built around a Vincent Price double bill.
77. The Boxer's Omen (1983)
Director: Kuei Chih-Hung
Starring: Phillip Ko, Bolo Yeung, Kar-Man Wai
Country: Hong Kong
Runtime: 105 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder and AMC+ (subscription). Rent or buy on Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Boxer's Omen, a Shaw Brothers production, shot its Nepalese lamasery scene on location at Swayambhunath, the hilltop temple complex in Kathmandu.
The Boxer's Omen is a Hong Kong horror film from the Shaw Brothers studio about a gangster who travels to Thailand to avenge his brother, crippled in a kickboxing match, and finds himself pulled into a war of black magic. It opened in Hong Kong on 29 October 1983 and is often described as a sequel to Kuei Chih-Hung's own Bewitched (1981).
It belongs to the Supernatural, and it stretches that source of fear as far as any film in this ranking. Curses, spells and rituals are not background here; they are the entire language of the film. It is a deep cut, but no survey of horror's outer limits is complete without it.
The Screendollars Take
The Boxer's Omen is a film with martial arts and horror in it. Kuei Chih-Hung and screenwriter On Szeto use the boxing plot as a doorway and then walk straight through it into ritual and rot. The studio sent the production to Swayambhunath in Kathmandu for its temple scenes, so real stone and real altitude sit inside a story built from spells. A young Gordon Chan, later a director in his own right, worked in the effects unit, which suits a film that treats its effects as the plot. Nothing in Western horror prepares you for it, and that is the reason to watch.
Best for: A midnight screening with friends who claim they have seen everything.
78. The Sixth Sense (1999)
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Collette
Country: United States
Runtime: 107 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Netflix and Hulu (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Sixth Sense grossed $672,806,997 worldwide, including $293,506,292 in the US and Canada, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Sixth Sense follows a child psychologist, played by Bruce Willis, who takes on a frightened young patient, played by Haley Joel Osment, who says he can see the dead. M. Night Shyamalan shot it mostly on location in Philadelphia, including St. Augustine's Church in Old City.
It belongs to the Supernatural, and it scores higher on endurance than its reputation suggests. Everyone knows the ending now, yet the film still works, because the second viewing becomes a different film about grief and missed signals. It earned six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won none.
The Screendollars Take
The Sixth Sense is remembered for its ending. It should be remembered for its use of color. Shyamalan withholds red from most of the film and spends it only in isolated shots, marking each place where the other world has touched the real one. Tak Fujimoto photographs Philadelphia in sober, wintry tones, so each red object lands like a warning you were not trained to read. Osment and Toni Collette were both nominated for Oscars, and their scenes together carry the sorrow that the twist only confirms. The twist tells you what happened, but the color told you first.
Best for: A first horror night with a friend who scares easily.
79. Witchfinder General (1968)
Director: Michael Reeves
Starring: Vincent Price, Ian Ogilvy, Hilary Dwyer
Country: United Kingdom
Runtime: 87 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Prime Video and MGM+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi and YouTube. No digital rent or buy option.
Key fact: Michael Reeves co-wrote and directed Witchfinder General at 24 on a budget of £83,000, and died in February 1969, aged 25, nine months after its release.
Witchfinder General is a British period horror film set during the English Civil War, with Vincent Price as Matthew Hopkins, a self-appointed hunter of witches who travels the countryside extracting confessions, and Ian Ogilvy as a young soldier determined to stop him. It is adapted from Ronald Bassett's 1966 novel, and in the US it was released by AIP as The Conqueror Worm to tie it to the studio's Poe cycle.
It belongs to the Human because there are no witches in it, only innocent people and the men who profit from accusing them. Its cruelty, played out in open countryside, gives it real weight on Idea.
The Screendollars Take
Witchfinder General is a film about the business of persecution. A BBFC examiner called the script "a study in sadism in which every detail of cruelty and suffering is lovingly dwelt on," and the censors cut it accordingly; the uncut version was not passed until 1995. John Coquillon shoots the English countryside in soft, green daylight, so the torture takes place in landscapes that look like postcards. Vincent Price drops the playful menace of his Poe films and plays Hopkins as a bureaucrat of pain. Every era has a Matthew Hopkins, and this film shows you what he looks like in daylight.
Best for: A grey autumn evening when you want horror with no comfort.
80. In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
Director: John Carpenter
Starring: Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow
Country: United States
Runtime: 95 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): Free with ads on Tubi and The Roku Channel. Free with a library card on Hoopla. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: In the Mouth of Madness grossed $8,924,549 at the US and Canadian box office for New Line Cinema, according to Box Office Mojo.
In the Mouth of Madness stars Sam Neill as a skeptic sent to track down Sutter Cane, a best-selling horror novelist who has vanished, and whose books seem to be changing their readers. It premiered at Germany's Fantasy Filmfest in August 1994, and its US theatrical release followed in February 1995.
It belongs to the Mind because its horror is the collapse of the line between fiction and reality, experienced from inside the head of the man losing it. John Carpenter calls it the third and final part of his informal Apocalypse Trilogy, after The Thing (1982) and Prince of Darkness (1987).
The Screendollars Take
In the Mouth of Madness is a Lovecraft adaptation about what happens when a reader can no longer tell a book from the world. Michael De Luca's script borrows its title from At the Mountains of Madness and names Cane's novels after Lovecraft stories, so the film is built from the genre's own bookshelf. Gary B. Kibbe shoots small-town America with a flat, ordinary brightness that makes every wrong detail sting. Of Carpenter's three apocalypse films, this is the bleakest, because the end of the world arrives as a bestseller. Carpenter's scariest monster here is the reading public.
Best for: Late at night, right after finishing a horror novel in bed.
81. Cure (1997)
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring: Koji Yakusho, Masato Hagiwara, Tsuyoshi Ujiki
Country: Japan
Runtime: 111 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): No current subscription streaming. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Koji Yakusho won Best Actor at the 1997 Tokyo International Film Festival for Cure, where the film premiered on 6 November 1997.
Cure is a Japanese psychological horror film in which Koji Yakusho plays a police detective chasing a series of killings carried out by ordinary people who cannot explain why they did it. Janus Films brought it back in a 4K restoration that opened at New York's IFC Center on 1 October 2021.
It belongs to the Mind because the threat is not a weapon or a creature but suggestion itself, the idea that a few words can reach into anyone. Kurosawa returns in this ranking with Pulse.
The Screendollars Take
Cure is a serial killer movie. It is a film about how little it takes to switch a person off. Kurosawa originally titled it Evangelist, and it was renamed after the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack on the Tokyo subway happened during production, a real-world reminder of how far a persuasive voice can carry. Tokusho Kikumura, who later supervised the 4K restoration himself, shoots with a patience that makes ordinary rooms feel watched. Yakusho gives the detective a grinding exhaustion, the face of a man whose own calm is starting to frighten him. You leave it checking your own thoughts for fingerprints.
Best for: A quiet weeknight alone, with your phone in another room.
82. Session 9 (2001)
Director: Brad Anderson
Starring: Peter Mullan, David Caruso, Stephen Gevedon
Country: United States
Runtime: 100 minutes
Source of fear: The Mind
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder and AMC+ (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Session 9 was shot inside the disused Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts and was one of the first feature films photographed on 24p HD digital video, by cinematographer Uta Briesewitz.
Session 9 follows a struggling asbestos-removal crew who take a rushed job clearing an abandoned mental hospital and begin to come apart as the week goes on. Brad Anderson co-wrote it with co-star Stephen Gevedon and made it for $1.5 million.
It belongs to the Mind because the building never needs to attack anyone; the pressure of deadlines, fatigue and old grievances does the damage. It grossed $378,176 in US theaters, according to The Numbers, a figure far smaller than the place it holds in this ranking.
The Screendollars Take
Session 9 is a workplace drama in which the workplace happens to be a ruin, a horror-esque setting. The cast took asbestos abatement training before shooting inside the real Danvers State Hospital, so the dust and decay on screen were never set dressing. Uta Briesewitz's early 24p digital photography gives the building a cold, clinical flatness where another film would reach for gothic shadow. The score by experimental group Climax Golden Twins, with a contribution from Vladimir Ussachevsky, sounds less like music than like the building breathing. The ghosts never need to appear, because the building does all the work.
Best for: A Friday night after a brutal week at work.
83. Under the Shadow (2016)
Director: Babak Anvari
Starring: Narges Rashidi, Avin Manshadi, Bobby Naderi
Country: United Kingdom, Jordan, Qatar
Runtime: 84 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Netflix (subscription). Free with a library card on Hoopla. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Under the Shadow won the 2017 BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer, accepted by Babak Anvari with producers Emily Leo, Oliver Roskill and Lucan Toh.
Under the Shadow is a Persian-language horror film that follows a mother and her young daughter in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War, alone in their apartment building as the bombing intensifies and the girl insists something else has come inside. It premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, where Netflix acquired it.
It belongs to the Supernatural, but its real achievement is the way it binds a folkloric threat to a political one, so neither can be separated from the other. The UK selected it as its entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, an unusual honor for a debut horror feature.
The Screendollars Take
Under the Shadow is not a ghost story set during a war. It is a war story in which the ghost is the only thing honest enough to show up in person. Babak Anvari confines almost everything to one building, and the walls become a pressure gauge for the city outside. Kit Fraser's photography keeps the light grey and rationed, as if electricity itself were under curfew. Narges Rashidi carries the film as a mother whose fear for her child is tangled with anger at the life she has been allowed. The scariest sound in it is the silence after the bombs stop.
Best for: The night after a Babadook rewatch, when you want its sharper cousin.
84. I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Starring: Frances Dee, Tom Conway, James Ellison
Country: United States
Runtime: 69 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): No current subscription streaming. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Produced by Val Lewton for RKO, I Walked with a Zombie was shot between 26 October and 19 November 1942, with screenwriters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray using Jane Eyre as the model for its structure.
I Walked with a Zombie follows a nurse, played by Frances Dee, who takes a job on a Caribbean island caring for a plantation owner's wife, a woman who moves through the house in a trance. Criterion released a new 4K restoration on 8 October 2024, paired with another Val Lewton production, The Seventh Victim.
It belongs to the Supernatural, though it treats the supernatural as a question it refuses to settle. It is the clearest proof in this ranking that suggestion can frighten more than spectacle.
The Screendollars Take
I Walked with a Zombie is not a zombie movie in any modern sense. It is a gothic romance that walks slowly into a nightmare and never raises its voice. RKO handed Lewton the lurid title first, lifted from an American Weekly article by Inez Wallace, and his writers answered it with Jane Eyre as a blueprint, which tells you how little interest they had in cheap shocks. Wallace's "zombies" were drugged plantation workers, not the undead, and Tourneur keeps that uncertainty alive under J. Roy Hunt's shadowed black-and-white photography and Roy Webb's subdued score. At 69 minutes, it proves dread needs no running time, only patience.
Best for: A candlelit night when you want dread without a drop of gore.
85. The Vanishing (1988)
Director: George Sluizer
Starring: Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege
Country: Netherlands, France
Runtime: 106 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): No current subscription streaming. Rent or buy on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Key fact: The Vanishing was the Netherlands' submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar but was disqualified because the Academy judged it had too much French dialogue to represent the Netherlands.
The Vanishing, released in the Netherlands as Spoorloos, follows a Dutch man whose girlfriend disappears without a trace during a road trip in France, and who spends years trying to learn what happened to her. George Sluizer adapted it with Tim Krabbé from Krabbé's 1984 novella The Golden Egg, shooting largely in Nîmes and the Netherlands.
It belongs to the Human because its horror comes from an ordinary man's patience and planning, with no supernatural cover at all. It won Best Film at the 1988 Netherlands Film Festival, and it remains far more frightening than the 1993 American remake.
The Screendollars Take
The Vanishing is a mystery film, among many things. It shows you the man responsible early on, and it is still the most frightening film ever made about the need to know. Sluizer splits the story between the searcher and the abductor, so you spend as much time inside cold, methodical preparation as you do inside grief. Johanna ter Steege, in her feature debut, won the European Film Award for Best Supporting Actress for a role that leaves a larger absence than its screen time would suggest. Toni Kuhn shoots French roads in bright, unremarkable light, which is exactly what makes them unbearable. Curiosity is the monster, and you share it.
Best for: The night before a long road trip, if you are brave.
86. Hereditary (2018)
Director: Ari Aster
Starring: Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro
Country: United States
Runtime: 127 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Hulu and Prime Video (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi. Free with a library card on Kanopy and Hoopla. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Hereditary grossed $90,431,327 worldwide, including $44,069,456 in the US and Canada, according to Box Office Mojo.
Hereditary is Ari Aster's film about a family that begins to unravel after the death of its secretive grandmother, with Toni Collette as the mother trying to hold the house together. In late July 2018, it became A24's highest-grossing film worldwide, a record it held until June 2022.
It belongs to the Supernatural, yet for much of its running time it plays as a family tragedy, which is why its turn into occult horror hits so hard. It is grief-driven horror at its most punishing, and it scores at the top of the range on fear for first-time viewers.
The Screendollars Take
Hereditary makes you uncomfortable. It is horror that makes you sit with your feelings. It is a film about inheriting your family's worst secret along with the furniture. Aster built most of the interiors on a soundstage to give the house its dollhouse look, and Pawel Pogorzelski's camera frames the rooms as if someone much larger were peering in. Colin Stetson's score sounds less like a saxophone than like something shifting under the floorboards. Collette's performance, all clenched control giving way to raw sound, is the reason the second half holds instead of tipping into camp. The family tree is the monster, and every branch was grown on purpose.
Best for: Any night you are not visiting your parents the next day.
87. The Substance (2024)
Director: Coralie Fargeat
Starring: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Country: France, United Kingdom, United States
Runtime: 141 minutes
Source of fear: The Body
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Hulu and MUBI (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The Substance grossed $77,316,812 worldwide as of October 2026, including $17,584,795 in the US and Canada through domestic distributor MUBI, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Substance stars Demi Moore as a fading television fitness star who takes a mysterious serum that produces a younger version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley, on the condition that the two share a single life. It premiered in competition at Cannes on 19 May 2024 and won Best Screenplay.
It belongs to the Body, and it took the subgenre's grossest tools all the way to the Academy Awards. It received five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and Moore won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy.
The Screendollars Take
The Substance is not a satire with gore in it. The gore is the satire, every wound an argument about what the industry does to women's bodies. Coralie Fargeat shot it entirely in France, with the Côte d'Azur standing in for Los Angeles, and Benjamin Kračun lights it like a commercial that has started to rot. Pierre-Olivier Persin, Stéphanie Guillon and Marilyne Scarselli won the Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, the right award for a film whose thesis lives in its prosthetics. Moore plays the role with no vanity at all. The mirror wins, and Fargeat makes you watch it collect.
Best for: Right after scrolling past one too many anti-aging ads.
88. Get Out (2017)
Director: Jordan Peele
Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford
Country: United States
Runtime: 104 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): No subscription streaming from 1 November 2026. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Get Out grossed $259,718,091 worldwide, including $176,040,665 in the US and Canada, according to Box Office Mojo.
Get Out follows Chris, played by Daniel Kaluuya, a young Black man who goes with his white girlfriend, played by Allison Williams, to meet her parents for a weekend at their country home. Jordan Peele won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for it, the first African-American winner in that category.
It belongs to the Human because every threat in it comes from people who smile while they do it. It scores at the top of the range on idea.
The Screendollars Take
Get Out is horror in every sense. It is a horror film about polite people and the things they want from you. It’s about being gaslit and losing your mind thinking you’re wrong when you’re right. Michael Abels' score uses Swahili vocals, and Peele has said the refrain works as a warning to Chris to listen to his ancestors, so the soundtrack is shouting advice the hero cannot understand. Peele shot it in 23 days in Fairhope and Mobile, Alabama, on a $4.5 million budget, and he replaced an original ending, in which Chris is arrested, after test screenings. Peele found the horror in a dinner party, and no dinner party has felt safe since.
Best for: Thanksgiving week, before you meet anyone's parents.
89. Pulse (2001)
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring: Kumiko Aso, Haruhiko Kato, Koyuki
Country: Japan
Runtime: 119 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on AMC+ (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Key fact: Pulse grossed $389,009 worldwide, including $51,420 from its 2005 US release, according to Box Office Mojo.
Pulse (Kairo) is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 J-horror film in which the dead begin reaching the living through the internet, and Tokyo slowly empties around a handful of survivors. It screened in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2001, and Dimension Films later bought its US and remake rights.
Pulse belongs among the best horror movies because its supernatural threat is loneliness given a delivery system. Ringu frightens you with a deadline; Pulse frightens you with a mood, and that mood has only grown more accurate as life moved online. It scores highest on Idea and Endurance, because its scares arrive slowly and the unease they leave behind does not fade.
The Screendollars Take
Pulse is not a ghost story about the internet. It is a film about what happens when connection becomes a substitute for company. Jun'ichiro Hayashi's cinematography keeps people small inside rooms that look abandoned even when someone is standing in them, and Takefumi Haketa's score sits so low that silence seems to do most of the work. Toho released it in February 2001, years before most of its audience carried the internet in a pocket, which makes its picture of a city vanishing into screens feel less like fiction every year. The ghosts in Pulse are not angry, only lonely, and loneliness turns out to be contagious.
Best for: Alone at 2 a.m., after an hour of scrolling.
90. The Platform (2019)
Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
Starring: Ivan Massague, Antonia San Juan, Zorion Eguileor
Country: Spain
Runtime: 94 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Netflix (subscription). No digital rent or buy option.
Key fact: The Platform won the Midnight Madness People's Choice Award at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, where it also secured a worldwide streaming deal with Netflix.
The Platform (El hoyo) is a Spanish dystopian horror film set in a vertical prison where a single slab of food descends floor by floor, so those at the top feast while those below wait for scraps. Ivan Massague plays Goreng, a new inmate who has to learn the rules of the tower from the inside.
The Platform is the Human source of fear in its purest form: no monster, no ghost, only people deciding how much to leave for the floor beneath them. It earns its place on Idea above all, and its craft carries the allegory without ever stopping to explain it, which is why the film plays as a thriller first and a sermon never.
The Screendollars Take
The Platform is a prison horror film. It is a dinner table where everyone can see exactly who is starving. Only two tiers of concrete cells were physically built, at a Red Cross facility in a Bilbao port, with the rest of the tower added through visual effects, and that economy becomes the film's grammar: the same cell, the same table, a different number on the wall. The production shot in chronological order over six weeks, so Massague's physical decline across the story was real rather than applied in the makeup chair. It won the Goya Award for Best Special Effects for a tower that barely exists. The horror is not the hole. It is the arithmetic.
Best for: Watching with the friend who loves arguing about politics.
91. Noroi: The Curse (2005)
Director: Koji Shiraishi
Starring: Jin Muraki, Marika Matsumoto, Rio Kanno
Country: Japan
Runtime: 115 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Free with ads on Tubi, and free with a library card on Hoopla. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Noroi: The Curse received its first Blu-ray release in October 2024, as the centerpiece of Arrow Video's limited-edition J-Horror Rising box set.
Noroi: The Curse is a Japanese found-footage film presented as the finished documentary of paranormal investigator Masafumi Kobayashi, played by Jin Muraki, whose research into a string of unrelated strange events begins to point toward one source. The actress Marika Matsumoto appears as a fictionalized version of herself, which blurs the line between the film and the television it imitates.
Noroi is the most patient found-footage horror film ever made, and patience is its weapon. It builds its fear out of fragments of footage until the pattern becomes impossible to unsee, which is why it scores so high on Fear for a film with almost no conventional scares.
The Screendollars Take
Noroi is a conspiracy board that slowly turns around to face you. Shiraishi, who wrote the script with Naoyuki Yokota, builds its mythology around the demon Kagutaba and the village of Shimokage in Nagano Prefecture, whose people performed an annual appeasement ritual until the village was abandoned in 1978. That history arrives in fragments, never in a single explanation, so you assemble the curse yourself and become complicit in it. The flat look of real Japanese television does the rest, because nothing in Noroi appears designed to frighten you. By the time Kobayashi understands, you already have.
Best for: A quiet late night when you can give it full attention.
92. The Addiction (1995)
Director: Abel Ferrara
Starring: Lili Taylor, Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra
Country: United States
Runtime: 82 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Criterion Channel (subscription). Free with ads on Plex, and free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Released by October Films on 6 October 1995, The Addiction grossed $307,308 at the US domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
The Addiction is Abel Ferrara's black-and-white vampire film about a New York philosophy student, played by Lili Taylor, who is bitten on the street and begins to treat her new hunger as a question of ethics. It was shot in Greenwich Village and on the NYU campus in the late summer of 1994.
The Addiction places the Monster inside the mind of the person becoming one, and it uses vampirism as a lens on addiction, sin, and responsibility. It ranks lower on Fear than its neighbors, but its Idea score is among the highest in the ranking, and it competed for the Golden Bear at the 45th Berlin International Film Festival.
The Screendollars Take
The Addiction is a vampire movie. It is also a film about a seminar on guilt that happens to draw blood. Ken Kelsch's black-and-white photography turns Greenwich Village into a city of gray streets where daylight offers no comfort, and Nicholas St. John's script lets characters argue about evil as if they were defending a thesis. Ferrara wrote the vampire Peina as a woman, but Christopher Walken read the part, wanted it, and got it, and his brief scenes give the film its coldest minutes. Lili Taylor makes hunger sound like a theory, then makes the theory sound like hunger.
Best for: A rainy weeknight after a long day of reading.
93. Talk to Me (2022)
Director: Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou
Starring: Sophie Wilde, Alexandra Jensen, Joe Bird
Country: Australia
Runtime: 95 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Free with ads on Tubi, The Roku Channel and Plex. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Talk to Me grossed $92,203,980 worldwide, including $48,299,436 domestic for A24, according to Box Office Mojo.
Talk to Me is an Australian possession film in which a group of teenagers passes around a mysterious hand that lets spirits take over whoever grips it, as long as they let go in time, and they film every turn on their phones. It premiered on 30 October 2022 as the closing-night film of the Adelaide Film Festival and played Sundance in 2023 before A24 acquired its US rights.
Talk to Me takes the oldest idea in the Supernatural category, talking to the dead, and recasts it as a party game, and its Fear score comes from how quickly the fun curdles. It also won eight AACTA Awards, including Best Film.
The Screendollars Take
Talk to Me is not a séance movie. It is a film about a generation that would rather record a dare than refuse one. Danny Philippou, who wrote the script with Bill Hinzman from a concept by Daley Pearson, and his co-director Michael Philippou stage each possession as a trick everyone wants a turn at, which is exactly why the consequences land so hard. Aaron McLisky's camera stays close on faces during the grip, and Sophie Wilde, who won the AACTA Award for Best Actress, plays her character's grief as a hunger the ritual seems to feed. Letting go is the only rule, and nobody in the film is any good at it.
Best for: A group movie night, with every phone in another room.
94. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
Director: Shinya Tsukamoto
Starring: Tomorowo Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Shinya Tsukamoto
Country: Japan
Runtime: 67 minutes
Source of fear: The Body
Where to watch (US): Streaming on AsianCrush, Midnight Pulp and Night Flight Plus (subscription). Free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Tetsuo: The Iron Man won the top award at Italy's Fantafestival in Rome.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man is Shinya Tsukamoto's black-and-white cyberpunk nightmare about a Tokyo salaryman whose body begins turning into scrap metal after a run-in with a man obsessed with machinery. At 67 minutes, it never stops to catch its breath.
Tetsuo is Body horror at its most extreme and most handmade, and its Craft score rests on how much one small crew achieved with almost nothing. It remains the clearest proof in the ranking that a body-horror film does not need a studio budget to feel enormous.
The Screendollars Take
Tetsuo is a weird body-horror monster film meant to make you think. It is a body learning to hate itself in the language of a factory. Tsukamoto shot it on 16mm, a step up from his earlier 8mm work so the film could play in theaters, and he wrote, produced, edited, and co-starred as the Metal Fetishist, which explains why every frame feels like one person's fever. Composer Chu Ishikawa had never scored a film before and was first told to use only metal sounds, and his soundtrack seems to grind the picture forward like machinery. Cronenberg made the body strange. Tsukamoto made it rust.
Best for: Very late at night, with the volume turned all the way up.
95. The House That Jack Built (2018)
Director: Lars von Trier
Starring: Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman
Country: Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden
Runtime: 152 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder and AMC+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi and The Roku Channel, and free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: The House That Jack Built grossed $3,128,316 worldwide, including $258,106 domestic for IFC Films, according to Box Office Mojo.
The House That Jack Built follows Jack, a serial killer played by Matt Dillon, as he recounts his murders to Verge, a guide figure played by Bruno Ganz, on a journey modeled on Dante's Inferno. At its out-of-competition Cannes premiere on 14 May 2018, more than 100 audience members reportedly walked out, and the screening still ended with a six-minute standing ovation.
This is the hardest film in the ranking to recommend and one of the easiest to defend. It takes the Human source of fear inside a killer's vanity rather than his victims' terror, and it earns its place on Idea: a filmmaker asking, with uncomfortable directness, whether cruelty can ever be art.
The Screendollars Take
The House That Jack Built is not a serial-killer film. It is a director putting his own reputation on trial and refusing to plead. Von Trier uses Dante's Inferno as the frame, with Jack defending his killings as art while Verge listens like a weary examiner, and the argument disturbs more than the violence because Jack is so pleased with himself. Manuel Alberto Claro's cinematography keeps the murders flat and procedural, which denies you the release a slasher offers. IFC's one-night US screening of the uncensored director's cut in November 2018 even drew an MPAA statement that it broke the rating system's rules. Jack wants an audience, and the film makes you one.
Best for: A night when you want to argue rather than sleep.
96. Stage Fright (1987)
Director: Michele Soavi
Starring: David Brandon, Barbara Cupisti, Giovanni Lombardo Radice
Country: Italy
Runtime: 90 minutes
Source of fear: The Human
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Prime Video (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi and Pluto TV. Rent or buy on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Key fact: Stage Fright was the feature directing debut of Dario Argento's protégé Michele Soavi, made for producer Joe D'Amato.
Stage Fright, also known as StageFright and Aquarius and released in Italy as Deliria, locks a theater troupe inside their rehearsal space overnight with an escaped patient wearing the giant owl costume made for their own show. That show is a musical about a fictional mass murderer called the Night Owl, so the cast is rehearsing the very thing about to happen to them.
Stage Fright is the most stylish Italian slasher of the late 1980s, and it represents the Human source of fear at its most theatrical. Its Craft score is the reason it is here: Soavi takes a thin, familiar setup and makes it play through camera movement, color, and sound.
The Screendollars Take
Stage Fright is not a giallo. It is a slasher that has studied its Argento and decided to be leaner about it. Soavi had worked as an assistant director on Argento's Tenebrae and Phenomena, and he later said he "didn't feel ready to direct" when the film was offered to him, yet its central image of a killer in an oversized owl head moving through a theater is the work of a natural. Simon Boswell, a British composer who had worked with Lamberto Bava on Demons 2, gives the bloodshed a pulse that never lets the pace drop. The owl mask is absurd, and the film dares you to laugh at it.
Best for: The second half of a late-night Italian horror double bill.
97. Seeding of a Ghost (1983)
Director: Chuan Yang (also credited as Yang Chuan)
Starring: Phillip Ko, Maria Yuen, Norman Tsui
Country: Hong Kong
Runtime: 90 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder and AMC+ (subscription). Rent or buy on Apple TV.
Key fact: Seeding of a Ghost was one of the last black-magic horror films Shaw Brothers made before the studio stopped film production in 1986.
Seeding of a Ghost is a Shaw Brothers black-magic film about a Hong Kong taxi driver who turns to a sorcerer for revenge after his wife is murdered. It opened in Hong Kong on 29 December 1983, near the end of the studio's horror cycle, and it contains scenes of sexual violence alongside its graphic gore.
Seeding of a Ghost represents the Supernatural as Hong Kong's black-magic cycle understood it: curses, rituals and bodily payment for every favor. It ranks here on Fear and nerve rather than polish, and it stands as one of the boldest examples of a regional horror tradition that most Western lists ignore.
The Screendollars Take
Seeding of a Ghost is a revenge plot film. It is the moment a studio's horror cycle stopped asking permission. The story spends its early stretch on infidelity and grief, then hands everything over to a climax in which the murdered wife's ghost is seeded into another woman, who gives birth to a tentacled creature that attacks a cocktail party. Even the score is scavenged, credited to Chin Yung Shing and Chen-Hou Su but built mostly from De Wolfe library music and cues lifted from other films. Arrow Video's 2K remaster from the original negative, in its Shawscope: Volume 4 set, finally gives the excess a proper frame. Restraint was never on the menu, and the film knows it.
Best for: A midnight screening with friends who think they have seen everything.
98. Cemetery Man (1994)
Director: Michele Soavi
Starring: Rupert Everett, François Hadji-Lazaro, Anna Falchi
Country: Italy, France, Germany
Runtime: 103 minutes
Source of fear: The Monster
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder, AMC+, and Criterion Channel (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi and Pluto TV, and free with a library card on Kanopy. Rent or buy on Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
Key fact: Retitled Cemetery Man by US distributor October Films and released on 26 April 1996, the film grossed $253,986 at the US domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore) stars Rupert Everett as Francesco Dellamorte, the caretaker of a small Italian cemetery where the dead refuse to stay buried and he puts them back down with weary efficiency. It is Michele Soavi's second film in this ranking, and the one where his style found its subject.
Cemetery Man treats the Monster as routine rather than threat, which turns a zombie film into a melancholy comedy about love, work and death. It earns its place on Idea and Endurance, because what seems like a cult curiosity on first viewing reads as a sad, funny fable on the second.
The Screendollars Take
Cemetery Man is a zombie comedy. The film is a love story told by a man who has stopped believing the living are much different from the dead. Gianni Romoli adapted it from Tiziano Sclavi's novel, and Sclavi's comic hero Dylan Dog, who shares traits with Dellamorte, was visually based on Rupert Everett, so the casting closes a loop that began on the page. Mauro Marchetti's cinematography and Manuel De Sica's score give the graveyard a romantic, almost operatic sweep that sits strangely against the drudgery of reburial. The zombies are the easy part of the job. The living are what wear Dellamorte down.
Best for: Halloween night, after the last trick-or-treater has gone home.
99. Insidious (2010)
Director: James Wan
Starring: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Barbara Hershey
Country: United States, Canada, United Kingdom
Runtime: 103 minutes
Source of fear: The Supernatural
Where to watch (US): Streaming on Shudder, AMC+, and MGM+ (subscription). Free with ads on Tubi. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home and Plex.
Key fact: Insidious grossed $100,106,454 worldwide, including $54,009,150 domestic for FilmDistrict, according to Box Office Mojo.
Insidious follows a family, led by Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne, whose young son falls into an unexplained coma soon after they move into a new house, and whose attempts to escape what follows lead somewhere far stranger than a haunted home. It premiered on 14 September 2010 in the Midnight Madness program at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Insidious earns its place on Fear and Idea. Made for a reported $1.5 million, it shows how far a small supernatural film can travel, and it makes a natural companion to Wan's The Conjuring, at No. 47 in this ranking.
The Screendollars Take
Insidious looks like a ‘haunted-house’ type of film. It is a haunted-family film that moves out of the house to prove the point. Leigh Whannell's script takes the familiar opening of a new home and strange noises, then reroutes the danger into the family itself, so the change of address solves nothing. Composer Joseph Bishara also appears on screen as the demon, and the film's sound and its monster seem to come from the same place, every sting arriving as though the creature itself had played it. Principal photography was completed in three weeks, and the speed shows as momentum rather than a shortcut. Wan earns every jump scare he spends.
Best for: A date night with someone who swears they do not scare easily.
100. Raw (2016)
Director: Julia Ducournau
Starring: Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Nait Oufella
Country: France, Belgium
Runtime: 99 minutes
Source of fear: The Body
Where to watch (US): No confirmed subscription streaming. Rent or buy on Apple TV.
Key fact: Raw grossed $3,164,983 worldwide, including $514,870 domestic for Focus World, according to Box Office Mojo.
Raw (Grave) follows Justine, a lifelong vegetarian played by Garance Marillier, who starts veterinary school and, after a hazing ritual forces her to eat raw meat, develops an appetite she cannot control. Julia Ducournau shot it on location at the University of Liège in Belgium, chosen for its American-style campus.
Raw brings the body as a source of fear into the coming-of-age story, and it is the strongest debut feature in the bottom tier of the ranking. It won the FIPRESCI Prize in the Critics' Week section at Cannes in 2016 and the 2017 Prix Louis-Delluc for best first film.
The Screendollars Take
Raw is a coming-of-age story that takes the idea of discovering your appetites at its most literal. Ducournau sets the hunger against a campus of initiation rituals, so Justine's change reads both as horror and as an exaggerated version of every first year away from home. Ruben Impens's cinematography keeps the colors clinical and the bodies close, while Jim Williams's score treats each craving like a revelation rather than a symptom. At a 2016 Toronto International Film Festival screening, some viewers reportedly fainted and needed emergency medical attention, which says less about the gore than about how close the film keeps you. The meat is not the shocking part. The recognition is.
Best for: After a family dinner you would rather not discuss.
What Are the Best Horror Movies by Subgenre?
The best horror movie in each subgenre is a different film, because each subgenre frightens you differently. The picks below are drawn only from the ranked 100, with each film's overall rank in brackets, so you can jump straight to the kind of fear you are in the mood for.
Best Supernatural Horror Movies
The best supernatural horror movie is The Exorcist (1973), ranked No. 2 overall, because it treats demonic possession with the procedural seriousness of a medical drama.
- The Innocents (No. 10) and The Haunting (No. 19) prove that a ghost story frightens hardest when you never quite see the ghost.
- Ringu (No. 20) carried that restraint into the video age.
- The Changeling (No. 33) built a haunted-house film around grief.
- The Conjuring (No. 47) showed that old-fashioned haunting technique could still fill multiplexes in the 2010s.
Best Psychological Horror Movies
The best psychological horror movie is The Shining (1980), ranked No. 3 overall, because the hotel never needs to be haunted for Jack Torrance to come apart.
- Repulsion (No. 72)
- Jacob's Ladder (No. 55)
- Cure (No. 81)
- The Babadook (No. 48)
- The Lighthouse (No. 65)
Best Slasher Movies
The best slasher movie is Psycho (1960), ranked No. 1 overall, because it proved that the most frightening killer can be the polite young man behind the front desk.
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (No. 4)
- Black Christmas (No. 61)
- Halloween (No. 11)
- A Nightmare on Elm Street (No. 25)
- Scream (No. 73)
- Stage Fright (No. 96)
Best Folk Horror and Cult Horror Movies
The best folk horror movie is The Wicker Man (1973), ranked No. 14 overall, because its island community is polite, cheerful, and completely certain of what it is about to do.
- Witchfinder General (No. 79)
- The Witch (No. 53)
- Midsommar (No. 49)
- Rosemary's Baby (No. 6)
- The House of the Devil (No. 59)
Best Body Horror Movies
The best body horror movie is The Fly (1986), ranked No. 15 overall, because David Cronenberg turned a creature feature into a love story about watching someone you love fall apart.
- Videodrome (No. 36)
- The Brood (No. 64)
- Eyes Without a Face (No. 62)
- Tetsuo: The Iron Man (No. 94)
- The Substance (No. 87)
- Raw (No. 100)
Best Found Footage Horror Movies
The best found footage horror movie is The Blair Witch Project (1999), ranked No. 41 overall, because for 81 minutes it makes you believe that what you are watching might be real.
- [REC] (No. 46)
- Noroi: The Curse (No. 91)
Best Comedy Horror Movies
The best comedy horror movie is Evil Dead II (1987), ranked No. 38 overall, because it plays Bruce Campbell's suffering as slapstick without ever letting the horror go slack.
- An American Werewolf in London (No. 35)
- The Return of the Living Dead (No. 52)
- Hausu (No. 74)
- Cemetery Man (No. 98) is the gothic Italian fable that finds the funny side of digging graves for the dead who will not stay in them.
Best Gothic Horror and Vampire Movies
The best vampire movie is Nosferatu (1922), ranked No. 12 overall, because Count Orlok still looks like nothing else in cinema a century later.
- Vampyr (No. 71) is the dreamlike art-house alternative.
- Dracula (No. 58)
- Let the Right One In (No. 63)
- Martin (No. 54)
- The Addiction (No. 92)
- Sinners (No. 50) is the vampire film that proved the genre can still be a blockbuster event in 2025.
- Bride of Frankenstein (No. 26)
- The Masque of the Red Death (No. 76)
What Are the Best Horror Movies of Each Decade?
The best horror movie of every decade since the 1920s appears in this ranking, and the 1980s supply the most films of any decade, with the 1970s and 2010s close behind. The picks below run in order, with each film's overall rank in brackets, so you can see how the genre's idea of fear changed from silent Expressionism to the present.
Best Horror Movies of the 1920s–1950s: The Universal and Early Classics
The best horror movie made before 1960 is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), ranked No. 9 overall, with Nosferatu (1922) close behind at No. 12. Those two German silents still define what early screen horror looks like, and Universal followed with Frankenstein (1931, No. 27), The Invisible Man (1933, No. 68) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935, No. 26). Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932, No. 71) went the other way, toward dream. In the 1940s and 1950s, the best work came from filmmakers who trusted suggestion, from I Walked with a Zombie (1943, No. 84) to Diabolique (1955, No. 75) and Night of the Demon (1957, No. 70), before Hammer's Dracula (1958, No. 58) brought color and blood.
Best Horror Movies of the 1960s–1970s: The Golden Age
The best horror movie of the 1960s and 1970s is Psycho (1960), ranked No. 1 overall, and the two decades it opened are the richest in the genre's history. The 1960s gave you Rosemary's Baby, Night of the Living Dead, The Innocents, and The Haunting, all inside the top 20. The 1970s then delivered The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Alien, Halloween, Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man inside the top 15. Between them, the two decades account for 13 of the top 20 films in this ranking.
Best Horror Movies of the 1980s: The Slasher Boom
The best horror movie of the 1980s is The Shining (1980), ranked No. 3 overall, followed by The Thing (1982) at No. 8. The decade is remembered for the slasher sequels that filled video shelves, but its best horror came from practical-effects craftsmen and directors with something to say about the body. The Fly, Videodrome, Hellraiser and An American Werewolf in London all rank, alongside A Nightmare on Elm Street, the slasher that rose above the boom. The 1980s also produced the wildest deep cuts here, from Hong Kong's The Boxer's Omen and Seeding of a Ghost to Japan's Tetsuo: The Iron Man.
Best Horror Movies of the 1990s: Post-Modern and Neo-Horror
The best horror movie of the 1990s is The Silence of the Lambs (1991), ranked No. 17 overall. The decade split in two directions. In the United States, Scream (1996) and The Blair Witch Project (1999) rewrote how horror talked to its audience, one through self-aware wit and the other through apparent reality. In Japan, Ringu (1998), Cure (1997) and Audition (1999) favored restrained, slow-burn dread. The Sixth Sense (1999) bridged both, a ghost story that became a mainstream phenomenon.
Best Horror Movies of the 2000s: Torture Porn and J-Horror
The best horror movie of the 2000s is Martyrs (2008), ranked No. 21 overall and the highest-placed 21st-century film in the ranking. The decade is often reduced to the American torture cycle, but none of those films made the cut, because the best extreme horror of the era came from France. J-horror is the decade's other legacy: Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), Pulse (2001) and Noroi: The Curse (2005) all rank. Britain answered with 28 Days Later (2002) and The Descent (2005), Spain with [REC] (2007), and Sweden with Let the Right One In (2008).
Best Horror Movies of the 2010s: The Elevated Horror Era
The best horror movie of the 2010s is The Conjuring (2013), ranked No. 47 overall, though the decade's reputation rests on the independent films around it. The Babadook, The Witch, It Follows, Hereditary, Midsommar, The Lighthouse and Get Out all rank. The label "elevated horror" is a marketing term, and an unfair one to the decades that came before, but it describes something real: a run of horror films about grief, family, race and faith that critics and audiences took seriously at the same time.
Best Horror Movies of the 2020s: The New Wave
The best horror movie of the 2020s so far is Sinners (2025), ranked No. 50 overall. Ryan Coogler's vampire film proved that original horror can still be a blockbuster event, and The Substance (2024) and Talk to Me (2022) proved that it can still come from almost anywhere. The decade is young, and these three films are the ones that have already earned a place among the best horror movies ever made.
What Are the Best International Horror Movies?
The best non-English-language horror movie in the ranking is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the German silent at No. 9, and the highest-ranked Asian film is Ringu (1998) at No. 20. Fear needs very little translation, and the ranking draws on more than a dozen countries. The sections below group the best international horror movies by country, with each film's overall rank in brackets.
Best Japanese Horror Movies
The best Japanese horror movie is Ringu (1998), ranked No. 20 overall, the film that was remade in both Korea and Hollywood. Japan has nine films in the ranking, more than any other non-English-language cinema. Audition (No. 40) and Cure (No. 81) are the slow-burn psychological masterclasses, Ju-On: The Grudge (No. 42), Pulse (No. 89) and Noroi: The Curse (No. 91) are the supernatural core, Kwaidan (No. 51) is the painterly anthology of folk ghost stories, Hausu (No. 74) is the psychedelic outlier, and Tetsuo: The Iron Man (No. 94) is the industrial body-horror nightmare.
Best Korean Horror Movies
The best Korean horror movie is Train to Busan (2016), ranked No. 60 overall, a zombie film set almost entirely on a high-speed train that works as both an action thriller and a study of who people become in a crisis. It is the only Korean film in the top 100, which is an honest reflection of how competitive the ranking is rather than of Korea's horror output. A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) and The Wailing (2016) are both in the Honorable Mentions below, and either would be a natural next step after Train to Busan.
Best French Horror Movies
The best French horror movie is Martyrs (2008), ranked No. 21 overall and one of the most extreme films in the ranking. French horror runs on two tracks. The classical track is cold, precise and surgical: Diabolique (No. 75) and Eyes Without a Face (No. 62). The modern track is physical and confrontational, and it belongs to Martyrs, The Substance (No. 87) and Raw (No. 100). France also co-produced Possession (No. 24), Andrzej Żuławski's Berlin-set breakdown, and The Vanishing (No. 85), the Dutch-French abduction thriller.
Best British Horror Movies
The best British horror movie is The Shining (1980), ranked No. 3 overall, a British-American co-production, followed by two more co-productions, Alien (No. 5) and The Innocents (No. 10), Jack Clayton's adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. The highest-ranked wholly British film is The Wicker Man (No. 14). Britain places more films in the ranking than any country except the United States. Don't Look Now (No. 13) and The Wicker Man both arrived in 1973, Peeping Tom (No. 28) scandalized critics in 1960, and Hammer's Dracula (No. 58), Night of the Demon (No. 70), Repulsion (No. 72) and Witchfinder General (No. 79) cover the rest of that golden era. Modern British horror is represented by 28 Days Later (No. 43), The Descent (No. 44), and Under the Shadow (No. 83).
Best Horror Movies From Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Beyond
The best horror movie in the ranking with Latin American roots is Pan's Labyrinth (2006), ranked No. 45, a Spanish-Mexican co-production directed by Guillermo del Toro. No film made wholly in Latin America or Southeast Asia reaches the top 100, a gap worth naming plainly. The closest link to Southeast Asia comes from Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers studio: The Boxer's Omen (No. 77), whose black-magic plot carries its hero to Thailand, and Seeding of a Ghost (No. 97). Beyond those, Spain contributes [REC] (No. 46), The Skin I Live In (No. 66) and The Platform (No. 90), Italy contributes Suspiria (No. 18), Deep Red (No. 31), Stage Fright (No. 96) and Cemetery Man (No. 98), and Australia contributes The Babadook (No. 48) and Talk to Me (No. 93). Sweden's Let the Right One In (No. 63), Czechoslovakia's The Cremator (No. 57) and the Iranian-set Under the Shadow (No. 83) complete one of the widest maps in the genre.
Where Can You Stream the 100 Best Horror Movies?
The best places to stream horror movies in the US right now are AMC+, which carries more of the ranked films than any other service, and the horror specialist Shudder, followed by Prime Video and HBO Max. Tubi streams dozens of the ranked films free, Plex and Kanopy add more, and Pluto TV adds a handful. Each platform below lists the ranked films it includes with a subscription or free, with overall rank in brackets, as verified on JustWatch (US) in October 2026 and updated for the titles leaving on 1 November 2026. Availability is US and was verified at the time of writing; check JustWatch for your region.
Best Horror Movies on Netflix Right Now
The best horror movie on Netflix right now is Psycho (1960), ranked No. 1 overall. Netflix also streams The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (4), Alien (5), Jaws (22), The Sixth Sense (78), Under the Shadow (83), and The Platform (90). Netflix's horror shelf is small but strong at the top, with three of the ranking's top five films in one place.
Best Horror Movies on Amazon Prime Video
The best horror movie included with Prime Video is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), ranked No. 4 overall. Prime Video also includes The Thing (8), Nosferatu (12), The Wicker Man (14), Carrie (23), Carnival of Souls (30), An American Werewolf in London (35), Hellraiser (37), Candyman (39), Midsommar (49), The Witch (53), The House of the Devil (59), Black Christmas (61), Let the Right One In (63), The Masque of the Red Death (76), Witchfinder General (79), Hereditary (86) and Stage Fright (96). The Silence of the Lambs, Bride of Frankenstein, Videodrome and The Invisible Man left Prime Video at the start of November 2026. Many of these, including The Wicker Man, An American Werewolf in London, Hellraiser and Candyman, are also in Prime Video's free-with-ads section.
Best Horror Movies on Shudder and AMC+
The best horror movie on Shudder and AMC+ is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), ranked No. 4 overall, which streams on both. Shudder streams Night of the Living Dead (7), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (9), Halloween (11), Nosferatu (12), Ringu (20), Possession (24), Carnival of Souls (30), Deep Red (31), The Descent (44), The Babadook (48), The Autopsy of Jane Doe (56), Black Christmas (61), The Boxer's Omen (77), Session 9 (82), The House That Jack Built (95), Seeding of a Ghost (97), Cemetery Man (98) and Insidious (99). AMC+ carries all of those except The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and adds Rosemary's Baby (6), The Thing (8), The Haunting (19), An American Werewolf in London (35), The Return of the Living Dead (52), The House of the Devil (59) and Pulse (89). If you subscribe to one service for this ranking, make it AMC+.
Best Horror Movies on HBO Max
The best horror movie on HBO Max is Night of the Living Dead (1968), ranked No. 7 overall. HBO Max also streams Carrie (23), Carnival of Souls (30), Eraserhead (32), Evil Dead II (38), The Blair Witch Project (41), The Conjuring (47), Sinners (50), Kwaidan (51), Eyes Without a Face (62), The Brood (64), The Lighthouse (65), Vampyr (71), Hausu (74) and Diabolique (75). The Exorcist, The Shining, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Midsommar, Poltergeist, Hereditary and Talk to Me left HBO Max on 1 November 2026.
Best Horror Movies on Hulu
The best horror movie on Hulu is The Fly (1986), ranked No. 15 overall. Hulu also streams Midsommar (49), Scream (73), The Sixth Sense (78), Hereditary (86) and The Substance (87). That makes Hulu the easiest place to watch both of Ari Aster's ranked films back to back.
Best Horror Movies on Paramount+ and Peacock
The best horror movie on Peacock is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), ranked No. 4 overall, and the best on Paramount+ is Rosemary's Baby (1968), ranked No. 6. Peacock also streams Night of the Living Dead (7), Train to Busan (60), Black Christmas (61) and Let the Right One In (63). Psycho, The Fly, The Silence of the Lambs, Bride of Frankenstein, Frankenstein, The Birds, Candyman, It Follows, The Invisible Man, Scream and Get Out left Peacock on 1 November 2026. Paramount+ streams Jacob's Ladder (55), The Autopsy of Jane Doe (56), It Follows (67) and Scream (73).
Best Horror Movies on The Criterion Channel
The best horror movie on The Criterion Channel is Kwaidan (1964), ranked No. 51 overall. The Criterion Channel also streams The Cremator (57), Hausu (74), The Addiction (92) and Cemetery Man (98). It is the best home for the ranking's international and art-house horror.
Best Free Horror Movies on Tubi, Pluto TV, and Plex
The best horror movie you can stream free is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), ranked No. 4 overall, on Tubi, Pluto TV and Plex with ads. Tubi is the strongest free option, with Night of the Living Dead (7), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (9), Nosferatu (12), The Wicker Man (14), The Silence of the Lambs (17), Suspiria (18), Ringu (20), Peeping Tom (28), Deep Red (31), Eraserhead (32), The Changeling (33), Hellraiser (37), 28 Days Later (43), The Descent (44), [REC] (46), Midsommar (49), Let the Right One In (63), The Brood (64), Night of the Demon (70), Repulsion (72), Hausu (74), In the Mouth of Madness (80), Hereditary (86), Noroi: The Curse (91), Talk to Me (93), The House That Jack Built (95), Stage Fright (96) and Insidious (99), among others. Pluto TV adds The Babadook (48) and Black Christmas (61), and Plex adds Halloween (11), The Witch (53), Eyes Without a Face (62), The Invisible Man (68), Vampyr (71), Diabolique (75) and The Addiction (92). With a library card, Kanopy streams Rosemary's Baby (6), Don't Look Now (13), Possession (24), Audition (40), Jacob's Ladder (55), Scream (73) and Tetsuo: The Iron Man (94) free.
Nineteen ranked films have no subscription or free streaming in the US from 1 November 2026 and are rent or buy only, or unavailable digitally: The Exorcist, The Shining, Dawn of the Dead, Martyrs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Bride of Frankenstein, Frankenstein, The Birds, Videodrome, Ju-On: The Grudge, Pan's Labyrinth, Martin, The Skin I Live In, Poltergeist, Cure, I Walked with a Zombie, The Vanishing, Get Out and Raw. The Evil Dead streams free only on Xumo Play, and The Innocents streams only on fuboTV. Each entry above names where to rent or buy them, including Apple TV where it is offered.
Which Horror Movie Directors Defined the Genre?
The horror directors who defined the genre are Alfred Hitchcock, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and George A. Romero, whose films in this ranking cover the thriller, the slasher and the zombie film at their best. The sections below group the directors with the most influence on the ranking into three generations, with their ranked films in brackets.
The Masters: Hitchcock, Carpenter, Craven, and Romero
Alfred Hitchcock is the most important director in horror history, and Psycho (No. 1) and The Birds (No. 29) are the proof: one moved horror from castles into motels, and the other made the sky itself a threat. John Carpenter has three films in the ranking, Halloween (No. 11), The Thing (No. 8) and In the Mouth of Madness (No. 80), more than almost any other director. George A. Romero matches him with Night of the Living Dead (No. 7), Dawn of the Dead (No. 16), and Martin (No. 54). Wes Craven scored twice, twelve years apart, with A Nightmare on Elm Street (No. 25) and Scream (No. 73).
The Auteurs: Kubrick, Argento, Cronenberg, and Lynch
Stanley Kubrick has one film in the ranking, and The Shining (No. 3) is enough to put him here. Dario Argento turned murder into opera with Suspiria (No. 18) and Deep Red (No. 31), the twin peaks of Italian horror. David Cronenberg built body horror into a personal philosophy across The Fly (No. 15), Videodrome (No. 36) and The Brood (No. 64), the most films by any director in the body-horror category. David Lynch's Eraserhead (No. 32) remains the purest nightmare in the ranking.
The New Wave: Peele, Aster, Eggers, and Wan
Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and James Wan are the directors who made horror the most exciting genre of the last fifteen years. Peele's Get Out (No. 88) won him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Aster has two films in the ranking, Midsommar (No. 49) and Hereditary (No. 86), both about families and grief. Eggers also has two, The Witch (No. 53) and The Lighthouse (No. 65), both built from obsessive period detail. Wan is the mainstream craftsman of the group, and The Conjuring (No. 47) and Insidious (No. 99) show how much fear he can draw from one family under siege.
What Are the Most Rewatchable Horror Movies in the Top 100?
The most rewatchable horror movies in the top 100 are Scream, Evil Dead II, An American Werewolf in London, Jaws, and Halloween, because each one is as much fun the tenth time as the first. A rewatchable horror film needs more than a scare, which only works once. It needs rhythm, humor, characters you enjoy spending time with, and craft that reveals more on every viewing.
- Scream (No. 73) rewards rewatching more than any slasher, because once you know who the killer is, every early scene plays as a second film hidden inside the first.
- Evil Dead II (No. 38) is closer to a Buster Keaton short than a horror film, and its physical comedy only gets funnier with familiarity.
- An American Werewolf in London (No. 35) balances jokes and grief so precisely that you notice new tonal shifts each time.
- Jaws (No. 22) is built like a perfect adventure film in its second half, which is why it suits a summer rewatch.
- Halloween (No. 11) is a masterclass in where to put the camera, and the second viewing is when you start watching the edges of the frame for Michael.
- The Thing (No. 8), Alien (No. 5), and The Sixth Sense (No. 78) also hold up, the first two for their craft and the third because a rewatch shows you how carefully the ending was hidden in plain sight.
What Are the Best Horror Movies for Beginners?
The best horror movies for beginners are Jaws, The Sixth Sense, Scream, Get Out, and Alien, because each one delivers real suspense without the graphic extremes that put new viewers off. Start there, then work outward in three steps.
- Start with the gateway films. Jaws (No. 22), The Sixth Sense (No. 78), Scream (No. 73), and Get Out (No. 88) are suspenseful, well-made, and widely loved. They teach you how horror builds tension without asking you to sit through extended gore.
- Move to the foundational classics. Psycho (No. 1), Alien (No. 5), Halloween (No. 11) and The Birds (No. 29) are the films whose fingerprints you will keep spotting in later horror. Watching them makes the rest of the genre easier to read.
- Choose your source of fear. Once you know whether you prefer ghosts, killers, monsters, bodies or minds, use the Five Sources of Fear in the At a Glance table to find more of what frightens you. Save the most intense films, flagged in the content warnings below, for when you are sure you want them.
Which Horror Movies in the Top 100 Are the Most Intense?
The most intense films in the top 100 are Martyrs, Audition, The House That Jack Built, Raw, Seeding of a Ghost and The Boxer's Omen, and each carries graphic material some viewers will want to know about in advance. The guide below groups the main warnings by type, without spoilers. It is a general guide, not an official rating, so check the rating on your streaming service as well.
- Prolonged torture and extreme violence: Martyrs (No. 21), Audition (No. 40), The House That Jack Built (No. 95), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (No. 4).
- Sexual violence: Seeding of a Ghost (No. 97), The Skin I Live In (No. 66), Videodrome (No. 36).
- Graphic body horror and gore: The Fly (No. 15), The Substance (No. 87), Raw (No. 100), Tetsuo: The Iron Man (No. 94), The Boxer's Omen (No. 77), Hellraiser (No. 37).
- Intense grief and family trauma: Hereditary (No. 86), The Babadook (No. 48), Don't Look Now (No. 13), Possession (No. 24).
- Little or no gore: The Innocents (No. 10), The Haunting (No. 19), Carnival of Souls (No. 30), Night of the Demon (No. 70), I Walked with a Zombie (No. 84), Kwaidan (No. 51) and The Changeling (No. 33) frighten through atmosphere alone, which makes them the best picks if you want dread without blood.
Which Horror Movies Just Missed the Top 100?
The horror movies that just missed the top 100 include Lucio Fulci's The House by the Cemetery, Dario Argento's Phenomena and the Korean films A Tale of Two Sisters and The Wailing. Each could replace a film near the bottom of the ranking without complaint, and together they make a strong second watchlist.
- The House by the Cemetery (1981, Lucio Fulci): Fulci's gothic gore film set in a haunted New England house.
- Phenomena (1985, Dario Argento): Argento's insect-psychic giallo, a third Argento film that lost out to Suspiria and Deep Red.
- The Seventh Curse (1986, Lam Ngai Kai): Hong Kong action-horror with Chow Yun-fat and Maggie Cheung.
- Angst (1983, Gerald Kargl): the Austrian serial-killer film shot from inside the killer's point of view.
- Alice, Sweet Alice (1976, Alfred Sole): a religious-themed American slasher with a giallo's eye.
- A Tale of Two Sisters (2003, Kim Jee-woon): the Korean ghost story that rewards close attention.
- The Wailing (2016, Na Hong-jin): a Korean village possession epic of rare scale.
- The Others (2001, Alejandro Amenábar): a classical ghost story in the tradition of The Innocents.
- The Orphanage (2007, J.A. Bayona): the Spanish haunted-house film produced by Guillermo del Toro.
- Lake Mungo (2008, Joel Anderson): the Australian mockumentary about grief.
Final Verdict: What Is the Best Horror Movie of All Time?
The best horror movie of all time is Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It scores at the top on all five criteria: it still frightens, its craft rewards close study, its influence is hard to overstate, it rewards every rewatch, and its idea, that the threat can be the polite young man behind the motel desk, still lands. The Exorcist (1973) and The Shining (1980) come close, and either would be a defensible No. 1.
The best modern horror movie in the ranking is Martyrs (2008), the highest-placed film of the 21st century at No. 21, and the best horror movie of the 2020s so far is Sinners (2025) at No. 50. If In the Mouth of Madness left you wanting more, our ranking of the [best cosmic horror movies](INTERNAL LINK: What Are the Best Cosmic Horror Movies? 25 Ranked, and Where to Watch Them) goes deeper into that strain of fear, and the [Screendollars Complete Streaming Guide](INTERNAL LINK: Screendollars Complete Streaming Guide) covers the best films on every platform beyond horror. Horror is still producing films that belong beside Psycho, which is the clearest sign of a genre in good health.
