From Universal monsters to modern serial killers, creature features to slasher flicks — these are the films that keep us forever screaming in the dark

ART BY MATTHEW COOLEY. IMAGES: CINEMATIC COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; FOTOS INTERNATIONAL/GETTY IMAGES; UNIVERSAL PICTURES/EVERETT COLLECTION; COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION; COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION

BY DAVID FEAR, A.A. DOWD, STEPHEN GARRETT, KATIE RIFE, TIM GRIERSON, JASON BAILEY, KEITH PHIPPS, KORY GROW, ESTHER ZUCKERMAN, ROBERT DANIELS, NOEL MURRAY

Do you like scary movies?

Of course you do! Freaking out with your fellow audience member when something shocking happens, or jolting together as one during a primo jump scare, is one of the great pleasures of going to the movies. And over the past 100-plus years, the art form has figured out almost every possible way to frighten us, unnerve us, make our hair stand on us, chill us, thrill us and touch upon our most primal of fears. Then, just when you think it’s safe to go back to the theater, something else comes along that reminds us that there are always new ways to come us screaming in the dark. If you can count on the movies for anything, it’s that there seems to be an exhaustible supply of scares. Naturally, everyone who helped cobble together the 101 best horror films of all time like scary movies. A lot. So we’ve gathered all of the old-school monster movies and modern serial-killer thrillers, the creature features and the slasher flicks, the canon-worthy creepfests from Universal and Hammer and A24, and come up this definitive list (or our definitive list, at least) of the greatest the genre has to offer. Just remember, as you read this list: It’s only a movie. Say that 101 times in a row, and you may just it make through this list…alive!

Part The Phantom of the Opera, part The Ten Commandments, this revenge fantasy follows a disfigured concert organist (the inimitable Vincent Price) as he exacts biblical vengeance on the doctors he thinks killed his wife by reenacting Egypt’s Old Testament plagues. Playing opposite Joseph Cotten, Price gives a memorably sinister performance, since for most of the movie Phibes is wearing a mask to look like his face so he can’t move his lips — and when he takes the mask off, he’s a fleshless ghoul … with Vincent Price’s unforgettable voice. A rare horror movie aware of its own camp value, The Abominable Dr. Phibes was marketed with an anti-Love Story tagline: “Love means never having to say you’re ugly.”—K.G.

Long before Black horror became the primary conduit for Black folks to interrogate the daily traumas associated with organized religion, identity and assimilation, writer-director Bill Gunn dared to fit these weighty subjects in one extremely alluring, ahead-of-its-time film. Dr. Hess (Duane Jones) is an anthropologist who becomes a vampire after his assistant, George Meda (Gunn), stabs him with an ancient African dagger. Hess ultimately murders his assistant and takes Meda’s widow, Ganja (Marlene Clark), as a lover. The pair embark on steamy, sticky sex scenes lathered in blood, and some lusty killing sprees. Nearly 50 years since its release, it still feels strikingly modern.—R.D.

There’s is a device — a sort of clockwork scarab — that, should you unlock it and its spindly, metal legs clamp onto you, may give you the gift of immortality. There’s a catch, however, as the antique store owner (Federico Luppi) who’s stumbled across this ancient artifact soon finds out. It involves the regular consumption of blood. A unique spin on the vampire movie (something you would have thought near-impossible by this point), Guillermo del Toro’s debut movie plays fast and loose with religious iconography, horror-movie tropes, pulp-lit tales of mystery and imagination, and mythology in the most exciting of ways. It’s a perfect introduction to his mix-and-match sense of the macabre, as well as proof that nobody plays a genre-movie heavy better than Ron Perlman.—D.F.

Mario Bava has given the world the prototype for the giallo movie in 1963, with his black-and-white thriller The Girl Who Knew Too Much. The next year, he’d give the subgenre it’s first bona fide masterpiece. After a female model is murdered, her bosses and peers begin to fret over a diary the woman kept, and that detailed everyone’s most sordid secrets. Everyone is trying to find the book before its revelations are discovered — including her killer, who is more than willing to slay everyone at the modeling agency in the process. The mix of graphic violence with lurid, eye-popping color and an abundance of stylish touches (the killer’s outfit of fedora, trenchcoat and eerie faceless mask is tres slasher chic) would become staples of these pulpy Italian horror movies into the 1970s, but Bava got there first. And, many would argue, did it best.—D.F.

Martin believes he’s an 84-year-old vampire, though he looks 25. He swears he needs to drink blood to survive, but is he just another psycho killer? Much as his victims try, garlic and crucifixes just don’t keep him away. Throughout the movie, Martin asks for help and understanding but receives little, driving him to kill more often — and thus making a statement about mental health a time when people would say, “get over it” to people with problems. “What I’m trying to show in Martin is that we can’t expect the monster to be predictable,” filmmaker George A. Romero once said. That uncertainty, coupled with gory scenes of Martin sedating people and imbibing their blood, engineered by special-effects wiz Tom Savini, is what made the low-budget film an instant cult hit.—K.G.

Director Irvin Yeaworth’s kitschy, low-budget creature feature about an amorphous, man-eating hunk of Jello from outer space is pure B-movie heaven. A romping teen flick with beach movie vibes — there’s even a catchy theme song by Burt Bacharach and Mack David — it kicks off with Steve Andrews (a still very green Steve McQueen) and his girlfriend Jane (Aneta Corseaut) cruising the Pennsylvania countryside. Then they see a comet streak across the sky, at which point the title “character” emerges to consume a man in front of them,. Despite their pleas to the town’s jaded adults, they aren’t believed until it’s too late. Similar to most 1950s movies, the air of the Cold War hangs heavy above this one. (So it’s a force that keeps spreading and consuming everything in its path? Hmm.). Even more chilling to modern audiences, however, is the dire ecological ending: The blob can be contained if Antarctica remains frozen and intact. Uh-oh.—R.D.

Having already made horror-movie stars out of Bela “Dracula” Lugosi and Boris “Frankenstein’s Monster” Karloff, Universal decided: Why not pair these icons together for double the shrieks? Like its unofficial companion piece The Raven (1935), this inaugural team-up is based loosely — very loosely — on an Edgar Allan Poe work, and finds Lugosi accompanying newlyweds David Manners and Julie Bishop to a castle in Hungary, owned by his old “friend” Karloff. It seems the latter sent his thick-accented buddy to a Siberian gulag after World War I and married the man’s wife; the estate’s master may also dabble in what Manners dubs “supernatural baloney” in his spare time. (“Supernatural, perhaps,” intones Lugosi. “Baloney…perhaps not!”) Revenge, black masses, a homoerotic skin-flaying sequence and some of the most Expressionistic set design this side of Doc Caligari’s office are on deck, with director Edgar G. Ulmer finding exactly the right blend of campiness and creepiness.—D.F.

As a rule, no good ever comes from trekking out into nature in a horror movie. But writer-director Neil Marshall’s second feature took that truism to disturbing new depths, sending his all-female ensemble down into a cave far beneath the earth’s surface. Long before modern horror fixated on the notion that a film’s terrors ought to be a reflection of the main character’s hidden trauma, The Descent gave the idea teeth, casting Shauna Macdonald as an emotionally scarred widow mourning the tragic deaths of her husband and child — she processes that pain by trying to outwit and outrun the hideous creatures that dwell underground, hungry to feast on her and her friends. Brutally effective and mercilessly paced, the film boasts the funhouse frights of an expert midnight movie. Yet it’s constantly accentuated by the pathos undergirding the scares: Even if this woman makes it out alive, she’ll never get back the part of herself she’s lost forever.—T.G.

Ostensibly, Claire Denis’ 2001 movie is about a newly married couple, Shane (Vincent Gallo) and June (Tricia Vessey), on their honeymoon in Paris. But a growing body count and almost sickening quantities of blood hint at the film’s dark heart, intertwining romance with cannibalism as Shane’s secret reason for visiting the City of Lights is eventually revealed. Despised upon its release and (inaccurately) accused of inspiring audience members to faint from the severity of the onscreen violence, Trouble Every Day is a mesmerizing, grisly meditation on passion and commitment in an age of sexually transmitted diseases. Beneath its gruesome imagery and fixation on pulverized human flesh, however, this horror film comes bearing a touching message: Even monsters need love. Just be careful not to get too close, lest they sink their teeth into you.—T.G.

Two years after Halloween rewrote the rules for teen terror, Friday the 13th upped the ante (and the body count) with a slasher whodunnit. As counselors (including Kevin Bacon) arrive at Camp Crystal Lake, they ignore well-intentioned warnings from Crazy Ralph, and go about carousing and [gasp!] having sex on the campground. That’s when the bodies start piling up. When the murderer finally appears, it’s not who any of the counselors thought it would be. And no, in the original Friday the 13th, it wasn’t Jason Voorhees. Unlike the rip-offs (Sleepaway Camp, The Burning), which revel solely in bloody kills, or the later Jason flicks, Friday the 13th played up suspense as much as the blood. It’s a shame how a hockey mask made people lose sight of that.—K.G.

Henry (Michael Rooker) has a routine: wake up, go to work, murder a woman, pound some beers, repeat. This drifter in the Henry Lee Lucas mold soon introduces his roommate/accomplice, Otis (Tom Towles), to his homicidal lifestyle. Set in a Chicago redolent of John Wayne Gacy, the Chicago Rippers and unspeakable violence behind wholesome Midwestern facades, director John McNaughton’s debut is sometimes a depraved buddy comedy, sometimes a perverse domestic drama, and 100-percent a nightmare. All of its modes are unrelentingly bleak, however, as this movie reveals the banal face of a real multiple murderer. Serial killers are not semi-supernatural evil geniuses — they’re dangerous, dim-witted losers, like these two jagoffs.—K.R.

Nestled by the most dangerous road in America — where semi-trucks zoom at seemingly supersonic speeds and turn animals into road kill – lies a most peculiar burial ground. Louis (Dale Midkiff), his wife, Rachel (Denise Crosby), and their young family are recent arrivals to a country home located uncomfortably close to that perilous stretch of asphalt. When their cat dies, their neighbor (Fred Gwynne), however, tells Louis of another site, founded by Indigeous people where things have a tendency to return to life. A Frankenstein myth mixed with zombie-movie tropes and blessed with stunning practical effects and gruesome makeup, director Mary Lambert’s film of Stephen King’s novel isn’t just one of the best of the legendary author’s works. It instinctively understands what makes his work such endlessly potent nightmare fuel: Find a relatable story, add one bit of the fantastic (and maybe three bits of the ironic), notch up the dread to an unbearable level…then find a pressure point and push hard.—R.D.

Long before Jaws made folks think twice about swimming in open water, there was Jack Arnold’s ’50s favorite about a scientific expedition in the Amazon that comes across the skeletal remains of a primitive half-man, half-fish creature. What they don’t realize is that there’s also a very-much-alive “Gill-Man” swimming beneath those same murky rivers and lagoons, and he’s got his eyes on ichthyologist Julie Adams. It’s the scenes of Adams swimming while the Creature hovers right below her kicking legs, ready to pounce, that set the movie’s original audiences on edge (what was going on beneath us when we obliviously doing the backstroke?). Yet it’s the iconic design of the Creature, courtesy of former Disney artist Milicent Patrick and Chris Mueller (he sculpted the mask), that’s kept this drive-in classic permanently in the Famous Monsters of Filmland pantheon.—D.F.

Ti West’s slow-simmering “Beware of Satanists!” cautionary tale looks and feels like an artifact from the early 1980s, found in a dusty corner of an abandoned video store. A naive college student takes a babysitting job at a creaky Victorian house, working for a couple of shady characters (played by veteran cult movie weirdos Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov). Before the literal all-hell-breaks-loose third act, The House of the Devil plays up the spooky atmosphere and retro style — right down to a scene involving a cranked-up Walkman, a song by the Fixx, and our sick fear that everything’s about to go very wrong.—N.M.

Four years before Halloween hit the screens, a mysterious murderer terrorized a sorority in Bob Clark’s proto-slasher. Far more upsetting than any of this homicidal maniac’s kills? The misogynistic invective he spouts over the phone. It would be easy for Black Christmas itself to become an outgrowth of its villain’s lurid, predatory gaze, but instead the movie (from the director of Porky’s, of all things) is a surprisingly progressive tale of what happens when women aren’t listened to and their choices aren’t respected. The bonus? The assembled cast including Olivia Hussey, Andrea Martin, and Margot Kidder. —E.Z.

A born-again Christian named Maud (Morfydd Clark) pines for a mission — and for her sins, she’s given one, in the form of a being a caretaker for a terminally ill choreographer (Jennifer Ehle). The longer she tends to her sick employer, the more she worries about saving this woman’s soul. But is Maud capable of offering salvation to the sick? Does this pious heroine really have a direct line to divinity? Or perhaps that voice in her head belongs to some other, less heavenly messenger? Director Rose Glass’ feature debut can be savored as a welcome, disquieting new addition to that old time religious-horror canon. (There will be back-bending levitation shots.) Or you can look at it as a portrait of young woman finding a warped sense of empowerment in her madness… which makes this “possession” story twice as unnerving.—D.F.

“Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night/May be become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms, and the autumn moon is bright.” Universal had already dabbled with those fated to get a little harrier and toothier during full moons with 1935’s The Werewolf of London, featuring Henry Hull as the title character. But it was Lon Chaney Jr.’s portrayal of doomed sad sack Lawrence Talbot, who returns to his ancestral home in Wales only to be bitten by a you-know-what, that would help sell these mythical half-man, half-animal creatures as horror-movie staples. Say “werewolf,” and several generations immediately imagined Jack Pierce’s make-up on Chaney’s face. He’d play many victims and monsters over the years, including several other Universal horror legends, but the wolf-man remains the cornerstone of his legacy. And the rest of this subcategory’s mythology, from folkloric curses to silver bullets, gets minted right here as well.—D.F.

For his follow-up to Get Out, Jordan Peele pierces deeper into questions of racial and cultural identity, coming up with something terrifying both in a “monsters jumping out of the dark” way and a “man, the entire social order is messed up” way. Lupita Nyong’o gives an all-time great horror performance in a dual role: as an anxious middle class wife and mother; and as the leader of an army of murderous doppelgängers. The movie doesn’t hammer too hard on any particular political point, rather, it’s more a succession of well-staged scenes of freaky tension and explosive violence, all riffing on the idea that whenever one group of people are living well, there’s almost always another group suffering in their shadow.—N.M.

This stripped-down shocker rewrites the rules for home invasion thrillers, dispensing with any kind of motivation or backstory for the masked killers at the door. Instead, writer-director Bryan Bertino focuses tightly on the victims: a young couple (played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) on the brink of breaking up before their already miserable night at a house deep in the woods gets interrupted by three blade-wielding sadists. The Strangers plucks away at the audience’s rawest nerves for 85 minutes, always keeping us aware of who might be lurking around any darkened corner or outside any window, waiting to torment these nice people when they’re at their most vulnerable.—N.M.

It’s difficult to think of a more decidedly pre-9/11 text than this teen horror flick from director James Wong, which kicked off a franchise that’s become something like the Mission: Impossible series of the horror world. It opens on airport security pulling a group of high schoolers off a plane bound for Italy when their classmates experience a premonition of the plane crashing. The jet explodes. The teens have somehow managed to cheat death — only for an extremely angry Grim Reaper to then elaborately kill them off one-by-one. What makes Final Destination so unforgettable is the way it stages its murders around a perfect storm of mundane events: One person dies by slipping in the bathroom, another by a kitchen knife. It’s the type of endlessly inventive horror flick that, by the end, makes you want to accident-proof your entire house.—R.D.

It’s starts as a Horror City NYC thriller, with Tony Lo Bianco’s world-weary detective investigating a wave of murders sweeping the city; the crimes are connected because every perpetrator claimed they committed the homicides when “God told me to.” It ends deep in horror-movie territory, with the cop and a half-alien messiah fighting for the soul of humanity. Director Larry Cohen never met a crazy premise he could not make a thousand times nuttier, and his blend of Christian iconography, supernatural scares, urban paranoia, Chariots of the God-style origin stories and exploitation-cinema griminess is arguably the best example of the madness behind his methods. It’s truly a rough-cut gem of ’70s genre-movie insanity, made all the more disturbing by the fact that so many people would be driven to violence simply because a charismatic blond gentleman who claimed to be divine commanded them.—D.F.

Co-written and produced by Steven Spielberg, Poltergeist arrived in theaters a few weeks before E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial — and it now plays like a dark counterpoint to that film’s twinkly suburbia. There’s something rotten, literally and figuratively, beneath the surface of the idyllic, newly constructed sprawl that’s home to Steven (Craig T. Nelson) and Diane Freeling (JoBeth Williams). Which may be why their seemingly ordinary ranch house becomes a site of wonder and terror after malevolent spirit kidnaps their young daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke). Directed by Tobe Hooper (with some unmistakably Spielbergian touches), the film is filled with one scary moment after another as everything from trees to toys turn against the Freelings. But it’s just as rich in subtly biting commentary: The parents are ’60s dreamers-turned-Reagan era achievers raising their kids in a world that now looks less like than a dream come true than a materialistic nightmare.—K.P.

Within the first 15 minutes of Martyrs, someone kicks in the front door of a cozy upper-middle-class home in the French suburbs and blows away two people with a shotgun. Spoiler: It doesn’t let up from there. The film follows two women, both seeking revenge for the psychological and physical torture inflicted on one of them by a secretive, moneyed cult. The group believes that the secret of immortality can be found at the intersection of religious ecstasy and extreme suffering, and the pain endured by its unwilling martyrs — all of them young women — is almost beyond human comprehension. Pascal Laugier’s 2008 New French Extremity shocker has more on its mind than mere sadism, however: The discomfort of sitting through the film’s intense violence eventually gives way to a more profound, but equally nihilistic, statement on religion.—K.R.

When a new wax museum opens up in turn-of-the-century New York, patrons are amazed at how lifelike so many of the exhibits are. Too lifelike, in fact. We’re sure it has nothing to do with the recent spate of murders, or the mysterious man in the black hat and cloak who’s been stalking Phyllis Kirk. The fact that this attraction is run by Vincent Price — in his first horror movie — suggests that something highly unsavory is going on, even if you’re not familiar with Charles Belden’s short story “Wax Works” (the same source material for the equally great 1932 film Mystery of the Wax Museum). It was one of the first scary movies to effectively utilize 3-D (watch out, that corpse is falling right toward you!), and the big reveal scene remains highly unsettling. You won’t believe the sight of wax melting off a statue’s face could be so eerie.—D.F.

Horror filmmakers have been innovating and experimenting since the very beginning of the genre, as firmly evidenced by this 100-year-old Swedish groundbreaker. The title translates to “The Witch,” and it is, per the opening credits, “a cultural and historical presentation in moving pictures in six parts.” Documentary cinema may have been in its infancy (this was the same year as Nanook of the North), but writer-director-star Benjamin Christensen was already aware of the value of its appropriation, opening the film with background, acknowledgements, and history, wrapping his dramatizations of the history of witchcraft within a genuine scholarly framework. Christensen understood that the prism of fact would give his narrative fictions extra punch. And if there’s any doubt that he was right, it’s worth noting that the directors of The Blair Witch Project named their production company Haxan Films.—J.B.

You need only say his name five times in a mirror for him to appear, or so the legend goes. Candyman gives us the legend of Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd) — a wealthy Black artist whose right hand was severed, his body smeared with honey for bees to feast on, and his corpse burned on a pyre for falling in love with a white woman — that initially draws graduate student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) to the Chicago housing projects known as Cabrini Green, where rumor says his spirit still lurks. An adaptation of a Clive Barker short story from writer-director Bernard Rose, Candyman is generational trauma. Candyman is racism, over-policing and the affordable housing crisis. Candyman is systematic inequality. And this gory, sociopolitical slasher is equal parts menacing and introspective, causing viewers who’ve just finished watching Candyman to quickly look in their own mirror and pray that there isn’t someone with a hook for a hand, standing right behind them….—R.D.

The elevator pitch reads like every parent’s worst nightmare: A kid goes with a friend to a concert in the city where depraved hippies abduct and torture them, eventually driving them back near where the parents live. But courtesy of a twist, by the end the film has become every parent’s greatest revenge fantasy leading up to a bloody climax. Half a century since it came out, Wes Craven’s ultraviolent film (written by Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham) is still one of the most unsettling movies ever made, as well as one of the greatest exploitation flicks ever, right down to its goofy bluegrass soundtrack recorded by the film’s actor who plays the main creep.—K.G.

As spellbinding and visionary a first feature as you’re likely to see, Ana Lily Armipour’s melding of spaghetti Westerns, John Hughes teen-misfit odes, black-and-white art movies and vampire stories definitely announced a major new talent. But the fact that horror is but one of the film’s many flavors doesn’t dilute the thrills or chills at all; you can swoon to its Type-O–craving heroine dancing with her crush one second and then shudder as she goes fangs-first ballistic on someone several scenes later. Consider this the punk-rock, girl-power Twilight you didn’t know you needed.—D.F.

Has any horror movie nailed its opening sequence like the original Scream? Look, we know you like scary movies, because you’re reading this list. So don’t answer that. But Kevin Williamson’s cheeky screenplay is the perfect match for Wes Craven’s finely tuned understanding of how to manufacture scares. The Scream movies run the gamut from pretty fun to very fun, but none match the first with its sheer meta-ingenuity about the way slasher flicks work and the people who love them. When Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and her pals start to be terrorized by horror hall-of-famer Ghostface, they realize exactly what kind of story they are in — and try to use the wits of their genre knowledge to outsmart the killer. It’s funny. It’s silly. It’s bloody as hell.—E.Z.

Whether you think the giant hellspawn at the center of Jacques Tourneur’s haunting noble-doctor-versus-devil-worshipping-cult procedural should have remained hidden in the shadows, or that its appearance adds to the uncanny flavor of this ’50s horror flick, is a matter of opinion. (It’s a debate that’s raged for years.) What we do know is that this seemingly normal movie drops Dana Andrews and Gun Crazy‘s Peggy Cummins right into the middle of a landscape in which evil wears a perfectly respectable face, which only makes the things they conjure out of the shadows that much more sickening. It’s the constant detouring into the weird that keeps you on your toes, not to mention the film’s balance of the paranormal and the slightly perverse. And for the record, we’re definitely Team Show-the-Demon.—D.F.

“It seems very clear to me that there is a dangerous maniac at large in this city.” Dario Argento wasn’t just launching his feature directorial career with this story of an American in Italy who witnesses a brutal murder and tries to solve it. He was injecting a new sense of style and danger into the Italian giallo. Building off the innovations that Blood and Black Lace‘s Mario Bava built, he took the main ingredients of the subgenre — the black-gloved killer, the sharp (and often phallic) knives penetrating skin, the deliriously overwrought score, the ruthless, chilling “kills” — and quickly proved he was a master of the form. One movie in, and you can already tell Argento’s staging is precise and his set pieces are ingenious, particularly the inciting incident, in which our hero can’t help the victim…but he can’t look away either.—J.B.

This quiet tale — about Eli (Lina Leandersson), a decades-old vampire child, and Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), the human boy she falls in love with — is, on its surface, as chilly as the Swedish landscapes. But there’s sweetness underneath all the neck biting and mutilation, and ultimately, the admittedly blood-soaked story is about what people, be they mortal or otherwise, will do to protect one another. You can see why American filmmakers and TV showrunners have gravitated toward to Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 film, as well as trying to recapture its spirit. The fact that it’s so brutal is what keeps it from sliding into the saccharine. —E.Z.

Glassy-eyed manicurist Catherine Deneuve navigates London’s Swinging-Sixties suitors with stone-faced indifference, then stolen-kiss disgust, followed by harrowing delusions and an unnerving knack for murder. Carnal aggression triggers mental derangement in Roman Polanski’s shivery psychological portrait, made even more unnerving with his deft mix of subjective surrealism and deadpan verisimilitude. It’s a chronicle of ravaged innocence, and the kind of horror that can emerge from even the most banal places. Sidewalk cracks, apartment fissures, overheard carnal moans, that relentlessly tick-tick-ticking clock, and a rotting rabbit corpse are the external expressions of a troubled mind, the debilitating deficiencies of an on-the-spectrum woman surrounded by lusty pigs blind to her feelings—and to their own doom.—S.G.

Day-lit dread abounds as a band of opportunistic anthropology-major broheims fly to Sweden for a remote village’s nine-day summer pageant. Fifth-wheel girlfriend Dani (Florence Pugh), struggling with devastating, and still-very-fresh deaths in her family, turns to passive-aggressive lover Christian (Jack Reynor) for solace, but all he can offer her is weak boyfriend vibes and a craven interest in exploiting ritual life for a good grade. No worries: Scandinavian folk horror will soon give them ample relationship clarity. Emotional torture artist Ari Aster’s follow-up to his supernatural domestic trauma-drama Hereditary mines some shocking pagan rites and disturbingly illustrated tapestries, framing a Midnight Sun community’s sacred life-cycle beliefs right next to its with its veiled xenophobia and clan-sanctioned sacrifices. The ultimate in cult-ish impulses, or a beautiful expression of dark devotion? Exactly.—S.G.

Within the heart of every man lurks a beast — and Dr. Henry Jekyll has the potion to prove it. There have been numerous adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella over the years, starring everyone from John Barrymore to Spencer Tracy to Michael Caine. Yet it’s this 1932 Paramount version, trying to hone in on Universal’s monster-movie territory, that everyone remembers the most vividly. It’s partially because of Frederic March’s Oscar-winning performance as both Jekyll and his brutish, animalistic counterpart Mr. Hyde, played as the personification of maniacal toxic masculinity decades before the term was coined. It’s partially because of Rouben Mamoulian’s inspired direction (no horror movie would use P.O.V. shots better until Halloween) and his ability to take advantage of pre-Code salaciousness. And it’s largely because of the transformation scene, which is still astounding to watch even once you know how the trick was done.—D.F.

With his background in special effects and cinematography, Mario Bava’s horror films are among the most breathtaking the genre has ever seen. And although he’s well known for his use of color, his 1960 debut feature accomplishes startling beauty in high-contrast black and white, filing Gothic atmosphere with rolling fog and inky darkness. Star Barbara Steele brings a ferocity to her dual role as a defiant 17th-century Moldavian witch and her naive 19th-century descendant; her witch creeps out of her tomb like Freud’s return of the repressed, eyes burning and cheeks pierced where inquisitors once strapped the “Mask of Satan” to her face. It’s bombastic, ghastly, a little kinky, and metal as hell.—K.R.

Slashing teens was bloody good business by 1984, when filmmaker Wes Craven conjured the original Nightmare. His villain was Freddy Krueger, a lascivious (and often hilarious) deceased school janitor hellbent on exacting revenge, one razor-tipped finger at a time, in the dreams of the children of Elm St. Actor Robert Englund, who played the fedora-sporting burn victim, was a natural ham — but it’s the way Krueger united the kids (including a young Johnny Depp) against him that made the original work. Less schticky than the sequels, the original Nightmare feels genuinely scary and its special effects, like a bed gushing blood up to the ceiling and a slimy tongue phone, rival Dalí for surrealism.—K.G.

The seventh (and best) of the eight films in Roger Corman’s drive-in horror movies based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, this retelling of the author’s 1842 short story casts his rep-company regular Vincent Price as Prince Prospero, a 12th century Satanist. After burning a village during a plague, this arrogant royal throws a masked ball for his fellow aristocrats in defiance of the pandemic. Things quickly take a turn for the macabre. It’s a perfect blend of high-culture ambition and low-culture accessibility, along with a presciently psychedelic color palette from cinematographer Nicolas Roeg that is so radiant it practically vibrates. And the film’s timeless feeling of a fable gained chilling new resonance when COVID-19 brought America its own Prince Prospero in the form of Donald Trump. —K.R.

The most exquisite of all cinematic ghost stories, this adaptation of the Henry James story “The Turn of the Screw” stars Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, a dutiful, inexperienced governess who starts to suspect something sinister is inhabiting the bodies of the children she’s been hired to safeguard. Where other horror directors seek to shock or petrify, filmmaker Jack Clayton very meticulously chills your blood, crafting an atmosphere of perpetual clammy unease inside the film’s central locale, a supremely spooky castle. Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens give uncommonly good child performances, but it’s Kerr as the overwhelmed governess who brings intelligence and grownup gravitas to the proceedings. Though set in the 19th century, this shimmering black-and-white classic feels timeless, residing in its own elegantly crafted universe — one in which every shadow hums with menace and the spirits of the dead never let go of the living.—T.G.

Welcome to the body-horror answer to Kramer vs. Kramer. Long-estranged couple Isabelle Adjani and Sam O’Neil have decided to end their marriage once and for all, yet before they can part ways, they must scream, display fits of rage, and physically attack each other in the streets of Berlin. And then Polish director Andrzej Zulawski psychodrama takes a hard left into psychotronic territory. Electric carving knives are put to self-harming use. A private detective meets a grisly end. Both characters get their own doppelgängers. Some 40-plus years later, it’s still impossible to tell whether the tentacled creature who shows up, courtesy of Alien and E.T.‘s special effects guru Carlo Rambaldi, is a real manifestation of one woman’s torment or merely a product of a warped imagination. What we can say is that Adjani’s freak-out in a subway station — the scene that gives this film its name — lives up to its reputation as one of the most visceral, go-for-broke moments of acting ever committed to film.—D.F.

A metaphor for the then-prevalent fear of nuclear holocaust? A commentary on the myopia of human beings and the primacy of Mother Nature? Just a fun excuse to freak out moviegoers? Whatever your interpretation of this Alfred Hitchcock thriller, it’s a stunningly efficient delivery device for escalating terror. An aborted meet-cute between Mitch (Rod Taylor) and Melanie (Tippi Hedren) leading to a potentially romantic rendezvous in picturesque Bodega Bay. Then their tentative love affair quickly takes a backseat to some sinister happenings within the town’s bird population. Soon enough, chaos reigns as the winged creatures start wreaking havoc, their lethal attacks as inexplicable as they are frightening. In his unparalleled career, the Master of Suspense gave us plenty of things to be afraid of, but The Birds fiendishly weaponized nature itself, suggesting that, any moment, our fine feathered friends might turn against us. Never again would the sound of seagulls be considered soothing.—T.G.

The third of Universal’s quartet of horror O.G.s (Lon Chaney, Jr.’s Wolf Man wouldn’t join the gang until 1941), Boris Karloff’s ancient, walking-dead Egyptian is only seen in the classic mummy-bandage get-up briefly; he spends most of the film unwrapped and playing Imhotep, the resurrected high priest in search in the Scroll of Thoth. Luckily, resident handsome square David Manners and Edward Van Sloan, a.k.a. Dracula‘s Van Helsing, put a stop to him sacrificing Zita Johann, a dead ringer for the priest’s long-deceased love. And while some have complained that this monster movie is as slow as its title character, German director Karl Freund’s addition to the canon contains what may be the single most chilling sequence in any Universal horror film: As Van Sloan’s assistant translates the scrolls, we see Karloff’s mummy gradually open his eyes and silently comes to life. When the man realizes what’s happening, he screams — and then begins uncontrollably laughing in a fit of hysteria and madness. —D.F.

The ultimate paranoid ’70s thriller is the one that says you really can’t trust anyone: Even your nearest and dearest could be one of them. In moving Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers out of the Red Scare era and into the San Francisco of the post-Nixon years, this terrifying remake shifts the allegorical function of the emotionless alien imposters, who this time represent nothing less than the sea change of America’s soul — an overnight transformation of hippies into yuppies. Yet the true horror of Philip Kaufman’s pod people, newly equipped with a bloodcurdling, ear-splitting vocal alarm, runs past topical anxiety to the existential variety, writ large across the changing facial expressions of Donald Sutherland. It’ll make you afraid to sleep, though after that pitiless ending, you won’t be able to anyway.—A.A.D.

You could approach Georges Franju’s arty serial-killer thriller purely as an intellectual exercise, meant to make an argument against the shallowness of beauty standards and the callousness of scientists, via a story about a surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) who kidnaps women and slices off their faces to transplant onto his disfigured daughter (Edith Skob). But to be fair, it’s hard to take that view when said doctor is calmly peeling off a young lady’s skin. This is a surprisingly graphic film for 1960, about a man so icily obsessed with righting wrongs that he makes appalling choices, shown to the audience in such detail that it jolts the gut as well as the mind.—N.M.

From the vibrant and lush hues of the technicolor compositions to the mutilated green face of Christopher Lee’s monster — stirringly revealed in one jagged jackknife of a zoom — director Terence Fisher’s reimagining of Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic novel didn’t just set it apart from Hollywood. This was the movie that set the standard for future Hammer Horror retellings of classic horror I.P. like Horror of Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959) as well as establishing the British studio as the place to go for garish, gore-soaked Goth-terror. It also gave us the pairing of Lee and Peter Cushing, who played the cold-blooded Baron Victor Frankenstein with a Godlike complex and, later, a guilty conscience. Before Hammer released this shot across the bow, Shelley’s groaning creature was strictly the purview of Universal Pictures. By the end, it was all theirs.—R.D.

“Offend one and you offend them all,” cautions a carnival barker as he describes his menagerie of misfits: Half Boy, Bird Girl, Human Skeleton, the Living Torso. Society’s outcasts and ostracized medical marvels find home in a traveling circus — from the he/she gender dysmorphia of the half-man/half-woman to the Siamese twin sisters and the bearded lady. Legless guys and armless ladies happily coexist, until a comely gold-digging trapeze artist seduces a secretly wealthy little person and incurs the group’s wrath. The so-called “mangy freaks” are director Tod Browning’s beautiful people, othered and repelled in life’s circles; despite the controversial reputation of this legendary cult classic, his film is unexpectedly tender proof that the true horror show really comes from the normies. One of us, one of us!—S.G.

The sole feature directed by Herk Harvey is a one-of-a-kind low-budget thriller that plays like a cross between a Twilight Zone episode and a piece of outsider art. Candace Hilligoss stars as Mary, a woman who escapes a car accident and tries to start a new life in a new city, only to encounter everything from a sexually threatening neighbor to terrifying otherworldly visions. A Kansas-based filmmaker who otherwise worked in educational and industrial films, Hervey shot the film while on an extended leave from his day job. He made a virtue of his limited budget, using atmospheric lighting and a creepy organ score to make everyday locations like a department store feel haunted and dangerous, as well as turning an abandoned resort on the shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake into a nightmare within a nightmare. It’s one of movies’ great one-offs. Hervey might have understood he could never have topped it.—K.P.

One afternoon, in a quiet town in the English countryside, everyone suddenly loses consciousness. When the population awakes several hours later, a series of mass “immaculate conceptions” appear to have occurred. Years later, these children have grown up to be near-identical blond, blue-eyed kids who have a penchant for being extremely quiet, very well-mannered, super-intelligent and able to communicate telepathically. Oh, and they’re also willing to kill anyone who might do them harm or threaten their quest for world domination. An absolutely top-shelf adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, director Wolf Rilla’s movie starts off as pure science fiction (with the military attempting to penetrate the town’s perimeters and not fall under its spell) and ends up in a hybrid SF/horror sweet spot, especially once these moppets’ eyes start glowing and some unfortunate townspeople learn the extent of the brood’s powers. A great reminder to never, ever trust anyone under the age of 12.—D.F.

Writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s ingenious supernatural thriller centers around a mysterious force that relentlessly stalks its intended victims until they either die or pass the curse along by having sex. The viral evil common to J-horror films like The Ring is mutated here into something that’s like a combination STD and chain letter. The malevolence infects a group of undeserving youngsters, who slowly and sickeningly realize they’re dealing with something they may just have to endure — and never conquer.—N.M.

A lonely, middle-aged widower holds fake auditions for a fake television show, hoping to surreptitiously meet the new woman of his dreams. If that sounds like the setup for a whimsical romantic comedy, then you’re already stepping right into the bear trap laid by prolific Japanese genre madman Takashi Miike. To even include his notorious shocker on this list is to let the cat (or mute, mutilated prisoner) out of the bag; part of the movie’s brilliance lies in the way its horror erupts suddenly from its tranquility, shattering expectations to make a point as sharp as acupuncture needles. The ending is unforgettable — for the outrageous extremity of the violence, yes, but also for its tricky ambivalence. Miike was ahead of his time on both counts, simultaneously anticipating “torture porn” and Time’s Up.—A.A.D.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was the movie that made America afraid of the devil again. William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel provided the kindling, but it was William Friedkin’s 1973 film that started a blaze of faith-based anxiety on a scale that fire-and-brimstone preachers can only dream of. The Exorcist re-introduced the concept of demonic possession to the masses, positing an obscure Catholic ritual as humanity’s last line of defense against ravenous, immortal evil. It whispered in moviegoers’ ears that maybe there were some things that science couldn’t explain; the film’s long lead-up to its harrowing exorcism scene systematically eliminates every bit of rationale for why the seemingly happy, normal 12-year-old Reagan MacNeil (Linda Blair) might begin acting out in disturbing (not to mention inappropriately sexual) ways. Even the film’s primary priest character, Damien Karras (Jason Miller), is a modern man who doubts the existence of demons — until he, like the audience, is forced to admit that he’s out of options. 

And Friedkin’s methodical approach lures the audience into believing that what they’re seeing is real, then pummels them with innovative effects sequences that use mechanical dummies, blaring air conditioning, and pea soup to bring Hell into an ordinary child’s bedroom. This sudden onslaught of intense terror shook audiences who weren’t used to such a shocking pivot, and news reports from The Exorcist’s initial run in December 1973 describe moviegoers fainting, vomiting, and fleeing theaters. (A 1974 New York Times article also documents a spike in estranged Catholics returning to the faith after seeing the film.)

Its grounded storytelling marked a turning point for the horror genre, and acolytes of the film’s makeup artist, Dick Smith, went on to further expand the possibilities of what could be done with fiberglass and liquid latex. But the commercial and artistic success of The Exorcist — not to mention the wave of hype that came with all that puking and passing out — changed the public’s perception of what a horror movie could be. It made evil real, and brought it into the real world. No misty castle or fairy-tale curse could ever compete with that.—K.R.