The 100 Scariest Movies of All Time
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Why do some people love being scared? It seems counterintuitive to have a bad time just to feel good. Ask any horror buff and they will tell you otherwise. There are a serious of emotional responses in the brain that light up when we are afraid—releasing dopamine, adrenaline, and an exhilarating feeling only accomplished when that level of fight-or-flight is achieved. The best horror movies are the ones that can capitalize on that bizarre, scientific process, like a terrifying rollercoaster for our brain.
To help get you there, we’ve rounded up the 100 scariest movies of all time. It’s a collection of hauntings, demonic possessions, crazed killers, camping trips gone wrong, and found-footage nightmares. Among classics such as Nightmare on Elm Street and The Exorcist, you’ll find modern masterpieces of horror, including Hereditary, The Grudge, and The Conjuring. With 100 films to sort through, even the most eclectic scary movie fan will surely find something new to send a chill down their spine. Scroll down, if you dare…
Skinamarink (2023)
Director: Kyle Edward Ball
Skinamarink is an entirely new kind of found-footage horror film, delighting fans of the genre looking for the next boundary-pushing thrill. The film follows two young children, alone and afraid, looking for their parents as parts of their house disappear.
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Inland Empire (2006)
Director: David Lynch
Inland Empire is an experimental thriller that starts Laura Dern as an actress on a cursed film production.
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Angst (1983)
Director: Gerald Kargl
Angst is such a violent film that the 1983 Austrian, prison psychopath thriller was banned in many countries.
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Rec (2007)
Directors: Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza
A found-footage cult classic, Rec follows a reporter and her cameraman as they investigate an emergency call to a quarantined apartment building.
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Raw (2016)
Director: Julia Ducournau
Raw follows a young vegetarian in veterinary school who turns cannibalistic after getting her first taste of meat.
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Terrified (2017)
Director: Demian Rugna
A funhouse of terror, Terrified features one horrifying image after another as supernatural events occur in Buenos Aires.
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It: Chapter Two (2019)
Director: Andy Muschietti
Thought the first film about Stephen King's creepy clown was scary? Just wait until you see part 2.
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The Substance (2024)
Director: Coralie Fargeat
The Substance is a soon-to-be body horror staple, starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid in a story about a celebrity who resorts to experimental drugs to look younger.
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Saw (2004)
Director: James Wan
Horror visionary James Wan delighted viewers with a new kind of horror movie in 2004 with Saw, a film about a sadistic villain who loves setting up violent traps.
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Saint Maud (2019)
Director: Rose Glass
One of the most modern films on this list, A24’s Saint Maud follows a religious caretaker who questions her faith. After self-immolating, she receives signs that warn her to stay ready for a dangerous test.
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The Purge (2013)
Director: James DeMonaco
What if murder were legal for 24 hours? That’s the system the government creates to curb crime and overpopulation in The Purge ... to obviously detrimental effects.
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The Wailing (2016)
Director: Na Hong-jin
Korean horror movies will scare you in ways that you never imagined were possible. Train to Busan put zombies on a high-speed train and The Call made even talking on the phone a scary endeavor. In The Wailing, director Na Hong-jin blends multiple genres to tell a unique story of demons and plagues. It’ll frighten horror buffs who think they’ve seen it all.
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It Follows (2014)
Director: David Robert Mitchell
The fear of being followed is one of the worst feelings in the world. Naturally, director David Robert Mitchell capitalized on that fear in It Follows, featuring a woman who is targeted by an unrelenting entity.
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Braindead (1992)
Director: Peter Jackson
Before Peter Jackson started adventuring with hobbits, the New Zealand–based director wowed audiences with a zombie flick—also known in some markets as Dead Alive—about a woman who turns violent after she’s bitten by a mutant rat-monkey hybrid creature.
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When Evil Lurks (2023)
Director: Demián Rugna
This Argentinian horror film about demonic possession on a farm shocks viewers with some of the goriest imagery of the past few years.
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The Strangers (2008)
Director: Bryan Bertino
With the help of some truly ruthless intruders, The Strangers takes the bones of every home-invasion story and kicks it up a notch. When Kristen and James head to their vacation home in (of course!) the wilderness, they expect to have a relaxing retreat. Instead, they’re forced to fight for their lives when a strange woman knocks on their door.
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Sinister (2012)
Director: Scott Derrickson
It goes without saying that you shouldn’t buy a haunted house. But in Sinister, true-crime writer Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) thinks it’s a perfectly rational idea. In hopes of writing a best seller, he moves his family into a home where an unsolved murder took place. But he soon learns that curiosity comes at a price.
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Goodnight Mommy (2014)
Directors: Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala
Goodnight Mommy follows two young boys who are reunited with their mom after she has a mysterious surgery. They’re initially overjoyed to see her, but their excitement turns to fear when she sets strange house rules. Is the woman they’ve been sent to really their mom, or someone else?
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Talk to Me (2023)
Director: Danny and Michael Philippou
Did you go to a party where the hosts brought out a severed hand that they play a weird Ouija-like ritual with as the main attraction? Definitely do not ask it about your mother’s suicide! “All throughout the film, I was drawing from things that scare me personally,” Danny Philippou told Esquire.
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Hellraiser (1987)
Director: Clive Barker
Hellraiser kicks off with two classic horror tropes you should avoid at all costs: moving into an old, scary house where a murder occurred and buying a mystical puzzle box. I’m so glad they did, though—because it gave us Pinhead.
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Poltergeist (1982)
Director: Tobe Hooper
Before creating The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg gave us the family horror classic Poltergeist. The “They’re here...” scene went on to inspire countless horror filmmakers.
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M3GAN (2023)
Director: Gerard Johnstone
What M3GAN lacks in horrifying frights it makes up for in fun, as the AI doll slays victims, both literally and on the dance floor. Don’t walk—run on all fours to the theaters to catch this early 2023 hit.
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Barbarian (2022)
Director: Zach Cregger
If your Airbnb has a series of secret tunnels in the basement, I recommend not following them to see what’s down there. Thankfully, we have the indie delight Barbarian to back us up on that worldly wisdom, as you could never guess what monstrous entity is waiting down there for you.
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Pearl (2022)
Director: Ti West
The one person who had a better 2022 in the horror genre than director Ti West? His leading star, Mia Goth. Let her creepy, wide-eyed smile—which she holds for eight minutes without blinking during the end credits!—be her ticket to horror Valhalla.
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The Orphanage (2007)
Director: J. A. Bayona
Relying on suspense rather than plain shock, The Orphanage makes it difficult to distinguish reality from illusion. Taking place at the orphanage where Laura grew up, her son, Simón, plays with an imaginary friend—who may or may not be make-believe after all.
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Split (2017)
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
A man with 23 personalities manages to kidnap three teenage girls in broad daylight. Locked away from the outside world, the girls do everything they can to escape before his 24th personality makes its horrifying debut.
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His House (2020)
Director: Remi Weekes
Adjusting to a new country isn’t easy. With menacing spirits lurking around? Forget about it. When you’ve fled a war-ridden country only to encounter otherworldly horrors, where do you go?
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The Conjuring (2013)
Director: James Wan
Paranormal investigators finally meet their match in The Conjuring, one of the most horrifying films of all time about demonic possession. Top ten scariest movie moments: when the ghosts join in on a children’s hide-and-seek game by mimicking the kids’ clapping.
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It (2017)
Director: Andy Muschietti
Clowns aren’t scary enough? Do they also have to trick us into following them down into the sewers, where they transform into our greatest fears? Leaves those kids alone, Pennywise!
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The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
Director: Drew Goddard
Starring a young Chris Hemsworth, The Cabin in the Woods follows a group of college students who spend the weekend at a remote cabin only to find that they are surrounded by horrors beyond their wildest dreams. As always, everything is not as it appears.
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Insidious (2011)
Director: James Wan
Insidious broke horror rules not only by scaring viewers during the day but also by doing it constantly throughout the film’s runtime. This horrifying demonic-possession movie is jump-scare heavy, so get ready.
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Signs (2002)
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Underappreciated at the time of its release, alien flick Signs has risen in critical popularity in recent years for being one of the best crop-circle horrors ever presented onscreen. Signs may not be as twist heavy as M. Night’s other work, but bits like the kitchen-pantry scene (if you know, you know) have been nestled in our minds since first watch.
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Paranormal Activity (2007)
Director: Oren Peli
Paranormal Activity brought found-footage horror to a whole new level, spawning an entire franchise of spin-offs and reinvigorating the genre. Filmed almost entirely from the perspective of a camcorder, the movie features a couple who try to videotape some demonic entity that they believe is terrorizing them while they sleep.
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The Ring (2002)
Director: Gore Verbinski
A remake of the Japanese horror film of the same name, The Ring follows a haunted videotape that kills the viewer after they watch it. Samara, a girl who climbs out of a well and then crawls through your television to kill you, was one of the scariest horror monsters of the early 2000s—and her ability to terrorize hasn’t waned.
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The Grudge (2004)
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Monstrous and possessed people started crawling around upside-down like a crab a lot more often in horror films following The Grudge, another Japanese-horror remake that put scary ghosts in the shower, under the covers, and just about anywhere else you previously felt safe.
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The Omen (1976)
Director: Richard Donner
Young Damien Thorn is believed to be the Antichrist after a series of violent deaths occur around the family that all involve the sinister five-year-old.
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Child’s Play (1988)
Director: Tom Holland
Child’s Play introduced Chucky, a doll with the soul of a serial killer trapped inside. The kid’s toy looked scary enough even before it began its killing spree, and after, the idea of a lifelike doll for kids seemed 100 times more foreboding.
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Midsommar (2019)
Director: Ari Aster
Florence Pugh in a flower crown? Lovely! Maybe she’s at Coachella? Wrong. She’s in rural Sweden for the midsummer festival of a pagan cult. And things get strange and dark, fast.
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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Director: Wes Craven
In the original film of this iconic, sprawling slasher franchise, several Ohio teenagers are visited and preyed on by the disfigured Freddy Krueger in their dreams. Except a death while asleep, locked in terror, will kill them in reality, too.
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Us (2019)
Director: Jordan Peele
Jordan Peele’s 2019 follow-up to his 2017 hit Get Out did not disappoint. Starring Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, and Tim Heidecker, Us pits a family against a particularly unsettling, nightmarish enemy: doppelg?ngers of themselves.
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A Quiet Place Part II (2021)
Director: John Krasinski
Emily Blunt is back at it in the latest A Quiet Place, which is just as terrifying and nerve-racking as its predecessor. In it, the Abbott family continues their silent fight to survive.
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Spiral: Saw (2021)
Director: Darren Lynn Bousman
Esquire cover star Chris Rock recently threw his hat in the horror ring with the latest film in the Saw franchise, and he did a damn good, chilling job of it, too.
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The Witch (2015)
Director: Robert Eggers
Before creepy-vibes mastermind Robert Eggers had Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe drunkenly running around in The Lighthouse, he scared the hell out of us in The Witch. The puritan horror-thriller (what a genre!) is not only one of the scariest movies in a stacked decade for horror films but one of the most frightening of all time.
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The Descent (2005)
Director: Neil Marshall
Things were a little weird for the horror genre in the 2000s (see: The Wicker Man), but The Descent is a gem from that era. The tale of spelunking gone wrong still has a cult following today. If you don’t have claustrophobia now, you absolutely will after watching the cramped-cave horror of The Descent.
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Suspiria (1977)
Director: Dario Argento
While Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 reimagining of fellow Italian director Dario Argento’s horror classic is well worth the watch, there’s no beating the original. Argento’s tale of a ballerina school turned coven is a master class in horror-movie suspense, spooky music, and mystery.
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Deliverance (1972)
Director: John Boorman
Sometimes the scariest films don’t need to venture into the supernatural or the grandiose to strike fear. Put a deep-woods boy on a bridge and give him a banjo and that’s all you’ll need to send a chill up a lot of people’s spines. Starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox, this 1972 film about a foursome who decide to venture down a rural Georgia river likes to label itself as “an adventure drama,” but the phrase “squeal like a pig!” begs to differ.
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Hereditary (2018)
Director: Ari Aster
After her estranged mother dies, Annie (Toni Collette) begins to notice some peculiar activity around her house. After another shocking tragedy, Annie begins to spiral out of control. Is there a supernatural force attempting to manipulate her family, or is it all in her head?
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The Vanishing (1988)
Director: George Sluizer
If Hollywood titles like Taken and The Call have primed you to want to get to the bottom of every abduction movie, Dutch filmmaker George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (also known by its original Dutch title, Spoorloos) will make you wish Liam Neeson had just hung up the phone and gone to bed. Following one man’s hell-bent quest to find his girlfriend after she goes missing at a rest stop, this psychological thriller has a climax that has often been rated as one of the scariest endings of all time.
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The Thing (1982)
Director: John Carpenter
A team of researchers in the Antarctic tundra encounter an extraterrestrial “thing” that can shape-shift into the appearance of its victims. Among a new wave of sci-fi horror films, The Thing’s groundbreaking special effects will make you wary of all that you see at first glance.
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Lake Mungo (2008)
Director: Joel Anderson
When a mourning family begins to experience strange occurrences following a teenage daughter’s drowning, a series of unearthed clues reveals that her life was as shrouded in secrecy as was her untimely death. Told through hyperrealistic cinematography and heavily improvised acting, this mockumentary questions the fine line between grieving and being haunted.
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The Exorcist (1973)
Director: William Friedkin
If The Exorcist can still make its original 1973 viewers shudder at the thought of it decades later, there’s clearly something possessing about this film—which is based on the last known Catholic-sanctioned exorcism in the U.S.
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The Babadook (2014)
Director: Jennifer Kent
While the Babadook’s reading as a queer icon may have since passed its Internet shelf life, there is plenty of subtext that still haunts this Australian psychological-horror film. First appearing as a demonic storybook in the home of a mourning mother and son, the haunting presence of the Babadook soon proves to be far from fabled. As menacing as it is beautiful, The Babadook reminds us that there’s no way to stay safe from our demons once we are aware of them.
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Blood and Black Lace (1964)
Director: Mario Bava
In the most stylish horror movie of all time, a masked killer picks off hot but not always bright models at a fashion house. The perverse elegance of a model getting her face burned alive on a hot iron in Technicolor is an iconic moment in giallo filmmaking.
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Under the Skin (2013)
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who is sent to earth to lure Scottish men back into her apartment, where they enter a black void. This visually stunning thriller is a slow burn, but it’s worth it to see what happens to the dudes when she’s finished with them.
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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
Director: David Lynch
The prequel to Twin Peaks, made after the original run of the show was canceled, follows Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in her last week on earth. For all of its wacko images and sounds (ghost David Bowie, the Red Room, Chris Isaak playing an FBI agent), Fire Walk with Me is a devastating story about family, trauma, and loss.
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M (1931)
Director: Fritz Lang
A serial killer who hunts children has caused citywide panic (all captured in extremely moody German-expressionist photography). While police use modern technologies to track him, an underworld of criminals being targeted by raids decides to bring the killer to justice. You can thank M for Seven and all your other favorite serial-killer thrillers that have copied it—which is basically all of them.
Scream (1996)
Director: Wes Craven
The one that set off the trend of postmodern scary movies about scary movies, for better or (probably) worse. Nineties icons (Neve Campbell, Drew Barrymore, David Arquette, Courtney Cox, Rose McGowan) are terrorized by a killer while everyone debates the rules of slasher movies. It’s fresh and funny and was genuinely shocking when it came out—and it still holds up.
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Cabin Fever (2002)
Director: Eli Roth
Roth’s first, and still by far best, movie dishes out Evil Dead–style camp, but it also significantly ups the stakes and cringe factor with a skin-eating disease spreading among drunk assholes (well, except for Rider Strong, who of course plays the nice one) who quickly turn on each other.
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The Lords of Salem (2012)
Director: Rob Zombie
Zombie’s artful take on the Salem witches who now seem to be haunting a recovering drug addict is ominous thanks almost entirely to its meticulous use of sound and set design. And—rarest of all for a movie like this—it has a lot of heart. The visions of a witch ritual and bodies heaped in a pile rank up there with anything Stanley Kubrick ever made.
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Pulse (2001)
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
People encounter ghosts through their computers and suddenly vanish in this Japanese techno-horror gem that somehow makes the Internet even scarier than it already is.
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The Witches (1990)
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Yes, this Roald Dahl adaptation is ostensibly a movie for kids, but it fucked me up when I watched it over and over on VHS as a child, and I’m still not sure why my mom thought that was okay. Witches all over the world disguise themselves as normal-looking, professional women, but they lure children to their death using sweets. Anjelica Huston’s head witch in charge—who has a full-on heaving, orgasmic reaction to the thought of turning children into mice and stomping on them—is a master class in scenery chewing.
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God Told Me To (1976)
Director: Larry Cohen
An NYPD officer investigates a series of killings in which the murderers say they were inspired by God—and then gets roped into a mythology that is definitely the weirdest thing on this list.
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When a Stranger Calls (1979)
Director: Fred Walton
A murderer (Tony Beckley) torments a babysitter (Carol Kane) over the phone. Years later, an obsessed investigator (Charles Durning) follows the killer, who’s escaped an asylum and drifts around, while Kane’s character has to grapple with her guilt and anguish over what happened. The opening 20-minute phone sequence is one of the most effectively creepy in movie history.
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Candyman (1992)
Director: Bernard Rose
Sadly one of the few horror movies interested in exploring Black culture, Candyman follows a graduate student (Virginia Madsen) researching the legend known as the Candyman (Tony Todd), who's supposedly the reincarnation of a Black man killed by a lynch mob now taking out revenge on residents of Chicago’s projects when they say his name three times in the mirror. Madsen’s character doesn't believe it, but you, smart horror viewer, know better.
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Let the Right One In (2008)
Director: Tomas Alfredson
A 12-year-old boy falls in love for the first time, and it’s with a child vampire. The stark Scandinavian style gives the film a romantic and devious quality, and the tossed-off nature of the horror—a person suddenly bursting into flames, a swift poolside murder—is what makes it so scary.
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Jaws (1975)
Director: Steven Spielberg
A rogue great white shark is eating people in a New England resort town, and a trio of brave men—a small-town sheriff, an oceanographer, and a surly sailor with his own past run-ins with sharks—are the only people who can stop it. The film’s opening image of a woman being slowly tugged down by a shark in the moonlight is what made many people, including me, swear off night swimming forever.
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Deep Red (1975)
Director: Dario Argento
A musician (David Hemmings) and journalist (Daria Nicolodi) team up with lots of sexual tension to solve the whodunit mystery behind gruesome murders in Rome that involve childhood trauma. While it’s not the scariest movie on this list, its ending will make you question your own perception of what you just saw.
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Frankenstein (1931)
Director: James Whale
You probably no longer need the warning that opens the pre-Code horror movie, but the adaptation of Mary Shelley’s legendary novel is no less disturbing than it was then— particularly because of Boris Karloff’s simple, understated acting as the monster.
The House of the Devil (2009)
Director: Ti West
A college student (Jocelin Donahue) reluctantly accepts a babysitting job from a total creep (great character actor Tom Noonan), only to find that everything is wrong in his house. Infused with early ’80s nostalgia (satanic panic, Dee Wallace Stone), the horror comes so quickly you barely have time to process it.
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Don’t Look Now (1973)
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland play a couple trying to escape the grief of their young daughter’s accidental death in Venice only to find it haunting them in every corner of the city. Daphne du Maurier’s short story gets the psychological-horror treatment it deserved.
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Freaks (1932)
Director: Tod Browning
Browning dared to imagine a revenge fantasy from the perspective of a group of circus “freaks” and found his career ended, but his masterpiece remains as jaw-dropping and moving as ever. (And it still gets fans shouting “gooble, gobble” at drunk midnight screenings.)
The Others (2001)
Director: Alejandro Amenábar
Nicole Kidman lives in a country house shielded from sunlight with her kids, who say they’ve seen ghosts. Soon she starts seeing things, too, but not quite what you expect. With all due respect to The Sixth Sense, this is the scariest turn-of-the-millennium ghost movie with a twist ending.
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28 Days Later (2002)
Director: Danny Boyle
Cillian Murphy wakes up fully naked on a hospital bed a month after a virus has infected humanity and finds that all of society has collapsed. Streets are empty, except for the packs of zombies who are more aggro than a mosh pit at a Megadeth concert. When the survivors take shelter in a military compound, things get even darker than zombies foaming at the mouth.
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Get Out (2017)
Director: Jordan Peele
A young Black photographer (Daniel Kaluuya) joins his perky white girlfriend (Allison Williams) for a visit to her Obama-supporting parents’ home and discovers that liberals can’t be trusted any more than Ku Klux Klan members. Its humor aside, the image of a white woman eating Fruit Loops while researching Black men’s bodies to hijack is chilling because it’s different only in degree from a million thoughtless comments about the special “physicality” of Black men.
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Alien (1979)
Director: Ridley Scott
Scott’s horror movie in space created a subgenre of its own, but it’s Sigourney Weaver’s badass performance as Ripley facing off against a parasitic alien life-form that makes it just about perfect.
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Dumplings (2004)
Director: Fruit Chan
A stunning woman’s (Bai Ling) agelessness involves a monstrous secret. Just wait until you finally realize what’s inside those plump, juicy steamed dumplings. (I wouldn’t dare spoil it for you.)
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Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Director: Georges Franju
In the very literally titled French art-horror classic, a famous and unhinged surgeon kidnaps beautiful women and tries to transplant their faces onto his daughter who is, yes, missing a face. This movie really tapped into the power of masks. It also inspired everything from Face/Off to Billy Idol.
Black Christmas (1974)
Director: Bob Clark
A sorority on winter break is stalked by a serial killer, who first makes obscene phone calls and slowly begins to take down the house girls one by one. The final reveal of who—and where—the real murderer is will leave you breathless (and you’ll never think of Clark’s other famous film, A Christmas Story, in the same way).
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Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
Director: Ruggero Deodato
It may not have popularized the found-footage genre, but this notorious banned-from-so-many-countries exploitation movie kicked things off. Footage is recovered from a documentary crew that went missing in the Amazon after encountering a cannibalistic tribe. The (still) real-looking human violence led to accusations that actors were killed, which is not true, though the nauseating image of an impaled woman may make you think otherwise.
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Carnival of Souls (1962)
Director: Herk Harvey
A woman who’s been in a car accident walks into an abandoned carnival pavilion. Later she’s drawn back to its eerie music and ghostly images. The pale-faced man who haunts the carnival surely got lodged into David Lynch’s brain.
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Audition (1999)
Director: Takashi Miike
A widower arranges for women to audition to be his new wife. One of them gets her revenge—and then some.
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The Fly (1986)
Director: David Cronenberg
Cronenberg takes an old-school monster premise—a scientist (Jeff Goldblum, in an incredible and overlooked performance) goes too far and turns himself into a fly—and makes it poetic and tragic.
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Maniac (1980)
Director: William Lustig
A loner (Joe Spinell) with an alarming fondness for mannequins and a habit of talking to himself finally finds the perfect woman (Caroline Munro) but has trouble preventing his terrible urges.
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Carrie (1976)
Director: Brian De Palma
A quiet high school loner (Sissy Spacek) does what every quiet high school loner dreams of doing: She unleashes total hell on her abusive classmates at senior prom. The performances from Spacek and her onscreen mom Piper Laurie were so incredible that both earned Oscar nominations, a rarity for a horror movie.
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Repulsion (1965)
Director: Roman Polanski
A gorgeous woman (Catherine Deneuve) slowly goes mad while holed up inside her apartment, reliving traumas from her past.
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Salò (1975)
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
In this unflinching Italian study of depravity and fascism, powerful men round up teenage boys and girls and subject them to humiliating sexual acts and torture. It’s full of unsettling images (you could pick any number of particularly terrifying moments), but there’s nothing more disturbing than men laughing at their prisoners’ cries of pain.
Wolf Creek (2005)
Director: Greg McLean
Three hot, young, cosmopolitan Aussies tour the beautiful outback until their car breaks down and they find something very ugly.
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The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Director: Charles Laughton
A preacher/serial killer who has HATE and LOVE tattooed on his hands (never a good sign) charms his way into marrying a woman in order to steal a hidden stash of money, and her children have to stop him. The murky black-and-white photography is beautiful and sinister as hell.
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The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Directors: Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez
Three snarky college students go into the woods in search of a local myth that turns out to be way too real, and only their footage is left behind. Yes, you can blame this movie for every lazy, cheap, and insanely profitable found-footage horror movie that came after it. The lack of a “witch” annoys some people, but the scariest thing is always what we can’t see.
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Psycho (1960)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Hitchcock pretty much created the slasher subgenre—and originated the surprise first-act murder of the star—with the story of a woman (Janet Leigh) on the run who is way too accepting of a dark-haired stranger’s (Anthony Perkins) generosity.
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The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)
Director: Tom Six
American tourists looking for help instead find a German surgeon who, yes, definitely gives off Nazi vibes and has plans for them far worse than death. If you haven’t already passed out by the surgery exposition, good luck when you figure out the digestive mechanics of the “human centipede.”
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The Shining (1980)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, a writer with a drinking problem, arrives with his family to become the caretaker of a snowed-in hotel that’s inundated with creepy signs, from his son muttering “redrum” over and over to a duo of creepy girls hanging out in the halls to an elevator gushing with blood. Not to mention the film’s catchphrase: “Here’s Johnny!” Who says ax-wielding comic actors can’t be terrifying?
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The Last House on the Left (1972)
Director: Wes Craven
Craven was one of a few masters of horror who plumbed the depths of America’s Vietnam War–era cultural divides in this grimy, arty thriller about two teenage girls who encounter escaped prisoners in the big city—and how the tables get violently turned. The torture and abuse in this film make Deliverance look like an after-school special.
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Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Director: George A. Romero
The most influential horror movie of all time not only produced flesh-eating gross-out shots that are still more effective than any CGI monstrosity today, but it also cannily tapped into racial and cultural tensions that turn out to be the ultimate horror.
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The Wicker Man (1973)
Director: Robin Hardy
No, not the schlocky Nicolas Cage remake but the deeply upsetting British original about a police officer who visits a pagan island to investigate the disappearance of a girl and finds that these are not the nice kind of pagans.
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Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Director: Roman Polanski
In the most disturbing allegory for childbearing gone wrong, Mia Farrow’s Rosemary becomes increasingly panicked about her painful pregnancy and the mysterious neighbors in a building with a history of Satanism. You probably know how it ends, but it doesn’t matter: Rosemary’s slow descent into madness is the true horror here.
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The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Director: Jonathan Demme
A female FBI agent trying to prove herself (Jodie Foster) is gaslit by one imprisoned serial killer (Anthony Hopkins) while trying to capture another (Ted Levine) who cross-dresses and collects women’s well-moisturized skin.
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Halloween (1978)
Director: John Carpenter
Michael Myers, a man made of pure evil who killed his own sister as a six-year-old, escapes a sanitarium as an adult and returns to his hometown for revenge. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has to face him. Director John Carpenter scored the film, and the simple, chilling theme music playing as Myers stalks Laurie and her friends is always tough to get out of your head.
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Martyrs (2008)
Director: Pascal Laugier
In the most stomach-churning movie in the already very stomach-churning “New French Extremity” movement (don’t ask), a bourgeois family’s home hides a basement with the most disturbing experiment ever conceived. While it’s beautifully made, I can’t say I recommend this movie if you’re feeling even a little emotionally maladjusted.
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Director: Tobe Hooper
At the height of the Vietnam War, a group of young hippies travels through Texas and discovers that America is crawling with its own backwoods terror. The movie was originally billed as a true story in a genius bit of marketing and political commentary and broke all the rules of what was acceptable in a mainstream movie.
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