If there's one collective shared pastime that brings us all together again and again, it's getting scared senseless in front of a glowing screen. There's just something about exploring the dark side of humanity from the comfort of a safety bubble that never gets old. Sorting through a heap of dull horror duds, however, does. And that's where we come in!
Our love for scary movies runs deep. We're talking deeper than the well Samara Morgan crawled out of and stronger than Michael Myers on a teen-tossing all-nighter. From classic horror movies that are still killer today — like Psycho, The Exorcist, and The Innocents — to artsy elevated frights that tap into social commentary— Get Out, It Follows, and Hereditary, for instance – we can't get enough.
Here is our list of the best horror movies that not only tell great stories, but their scare tactics chill to the bone.
The Exorcist
You may not agree that 'The Exorcist' is the scariest movie ever, William Friedkin’s adaptation of the eponymous novel about a demon-possessed child and the attempts to banish said demon became the highest-grossing R-rated horror film ever and the first to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars (it earned nine other nominations and took home two trophies. The film is well-known for the mass hysteria it inspired across the country, from protests over its controversial subject matter to widespread reports of nausea and fainting in the audience. Its dramatic pacing and somewhat dated effects may seem quaint compared to some contemporary horror, but there’s no denying the power the film continues to have over those who see it for the first time.
Hereditary
Writer-director Ari Aster made a huge splash with his feature directorial debut, a dark family drama about the nature of grief couched within a supernatural horror film. Toni Collette earned a spot in the pantheon of great Oscar snubs with her slowly-ratcheted-up-to-11 performance as bedeviled mother Annie, but the movie’s biggest shock came courtesy of… Well, we won’t spoil that here. Suffice it to say 'Hereditary' struck such a nerve with moviegoers that it instantly turned Aster into a director to watch and shot up to second place on our list.
The Shining
Literally, dozens of Stephen King’s novels and stories have been adapted for the big screen, and several of those films are considered classics today, like Carrie, Misery, and Pet Sematary (and that doesn’t even account for non-horror stuff like The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me). But the mother of them all is easily Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. A marvel of set and production design and a genuinely unnerving take on the traditional haunted house story, The Shining features a host of memorable images and an iconic Jack Nicholson performance. The film’s relatively few jump scares are still absolutely chilling, but its true power lies in the way it crawls under your skin and makes you experience Jack Torrance’s slow descent into madness. It’s rightfully considered one of the greatest horror films ever made, and it ranked fourth in our poll.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The setup is this: a bunch of college-age kids show up in rural Texas in a van because they’ve heard a crazy person is digging up corpses from graves thereabouts and placing them in bizarre positions around the monuments; we see a gruesome example in the opening shot. People are concerned their loved ones are being desecrated, and our heroes are among them. One of them feels that her grandfather has had his eternal rest disturbed in this horrible way.
IT
The fear of clowns is a very real thing, even if it’s become so commonplace to announce it that it feels disingenuous. If you need any further evidence, we direct you to the box office haul of 2017’s IT, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, which went on to beat The Exorcist’s 44-year record as the highest-grossing horror film ever. Oh, and of course, it is 10th-place finish on this list. Andy Muschietti’s big-budget adaptation drew on nostalgia to tell its story of children scarred by trauma, while Bill Skarsgard’s take on Pennywise the evil, shapeshifting clown was bizarre and unsettling in all the right ways. Add a healthy dose of jump scares, a handful of impressive set pieces, and some top-notch CGI, and you’ve got a recipe for a horror film that’s both fun and full of scares.
Sinister
For those who didn’t read the “scientific study” mentioned at the top, we’ve finally come to the film it crowned the scariest. Before he joined the MCU with 2016’s Doctor Strange, director Scott Derrickson had racked up a few horror films, a couple of which earned cult followings. One of them was this small-scale haunted house/possession story about a true-crime writer (Ethan Hawke) who moves his wife and kids into a house where a family was murdered, only to discover the new place might already have a rather evil tenant. Writer C. Robert Cargill was reportedly inspired to pen the script based on a nightmare he had after watching The Ring, and the story does share a minor similarity with that film, what with the creepy snuff film angle. But for many who saw it, the dramatic reveals and creepy set pieces far outweighed any recycled genre tropes that might have been present. Plus, there’s at least one report out there that says it’s the scariest movie ever made, so that has to count for something.
The Ring
It’s always a tricky proposition to take something that works well for one culture and try to translate that formula successfully for another, but Gore Verbinski managed that with The Ring. A remake of Japanese director Hideo Nakata’s acclaimed thriller about a cursed videotape, Verbinski’s take kept the original film’s striking visual imagery — the ghost of a young girl in a white dress with long black hair covering her face — and found that it scared the hell out of audiences no matter where they were from. While the film wasn’t as well-regarded as its predecessor, it features a committed performance from a then up-and-coming Naomi Watts, and for many, it served as an introduction to East Asian horror cinema.
Talk to Me
Show of hands if you've seen this little Aussie treat from the A24 folks. About a group of teens who conjure the dead through an ancient relic, it stars relative newcomer Sophie Wilde, who's brilliant as Mia, a woman who recently lost her mother and believes this new embalmed-hand party trick is her ticket to seeing her again. With genius effects and an intensity that takes hold like a death grip, Talk to Me is one of the best modern entries into the supernatural subgenre.
Midsommar
It is an outrageous black-comic carnival of agony, starring charismatic Florence Pugh in a comely robe and floral headdress. It features funny-tasting pies and chorally assisted ritual sex, with pagan celebrants gazing into the middle distance and warbling as solemnly as the young dudes in the Coca-Cola TV ad about teaching the world to sing.
The scheme of 'Midsommar' revolves around its characters’ field of study, anthropology: the organization of society, the nature of culture. One of the crucial pretexts for the graduate students’ trip to the festival is that Josh is writing his thesis on summer-festival rituals across cultures and hopes to include this one in his research. What’s more, after his first experiences at the festival, Christian, who’s floundering in his field and unsure about his thesis topic, decides to make it his subject of study, as well, creating a rift between the two friends that further isolates both and renders them ever more vulnerable to the cult’s clutches. The trip’s anthropological basis, and the theoretical premise enfolding the elaborately imagined festival, suggests an admirably bold ambition on the part of Aster—a severe test of artistry akin to the grand design of Jordan Peele, who, in his second feature, 'Us' embraced a similarly vast view of social order symbolically, and that of Jim Jarmusch in his political zombie movie 'The Dead Don’t Die'.