The films guaranteed to scare you senseless.
Only one horror film has ever terrorised me so completely that I didn’t sleep at all the night after watching it. It’s at No 37 on the top 50 below, which is an attempt to sort almost 130 years of the form – from Georges Méliès’s The House of the Devil, released in 1896, to Danny Boyle’s brand new revival of his millennial zombie myth 28 Years Later – into an objective pulse-quickening pantheon.
It might seem a shade premature to include the latter, but sometimes as a critic, you have a gut instinct you’ve just seen an all-time great; the last occasion, for me was Oppenheimer, which (rightly) got an instant spot on the Best Biopics list we first published two years ago. Similarly, behind the heat-of-the-moment terror during my first viewing of 28 Years Later last week, I could already feel the slow-burn amazement starting to catch – so into my list it has gone, at No 42.
In whittling down the selection, some terrific borderline cases had to be excluded, including Ridley Scott’s Alien, which contains enough sci-fi to feel as though it doesn’t strictly belong here, and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, which is more of a psychological thriller with slashings, even though it owes an enormous debt – spoiler alert! – to one of our top three.
The final list is deeply partial but, I hope, also a fair overview of a genre which, even in another 130 years’ time, will surely still be causing as much distress and delight as it always has. Read on...if you dare.
50. The Witches (1990)
Horror for kids! There isn’t enough of it around, though Nicolas Roeg’s immortal Roald Dahl adaptation is more than nasty enough to make up for the shortfall. Jim Henson, whose Creature Shop furnished the film with its cute mice and terrifying prosthetics, came up with the masterstroke of putting the Don’t Look Now and Walkabout director behind the camera, while Anjelica Huston, by turns slinky and putrid, perfectly strikes the film’s signature balance between fright and camp. Beware: Robert Zemeckis’s sappy, CGI-soaked remake from 2020 doesn’t come close.
49. Saw (2004)
The film that got the controversial “torture porn” sub-genre rolling was a product of its time – a cheap-and-cheerless serial killer piece in the style of David Fincher’s 1995 hit Seven, thoroughly doused in post-9/11 nihilism and despair. The series would graphically articulate what many younger American audiences feared but couldn’t quite state outright: that acts of terror were firstly punishments, but also ordeals through which the sins of the past could be purged.
48. The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
Uncanny lyricism abounds in this early Poe adaptation, which manages to suggest that things are indefinably wrong in the Usher residence, using shivery long takes and marvellous photographic effects. A wordless séance, full of surprises.
47. Get Out (2017)
Horror’s capacity for burrowing straight to the dark heart of contemporary fears was behind the extraordinary success of Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning debut feature, in which a young black photographer is preyed upon by a smiling family of well-to-do white liberals.
46. The Orphanage (2007)
A protege of Guillermo del Toro (inevitably, see below), Spain’s Juan Antonio Bayona made an unforgettable debut with this desperately moving gothic ghost story, about a woman whose adopted son goes missing in the abandoned children’s home where she grew up.
45. The Substance (2024)
This instant body horror classic pulled off an increasingly tricky feat on the modern genre scene: it stoked genuine outrage. Starring Demi Moore as an ageing Hollywood starlet taking one last, medically-assisted shot at career rejuvenation, Coralie Fargeat’s shapeshifting show-business nightmare was accused on release of every “-ism” under the sun – largely by younger critics who bridled at its use of disgust as a punchline, satirical weapon and fairground mirror for its own audience’s deepest-seated fears. That discomfort, of course, just meant job done in style.
44. Häxan (1922)
Pronounced “Hexen”, the title of this silent Swedish chiller means witch, and Benjamin Christensen’s controversial opus certainly received the ducking stool treatment. A supremely creepy account of occult ritual through the ages presented in the guise of a documentary, the film’s blasphemy, violence and sex scandalised censors, and only in 2001 did its original cut become easy to see.
43. Dracula (1958)
There have been countless adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel over the years, but none have bested Hammer’s first bite at the character, which gave Christopher Lee his star-making role. Directed by Terence Fisher, this was gothic horror with a ravishing technicolour sheen, which lent the count’s stalkings and slurpings a debonair sexual charge.
42. 28 Years Later (2025)
Some of the scariest horror films double as sharp state-of-the-nation critiques. Britain has an especially strong track record in this regard: think noughties “hoodie horror” Eden Lake, the nuclear paranoia of Threads, or the post-Iraq, post-expenses-scandal, post-credit-crunch collapse in civic trust captured by Ben Wheatley’s Kill List. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s savvy revival of their millennial zombie myth puts its finger on the UK’s current plight with terrifying acuity, as the nation simultaneously turns in on and against itself in a frantic attempt to claw back its semi-mythical past.
41. Night of the Demon (1957)
MR James’s Casting the Runes provided the delectably sinister plot – a curse is passed from body to body, often by subterfuge – and Jacques Tourneur fashioned a British occult chiller around it, whose sly wit and aura of dread are unsurpassed.
40. Audition (1999)
The Japanese horror boom of the late 1990s was the antidote to the decade’s Hollywood slasher revival, defying Western viewers’ expectations of what horror could be. Perhaps no film of the time was more discombobulating than Takashi Miike’s international breakthrough, which behaves for the most part like a lyrical romantic drama before the spine-freezing terrors of its final act.
39. Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
Murnau’s silent take on the vampire myth may be more famous (and Robert Eggers’ 2024 version more gorgeously glossy) but Werner Herzog’s hypnotic 1970s remake turns it into Wagner. Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani might be the weirdest coupling in a genre with many of them, and the dark poetry of the film-making electrifies.
38. Eyes Without a Face (1960)
A Parisian plastic surgeon resolves to perform a face transplant on his disfigured daughter – whatever the cost – in this (often literally) skin-prickling film from France’s Georges Franju. The director’s surrealist and poetic tendencies are at the fore, in the blankness of the mask that conceals Edith Scob’s injuries, and the dreamy noir vibe of her father’s maze-like mansion, where he goes about his grisly work.
37. Martyrs (2008)
Four years after Saw, torture porn had said just about all it could, but Pascal Laugier’s French-language addition to the genre pushed it to its graphic and spiritual limits. A home invasion horror that mutates into something far stranger, it involves a cult seeking to make contact with the afterlife by inflicting terrible suffering on its victims. Its climax might be the quintessence of extreme horror: impossible to un-see.
36. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
More horror as era-defining metaphor – this time courtesy of George A. Romero, the undisputed master of the zombie beat. After a deadly plague, undead hordes flock to a shopping mall: it’s the 1970s economy, stupid, in which the growing first-world desire to consume is made (rotting, shuffling) flesh.
35. Repulsion (1965)
The most gory thing in Roman Polanski’s film is a whole skinned rabbit, which decays as the film’s protagonist, Carol Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve), descends into madness. Carol’s Kensington flat sees little blood spill, but the tension is always on a knife edge.
34. Peeping Tom (1960)
So abhorred was Michael Powell’s proto-slasher about a murderous voyeur at large in pre-swinging London that his career never quite recovered from the backlash. Today, though, its brilliance is widely recognised – in scenes as overtly shocking as its implicatory, point-of-view murders; in the horribly ambient threat of a sequence in which a little girl talks happily to a newsagent, oblivious to the dirty magazines leering down on all sides.
33. Suspiria (1977)
Does Dario Argento’s crackpot masterpiece count as a giallo, or no? Aficionados tend to say not – the paranormal elements are disqualifying – but it’s certainly seething with the genre’s fixations and quirks. Jessica Harper stars as a ballet exchange student who realises all too late that her new German dance school is in fact a hideout for witches; much garish slaughter ensues.
32. Trouble Every Day (2001)
Claire Denis’ cannibal love story might fall at the more brooding end of the scare spectrum – but its evocative portrayal of addiction, coupled with a monstrous, erotically charged performance from Béatrice Dalle as disturbed cannibal Coré, ensures its place in horror chart. This is a film with bite, about the human longing to be bitten. Even in Denis’s own work, desire has rarely felt so dangerous.
31. The Wicker Man (1973)
“Try everything once except incest and folk-dancing,” said the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Had he lived to see The Wicker Man, it would have backed him up on at least one of those counts. What a strange, singular film it still is: in some respects dated in all the best ways, yet its famous climax holds on to every shred of its unmatched, infernal power.
30. The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Silver of tongue and black of soul, Robert Mitchum’s serial-killer pastor with LOVE and HATE emblazoned over his knuckles is a horror villain for the ages. Audiences at the time didn’t see it that way, though: this dark fairy tale, with its waterlogged corpses, children lost in the forest and its $10,000 cache of buried loot was a commercial and critical failure, which ended the actor Charles Laughton’s nascent directorial career at a stroke.
29. The Birds (1963)
In his adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s story, Alfred Hitchcock manages to make something we usually associate with harmless beauty, utterly terrifying. As you might expect from the master of suspense, it’s all about the tension. It builds and builds and builds in an excruciating crescendo.
28. Funny Games (1997)
Is Funny Games horror at all, or just a punishing commentary on movie violence, and the ways in which it cheapens our comprehension of the real thing? Either way, Michael Haneke’s grim postmodern parable – in which a family are terrorised by two eerily polite young men – is a masterfully crafted, unforgettably nasty piece of work.
27. The Babadook (2014)
You can never truly banish your demons, this superlative Australian chiller suggests: instead, we ultimately have to make peace with the monster under the bed. En route to that sharp-sighted moral, director Jennifer Kent scares her audience rigid relentlessly with a story of a top-hatted spectre who torments a single mother and her troubled child from the pages of a haunted pop-up book.
26. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920)
The oldest entry in our horror top 50, about a mad hypnotist who murders by mesmerised proxy, managed to bottle everything great about the genre when it was barely years old. Made in Weimar Germany by Robert Wiene, it was a bold social parable, reflecting the Government’s megalomaniacal tendencies, but also a stylistic marvel, full of bone-jangling expressionistic angles and set in streets and rooms that lean and jut like broken teeth.
25. It Follows (2014)
David Robert Mitchell’s staggeringly spooky and fun spin on the popular noughties Final Destination format will have made more than its fair share of teens sit up straight in sex ed. A supernatural entity walks slowly towards its targets, messily dispatching them one by one: the twist is that the curse is a sort of spiritual STD, transmissible via intercourse. It’s an outrageous, ingenious premise, given weight by a superb ensemble cast and Mitchell’s deft and merciless technique.
24. Onibaba (1964)
What bridges the gap between the J-horror explosion of the 1990s and the elegant supernatural tales of Japanese cinema’s postwar golden age? Step forward Kaneto Shindo, whose sublimely eerie, swirlingly erotic tale of two peasant women and a cursed demon mask combines classical tragedy with a very contemporary sense of uncanny dread.
23. Scream (1996)
Just over a decade after its golden age, the slasher flick ate (or arguably butchered) itself in Wes Craven’s electrically crafty pastiche. During Ghostface’s original Woodsboro rampage, the tone was set for a new era of horror fandom that took winking ownership of the genre’s many rules and kinks.
22. American Psycho (2000)
John Carpenter – coming right up – might have set the slasher-movie template in the late 1970s, but two-and-a-bit decades on, Mary Harron’s blackly comic adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s source novel optimised its satirical force. Christian Bale’s star-making performance as Wall Street fiend Patrick Bateman lays bare the barbarous mindset lurking behind the ‘Me’ Decade’s excesses.
21. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
An admitted edge case in a list like this – isn’t it more accurately fantasy, or a dark fairy tale? – Guillermo del Toro’s 1940s-set parable of childhood during wartime is as haunting a film as has been made this century, full of images and ideas that cling to the soul like dew to leaves.
20. Eraserhead (1977)
David Lynch’s wonderful, excruciating nightmare is another does-it-count-or-not entry – but it’s simply too great, and crucially too unnerving, not to include. In his debut feature, Lynch creates a whole weird, grungy, post-industrial world for his sad-sack besuited hero Henry (Jack Nance) to inhabit. It’s in beautiful black-and-white – in colour, these images would probably disgust us.
19. Possession (1981)
Another casualty of the 1980s video nasty panic, Andrzej Zulawski’s tentacle-flapping psychological freakout was finally released in the UK in 2000, having lost precisely none of its sense-scrambling force in the interim. Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill go fully off the chain as a couple in split Berlin going through marital meltdown, while in an abandoned house across town, she nurses wriggly secrets.
18. Diabolique (1955)
A put-upon wife and her girlfriend conspire to murder her awful husband – but why, when the swimming pool in which they dumped the body is drained, is there no trace of him? Still one of the most clammily satisfying horror-mysteries of all time, utterly un-dated, with Henri-Georges Clouzot making expertly menacing use of the gloomy school in which the events increasingly spiral.
17. Ring (1998)
Countless horror films deal with possession. But Hideo Nakata’s J-horror classic, about a cursed VHS tape that dooms all who watch it, is one of the few which itself feels actually possessed. The threat, a string of grainy, initially meaningless images, was viral before that term had even found its modern meaning. And the movie’s signature shock – a forbidden breaching of the barrier between the on and off-screen worlds – brilliantly fused jump-scare showmanship to gnawing, slow-build dread.
16. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Few would have guessed it at the time: we were too petrified by the swinging torch beams and twig-built totems. But this shoestring American indie – marketed as footage recovered from an occult documentary shoot in the woods gone horribly wrong – pre-empted a generational shift in the way the world produced and consumed moving images. Its DIY aesthetic gave us horror raw and unmediated, with a seeming built-in truthfulness that made its scares all the harder to shake off.
15. Pulse (2001)
Techno-paranoia may have never been so unnerving – or prescient – as in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s early internet-age chiller, in which ghosts worm their way into the world of the living via the Web. Here, online space is a sort of digital spirit realm, through which evil can be contacted and channelled, and portals opened to places that should never be found.
14. The Thing (1982)
What do you get if you cross HP Lovecraft with Agatha Christie and some all-time most revolting creature effects? The answer, courtesy of John Carpenter, is cinema’s most rivetingly horrid whodunnit, in which Kurt Russell frantically tries to put a stop to the extraterrestrial monster that plans to mush together an Antarctic research team like so much human Play-Doh.
13. Halloween (1978)
Carpenter again – endlessly imitated but never matched, the horror master’s low-budget slasher film virtually invented the genre, making brilliant use of widescreen, and of the director’s own score, to make you jump out of your chair. Despite its reputation, the film is almost entirely gore-free.
12. The Fly (1986)
Body horror turns the wider genre inside out: the nasty stuff isn’t out there in the forest and/or distant cosmos, but squirming around beneath your very flesh. David Cronenberg is the genre’s undisputed high priest – and this stomach-twisting mid-career masterpiece, in which Jeff Goldblum’s scientist accidentally splices his DNA with that of an insect, finds him at the peak of his transgressive powers.
11. Carrie (1976)
A high-school misfit’s humiliation and orgiastic revenge are extraordinary conduits for empathy in Brian De Palma’s hands – the real horror, every time, is Sissy Spacek’s telekinetic teen not getting what she wants. Astonishingly suspenseful, and funny, with it.
10. The Innocents (1961)
Our top 10 opens with prestige horror: Jack Clayton’s pristine distillation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw into unsettlingly ambiguous cinema. Deborah Kerr is perfectly cast as Miss Giddens, the repressed governess who may or may not be projecting her own fears on to her wards. Are her two young charges really controlled by the vulgar spirits of their late former nanny and their uncle’s valet? Or do the strange goings-on stem from this unworldly vicar’s daughter’s hidden wicked side, as she finds herself both repelled and enticed by the suggestive shadows of her new place of work?
9. Cure (1997)
Tokyo is being rocked by a spate of murders – each carried out by a different, seemingly motiveless perpetrator, but in the same gruesome manner as all the others, hinting at a broader pattern that Koji Yakusho’s detective can’t quite comprehend. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s transfixingly scary international breakthrough reimagined Japan’s fin-de-siècle malaise as a literal killing spree, in which the crumbling social order becomes a labyrinth where evil freely goes about its work.
8. Evil Dead II (1987)
You never forget the first time you see Sam Raimi’s Grand Guignol splatterfest. Me, I was 18, channel-surfing late one night, and spent the ensuing 84 minutes with my jaw down by my ankles, thinking repeatedly: come on, surely you can’t show that. But Raimi could, and did relentlessly – his (slightly) bigger-budget reboot of his 1981 debut moves like a Looney Tunes short, albeit one crammed with ancient curses, rapacious trees and slavering, eye-rolling ghouls. It’s wildly funny, but never allows you to laugh long enough to get comfortable: see, for instance, Bruce Campbell’s iconic possessed-hand scene, which chases down an absurdist slapstick set-piece with a stomach-churning anti-punchline. Take that, me!
7. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Is horror habitually overlooked by Hollywood? Put it this way: 43 films into our list, we’ve arrived at the only entry to have won the Best Picture Oscar (two more – one yet to come – were nominees). But then Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel was a phenomenon in every field going – not just sweeping the top five Academy Award categories that year but breaking box office records in the UK, and turbo-charging the VHS rental market.
What audiences got, in their droves, was an unflinching encounter with human evil – both in the cool, composed form of Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter (16 minutes of screen time; one Best Actor Oscar to show for it) and the psychotic Buffalo Bill, the Ed Gein type that Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling hopes Lecter can help bring to justice. Demme directs with Lecter’s own steely intellect and extraordinary psychological acumen; the film has got inside your head before you’re even aware it’s been testing the locks.
6. The Shining (1980)
Springing back from the commercial failure of Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick made the stir-crazy psychothriller to beat them all, with Jack Nicholson going rapidly doolally at a mountain resort and blaming ghosts for his own marital collapse. Kubrick’s films are all long corridors into the mind, and this literalises his obsessions terrifyingly, as Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, wife Wendy and young son Danny find themselves lured deep into the Overlook Hotel’s mazy recesses with no hope of returning with their psyches in one piece. Forty-four years on, its continuing influence almost defies belief – you simply can’t portray this kind of walkthrough breakdown without audience and artist alike being drawn right back to Jack.
5. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper’s tale of backwater cannibals and lost road-tripping teens might have premiered half a century ago this year, but even today it feels like a moral black hole from whose orbit cinema may never quite manage to escape. Made in the shadow of mounting social and political turmoil, the film is both a howl of rage against the supposedly civilised world and a whoop of pure glee at its downfall: it’s the United States’ outcasts and left-behinds getting one last chance to bite back before the American Century burns out for good. Refused a certificate by the BBFC for 25 years (and banned in many other countries outright), it was only passed at 18 in 1999, by which point its DNA had long since found its way into the genre’s bloodstream.
4. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Ira Levin’s taut tale of Manhattan witchcraft got sensational screen treatment from then-prodigy Roman Polanski, who organises the whole plot against Mia Farrow’s expectant mother with brilliantly oblique technique. The genius shift Polanski’s film effected – bringing about a good decade of upmarket horror and spawn-of-Satan cinema in the process – was in selling modern audiences on the notion that any house could be a haunted one; even a chic apartment in the Branford building (to all intents and purposes, the Dakota) on the edge of Central Park.
Rosemary’s suspect neighbours, all installed there for years, embodied the New York of old, its closets stowed with skeletons – while the sweet, pretty girl with the pixie cut was the city’s bright and modern new face. In America of the late 1960s, however, fresh starts were wishful thinking: the ancient evils could still get their claws into you, even if they show up bearing cups of chocolate mousse.
3. Don’t Look Now (1973)
Nicolas Roeg’s occult-tinged masterpiece, based on a Daphne du Maurier short story, is the story of two deaths: one quick, the other painfully slow. The first involves a girl – the young daughter of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie’s John and Laura Baxter, who drowns while playing by a lake near their rural English home. The couple relocate to Venice, city of alleys and echoes, in an attempt to grieve and move on. But all of their attempts to do so, whether via work, sex or seances, only bring them circling back towards the tragedy, making their marriage the film’s second victim – and like John, we sense the end coming in our bones, even if its manner comes as a sickening shock.
2. Psycho (1960)
Suspense may have been Alfred Hitchcock’s métier, but the twist in this was something else. After around 45 minutes, the familiar contours of its getaway story lurch into strange and sickening new terrain, like a hastily purchased 1957 Ford Custom 300 sinking beneath the surface of a swamp. More brazenly than ever before, Hitchcock was flouting 50 years of movie-making taboo, from the steamy opening sex scene to its frank depiction of a flushing toilet (the first in mainstream US cinema) to the iconic shower scene, with its 52 cuts in 45 seconds, each one slicing at the film itself like Norman Bates’ knife.
1. The Exorcist (1973)
William Friedkin would make only one further horror film in his 56-year career: 1990’s The Guardian. (What a blood-curdling title.) But why bother going back to a genre you’d not only perfected, but topped, first time around? More than half a century after its initial, controversy-stirring release, Friedkin’s religiously charged scare-fest has lost none of its uncomfortable, taboo-breaking edge.
Boundaries are crossed, and our expectations repeatedly outraged, as the body, mind and vocal cords of a 12-year-old girl – Regan MacNeil, played by the phenomenal Linda Blair – become a battleground for an age-old contest. A large part of the film’s power comes from its wholehearted seriousness, and from the way it fully embraces its own convictions. Here, hell, demons and demonic possession are tangible, formidable things, as real and as visceral as our own skin and flesh – or, indeed, as a projectile splurge of green vomit.