Every genre has its films that serve as the gold standard of the style, and that goes doubly true for horror movies. The best horror movies convey the best things about the genre while still being excellently made films on the technical side in their own right. It’s safe to say that some of them are even near perfect, with little to no flaws that hold them back no matter how many years it may have been since they first debuted on cinema screens.
There are several aspects that horror movies have to succeed in to be considered near-perfect. For one, they must be sufficiently scary, able to summon genuine dread and terror without the use of cheap jump scares or fake-outs. They also have to be proficient films as a whole, avoiding the usual pitfalls of bad movies like poor acting, shoddy writing, low-quality production design or cinematography, and lackluster editing or sound design. When a horror film is able to succeed in all of these categories while also adding something new to the formula, it creates a truly legendary experience.
10
The Exorcist
1973
The original possession movie, The Exorcist is still hallowed grounds decades after its initial release due to the enduring horror of its sickening depiction of demonic possession. The film revolves around a young girl, Regan, who finds herself possessed by an evil malevolent entity, specifically a Christian demon. It’s up to a lone exorcist to free the young girl from the presence within her, a dangerous job that isn’t without supernatural peril.
The demon within Regan in The Exorcist is still one of the most terrifying movie monsters ever put to screen. The way the young Linda Blair is able to contort her face and demeanor to align with the jaw-dropping special effects and blood-curdling demonic voice is a difficult image to scrub from the mind, making for one of the most enduring horror experiences ever. From the technical prowess behind the camera to the iconic soundtrack, The Exorcist‘s influence is impossible to deny.
9
Jaws
1975
One of the greatest films from legendary director Stephen Spielberg, Jaws was not only hugely important for the horror genre, but it also helped invent the summer blockbuster as we know it. For how influential it is, the film has a relatively simple premise. A blood-thirsty, man-eater Great White shark is terrorizing the idyllic summer tourist season of a small beach town, and it’s up to the city to assemble a crack team of experts to take it down.
Eliminating such a monster is no simple matter of shooting fish in a barrel, however, and Jaws proved to be groundbreaking for the sheer buckets of blood and gore it got away with on a PG rating. It says something that the film’s terrifying imagery was so powerful as to inspire a whole series of Jaws spin-offs, though none could ever match the aquatic terror of the original. Famous enough for two simple notes of its theme song to be synonymous with shark attacks, Jaws has such a strong legacy for a good reason.
8
Night Of The Living Dead
1968
There was a time when the humble zombie movie had a chokehold on pop culture, and to this day the subgenre remains a massively popular touchstone for the horror movie community. None of it would’ve been possible without the legendary George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which popularized the idea of slow, shuffling hordes of undead humans who could only be killed with a decisive blow to the head and transferred their condition via bites. The film centers on the survivors of a town plagued by zombies huddled within a barricaded home with little hope of survival.
Other than popularizing many of the tropes that came to define zombie media, Night of the Living Dead is near-perfect so many other reasons. The tension between survivors and the sheer hopelessness conveyed through the menacing onslaught of the army of ghouls makes for an utterly entrapturing experience. With gorgeous black-and-white footage hiding the creases and imperfections of the film’s special effects, Romero truly managed to strike gold with the film on a miniscule budget.
7
Hereditary
2018
The film that put eccentric horror director Ari Aster on the map, Hereditary may be a relative newcomer to the horror hall-of-fame, but has quickly cemented itself as one of the most brilliant scary movies ever conceived. The film follows a dysfunctional family dealing with the emotional fallout of the death of their matriarch, who seemed to have a mysterious past none of the immediate family were aware of. It isn’t long before further tragedy and terror besets the household, heralding the arrival of a powerful demonic lord.
Toni Collette’s performance alone inarguably ranks Hereditary among one of the most genius horror films ever conceived, conveying grief and hopelessness with frightening accuracy. Aster is also a master at his craft, sowing the seeds for the disturbing ending with a breadcrumb trail of hints that necessitates additional viewings to fully grasp. With killer performances, a haunting soundtrack, and some of the most jaw-dropping scenes of any 2010s horror film, Hereditary is hard to find fault with.
6
The Thing
1982
While Halloween was the film that proved John Carpenter was a horror visionary to remember the name of, The Thing is arguably his magnum opus. An ingenious premise, the story revolves around the isolated crew of a research station deep within the windswept icy plains of Antarctica. When the station is invaded by a devious shape-shifting alien, the crew, headed by Kurt Russell’s MacReady, has to find a way to survive while distinguishing friend from foe.
The Thing doesn’t waste a single moment of its runtime, wordlessly dropping the viewer into the hellish snowstorms of Antarctica before setting its creative and repulsive creature on them. The practical special effects in The Thing are some of the greatest of all time, and make for spectacularly bloody messes that punctuate the long periods of tension within the claustrophobic research station. While audiences of the 80s weren’t able to appreciate it, The Thing continues to be an all-time-great horror film for a variety of reasons.
5
The Shining
1980
From the mind of the genius director Stanley Kubrick comes one of the greatest adaptations of a Stephen King book of all time, The Shining. Even if King himself isn’t a fan of Kubrick’s film, for most, it’s hard to find things to complain about the brilliantly-crafted multi-genre horror masterclass. The story centers around the Torrance family, whose young boy, Danny, has an uncanny ability to telepathically communicate. This comes in handy when his father, Jack, brings him and his mother to the Overlook Hotel, where madness soon gets the better of him.
Every performance in The Shining is almost impossible to believe as an act, from Nicholson’s eerie grin to Shelley Duvall’s shrieking hysteria. Every solitary frame of the film is an absolute painting, from the bone-chilling bathroom sequence to the legendary shot of Danny patrolling the halls of the Overlook on his tricycle. It could be argued that The Shining is simply one of the greatest films of all time, let alone among horror movies specifically.
4
Alien
1979
It’s rare for a multi-genre film to be so thoroughly inspirational to its peers in multiple sectors, but Ridley Scott’s Alien is undoubtedly monumental in both the horror and science fiction spaces. Set in an isolated spaceship, the film follows Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley as she’s waken up from cryogenic stasis, along with the rest of her crew, only to encounter a terrifying alien life form that terrorizes the confined ship. Before long, Ripley’s crewmates are plucked off one at a time by the apex predator that is the Xenomorph.
Like The Thing, Alien is also a groundbreaking film when it comes to conveying extraterrestrial terror through the lens of practical effects. Every performance thoughtfully navigates through Scott’s believable retro-future world, full of twisted black cables and chunky digital screens that form the bones of the USCSS Nostromo. Even if none of the spin-offs or sequels have quite been able to re-capture the quiet terror of the original film, Alien is so influential for a good reason, having few to no true faults.
3
Psycho
1960
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Even if the iconic thriller director Alfred Hitchcock might be better known for his intricate murder mysteries, it’s his work in straight-laced horror that looms above the rest of his filmography. The precursor to the modern slasher film, many stories owe their existence to Psycho. The story revolves around a trio of unlikely allies converging to investigate the disappearance of a young woman at the mysterious Bates Motel, run by the nebbish innkeeper Norman Bates, who soon becomes a suspect of murder.
As far as horror villains go, Norman Bates is one of the most chillingly human, with his sadistic grin in the final shot leaving a last ghastly impression. For its time, Psycho is brilliantly edited, with the infamous shower scene still being a pop culture touchstone over 50 years after its conception. An old movie that’s aged remarkably gracefully, it’s difficult to find fault in Psycho even by modern horror movie standards.
2
The Silence Of The Lambs
1991
Based on the novel of the same name, The Silence of the Lambs is one of those rare horror films that transcends its disturbing subject matter enough to become highly-regarded as genuine art. The film posits Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, a rookie F.B.I. agent tasked with apprehending the disturbing serial killer known as Buffalo Bill, who is suspected to have kidnapped a powerful senator’s daughter. To aid her in her search, she enlists the help of the infamous Hannibal Lecter, an incarcerated serial killer and former licensed psychiatrist known for eating his victims.
Sir Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter is simply one of the greatest cinematic villains of all time, transcending his role with a hypnotically watchable yet disturbing persona of vicious violent tendencies colliding with an appreciation for the finer things in life. Every other performance keeps up just as well, and the film’s imagery and drawn-out moments of alarming tension feel capable of having a physical effect on the viewer. As far as horror movies go, The Silence of the Lambs just may be a perfect film.
1
Get Out
2017
Marrying the very real horror of racism with some existentially terrifying body horror implications, Get Out was the first horror film by Jordan Peele, quickly changing the public perception of the director as a former sketch comedy guru. The film centers on a young African American photographer who agrees to travel to a well-to-do suburb in an effort to meet his white girlfriend’s parents. Racial tensions soon turn to something much darker as Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris Washington uncovers the community’s sinister secret.
It’s rare enough for a horror film to look as good as Get Out does, but it’s the writing that truly elevates the debut movie to another level. Few horror movies offer political commentary as valuable as Peele’s, which comes across without feeling overbearing or eclipsing the more supernatural elements of the story. Thought-provoking, scary, and expertly crafted in every technical category, Get Out is about as perfect as horror movies come.