The Scariest Movies of All Time

Horror movies hardly ever get the respect they deserve. Save for the fanatics, who worship at the feet of Wes Craven, Stanley Kubrick, and Stephen King, even the most acclaimed creepy thriller or slasher film is usually buried by dramas and biopics when award season rolls around. Only lately, thanks in large part to Blumhouse Productions, have horror movies started to get their due, with upcoming films like Candyman and Spiral attracting the crowds who loved films like Get Out and the recent Halloween reboot.

Whether they're based on a true story (sort of) like The Conjuring, a low budget found footage piece like The Blair Witch Project, or more sci-fi leaning like The Sixth Sense, the best horror movies are well-acted and able to terrify even a seasoned scary movie vet. If you're on the prowl for horror movies on Netflix, or just trying to learn more about the genre, check out this list of the scariest movies of all time.

The Shining (1980)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Stars: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone, Joe Turkel

The premise remains just as creepy as it did in 1980: A man (Nicholson) accepts a job as the winter caretaker of a massive hotel in Colorado and moves his family (Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd) there just as the cold sets in among the mountains. But the hotel is the source of great evil.

Whether you want to read the violence as symbolism for the Native American genocide, the Holocaust, or the irrational misogyny of the world, well, that's up to you. You won't have a choice but to be afraid. The music, culled mostly from dissonant 20th century classical, conspires so tightly with the smooth tracking shots and powerful images (the hemorrhaging elevator, the twins) that only one response is possible: you succumb. —RS

Candyman (1992)

Director: Bernard Rose

Stars: Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd, Xander Berkeley, Vanessa Williams, Kasi Lemmons, DeJuan Guy, Bernard Rose, Gilbert Lewis, Ted Raimi

1992's Candyman, which transplanted Clive Barker's horrific short story "The Forbidden" from London into the Cabrini Green projects, is the feather in the cap for black horror film lovers. The options for horror films lead by black stars are slim, and surprisingly, Candyman is the only black horror icon to stan on par with Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. The way he's broken down on film—starting out first as being appropriated by a local gang to intimidate those living in the projects, but then coming to life after being summoned—is so artistic. It's chilling, then gets insanely violent, all while documenting one woman's obsession with urban lore. The fact that Nia DaCosta's directing the modern take on the tale in a film that is being produced by Jordan Peele makes us even more excitedly afraid for the future of the franchise. —khal

Get Out (2017)

Director: Jordan Peele

Stars: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Stephen Root, Catherine Keener

Jordan Peele's Oscar-winning entry into the world of horror was an important one. While the indie space has been where horror has thrived, Peele took that aesthetic and applied it to a film that won the hearts and support of the mainstream. And while horrific—there are some downright brutal kills in the latter part of the film—the true terror in Get Out is in the America that is being satirized. The America we've lived in.

Of course, the film is about rich AF liberals who secretly lure and kidnap black folks to essentially live on through the bodies of these people. Built with older school aesthetics, you may not realize that's the case from early on, but upon repeated viewings, the true terror is in how similar these situations are to our own lives. Peele forever wins for thinking this up and throwing it up on-screen. —khal

Hereditary (2018)

Director: Ari Aster

Stars: Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Gabriel Byrne

Ari Aster is another name to watch, and A24's Hereditary is what solidified it. A family deals with the death of a grandmother. All the while, they really need to deal with the mysterious force that's overtaking their lives. Hereditary is a film that never really sits right with you. Something creepy's always around the corner, and for the most part, no one else can see it. While a bit slower to take off, once Hereditary begins its ride, it truly never ends. It just crescendos into a wild opera of horror. People crawling on ceilings and secret cult rituals and fire and so much more. The imagery is so vibrant, it truly sticks with you. Sadly, these aren't the images you'll want to stay with you. —khal

Goodnight Mommy (2014)

Director(s): Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala

Stars: Susanne Wuest, Elias Schwarz, Lukas Schwarz

A film about a pair of twins trying to figure out if the woman under her bandages is really their mother. For some reason, they have a fanciful idea about what's going on, seeing the stage for this twisty Austrian horror flick. With a small cast and one central location, it's genius how the film builds intensity. The progression into darker territory moves steadily, so once the shit really starts to hit the fan, you've been properly prepped for it, although you damn sure won't be ready for where this film goes. Made scarier because of the isolation, Goodnight, Mommy is the stuff nightmares are made of. —khal

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Director: Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez

Stars: Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, Michael C. Williams

If, 20 years from now, you find yourself in the bind of having to explain how found footage became the technique in horror movies, you have to trace it back to the source, to the little indie that did, The Blair Witch Project.

Released in 1999, the film wanted you to see it as non-fiction, the actual record of three students pursuing a local legend in Maryland. (Yes, this is also the film that has got you into countless arguments with dummies who think that recent incarnations of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Paranormal Activity are based on true events.) Costing less than a million dollars, The Blair Witch Project grossed about 250 times that amount.

This is the model for countless films, and to be an informed, developed viewer of film, you have to go back to the blueprint. —RS

Paranormal Activity (2007)

Director: Oren Peli

Stars: Katie Featherstone, Micah Sloat

You know what's really scary about Paranormal Activity? Any one of us could've made it in our own homes, with any store-bought video camera. Well, assuming you've got the same degree of talent and vision that first-time filmmaker Oren Peli had when he shot this $15,000 found-footage haunted house flick and mined scares from nothing more than noises and tight pacing.

That Paranormal Activity raked in $193 million at the box office, has spawned three sequels, and dethroned the Saw franchise to become Hollywood's new October sure thing only makes Peli's do-it-yourself wizardry sweeter. OK, so maybe we couldn't do all of that. —MB

Hellraiser (1987)

Director: Clive Barker

Stars: Ashley Laurence, Doug Bradley, Claire Higgins, Andrew Robinson, Sean Chapman, Nicholas Vince, Simon Bamford, Grace Kirby

It's the classic that officially ushered British genre master Clive Barker into Hollywood, and, boy, is it one hell of an introduction. Throughout his many works of fiction (namely his Books of Blood short story collections), Clive Barker routinely covers terror of the sexually disturbed, bodily revolting, and fantastically nightmarish varieties; Hellraiser, bless its cinematic soul, falls into all of those categories, sometimes in one given scene.

At the center of Hellraiser are the Cenobites. Adorned with body piercings, clad in sliced-up S&M black leather outfits, and cursed with inhuman faces, the Cenobites torture and kill through disgustingly hedonistic means. The only purveyor of sadomasochistic pain worthy of running their show is Pinhead (Doug Bradley). As the story goes, he was once British captain Elliot Spenser, who shunned God, wandered the land practicing sadistic hedonism, and ultimately became Hellraiser's villain identified by the nails sticking out of his head. Not to mention his penchant for mutilating victims by summoning hooks and chains to rip their bodies apart.

For Pinhead, pain is pleasure. The same can be said for Hellraiser's viewers. —MB

Poltergeist (1982)

Director: Tobe Hooper

Stars: Craig T. Nelson, JoBeth Williams, Heather O'Rourke, Zelda Rubinstein, Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robbins, Beatrice Straight

Poltergeist is to the haunted house sub-genre as Halloween is to the slasher movie: It wasn't the first of its kind, but it elevated things to a whole new level of style, excess, and intelligence.

Coming largely from the mind of co-writer/co-producer Steven Spielberg, Poltergeist, directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), established several tropes the have since been copied to death: the little kid who becomes the evil spirits' conduit; the freaky apparitions that haunt a youngster in his bedroom at night, while mommy and daddy are snoozing; the medium and her sidekicks who move into the house to exorcise the demons. The result is a creepshow that blasts viewers with one ghoulish set-piece after another (try to sleep in a room with a clown doll ever again) before a showstopping and crowd-pleasing bit involving a terrified mother, an in-ground pool, and tons of wet, rotting cadavers. —MB

Jaws (1975)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Stars: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gray, Murray Hamilton

In 1974, novelist Peter Benchley's Jaws emerged as a best seller, an unlikely thriller about a killer great white shark and the few men brave enough to battle it. As an enjoyable page-turner, Benchley's book works just fine, but it wasn't until Steven Spielberg endured a hellish shoot to complete his 1975 blockbuster adaptation that the homicidal fish officially earned its scary stripes.

Mostly kept off the screen-the unintended result of the animatronic shark's steady malfunctions on set-Spielberg's underwater antagonist strikes fear in viewers' bone through mere suggestion, be it a camera shot beneath swimmers' dangling legs or composer John Williams' iconic score. When Jaws does finally show his face and razor-sharp teeth, so to speak, the shocks are ferocious. —MB

Event Horizon (1997)

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Stars: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Richard T. Jones, Jack Noseworthy, Jason Isaacs, Noah Huntley, Sean Pertwee

The snarky description of Ridley Scott's Alien is that it's just a haunted house movie in space. Is that a fair description? Does it diminish the quality of the movie? It doesn't matter, because the real haunted-house-in-outer-space movie is Paul W.S. Anderson's cult-favorite Event Horizon. In fact, the film's screenwriter, Paul Eisner, pitched his idea to Paramount Pictures as "The Shining in space."

In the year 2047, the rescue vessel Lewis and Clark happens up the Event Horizon, a ship that went missing seven years earlier, after its experiments with interdimensional travel went awry. See, the ship went to Hell and has returned a sentient and malevolent being, kind of like the Overlook Hotel. It begins to manipulate the crew of the Lewis and Clark, causing hallucinations based on their darkest fears and regrets.

Like the great haunted house movies, Event Horizon relies on atmosphere and brief moments of monstrous violence rather than gallons of blood and gristle. Paul W.S. Anderson is now known as the Resident Evil director, but, for a brief moment in 1997, he could've been the next Clive Barker. —RS

The Sentinel (1977)

Director: Michael Winner

Stars: Chris Sarandon, Cristina Raines, Martin Balsam, John Carradine, Jose Ferrer, Ava Gardner, Burgess Meredith, Arthur Kennedy, Sylvia Miles, Eli Wallach, Christopher Walken, Jerry Orbach, Beverly D'Angelo

The Sentinel, director Michael Winner's fascinating and bizarre adaptation of co-screenwriter Jeffrey Konvitz's same-named novel, is one of the better unsung triumphs of the '70s. Namely for its all-bets-off, see-it-to-believe-it finale, which sees the gates of Hell open and freakish zombie-like demons run amok inside the interior of a Brooklyn brownstone. The craziest thing about it, though: Winner cast a bunch of actual circus freaks and disfigured people to play the demons. Pure insanity. —MB

The Beyond (1981)

Director: Lucio Fulci

Stars: Catriona MacColl, David Warbeck, Cinzia Monreale, Antoine Saint-John, Veronica Lazar, Larry Ray, Al Cliver

As any admirer of Italian horror stalwart Lucio Fulci will tell you, the filmmaker's best undead movie is Zombie, his answer to George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, notorious for its gore and the on-screen, underwater duel between a zombie and a shark. But those who appreciate cinema that's incoherent and unsettling will cite Fulci's 1981 oddity The Beyond as the man's greatest movie. You won't hear us arguing with that.

In the way of plot, you've got a fetching young woman who inherits a hotel in Louisiana, and when she starts poking around the premises, she unwittingly opens up one of the seven doors to Hell. From there, The Beyond explodes into an endless procession of blood, guts, eye-gougings, acid-burnings, and one of the sickest bullet wounds in movie history. —MB

The Omen (1976)

Director: Richard Donner

Stars: Gregory Peck, Lee Remicj, David Warner, Billie Whitelaw, Harvey Spencer Stephens, Patrick Troughton, Martin Benson

The "creepy kid" set-up: it seems that at least once a year horror-movie producers try to use scary youngsters to their advantage. Anyone who knows even the barest amount about horror, however, realizes that each of these films is really just attempting to knock The Omen off its rightful throne. Which, of course, never happens.

That's because director Richard Donner, in addition to staging a series of effectively unnerving sequences (i.e., a woman hanging herself off the side of a building), scored a casting coup with little Harvey Stephens, the kid who plays Damien Thorn. Tasked with portraying the son of Satan, the then-6-year-old child actor gives a chilling, fully committed performance that hits the right balance of disarming cuteness and ominous presence. —MB

28 Days Later... (2002)

Director: Danny Boyle

Stars: Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Eccleston, Megan Burns

Arguing whether or not Danny Boyle's plague drama is really a zombie movie is a waste of time. True, the monsters in 28 Days Later... move faster than the undead in the original Night of the Living Dead, but Boyle's film realizes the lonely grandeur of a post-apocalyptic world in ways Romero couldn't. The film's opening, where bike courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes in a London hospital to find that something rather awful has happened to the citizens of the UK, remains one of the most awesome feats in recent horror cinema.

Accompanied by the creeping crescendo of Canadian post-rock outfit Godspeed You! Black Emperor's "East Hastings," Jim wanders out of the hospital and into the streets, finding signs of the end everywhere. Eventually, he encounters the film's zombies, and then help.

A zombie movie, a road movie, a critique of the military—however you'd like to describe the film, there's no denying its potency. —RS

Alien (1979)

Director: Ridley Scott

Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Skerritt, Yaphet Kotto, Ian Holm, Veronica Cartwright, Bolaji Badejo

Depending on who you ask, Ridley Scott's Alien is either sci-fi or a haunted house story set in space. Either way, you have to acknowledges it's a masterful classic.

Under Scott's watch, Alien is full of genuine scares, palpable tension, and dazzling visual effects. Speaking of the FX, the alien's design, credited to H.R. Giger, is the freakiest of its kind; with a long, jai-alia-racket-shaped head and Velociraptor-like arms and legs, the film's monster is the stuff of intergalactic nightmares. It's also the benefactor of one of cinema's all-time great taglines: "In space, no one can hear you scream."

Too bad the people watching Alien with you can. —MB

The Innocents (1961)

Director: Jack Clayton

Stars: Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave, Peter Wyngrade, Megs Jenkins, Martin Stephens, Pamela Franklin, Clytie Jessop, Isla Cameron

If you ever find yourself having to defend the horror genre's honor, tell the doubters to watch Jack Clayton's The Innocents. It's the best kind of creepy film, one that works beautifully as a suspenseful tale of the supernatural but is also elegant, prestigious, and impervious to the genre's naysayers. Hell, Martin Scorsese himself once called it one of his all-time favorite horror movies—co-signs don't get much better than that.

It doesn't hurt that Clayton and co-screenwriters Truman Capote, William Archibald, and John Mortimer had some amazing source material to work with. The Innocents is an adaptation of iconic ghost storyteller Henry James' classic novella The Turn of the Screw, about a nanny (here played by Deborah Kerr) who starts working in a mansion where two little kids are haunted by a pair of apparitions.

Clayton's film emphasizes psychological unease, putting viewers into the nanny's state of mind. Is she going crazy? Or is she legitimately seeing the dead? The answers are terrifying, but also heartbreaking. —MB

[REC] (2007)

Directors: Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza

Stars: Manuela Velasco, Ferran Terraza, Jorge-Yaman Serrano, Pablo Rosso, David Vert, Martha Carbonell, Carlos Vicente

When discussing found-footage horror movies, the conversation always circles back to The Blair Witch Project, and for a good reason. It's not the scariest found-footage movie ever made, though. No, sir—that honor goes to the 2007 Spanish tour-de-force of relentless fear known as [REC]. By a long shot.

To sell it quickly, [REC] is 28 Days Later…if Danny Boyle's film were confined to a single setting, that of a locked-down apartment building in Barcelona. Here, a news reporter, her cameraman, and some firefighters, bad luck be damned, find themselves in the aforementioned apartment building just as a mysterious viral outbreak begins turning its residents into bloodthirsty lunatics.

[REC] spends most of its perfectly brief 90 minutes going for the viewer's jugular. The film's last 15 minutes—staged with a breakneck intensity by co-directors Balaguero and Plaza, and breathlessly ferocious—amount to one of horror's greatest sequences of sustained, presented-in-real-time anarchy, leading into a final reveal that no subsequent genre flick has been able to top so far. —MB

The Evil Dead (1981)

Director: Sam Raimi

Stars: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Hal Delrich, Betsy Baker, Sarah York

Then-21-year-old filmmaker Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead isn't simply a rollercoaster ride of a movie-it's that flying-off-the-rails coaster from the beginning of Final Destination 3. Out of control from beginning to end, the future Spider-Man franchise director's (who's back in blockbuster form this month with Oz, the Great and Powerful) low-budget first effort is the purveyor of horror's "cabin in the woods" template.

A group of young, likable innocents head to a secluded, wooded crib, find an ancient evil text, and unleash plenty of gory slapstick comedy. All, mind you, produced with barely $400,000. The Evil Dead is a glowing testament to the power of imagination over money. —MB

Kill List (2012)

Director: Ben Wheatley

Stars: Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring, Michael Smiley, Emma Fryer, Harry Simpson, Ben Crompton, Struan Rodger

Kill List is one of the most powerful mind-fucks to come around in years. With this movie, English filmmaker Ben Wheatley establishes himself as a fearless storyteller, keeping the mood pitch-black while concealing several jarring twists and maintaining a firm ambiguity that, by the film's end, leaves you bewildered.

The movie's imagery and brutal ideas come directly from Wheatley's own dreams. Kill List is about an out-of-work, married military vet and former hitman (Neil Maskell) who reconnects with an old partner-in-crime (Michael Smiley) to off a few unlucky folks for a mysterious new client. And that's all we can say here. —MB

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Director: Wes Craven

Stars: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, Johnny Depp, Ronee Blakley, Amanda Wyss, Nick Corri, Joe Unger, Charles Fleischer

Because Freddy Krueger's become as cartoonish a figure as Child's Play's Chucky or the Leprechaun from that abysmal series, A Nightmare on Elm Street has lost some of its luster. But try to remember the film outside the light of pop culture references and bad sketch comedy. Remember it in the dark.

Wes Craven's eighth feature as a director pits a group of teenagers against Krueger, a child molester who was killed by the parents of the teens. Krueger has returned from the dead, now able to kill you in your dreams while you sleep. The premise allows Craven to blur the lines between waking life and what lies beyond. It allows for memorable and inventive scares like the one depicted above and creates instant suspense because, after all, you have to go to sleep at some point. And when you do... —RS

The Descent (2005)

Director: Neil Marshall

Stars: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, MyAnna Buring, Saskia Mulder, Nora Jane Noone, Molly Kayl, Oliver Mulburn

Neil Marshall didn't need to introduce monsters at the start of The Descent's third act. Throughout the film's first creature-free hour, the writer-director's claustrophobic, unbearably tense feature plays more like a thriller than horror, getting up close and personal with a group of female spelunkers finding themselves repeatedly trapped in narrow caves and crumbling, constrictive walls.

Just when you don't think The Descent can get any more suffocating, though, Marshall unleashes his army of blind, inhuman ghouls. Stalking the ladies through sound, not sight, the humanoid crawlers tear through flesh and snack on innards as a means of survival, not simply to express villainy. Nevertheless, their murderous, unrelenting actions are stained-underwear material. —MB

Phantasm (1979)

Director: Don Coscarelli

Stars: Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Banister, Kathy Lester, Angus Scrimm

With 1979’s Phantasm, writer-director Don Coscarelli introduced the masses to one of horror’s great unsung villains: The Tall Man. Played by the gangly and creepy-looking Angus Scrimm, Coscarelli’s bad guy doesn’t belong in the same lane as Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, Michael Myers, and Freddy Krueger—he’s a more ethereal presence, controlling his dwarf minions and zombie army from the comfort of a mausoleum.

To great effect, Coscarelli sparingly inserts The Tall Man into Phantasm, keeping him off-screen for most of the film. But when Phantasm's Tall Man does pop up to scare the ever-living piss out of you, he does so exceedingly well. Case in point: the film's best moment, a dream sequence in which the teenage protagonist, Mike (Michael Baldwin), opens his eyes to find the Tall Man hovering over his bed. Freddy Krueger isn't the only one worthy of that "never sleep again" reputation. —MB

Inland Empire (2006)

Director: David Lynch

Stars: Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, Julia Ormond, Diane Ladd, Mary Steenburgen, Terry Crews

Lynch has made better films than Inland Empire, but he's never made a more unnerving one. Clocking in a three-hours long, it's a marathon of strangeness, replete with modern-day Hollywood drama, 1930s Polish prostitutes, homeless people on Hollywood Boulevard, beautiful women breaking into dance choreography, and man-sized bunnies dressed wearing suits.

In a lesser director's hands, Inland Empire's parade of oddities would degenerate into self-parody, but not with Mr. Lynch. Shot entirely on digital video, it never looks or feels like a Hollywood movie; rather, it's a fever dream shot like a home movie and structured like a cinematic rabbit hole. You never know where Lynch will take you or what sorts of visual shocks he has in store, but the ride is consistently hypnotic. —MB

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

Director: Kim Ji-woon

Stars: Im Soo-jung, Moon Geun Young, Yeom Jeong-ah, Kim Kap-soo

Thanks to the influx of "J-horror" remakes in the early 2000s, Japan was universally recognized as Asian cinema's top purveyor of scary movies; yet, interestingly enough, the best of all recent Asian horror flicks hails from South Korea.

A Tale of Two Sisters (unconvincingly remade by Hollywood in 2009 and re-titled as The Uninvited) holds up, nine years after its release, as one of the last decade's strongest psychological creep-outs. Showing hardly anything in the way of gore or jump-scares, master genre filmmaker Ji-woon Kim blends mental instability with potential supernatural activity, showing how a girl's return home from a mental institution, after her mother's death, triggers full-blown insanity.

As an unsettling mood piece, A Tale of Two Sisters is tough to beat. —MB

The Exorcist (1973)

Director: William Friedkin

Stars: Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Max Von Sydow, Lee J. Cobb, Jason Miller, Kitty Wynn, Jack MacGowran

When The Exorcist hit theaters in 1973, it redefined the horror genre and revolutionized the way these movies blended legitimate scares will stomach-churning special effects. The movie tells the story of Father Damien Karras' (Jason Miller) attempts to drive a demonic spirit out of the body of a young girl named Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair).

It wasn't just the physical distortion of a young girl that made this movie so disturbing; there is also a lot of religious desecration throughout the movie that struck a chord with some of the more devout members of the public. We're pretty sure most churchgoing folk weren't too happy about that crucifix masturbation scene, but it was parts like that which added to the disturbing tour de force that made The Exorcist a landmark in horror cinema. —JS

The Strangers (2008)

Director: Bryan Bertino

Stars: Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman, Gemma Ward, Kip Weeks, Laura Margolis, Glenn Howerton

Genuinely creepy and intelligently made, The Strangers blindsided Hollywood, capitalizing on a superb trailer and turning a huge profit on the strength of positive word-of-mouth exposure. Harking back to spooky genre classics such as 1963's The Haunting, Bertino skipped gruesomeness for atmospheric chills, mounting tension through off-camera sounds, skipping vinyl records, and out-of-focus shots of the film's masked intruders prowling behind stars Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman.

The Strangers also has the best reasoning from a villain about his or her choice of home-to-invade out of all this subgenre's entries; when Tyler asks one of the anonymous baddies why she and her hubby are under attack, her emotionless assailant simply says, "Because you were home." Translation: "You're just shit out of luck." —MB

Halloween (1978)

Director: John Carpenter

Stars: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance, P.J. Soles, Nancy Loomis

The formula, by now, is legendary: Take a group of promiscuous high schoolers, throw in one vestigial virgin and one psychotic killer and watch the horror unfold. John Carpenter's Halloween didn't invent the slasher picture, but it set the bar for all those that would follow in its footsteps.

Shot in 20 days and for just $325,000, the film is noted for its camerawork, which has the audience identifying with the villain for the first part of the film (a device used to similarly creepy effect in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Bob Clark's Black Christmas). While the implications of this have been debated by many over the years-feminists have come down on both sides, some calling the film a triumph for women, others calling it degrading-Carpenter himself has dismissed all definitions of Halloween as anything but what it was intended to be: a horror film, plain and simple. And a groundbreaking one at that. —JW

The Haunting (1963)

Director: Robert Wise

Stars: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn, Fay Compton

Robert Wise's adaptation of Shirley Jackson's classic novel The Haunting of Hill House is the antithesis of what modern horror audiences are used to seeing. There's not a drop of blood in it, nor do you ever see any actual ghosts, demons, or other variety of supernatural antagonist. It's a pure sonic nightmare, with Wise's brilliant use of sounds, implications, and his actors' terrified facial reactions to relay the terror. Which, if you watch The Haunting home alone with the lights off, is no joke.

Like in Jackson's novel, the four protagonists in The Haunting are all assisting in a paranormal investigation, one for which they must spend several nights in a row living inside massive, imposing, abandoned Hill House. Wise's film is a Master's class in slowly developed dread and subtle visual effects—the sight of a bedroom door getting pushed inward, as if Bigfoot's trying to punch through it, is all Wise needs to conjure shrieks. It's the same less-is-more technique employed decades later by the filmmakers behind The Strangers and Paranormal Activity. —MB

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

Director: John McNaughton

Stars: Michael Rooker, Tom Towles, Tracy Arnold

Loosely based on the life of Henry Lee Lucas, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer follows the exploits of a crazed killer, played by Michael Rooker. During the film, Henry befriends a fellow prisoner named Otis, and the two go about a savage rampage of random killings, neither expressing even the slightest bit of remorse.

Henry separates itself from other serial killer dramas by avoiding the investigating cops; instead, we're stuck inside the killer's head the whole time, a very dangerous place to be. In the end, even the people Henry calls "friends" and "lovers" don't stand a chance. —JS

Nosferatu (1922)

Director: F.W. Murnau

Stars: Max Schreck, Greta Schroder, Gustav von Wangenheim, Alexander Granach, Ruth Landshoff

Yes, that is a real person you see above. Well, at least we think Max Schreck wasn't actually a creature of the night, though the terrifying German silent flick Nosferatu makes quite a case against that notion. A sparse, visually chilling interpretation of Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula, director F.W. Murnau's nightmare on celluloid benefits endlessly from ultimate method actor Schreck's obsessive dedication to the vampire's look, mannerisms, and overall demeanor. We'd applaud his commitment, but we're afraid that Schreck's ghost will visit us tonight to thank us in person. —MB

Frankenstein (1931)

Director: James Whale

Stars: Colin Clive, Boris Karloff, John Boles, Edward Van Sloan, Frederick Kerr, Dwight Frye

The basic concept behind Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, famously adapted by director James Whale for his 1931 genre classic of the same name, is the ghastliest of ideas: a monster created from various parts of long-buried corpses. As brilliantly played by the great Boris Karloff, Frankenstein's monster is so unforgettably chilling that it's easy to overlook the fact that a figure made up of different body parts should look more disjointed and piecemeal.

Still, Karloff's incarnation of the walking dead man achieves a distinct level of horror through the monster's slightly human but mostly lifeless look. Injecting just the right amount of pathos into the character, Karloff disarms the viewer, leaving one prone to sympathizing with the beast (he just wants to be loved, after all) while fearing the moment when he does something horrific. —MB

Black Christmas (1974)

Director: Bob Clark

Stars: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon

Just to be clear: We are not referring to the 2006 remake starring Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Lacey Chabert. No, no, no. The Black Christmas we're talking about is the 1974 original, which finds a handful of college co-eds being stalked in their very own sorority house as they prepare to depart for Christmas break.

Often cited as one cinema's first slasher film, Black Christmas is a yuletide take on "The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs" urban legend, which inspired both Halloween and When a Stranger Calls in the latter part of the decade. Exploitative in the way that only a '70s movie can be, the tension begins with a series of threatening phone calls being placed from a deranged man who is hiding out in the attic that quickly escalate to cold-blooded murder, with sorority sisters being knocked off left and right.

Truth be told, there's no real reason for the film to be set at Christmas. But we're thankful it was, as it allowed director Bob Clark-who would make holiday movie history again in 1983 with A Christmas Story (yep, the same guy directed both movies)-to put a grisly spin on chaste traditions, like the Christmas carolers who drown out the sound of Barb (Margot Kidder) being stabbed to death with a tree ornament. —JW

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Director: George A. Romero

Stars: Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley, Kyra Schon, Bill Hinzman, Russell Streiner

George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead is a national treasure; shot on a shoestring budget in and around Evans City, Pennsylvania, the zombie classic stands as a crucial milestone for independent cinema, an untouchable gem amongst horror purists, and an intelligent, thought-provoking time capsule from the Civil Rights era. Not bad for a movie about corpses devouring humans.

The set-up is basic: Seven random people barricade themselves inside a nondescript farmhouse as flesh-eating corpses stalk around outside. Independently made back in 1968, Night Of The Living Dead pushed horror's boundaries with extraordinarily graphic scenes of cannibalism and the ballsy choice to have a black leading man during the Civil Rights era.

Above all else, though, it's still scary as hell. —MB

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Director: Tobe Hooper

Stars: Marilyn Burns, Gunnar Hansen, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the only films this writer has ever seen that, when the killer first appeared, his face hidden behind tatters of sun-leathered skin, triggered a horrible looping thought of: "I don't want to watch this I don't want to watch this I don't want to watch this." And the writer has seen lots of horror movies. But there's something so—it seems silly to use a meaningless word like "real." There isn't a word for this. It's just terrifying, and in a way all these recent torture porn movies wish they could be.

The film, on paper, is patently ridiculous. Family of cannibals. Van of kids. Power tools. But truly, this movie is scary. Too scary. —RS