Horror Movie Reviews

Ouija: Origin of Evil

Mike Flanagan's Ouija: Origin of Evil sneaks into the domestic life of a grieving suburban family and turns a parlour trick into something much nastier. It's a short,...

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Fright Night Part 2

This sequel picks up with Charley trying to be a normal college student — therapy appointments and all — while the monsters from his past quietly move back into town....

The Conjuring

The Conjuring puts family life at the centre of its scares: a mother with fresh bruises, five girls in a lonely farmhouse and the couple who show up saying they can he...

Weapons

A child's voice opens Weapons with a single, jolting fact: in the dead of night, a troupe of kids walked out of their houses. From there Zach Cregger builds a slow-bur...

1951

The Thing from Another World

The Thing from Another World wastes no time. In under ninety minutes Christian Nyby's film drops a frozen body into a bleak outpost, mixes in a military-versus-science...

1975

Jaws

Jaws still starts the same way it always has: with somebody alone in the water and the polite little town on the shore pretending nothing has happened. That simple pre...

The Witch

Robert Eggers's The Witch arrived in 2016 like a cold wind through a poorly boarded window: precise, spare and impossible to ignore. It centres on Thomasin, a teenage...

Gremlins

Gremlins opens with a perfectly ordinary act of gift-shopping and then quietly tears the rules of 'home' to shreds. Joe Dante’s 1984 genre mash‑up pairs a squeezable f...

Nope

Nope landed in 2022 as Jordan Peele's loud, strange argument about spectacle: a movie that cares about images and the price people will pay to capture them. It begins...

The Ring

The Ring still creeps in the particular way only a domestic horror can: it takes the ordinary — a family, a job, a bedtime routine — and rewires it into something you...

1954

Creature from the Black Lagoon

There are moments in Creature from the Black Lagoon that lodge in the head: a woman swimming, something watching, a claw left in a net. Jack Arnold’s lean 79‑minute ch...

Darkman

Darkman straps together mad-science, pulp revenge and a strangely tender heartbreak and fires it off in 95 minutes of pure Sam Raimi energy. It’s a film about a man tr...

Predator 2

Predator 2 swaps jungle camouflage for concrete — and then proves the switch works. Stephen Hopkins’s sequel drops an extraterrestrial killer into a Los Angeles heat w...

1999

The Blair Witch Project

You know the drill: a handheld camera, a small crew and the promise of a documentary that goes off the rails. The Blair Witch Project folds that familiar set-up into 8...

Evil Dead II

There are films that frighten you and films that make you laugh while frightening you. Evil Dead II is the rare example that does both in the same breath, squeezing ho...

The Faculty

There’s a particular kind of high-school panic The Faculty loves: teachers leaving a budget meeting and not coming back. It opens on that ordinary administrative momen...

2000

Scream 3

Scream 3 is the kind of movie that starts by picking at the scab. It opens not in a sleepy suburb but with a familiar voice—Ghostface—reaching out to remind everyone t...

Immaculate

Immaculate hooks you with a simple, savage idea: what if a supposed miracle is actually someone else’s experiment? Michael Mohan’s compact psychological horror centres...

1963

The Birds

You remember the pet shop: a socialite buying lovebirds, a brief, teasing meeting with a man called Mitch Brenner, and the ordinary world wobbling on its hinges. Alfre...

Jigsaw

Jigsaw isn't attempting a quiet reinvention; it wants to throw you into a barn, hand you a terrible choice and see if you squirm. Michael Spierig's 2017 return to that...

1977

Eraserhead

Eraserhead is the kind of film that puts home life under a loupe until the ordinary looks hostile. David Lynch’s 89-minute oddity funnels family, claustrophobia and th...

Candyman

Mention Candyman in a room and most people will either laugh nervously or stop speaking. Bernard Rose’s 1992 horror-thriller pins that uneasy silence to a specific set...

The Possession

There’s a moment in The Possession that sticks: an old wooden box hissing a Polish line that translates, bluntly, to “I will eat your heart.” It tells you exactly what...

Oculus

Oculus is the kind of horror that keeps its teeth in your head long after the credits. Mike Flanagan layers a present-and-past structure around one malicious object, a...

1968

Night of the Living Dead

If Night of the Living Dead still gives you a jolt, it’s usually the same two things: the sudden, cold violence of that cemetery opening and the way a stranger called...

1932

The Old Dark House

You arrive in a storm, unplanned and damp, and the house that takes you in never quite feels like sanctuary. James Whale's The Old Dark House is short — seventy minute...

Possession

Possession is one of those films that starts at the kitchen table and ends several flights up a stairwell you didn't know existed. Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 horror-drama...

2011

Grave Encounters

Grave Encounters presents itself as recovered footage from a paranormal reality series gone badly wrong — the sort of late-night TV that promises shocks and delivers c...

The Lost Boys

The Lost Boys begins with a perfectly ordinary-sounding relocation: Michael Emerson, his little brother Sam and their recently divorced mum head for Santa Carla. What...

The 'Burbs

The 'Burbs is a darkly comic neighbour‑watch tale that spends 101 minutes watching polite suburbia unravel. Joe Dante gives Tom Hanks a week off work, a barking dog an...

Saw V

Saw V doesn’t waste time reminding you what series you’re in: a man is strapped beneath a pendulum blade and solves his way into horror. Directed by David Hackl and cl...

Midsommar

Midsommar is the sort of film that arrives like a sunbeam and then won't let you look away. Ari Aster spent 147 minutes turning a midsummer festival into a pressure co...

Pumpkinhead

Pumpkinhead is a short, sharp shock of a horror film from Stan Winston that squeezes a folk-legend revenge tale into just 86 minutes. At its centre is Ed Harley, a gri...

Saw X

John Kramer arrives desperate: told he has only months to live, he chases a miracle at the other end of the world. Saw X turns that desperation into a tight, nasty fab...

The Blob

The Blob arrives in the slowest, most unnerving way: a fallen meteorite, a curious old man and then the sight of a thing that eats people. Chuck Russell’s 1988 take tr...

Sleepaway Camp

Sleepaway Camp is the kind of movie that still makes people wince and laugh in the same breath — partly because it’s a compact bit of nastiness and partly because ther...

Happy Death Day

Happy Death Day straps you into a single day that keeps rewinding until its lead, Tree Gelbman, works out how to stop being killed. Christopher Landon’s 2017 mash-up l...

Final Destination 3

Final Destination 3 takes one simple idea — that fate keeps score — and squeezes every nerve out of it. James Wong’s lean, 93‑minute horror movie straps you in via Wen...

Friday the 13th

If you remember the sound of a hockey mask hitting wood, you’re already halfway there. Marcus Nispel’s 2009 Friday the 13th strips the myth back to its rough skeleton—...

Re-Animator

Re-Animator still feels like the film that raised every eyebrow in the lecture theatre and then dared the corpse to blink. Stuart Gordon’s 1985 mash-up of science fict...

Inferno

Dario Argento’s Inferno throws its horror into a building you could almost live in, then asks what happens when home stops meaning safety. It begins with a poet, an an...

Terror Train

Remember the bit where a would-be seduction ends with someone finding a cadaver in the bed? That nasty, absurd moment is Terror Train’s opening handshake: one prank th...

Dead & Buried

Dead & Buried begins with an amateur photographer turning up in a coastal town and wondering whether the locals will pose or pounce. Directed by Gary Sherman and clock...

Ghost Story

Ghost Story is the kind of grown-up horror that gathers in a sitting room, pours tea and then tells you about the thing you’re trying not to mention. Directed by John...

Dreamscape

Dreamscape hooks you with a simple, slightly daft idea: what if someone could walk into another person’s sleep and change what happens there? Dennis Quaid’s Alex Gardn...

April Fool's Day

April Fool's Day is the kind of horror movie that starts with a laugh and finishes with a cold look. Fred Walton’s 1986 little thriller rigs a college spring-break wee...

Dolls

A violent storm strands a little girl and her awkward family at a mansion that sells nostalgia by the dozen — and hides something nastier beneath the varnish. Stuart G...

Black Sunday

Black Sunday is the kind of horror that bites before you’ve finished your first sip of tea. Mario Bava’s 1960 thriller pairs a blunt, unforgettable image — a spiked de...

Get Out

Jordan Peele's Get Out opens like a small, ordinary fear — a lone man walking at night — and then keeps nudging that nervousness until it becomes something awful and s...

1971

The Abominable Dr. Phibes

There are villains you fear, and then there is the sort you can’t quite stop staring at. Robert Fuest’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes centres on one of those show-stealing...

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

A corpse turns up in a cellar, is wheeled into a tiny-town morgue, and for one long night two men try to make sense of why a dead body doesn't behave like a dead body....

2010

The Last Exorcism

The Last Exorcism straps a camera to a confident fraud and then lets rural Louisiana slowly unnerve him. Daniel Stamm’s tight, 87-minute pseudo‑documentary pairs a sce...

Upgrade

Upgrade is that rare modern thriller that sneaks up on you: a lean, machine-led revenge story from Leigh Whannell that begins with an ordinary mechanic and a terrible...

The Conjuring: Last Rites

The Conjuring: Last Rites is the kind of horror that opens with a tiny, domestic detail — an old mirror in a curios shop — and refuses to let you forget it. Michael Ch...

A Nightmare on Elm Street

There’s a scene early on where a girl wakes from a dream with fresh, unexplained slashes on her nightgown — and that moment sets the tone. Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on...

The Stepfather

The Stepfather starts with a man calmly removing the last traces of something terrible and ends with a suburb that looks less safe than it did at the beginning. Joseph...

Talk to Me

Talk to Me feels small and savage: a 94-minute horror that begins at a party and never quite leaves the kitchen, the hospital or the things people hide from one anothe...

Oddity

Oddity is the sort of small, mean-spirited supernatural thriller that prefers a tight idea to spectacle. Damian McCarthy keeps the story keyed to one house, one family...

Freaky

Freaky takes a familiar high-school horror setup — an urban-legend serial killer, a sleepy town and a cancelled homecoming — and turns it into something oddball and wa...

Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice is the kind of movie you remember when someone says ‘stripes’ and ‘wedding reception’ in the same breath. Tim Burton’s 1988 comedy-horror straps together s...

Night of the Demons

Night of the Demons is the kind of midnight-movie mischief that hooks you with a single, terrific idea: a group of teenagers throw a Halloween party in an abandoned mo...

Halloween

There’s an opening so simple and terrible it rearranges how you think about a quiet street. Halloween begins with a child doing the unthinkable, and the rest of the fi...

Phantasm II

Phantasm II is Don Coscarelli’s loud, oddball return to a story that never aimed to be tidy. It pairs haunted-teen melodrama with road-trip splatter and a Tall Man who...

Return of the Living Dead Part II

Return of the Living Dead Part II is not trying to be earnest. It picks up after the warehouse affair and, in brisk 85 minutes, turns a dropped military barrel into a...

A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place turns the obvious — that loud noises get you killed — into an entire film language. John Krasinski's 2018 thriller keeps the stakes intimate: a family on...

The Nun

The Nun lives off one simple, mean idea: what if the thing that looks like safety — a nun — is the very face of danger? Corin Hardy directs this compact, 96‑minute sho...

Scream VI

If Scream VI feels like a fresh set of teeth in an old mouth, that's deliberate. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin's 2023 follow-up refuses to tuck the survivors back into a sleep...

Evil Dead Rise

Evil Dead Rise is a lean, furious horror movie that stuffs domestic dread into a high-rise car park and refuses to let go. Directed by Lee Cronin and running under 100...

The Wailing

The Wailing is that rare modern horror that makes dread feel domestic: a single arrival in a mountain village and everything you took for granted about home, family an...

The Visit

You know the premise in thirty seconds: two Philly siblings are sent away to stay with grandparents they've never met while their mum goes on a cruise. What starts as...

They Live

They Live is the kind of movie that feels like it was made to be argued over in pub queues. It follows a drifter who arrives in Los Angeles, finds work, and discovers...

The Others

Pull the curtains and The Others still has teeth. Alejandro Amenábar’s 2001 mood-dagger of a ghost story centres on Grace Stewart, a mother who has turned her Jersey c...

Sinister

Sinister hooks you with a straightforward, terrible bargain: a writer desperate for a comeback trades the safety of his home for the promise of a story. Scott Derricks...

1974

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Remember the image of a corpse lashed to a stone, found as the sun comes up? That grotesque, stubborn opening is the tone-setting promise of The Texas Chain Saw Massac...

Train to Busan

Train to Busan is the sort of crowd-pleasing, stomach-in-throat movie that starts with a strange little image — a hit deer coming back to life — and never relaxes from...

Waxwork

Waxwork is one of those 1980s horror comedies that turns a simple idea—step over a rope and the exhibit becomes real—into an evening of absurd jeopardy. Directed by An...

Annihilation

Annihilation is that rare kind of modern sci‑fi that makes you feel like you’ve been led somewhere strange and slightly dangerous by someone who knows exactly what the...

Death Becomes Her

If you remember Death Becomes Her at all, you'll remember its teeth — not literal teeth, but that gleeful, slightly nasty bite. Robert Zemeckis made a 99‑minute potion...

Smile

Smile opens with one of those images that lodges in your head: a patient who calms, smiles — and then kills herself in front of her therapist. Parker Finn’s 2022 psych...

The Toxic Avenger Part II

The Toxic Avenger Part II never pretends to be subtle. It’s a 96‑minute joyride where Melvin Junko — now the Toxic Avenger — is still trying to keep Tromaville from fa...

The Cabin in the Woods

Remember the moment the cabin stops being the scariest thing on screen? That’s The Cabin in the Woods’ opening trick: it lures you into a familiar set‑up and then quie...

Doctor Sleep

Doctor Sleep is a long, strange follow-up that takes Danny Torrance's trauma seriously and refuses to let the Overlook Hotel have the final word. Mike Flanagan's 2019...

Ready or Not

Ready or Not is the sort of horror-comedy that can make you laugh and then flinch in the same breath. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin serves up a 95-minute sprint that throws a...

Lights Out

Lights Out is a lean little frightener that does one tidy thing very well: it takes the ordinary—a family home, a mother’s fragile mind, a bedroom light switch—and tur...

Annabelle

You remember the doll before you remember anything else — porcelain, wrongness folded into its smile. Annabelle turns that simple image into a compact, efficient horro...

The Substance

Coralie Fargeat's The Substance is the sort of film that greets you with a grin and then refuses to be polite. It's about a washed-up TV star who pays to be young agai...

Cube

Cube is the sort of film that announces itself as soon as someone opens a hatch and dies. Tight, clever and unpleasant in the right ways, Vincenzo Natali’s 90-minute n...

1999

The Sixth Sense

You remember that moment: a child psychologist at home with his wife, an unexpected intruder, and a life that quietly unravels. M. Night Shyamalan's 1999 shocker funne...

Late Night with the Devil

Late Night with the Devil arrives like a VHS you’ve found in a loft: dusty, specific and eager to convince you something odd happened on live television. Cameron Cairn...

1956

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

You know the image already: ordinary neighbours who suddenly feel off, like someone swapped the batteries in humanity. Invasion of the Body Snatchers tells that story...

Spawn

Spawn is the sort of loud, strange comic-book film that remembers it’s allowed to be both nasty and tender. Mark A.Z. Dippé’s 1997 take on Todd McFarlane’s creation to...

1933

The Invisible Man

You remember the sight before the explanation: a man wrapped in bandages and dark goggles taking a room at a country inn. James Whale's The Invisible Man squeezes a bi...

1995

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers

There’s an odd comfort to watching Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers — even when it’s being deliberately unpleasant. Joe Chappelle’s 1995 entry squeezes a lot into...

Hannibal

Hannibal is the sort of film that expects you to be slightly breathless by the interval. Ridley Scott took Thomas Harris’s famously implacable mind and made a big, sho...

Scary Movie 2

Scary Movie 2 is the kind of sequel that doubles down: curses, possessions, a manor full of nasty surprises and a crew of survivors who've learned to live with the rid...

Underworld

Underworld arrives like a promise: an old war between monsters, a lone hunter who won’t take orders, and a mystery that turns allegiances inside out. Len Wiseman’s 200...

Cloverfield

Cloverfield still grabs you the same way Hud’s camera does: unceremoniously, loudly and a little bit out of breath. Matt Reeves wrapped a kaiju movie inside a personal...

Maniac

Maniac is the kind of small, unsettling horror that burrows under the skin and stays put. Directed by Franck Khalfoun and released in 2012, it gives us Elijah Wood as...

1973

The Wicker Man

You arrive on Summerisle the way Sergeant Neil Howie does: by seaplane, ready to ask questions and leave again. Robin Hardy’s compact, 88-minute picture refuses to be...

The Fly II

The Fly II opens on one of those images that refuses to be casual: Veronica Quaife dies after giving birth to a larval sac, and from it comes a boy who will never be o...

Killer Klowns from Outer Space

You know the opener: a couple parked at lovers' lane spot a strange glowing object and decide, sensibly or not, to go find out. That frivolous curiosity is the engine...

Scanners

There’s a moment early in Scanners when a rough-looking stranger in a shopping food court causes a woman to seize without touching her. That sudden, inexplicable viole...

Hush

Mike Flanagan’s Hush is a compact, 81‑minute thriller that turns one simple flip — a woman who cannot hear being hunted — into a dozen stomach‑tightening gambits. It’s...

1932

The Mummy

The Mummy feels compact in the best way: a lean, 73-minute dose of ancient grief and modern unease. Karl Freund’s film keeps returning to one figure — Imhotep — and th...

1939

Son of Frankenstein

Son of Frankenstein is the sort of horror film that keeps one foot in the grave and the other in the nursery. Directed by Rowland V. Lee and released in 1939, it begin...

28 Weeks Later

28 Weeks Later arrives like a sprint: quick, clean, devastating. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's follow-up moves the action from isolated fear to a fragile, militarised atte...

The Thing

The Thing opens with a helicopter chasing a terrified sled dog across the Antarctic ice — and everything that follows is the logical, increasingly desperate conversati...

1996

Scream

Remember the phone? That slow, polite, suddenly poisonous conversation while a teenager answers trivia to save someone else — that opening still catches the breath. We...

The Devil's Advocate

Remember the movie where a small‑town lawyer who’s never lost a case is offered the kind of job most people only imagine in their worst daydreams? That’s The Devil's A...

2005

Constantine

Mention Constantine and most people picture a trench coat, a bargain with Lucifer and that brisk, world-weary tone. Francis Lawrence’s 2005 take on John Constantine pa...

Halloween

David Gordon Green's 2018 Halloween centres its terror where it ought to: inside a family that's never stopped living through a single night. Jamie Lee Curtis returns...

Dawn of the Dead

Dawn of the Dead hooks you where you live — literally. It begins with Ana coming home from a shift and finding the world ruptured in her bedroom, then never lets the p...

Sinners

Sinners feels like a folk tale told loud and close: two brothers open a juke joint, music calls ghosts, and the night brings a bargain with blood. Ryan Coogler's 2025...

An American Werewolf in London

John Landis's An American Werewolf in London is a lean, weirdly tender flick that starts with two Americans lost in the English countryside and ends by asking what a m...

Tremors

Tremors is the kind of movie that starts with two blokes fed up with their town and, thirty minutes later, has them outsmarting tentacled worms by hopping between boul...

The Hitcher

There are thrillers that rattle you and thrillers that keep coming back for more — The Hitcher is the latter. Robert Harmon’s lean 97-minute nightmare sets a young del...

1991

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare goes for the jugular and, in the process, tries to close the book on Freddy by turning the whole thing into a story about family. Di...

Firestarter

There’s a particular kind of 1980s nightmare Firestarter offers: ordinary people, messed up by a government experiment, trying to keep a child safe while everyone in a...

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is the kind of sequel that walks in, puts its hand on your shoulder and refuses to let go. Directed by Dwight H. Little and cl...

Day of the Dead

There are three things you remember from Day of the Dead: the underground bunker, the argument that never quite shuts up, and Dr Sarah Bowman refusing to give up on a...

28 Years Later

There’s a particular kind of dread in 28 Years Later that doesn’t come from monsters alone: it comes from the small, human compromises people make to survive. Danny Bo...

Creepshow

Creepshow opens like a dare: a kid sneaks a comic, gets caught, and then something crawls up to his bedroom window. That moment — equal parts playground mischief and p...

The Howling

Joe Dante’s The Howling is a lean, 91-minute horror about a woman who flees the city to recover and discovers that the countryside has other plans. It’s a werewolf pic...

Cat's Eye

Cat's Eye straps a scruffy tomcat to three very different nightmares and lets him wander between them. Directed by Lewis Teague and running a brisk 94 minutes, it’s a...

Arachnophobia

Arachnophobia launches on a simple, poisonous idea: a British field scientist brings back more than specimens, and one of those specimens finds its way into a Californ...

The Beyond

The Beyond is the sort of film that opens a door and refuses to close it. Lucio Fulci's 1981 horror packs an odd, stubborn intelligence: inherit a derelict hotel, igno...

Nosferatu

Robert Eggers' Nosferatu is the sort of remake that nudges an old ghost and listens to what it says. At its centre is a peculiar, terrible bargain: a lonely girl reach...

Evil Dead

You know the image: an old woman in a cellar mutters from a book and something very bad answers. That moment — sudden, filthy, utterly unromantic — is the tone Fede Ál...

DeepStar Six

DeepStar Six throws eleven military and civilian crew into one of those terrible, brilliant movie situations: trapped inside an experimental deep‑sea naval facility wh...

2010

Saw 3D

Saw 3D arrives like a familiar, slightly rattled friend: same teeth, same traps, but with one last card up its sleeve. Kevin Greutert's 2010 entry crams Jigsaw's moral...

Annabelle Comes Home

Annabelle Comes Home is a neat, efficient little horror set inside one house and a single, terrible toy. Directed by Gary Dauberman and centred on Judy Warren — played...

Amityville II: The Possession

Amityville II: The Possession is the kind of horror movie that doesn't ask for permission to be uncomfortable. Directed by Damiano Damiani and released in 1982, it dro...

The Fly

Meet-cute, laboratory tour, and then everything goes wrong: that’s The Fly in miniature. David Cronenberg’s 1986 horror asks what happens when a brilliant scientist’s...

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later

If you remember Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, it’s probably for one irresistible thing: Jamie Lee Curtis back in the story and the film brisk enough to get to the sta...

Halloween: Resurrection

You remember Laurie Strode bristling with paranoia; you remember the idea of sending college kids into Michael Myers’s old house for an internet stunt. Halloween: Resu...

Jason X

Jason X is the film that decided Friday the 13th could be a space opera. James Isaac's 2001 oddball fling takes the franchise out of the lake and into a future where h...

The Ninth Configuration

The Ninth Configuration is the kind of film that walks into a room and changes the temperature. Set in a government-run castle asylum, William Peter Blatty’s 118‑minut...

The Guest

The Guest is the sort of small, hungry thriller that arrives like a well-dressed neighbour: courteous, easy to invite in — and quietly unsettling. Adam Wingard's 2014...

Aliens

You know the moment — an exhausted woman wakes from a decades-long sleep to a world that has moved on and still refuses to believe her. Aliens isn’t just about xenomor...

The House by the Cemetery

Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery wastes no time getting unpleasant: it opens with a woman searching an abandoned house and ends up threading a family drama through a...

Swamp Thing

Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing is the sort of movie that turns a bog into a battleground and a lumbering creature into something unexpectedly tender. It begins with a dead s...

1973

Don't Look Now

Don't Look Now feels like a private nightmare dressed as a romantic trip. Nicolas Roeg's 1973 horror-drama plants a family shaken by loss into Venice and lets the city...

Body Double

There’s a particular queasy pleasure to watching Body Double: it makes you complicit before the movie even asks the question. Brian De Palma’s 1984 mystery puts a tele...

Night of the Comet

Night of the Comet is a brisk 95-minute collision of teen hustle and end‑of‑the‑world horror that knows exactly what it is: a genre sandwich with a sharp heroine in th...

Demons

Demons is the sort of film that invites you in with a ticket and then refuses to let you leave until it’s done turning the cinema into a blood-soaked playground. Lambe...

House II: The Second Story

House II: The Second Story is the kind of film that trots out a cowboy zombie called Gramps, hands him a secret to guard and then piles on prehistoric pets and time-ho...

My Best Friend Is a Vampire

My Best Friend Is a Vampire squeezes three ideas into ninety efficient minutes: adolescent embarrassment, an oddly pastoral take on the supernatural, and family troubl...

1961

The Innocents

There are films that creep up on you, and then there’s The Innocents: a tight, 100‑minute ghost story directed by Jack Clayton that begins with a young woman answering...

1961

The Pit and the Pendulum

Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum is the sort of compact Gothic that knows exactly which buttons to press: family ties, buried sins and a single, terrifying inst...

1964

Onibaba

Onibaba isn’t a slow-burn about ghosts so much as a small domestic tragedy that chooses to dress itself in horror. Kaneto Shindō built a film where the real menace liv...

1966

The Plague of the Zombies

Think of The Plague of the Zombies and you instantly locate the smell of damp earth and a village where normal life is being eaten away from the inside. John Gilling’s...

1970

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage arrives like a good party-story: you remember the moment — a man stuck in sliding gallery doors, a figure in a black raincoat vanishi...

1975

Deep Red

Deep Red is the kind of film that greets you with a domestic nightmare: a household crime whose echoes refuse to stay buried. Directed by Dario Argento and centred on...

The Town That Dreaded Sundown

The Town That Dreaded Sundown isn’t a polished whodunnit so much as a rumpus of unease: a story about ordinary people discovering that the safe places — the car at the...

Alice, Sweet Alice

Alice, Sweet Alice is the sort of small, stubbornly uncomfortable film that lingers because it knows where to jab. Alfred Sole's 98‑minute study of a fractured family,...

Barbarian

Barbarian is the sort of horror that starts with a very ordinary, very modern worry — an Airbnb gone wrong — and then refuses to be polite about where it goes next. Di...

The Menu

The Menu serves up a dark, delicious premise: an exclusive island restaurant where the courses are as exacting as the man who designed them. Mark Mylod's 2022 thriller...

Bone Tomahawk

Bone Tomahawk is that rare thing: a frontier film that quietly tightens the screws until you notice the silence between the shots. Steven Craig Zahler’s 2015 oddity pa...

The Invisible Man

Leigh Whannell's The Invisible Man turned a classic monster into something quieter and nastier: a technological tool for domestic abuse, and a story about a woman tryi...

Malignant

There’s a particular kind of pleasure in watching a film that refuses to apologise for being strange. Malignant is exactly that: James Wan’s 2021 horror-thriller that...

Don't Breathe

Don't Breathe wastes no time. In under a hundred minutes Fede Álvarez turns a petty burglary into a claustrophobic, morally awkward sprint: three Detroit kids, one bli...

The First Omen

The First Omen arrived in 2024 with a neat trick: it dresses itself in old ghosts while asking very modern questions about family, memory and agency. Arkasha Stevenson...

The Eye

The Eye is the sort of late-00s horror that trades cheap shocks for one persistent, uncomfortable idea: what if seeing again meant inheriting someone else’s sight — an...

His House

His House arrives like two connected ideas: a refugee story and a ghost story, stitched together until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Remi Weekes’...

Willard

There’s something disarmingly specific about Willard: it’s not just a horror film with rodents, it’s a small, stubbornly grim story about a man whose life has been qui...

Taxidermia

If Taxidermia still lingers in your head, it's because it prizes discomfort over easy answers. György Pálfi's 2006 oddity opens in a cold military outpost and introduc...

Dead Snow

Dead Snow arrives like a dare: throw a handful of students into a Norwegian cabin, add an old wartime secret and then watch manners melt with the snow. Tommy Wirkola’s...

Within the Woods

Within the Woods is that thrillingly grubby little film you point to when you want to explain where Sam Raimi's needling, kinetic horror began. It's a compact, 31‑minu...

Wishcraft

Wishcraft is one of those small, slightly grubby early-00s horror films that knows exactly what it is: a teen slasher with a supernatural twist. Give a socially awkwar...

Horsemen

Horsemen is the kind of late-00s thriller that pretends to be a serial-killer puzzle but keeps returning to a smaller, nastier question: what happens when the place yo...

1931

Dracula

There are plenty of reasons to open Dracula again — the abrupt shocks, the tiny running time, the way the story moves like a dream you can't finish — but the clearest...

1931

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde still hooks you with a simple, savage question: can a decent man hold back the part of himself that wants to break the...

1931

Frankenstein

If you remember one thing from Frankenstein, it's probably not the lightning or the windmill. It's the small moments where people look after one another — and where El...

1932

Freaks

Watch one scene and you'll know what Freaks is about: not just spectacle, but people who live and look differently trying to be ordinary. Tod Browning's short, sharp 6...

1935

Bride of Frankenstein

There’s a peculiar tenderness threaded through Bride of Frankenstein — and it arrives by way of a creature who never fits. James Whale’s short, sharp follow-up makes i...

1935

Werewolf of London

Werewolf of London feels compact and oddly modern: a 75-minute mood piece about a man who brings a little of the moon back with him and discovers that some problems fo...

1936

Dracula's Daughter

Dracula's Daughter is a brisk, 71‑minute take on what happens after the stake: the monster's child, restless and furious, trying to trade immortality for ordinary huma...

1941

The Wolf Man

The Wolf Man doesn’t open with fang-bearing melodrama; it begins with a son returning home. George Waggner’s tight, 70-minute picture uses that simple knot — family, o...

1942

Cat People

Cat People opens with a woman sketching a captive black panther and never lets you forget that animal is a question more than a beast. Jacques Tourneur’s compact 73-mi...

1943

I Walked with a Zombie

You remember the image: a pale, mute woman wandering a plantation at night and a nurse who turns up from a snowy Canadian day and slowly realises she’s stepped into so...

1945

House of Dracula

House of Dracula is 67 brisk minutes of organised mayhem: vampires asking for medical help, a scientist crossing lines, and monsters turning up like awkward houseguest...

1945

The Body Snatcher

There’s an economy to The Body Snatcher: 77 minutes, a handful of rooms in a doctor’s house, and a moral problem that refuses to leave. Robert Wise keeps the pressure...

1953

House of Wax

Walk into a wax museum and the rules change: everything that looks preserved may be hiding something rotten. House of Wax plants that uncomfortable idea at its centre,...

1954

Godzilla

Godzilla opens not with spectacle but with wreckage: a freighter reduced to ruin and a few bewildered survivors washing ashore. Ishirō Honda’s 1954 picture uses that s...

1955

The Quatermass Xperiment

The Quatermass Xperiment still feels like someone leaving the lights on in a quiet house: uncomfortable, intelligent and oddly stubborn. Val Guest’s 1955 science-ficti...

1957

The Curse of Frankenstein

The Curse of Frankenstein doesn't start with thunder. It starts with a man waiting to die—and telling the tale that got him there. Terence Fisher's 1957 take turns a f...

1957

The Incredible Shrinking Man

Start with a mist. In Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man a holiday fog is the first pinprick in a very ordinary life, and that small beginning ripples out into...

1958

Dracula

There’s a particular kind of chill in this Dracula: not the velvet-glove grand guignol so often associated with the name, but something lean and relentless. Terence Fi...

1958

The Fly

The Fly doesn’t sneak up on you so much as drag a crying child into the centre of its experiment. Kurt Neumann's 1958 picture uses a science-fiction premise to ask how...

1959

House on Haunted Hill

Invite five strangers, promise them a sack of money and lock the doors. William Castle's House on Haunted Hill is exactly that kind of gleefully economical horror — 75...

Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom feels like a private view you weren’t invited to. Michael Powell’s 1960 thriller hooks you with a simple, sickening premise: Mark Lewis films people in the...

Psycho

Psycho still grabs you because it finds terror in the most ordinary bargains: a woman who takes money to buy a life, a man who keeps a house to lock something away. Al...

Village of the Damned

Village of the Damned opens with a simple, chilling stunt: a whole English village drops unconscious and, for a few hours, the world stops. That odd, clinical premise...

1963

The Haunting

The Haunting isn't interested in cheap shocks. From the moment Dr John Markway begins to tell Hill House's history — a house built for love that keeps producing deaths...

1964

Blood and Black Lace

A model walks the grounds at night and a masked figure ends her life before the credits settle. Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace is short — 86 minutes — and doesn’t w...

1965

Kwaidan

Kwaidan isn't a museum piece you admire from a distance. It's a long, quietly stubborn film that keeps returning to ordinary homes and ordinary desires — and then make...

1965

Repulsion

There are films that make you look at a hallway differently. Repulsion is one of them. Roman Polanski’s 1965 study of a shy Belgian manicurist who lives with her older...

1975

The Stepford Wives

There’s a particular kind of chill in The Stepford Wives — the sort that arrives when everything is shiny, polite and a little too convenient. Bryan Forbes’s 1975 film...

1968

Rosemary's Baby

There are films that scream for your attention and films that whisper in your ear until you realise you’ve been listening the whole time. Rosemary's Baby is very much...

1966

Dracula: Prince of Darkness

Dracula: Prince of Darkness arrives like a whispered story told by candlelight — short, sharp and with a clear agenda: bring Count Dracula back and see what that does...

1970

The Vampire Lovers

It opens with a woman stepping out of a mist and a tavern-goer making the worst career decision of his life. That single image — a diaphanous figure, a quick, fatal en...

1972

The Last House on the Left

There’s an opening you don’t forget: Mari Collingwood slips out for a seventeenth‑birthday concert and, like plenty of 70s coming‑of‑age seeds, the evening feels ordin...

1973

The Exorcist

You remember the image — not necessarily the specifics — of a house that stops being a safe place. The Exorcist sets that unease in motion by linking an archaeological...

1974

Black Christmas

Black Christmas feels like a ploy from the moment you realise the danger isn't outside the walls but living above them. Bob Clark's lean, 98‑minute horror turns a fest...

1974

It's Alive

Larry Cohen's It's Alive is ninety-one minutes of domestic horror that starts where most nightmares do: at home. The film pins a family's life to one grotesque, unstop...

Carrie

There are scenes from Carrie that lodge in your head the moment you think of the film: a shy schoolgirl overwhelmed in a locker-room, a prank that makes humiliation ph...

The Omen

You remember the small, polite smile that suddenly feels wrong. The Omen trades jump-scare pyrotechnics for a slow, nagging dread: a family built on a lie, and the bad...

1977

Suspiria

Suspiria grabs you the way a single unsettling detail can — a frightened girl bolting from a dance studio, and then a new student, Suzy Bannion, arriving to a prestigi...

1977

The Hills Have Eyes

The Hills Have Eyes drops a perfectly ordinary family into an unthinkable situation and refuses to look away. Wes Craven’s lean, 89-minute horror keeps the focus tight...

Dawn of the Dead

Dawn of the Dead does something that still rattles: it turns the shopping mall — a place of ease and excess — into a bunker. George A. Romero’s 1978 zombie picture mix...

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

There’s a particular chill to the idea of your neighbour being quietly, perfectly wrong. Philip Kaufman’s 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers turns that chill into a s...

Alien

Alien is the kind of film that begins like an ordinary haul home — a commercial tug, a seven-strong crew, a cat called Jones — and slowly, deliciously, unravels. Ridle...

Phantasm

Phantasm opens on a cemetery with a moment that still makes you wince: a tryst, a stabbing, and a mortician who is not what he seems. Don Coscarelli made a short, shar...

The Amityville Horror

You know the image: a well-meaning family unpacking, unaware that everything good about home might be negotiable. The Amityville Horror trades on that moment — a real-...

When a Stranger Calls

There are films that start with a shock and films that build a slow, steady dread. When a Stranger Calls does both: it opens with a perfectly ordinary babysitting job...

Altered States

Ken Russell’s 1980 oddball-thriller Altered States throws a serious-minded scientist into seriously unglued territory. William Hurt’s Eddie Jessup begins as a research...

Dressed to Kill

Dressed to Kill opens with a married woman in a shrink's office and refuses to be polite about what happens next. Brian De Palma packs 105 minutes with sex, suspicion...

Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th isn't polite cinema. It arrives like a warning you ignore: young people at a remote camp, a simple setup, and then the rules change. Sean S. Cunningham...

Maniac

Maniac doesn’t announce itself as a philosophical horror — it arrives in the shape of a man who collects hair. William Lustig’s 1980 shocker is lean (88 minutes), ugly...

Motel Hell

Motel Hell is the sort of film that glares at you like a crooked neon sign: amusing, uncomfortable and impossible to pretend isn’t having a good time with itself. Kevi...

Prom Night

There’s a specific kind of dread Prom Night trades in: childhood mischief that refuses to stay buried. Paul Lynch’s 1980 horror sticks around in the head because it pa...

The Fog

There’s a peculiar pleasure in watching a horror film that starts with someone telling a ghost story by a beach and then keeps its promise. John Carpenter’s The Fog pa...

The Island

The Island is that awkwardly thrilling thing: a grown-up adventure that starts as a Bermuda Triangle yarn and turns into a claustrophobic fight for family. Directed by...

The Watcher in the Woods

The Watcher in the Woods is the sort of film that arrives like a polite neighbour and then, thirty minutes later, leaves a blindfolded girl in your head. John Hough’s...

Friday the 13th Part 2

Friday the 13th Part 2 strips everything back to essentials: short, sharp and fixated on what gets lost when violence breaks a family. Steve Miner’s 1981 follow-up mov...

Galaxy of Terror

Galaxy of Terror is the sort of small, strange sci‑fi horror that sticks in your head because it’s willing to be awful and weird in equal measure. Directed by Bruce D....

Halloween II

If the first Halloween put a masked intruder in suburban darkness, Halloween II drags that fear inside fluorescent corridors and hospital beds. Rick Rosenthal's brisk...

Happy Birthday to Me

Happy Birthday to Me is the sort of early‑80s horror that spends as much time with funerals and family rows as it does with throat wounds. Directed by J. Lee Thompson...

The Burning

The Burning starts with a joke that goes catastrophically wrong — a worm‑ridden skull, a startled caretaker and a fire that changes everything. It’s a short, sharp sli...

The Funhouse

If you remember one image from The Funhouse, it’s probably the idea of a safe, silly carnival turning suddenly poisonous. Tobe Hooper’s 96-minute trip to the midway pl...

The Prowler

The Prowler arrives like a dare: throw a graduation ball where a wartime double murder happened and see which part of small-town life snaps. Joseph Zito’s tight, 89-mi...

Wolfen

Wolfen isn't a straight-up monster movie or a neat police procedural. It sits between them: a thriller that uses a murder investigation to pry at fear, community and t...

Cat People

There’s an image that opens Cat People that refuses to be politely ignored: a sacrificial maiden bound to a tree while a black panther pads forward and rests its paws...

Friday the 13th Part III

Friday the 13th Part III isn’t shy. In 91 minutes it gives you a wounded, unmasked Jason looking for a change of clothes, a gang of holidaymakers who really should hav...

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Forget jump-scares and familiar masks. Halloween III: Season of the Witch starts with a shopkeeper fleeing through rain and ends with a desperate phone call to stop te...

Poltergeist

Poltergeist drops its strangest business into the middle of domestic life: a normal family, a normal living room, and a little girl who starts talking to the televisio...

Christine

There’s an image from Christine that lodges in your head: a freshly-built Plymouth on a Detroit line that behaves like it has teeth. That jolting opening sets the tone...

Cujo

You remember the dog: big, friendly, the sort of beast you’d expect to lick a kid’s face and slobber through a backyard fence. Cujo begins with that exact domestic com...

Jaws 3-D

Jaws 3-D asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when a killer shark gets invited into a theme park? Move the action from a sleepy seaside town to a corporate...

The Hunger

There’s a specific chill in The Hunger that has nothing to do with coffins: it’s the idea of a safe home that’s actually the most dangerous place you can be. Tony Scot...

Videodrome

Videodrome is the film that takes a late-night TV obsession and turns it literal — not just in your head, but under your skin. In a tight 89 minutes, David Cronenberg...

C.H.U.D.

C.H.U.D. opens on an image you don't forget: a woman walking her dog, a manhole, and then the world tipping beneath the pavement. It's a ninety-something-minute B-movi...

Children of the Corn

Children of the Corn is the sort of small, scary movie that lingers because it gets one miserable idea exactly right: what happens when a community’s children turn on...

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is the kind of horror movie that announces itself in the first five minutes: a body collected by the police—supposedly finished—gets...

Silent Night, Deadly Night

Silent Night, Deadly Night is the kind of horror that opens with a child's lesson about Santa and never quite lets you unlearn it. It's short, sharp and allergic to su...

Near Dark

Near Dark opens like a late-night wrong-turn: a small-town kid meets a drifter and wakes up in a world that moves in an RV. Kathryn Bigelow’s brisk 1987 horror blends...

The Company of Wolves

The Company of Wolves is the sort of movie that opens on a girl in a country house and then gently convinces you the wallpaper is the least strange thing in the room....

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

There’s a particular kind of 1980s horror that’s part campfire tale, part domestic anxiety — and Friday the 13th: A New Beginning sits squarely in that lane. Danny Ste...

Fright Night

Fright Night still hooks you with a single, simple idea: what if the man next door was an actual vampire? Tom Holland turns that neat premise into a tight, 103‑minute...

Lifeforce

There’s a moment in Lifeforce when a British–American shuttle brings home something it really shouldn’t have. That image — discovery, panic, and a naked, awake passeng...

Once Bitten

Once Bitten is Howard Storm’s 1985 comedy-horror about a centuries-old Countess with an embarrassing modern problem: she needs male virgins to stay young. It’s a brisk...

Phenomena

Phenomena is the kind of horror that keeps one foot in fairytale and the other tripping over something sticky. Dario Argento stages grotesque set-pieces around a curio...

The Return of the Living Dead

There are films that treat the undead like a problem to be solved and films that turn them into an excuse for mischief. The Return of the Living Dead is very much the...

The Stuff

A white, cream‑like substance bubbles up from a Georgia quarry and — for reasons nobody quite explains — becomes the nation's favourite snack. Larry Cohen's The Stuff...

Chopping Mall

Chopping Mall hooks you with a single, neat idea: a mall has been locked down with three high-tech protectors that are meant to keep thieves out — until the tech goes...

Critters

Critters is the sort of movie that gets straight to the point: escaped aliens, shape‑changing hunters and a Kansas family suddenly very short on sleep. Stephen Herek p...

Manhunter

Manhunter feels like a private, low-key thriller that never forgets the people living inside its investigation. William Petersen's Will Graham has retired after a brea...

Maximum Overdrive

Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive is the kind of movie that announces itself in the first ten minutes: an ATM insults a customer and a bridge rises at the wrong moment....

Night of the Creeps

There’s a moment early on — a spaceship, a canister, and a tiny creature that doesn’t belong on Earth — and from that absurd handshake the movie never stops hustling....

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

There are two images from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors that hang around your head. One is a terrified teenager who refuses to sleep; the other is Nancy...

Angel Heart

Angel Heart hooks you with a private-eye job — a strange client, a missing crooner and a trail that smells faintly of brimstone — and refuses to be just a straightforw...

Creepshow 2

Creepshow 2 arrives the way it wants you to think it always did: a delivery truck pulling up to a newsstand, a kid on a bike, and a creepy host inviting you to flip th...

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is the sort of cheap, cheerful horror that remembers how to have fun without pretending to be high art. It’s a tight 97 minutes of reveng...

Hellraiser

If you remember Hellraiser at all, you probably remember the box. Clive Barker’s 1987 horror throws a mechanical riddle into the middle of a family home and watches po...

Predator

Predator is that peculiar 80s beast: part jungle-war yarn, part science-fiction whodunnit and part one-on-one gladiatorial scrap. John McTiernan keeps it taut — 107 mi...

The Gate

The Gate is the sort of horror film that opens on a nightmare and then refuses to be polite about it. Directed by Tibor Takács and clocking in under an hour and a half...

The Hidden

The Hidden starts like a straightforward LA crime movie and then quietly, deliciously, turns sideways. In under 100 minutes Jack Sholder gives us a genre mash-up — a b...

The Monster Squad

The Monster Squad packs Universal’s gallery of ghouls into a suburban kids’-adventure and somehow comes away feeling both affectionate and dangerous. Fred Dekker’s lea...

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

There’s a particular kind of comfort in a film that knows exactly what it is: a brisk, mischievous horror picture that introduces a fresh heroine and hands Freddy Krue...

Child's Play

Child's Play squeezes a mean little idea into 83 minutes: a dying murderer slips his soul into a child's toy, and suddenly the ordinary things in a family home feel vu...

Hellbound: Hellraiser II

Hellbound: Hellraiser II arrives like a fearsome houseguest: loud, unnerving and impossible to ignore. Tony Randel’s 1988 follow-up pushes the first film’s nightmare l...

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

There are worse ways to spend ninety-six minutes than watching Jason Voorhees get unexpectedly mobile. Rob Hedden’s Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan ta...

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers is the kind of sequel that refuses neat closure. Directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard and running a tight 96 minutes, it pick...

Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary isn’t a creature feature so much as a domestic nightmare: a family relocates to rural Maine and discovers that the comforting rules of home no longer appl...

Shocker

Shocker is the sort of late‑decade horror that mixes a daft premise with genuine domestic stakes. Wes Craven directs a 101‑minute oddity from 1989 where a TV repairman...

Vampire's Kiss

Vampire's Kiss is the sort of film that doesn’t sit politely in a single box: it’s a comedy about someone unravelling, a horror about what we tell ourselves, and a lat...

Child's Play 2

Child's Play 2 is the sort of sequel that doubles down: same doll, faster beats, and a new foster-home setup that turns domestic routine into a siege. John Lafia keeps...

Flatliners

Flatliners begins with a dare and then refuses to let the consequences stay polite. Joel Schumacher's 1990 medical thriller pins a small group of students — led by Nel...

Jacob's Ladder

There’s an image from Jacob's Ladder that lodges in the head and won’t leave: a man who can’t find the exit, seeing things that shouldn't be there. Adrian Lyne’s 1990...

Misery

Misery is the sort of movie that makes a cosy room feel suddenly suspicious. Rob Reiner’s 1990 thriller sets its dread inside a single relationship — a bestselling wri...

The Witches

Remember the part where Grandma tells the story about witches and you decide you will never trust sensible shoes again? That moment — a child being warned, an adult ta...

1991

Child's Play 3

Child's Play 3 is the kind of sequel that refuses to sit still: a revived Chucky, a teenage Andy stuck in a cadet college and a handful of bold, nasty set-pieces that...

Army of Darkness

Put a man from the late 20th century in chainmail, hand him a couple of bewildered weapons and let Sam Raimi run the show. Army of Darkness is short, loud and impatien...

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

If Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me opens with a smashed television and a scream, you already know you're not in for cosy small-town nostalgia. David Lynch's 1992 film sp...

1993

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday

There’s a very specific shock that opens Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday — a hulking figure stalking a lone woman at Crystal Lake only to be baited into a militar...

1994

Wes Craven's New Nightmare

Wes Craven's New Nightmare puts the business end of Freddy Krueger back where it hurts the most: in the house where someone you love should be able to lock the door. I...

1995

Species

Species is the sort of mid-90s thriller that still surprises you: part containment drama, part cat-and-mouse monster movie, all driven by one unsettling central figure...

1999

Deep Blue Sea

Deep Blue Sea isn’t politely asking you to be frightened — it drags you into an underwater lab, hands you a simple premise and then keeps upping the stakes until somet...

1996

The Frighteners

The Frighteners is the sort of movie that refuses to sit politely in a single box. It wants to be a caper, a horror story, a love story and a grim joke about salvation...

Alien Resurrection

Alien Resurrection is the odd, noisy sci‑fi sequel that sauntered into 1997 with Jean‑Pierre Jeunet behind the wheel and a very complicated Ripley in tow. It’s the one...

I Know What You Did Last Summer

Remember the hair-clip, the postcard note and that fisherman’s slicker? I Know What You Did Last Summer isn’t subtle, but it knows how to lodge itself in your bones. J...

Scream 2

Scream 2 opens in a cinema: students laugh at a film called Stab, someone leaves for the loo and never returns. From that jolt the movie spins a campus into a hunting...

Bride of Chucky

Come for the homicidal doll, stay for the ridiculous marriage plot. Bride of Chucky takes a familiar horror mascot, straps a seatbelt on the whole franchise, and speed...

Dark City

You remember the moment: a man comes round in a bathtub, no idea who he is. That’s John Murdoch’s first morning in Dark City, and everything that follows spins out fro...

2000

Scary Movie

Scary Movie arrives like a prank call: loud, crude and impossible to ignore. Keenen Ivory Wayans steers this 88‑minute parody through slasher beats, teen-party chaos a...

Donnie Darko

You remember the rabbit first. Then the strange, small-town logic that lets a teenager talk about time travel and still go to school the next day. Richard Kelly's Donn...

Blade II

Blade II feels like a midnight handshake: you recognise the shape of the hero immediately, but the people crawling around him are the reason you keep watching. Guiller...

Resident Evil

You know the moment: a woman comes to in a bathroom and has no idea who she is. That disorienting hook — Alice waking with amnesia — is the small, clever pivot Residen...

Scary Movie 3

Scary Movie 3 is the kind of film that opens with a cursed videotape and never quite stops hurtling absurdity at the screen. Directed by David Zucker and clocking in a...

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

There’s a specific kind of dread The Texas Chainsaw Massacre specialises in: the ordinary becoming dangerous, fast. Marcus Nispel’s 2003 horror takes a familiar set-up...

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Resident Evil: Apocalypse wears its 2000s personality on its sleeve — loud, fast and unapologetically violent — and it asks you to care about a handful of people while...

Saw

There are horror openings you forget and then there’s the one that starts with a man waking up ankle‑chained to a pipe. Saw doesn’t linger on atmosphere for its own sa...

Shaun of the Dead

Shaun of the Dead is the sort of film you can describe in one sentence and fall back into immediately: a bloke who can't get his life together, his useless best friend...

2005

Saw II

Saw II doesn't try to be subtle. It straps you to its rules, winds the clock and asks whether survival is worth what you have to do to stay alive. Revisit Darren Lynn...

Saw IV

Saw IV doesn’t waste time: the film opens on a clinical discovery that immediately pulls you back into John Kramer’s world. It’s compact — a brisk 96 minutes from Darr...

The Strangers

The Strangers is a lean, 85‑minute horror about two people whose private life is broken open by a knock and then by a series of ever colder choices. Bryan Bertino’s fi...

2005

The Descent

Remember that moment when a girl's night out turns into something unbearably small and suddenly forever? The Descent traps you in that pivot: a personal tragedy, a ret...

Hostel

Hostel is often remembered for how loudly it screams. But strip away the headline gore and you find three mates on a European jaunt, a savvy bit of escalation, and a s...

Saw III

Saw III squeezes its horror out of one tight, cruel idea: a bedridden John Kramer needs someone to keep him alive while a grieving father is forced to reckon with loss...

The Hills Have Eyes

The Hills Have Eyes still starts in the only place a proper nightmare should: the middle of a planned family celebration gone sideways. Alexandre Aja's 2006 take tosse...

1408

1408 is the kind of horror film that trades cheap jump scares for a slowly tightening trap: one man, one hotel room and a clock that will not be wished away. Directed...

Halloween

Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween is the sort of horror film that wants to be felt as much as watched: a brutal retelling that burrows into family history and comes back wit...

Halloween II

There’s a shot early on that sticks: a small white toy horse handed to a very small boy. It’s a simple token, but in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II it becomes a sharp, recu...

Saw VI

Saw VI doesn't open with a courtroom or a manifesto. It opens with two predatory lenders literally cutting into themselves to survive, and from that moment it makes cl...

2010

The Crazies

The Crazies wastes no time making you uneasy. A man storms onto a village baseball pitch with a shotgun, and the local sheriff—David—has to make the kind of split-seco...

2011

Insidious

Insidious is the kind of haunted-house picture that starts in a perfectly ordinary living room and quietly remembers how to make a home feel dangerous. James Wan’s 201...

The Woman in Black

If a single image can sell a horror movie to the back row, The Woman in Black has one that still punches: three girls, mesmerised, stepping out of a nursery and into s...

Insidious: Chapter 2

Insidious: Chapter 2 is that awkward sequel that keeps walking back into the very living room it frightened you out of the first time. James Wan returns to the house,...

Mama

There’s a single image that tends to pull people back to Mama: two feral little girls found alive after years in the woods, and a weird, mourning presence that calls i...

The Purge

The Purge is the sort of idea that hooks you before it gets loud: an annual twelve-hour window when violent crime below a certain threshold is legal. James DeMonaco to...

The Babadook

You know the opening: a small boy, a bedtime story and a picture-book that doesn’t feel like it belongs in the nursery. Jennifer Kent’s 2014 chiller pins its horror to...

Insidious: Chapter 3

If you remember Lin Shaye’s Elise Rainier — stubborn, wary, oddly affectionate — you can thank this film for giving her more room to breathe. Directed by Leigh Whannel...

It Follows

It Follows walks into a room and sits down beside you — politely, unrelentingly. David Robert Mitchell's tight, 100-minute chiller turns a simple premise into a small,...

Krampus

Michael Dougherty's Krampus takes the familiar chaos of a family Christmas and tilts it into something nastier, funnier and surprisingly sad. At its centre is Max Enge...

The Conjuring 2

James Wan's The Conjuring 2 still turns up in conversations about modern ghost stories because it pairs a simple, old-fashioned haunting with a stubbornly human core:...

The Invitation

Turn up to your ex’s house and everything feels off — that small, private dread is The Invitation’s whole trick. Karyn Kusama’s compact thriller stages grief, suspicio...

Annabelle: Creation

Annabelle: Creation arrived in 2017 under the steady hand of David F. Sandberg, and it prefers to unsettle you with family trouble rather than jump scares alone. At it...

Raw

Raw announces itself like a dare: a veterinary school, a reluctant vegetarian named Justine, and a week of initiation that refuses to be genteel. Julia Ducournau's sho...

Split

Three girls in a parked car; a man who is not who he seems. Split is M. Night Shyamalan at his bluntest — a 116-minute jig-saw of menace, identity and moral discomfort...

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer still sneaks up on you. It starts like a strange, quiet fable — a cardiothoracic surgeon casually meets a grieving teen...

Hereditary

Hereditary feels like someone took a domestic argument, shrank it down and set it on fire. Ari Aster’s 2018 horror-drama starts in the small, claustrophobic world of A...

Mandy

Mandy is the sort of film that announces itself by mood rather than plot: Panos Cosmatos made a 2018 movie about a haunted lumberjack and the woman he loves, and then...

Suspiria

Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria landed in 2018 like a long, slow exhale: a 152‑minute horror that insists you sit with it. Set in West Berlin in 1977, it follows an America...

Crawl

Crawl is the kind of lean, unshowy thriller that tells you everything it needs to in under ninety minutes. Alexandre Aja’s 2019 horror-action picture pins a University...

Possessor

Possessor asks a simple, poisonous question: what happens when the person doing the killing can't tell where they end and someone else begins? Brandon Cronenberg's 202...

Candyman

Candyman walks into a room and refuses to play the usual remake game. Nia DaCosta's 2021 revamp uses a tight 91-minute runtime to shove an old urban legend into new co...

Halloween Kills

Halloween Kills feels like a family argument that spills into the street and refuses to stop. David Gordon Green’s 2021 sequel keeps Laurie Strode at its emotional cen...

Last Night in Soho

Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho trades his usual kinetic wink for something darker: a coming-of-age nightmare dressed in 1960s glamour. At its centre is Eloise “Elli...

The Night House

The Night House is the kind of horror that sneaks up through the floorboards of ordinary life. David Bruckner's 2021 thriller pins a widow — Beth Parchin — to a slow,...

Halloween Ends

Halloween Ends isn’t interested in reviving Michael Myers as a mystery; it wants to close a story about what a lifetime of fear does to ordinary people. David Gordon G...

M3GAN

M3GAN feels like the film that named a worry: what happens when the things we design to keep children safe start deciding they're the safest option. Gerard Johnstone's...

Pearl

Pearl arrives like a period melodrama with its teeth bared: a 1918 Texas farm, a young woman desperate to escape, and a handful of very bad decisions. Ti West’s 2022 h...

Scream

Scream (2022) arrives like someone kicking down the sitting-room door: it puts a familiar mask back on and asks what happens when the terror you thought was finished t...

The Black Phone

The Black Phone arrives like a dare: take a small-town abduction story, add a haunted rotary that refuses to be ignored, and watch a boy discover what bravery actually...

Alien: Romulus

Alien: Romulus is Fede Álvarez’s lean, mean return to the thing that made the franchise twitch: survival under corporate rules, and the messy loyalties that form when...

Longlegs

Longlegs opens with a Polaroid and a voice — and from that small, eerie start Oz Perkins builds a movie that keeps tugging at what counts as protection, and who gets t...

Smile 2

Smile 2 is a loud, unpleasantly clever follow-up that pins a parasitic horror to pop stardom and refuses to let go. Parker Finn directs Naomi Scott as Skye Riley, a po...

Final Destination Bloodlines

You know the drill: a premonition, a narrow escape, and a ledger that refuses to let anyone forget. Final Destination Bloodlines drops that familiar engine into a very...

Hellraiser

Hellraiser (2022), David Bruckner's take on Clive Barker’s nightmare toybox, launches with a scene that refuses to be polite. It’s a horror film that keeps one boot fi...

Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled

Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled is the kind of sequel that knows exactly what it is: a tight, home-video horror about desire getting twisted into danger. Chris Ange...

Wrong Turn

Wrong Turn has a neat, horrible premise: a punctual medical student’s detour leaves a group of strangers stranded on a remote back road, and that decision is the film’...