Horror Movies

The most-underestimated of the major film genres. From Hitchcock's shower scene to A24's prestige horror — what's worth your evening, organised by sub-genre.

Horror is the genre critics historically discounted, the Academy historically refused to honour (only The Silence of the Lambs has won Best Picture from the genre), and the audience kept showing up for anyway. It's also the genre most-likely, in 2026, to be doing serious dramatic work at scale — partly because the mid-budget adult drama has migrated to streaming, and partly because the post-Get Out audience demands more from horror than jump scares.

This page is the genre hub. We've organised by sub-category, with links to full reviews.

The supernatural classics

  • The Exorcist (1973) — William Friedkin. Considered by many the most-disturbing studio horror release ever made.
  • Rosemary's Baby (1968) — Roman Polanski. The model for paranoid social horror.
  • The Shining (1980) — Stanley Kubrick. Stephen King's novel as cold formal exercise. See our Kubrick profile.
  • Don't Look Now (1973) — Nicolas Roeg. Venice in winter. The red coat.
  • Hereditary (2018) — Ari Aster. The most-discussed horror debut of the 2010s.

The slasher and the killer-on-the-loose

  • Psycho (1960) — Hitchcock. The shower scene was a thirty-year shift in what mainstream cinema could show.
  • Halloween (1978) — John Carpenter. The slasher film's foundational text.
  • The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) — Tobe Hooper. Cheap, fast, foundational.
  • Scream (1996) — Wes Craven. The slasher's self-aware reinvention.
  • It Follows (2014) — David Robert Mitchell. The teen-sex-as-curse premise played for genuine dread.

Psychological and slow-burn horror

  • The Silence of the Lambs (1991) — The only horror film to win Best Picture.
  • Se7en (1995) — Fincher's serial-killer thriller crosses fully into horror in the third act.
  • The Witch (2015) — Robert Eggers. New England Puritan horror.
  • The Babadook (2014) — Jennifer Kent. Grief as monster.
  • Audition (1999) — Takashi Miike. The mid-film tonal shift that re-defined J-horror.

Social horror

  • Get Out (2017) — Jordan Peele's debut. Best Original Screenplay winner. See our full review for the Sunken Place analysis.
  • Us (2019) — Peele's second film. Doppelgängers as class allegory.
  • Nope (2022) — Peele's third. Spectacle as entity.
  • Candyman (1992) — Bernard Rose. Urban legend meets racial trauma.
  • The Stepford Wives (1975) — Bryan Forbes. The original; not the remake.

Body horror

  • The Thing (1982) — John Carpenter. Practical effects at their peak.
  • The Fly (1986) — David Cronenberg. The most-quoted body-horror film of the 1980s.
  • Possessor (2020) — Brandon Cronenberg. The genre tradition continues.
  • Titane (2021) — Julia Ducournau. Palme d'Or winner; the second film directed by a woman to win the Palme.

Foreign-language horror

  • Let the Right One In (2008) — Tomas Alfredson. Swedish. Adolescent vampire drama.
  • A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) — Kim Jee-woon. Korean. Modern J-horror's most-elegant entry.
  • Pan's Labyrinth (2006) — Guillermo del Toro. Spanish. Fascist Spain meets the fairy tale.
  • Ringu (1998) — Hideo Nakata. The Japanese original; remade as The Ring (2002).
  • REC (2007) — Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza. Spanish found-footage at its tightest.

The A24 era and the rebirth of prestige horror

The 2010s and 2020s have seen horror return to critical relevance in a way it hadn't held since the 1970s. The A24-distributed films — The Witch, Hereditary, Midsommar, Talk to Me — are part of this. So is Jordan Peele's three-film run. So is the international output of Robert Eggers, Ari Aster, and Julia Ducournau.

For more on this shift, see our blog essay The A24 Phenomenon and our ranked list The Best Horror Movies of All Time.

Where to start if you don't watch horror

If you're new to horror cinema, start with Get Out. It's the most-accessible serious horror film of the past decade, doesn't rely on traditional jump scares, and rewards the same kind of attention you'd give a non-genre drama.

If Get Out lands, the next step is Psycho (to understand where modern horror grammar came from), followed by Hereditary (to see contemporary prestige horror at its peak). From there, the sub-genres above are all available to be explored.