The Best Horror Movies of All Time

From Psycho to Hereditary. A ranking that distinguishes genuine craft from jump-scare cynicism.

Horror is the most-discounted of the major film genres. Critics historically reviewed horror films defensively; the Academy has nominated only three horror films for Best Picture in its history (The Exorcist, Jaws, and Get Out, with The Silence of the Lambs winning).

What we're including on this list are films whose horror is doing dramatic work — films in which the terror is, in part, about something. Pure splatter has its own pleasures and traditions; this list isn't about those.

The picks

  • Psycho (1960) — Hitchcock. The shower scene was a thirty-year shift in what mainstream cinema could show.
  • The Exorcist (1973) — William Friedkin. Considered by many the most-disturbing studio horror release ever made.
  • The Shining (1980) — Stanley Kubrick. Stephen King's novel as cold formal exercise.
  • Halloween (1978) — John Carpenter. The slasher film's foundational text.
  • Get Out (2017) — Jordan Peele. Best Original Screenplay winner.
  • The Silence of the Lambs (1991) — The only horror film to win Best Picture.
  • Hereditary (2018) — Ari Aster. The most-discussed horror debut of the 2010s.
  • The Babadook (2014) — Jennifer Kent. Grief as monster.
  • Rosemary's Baby (1968) — Roman Polanski. The model for paranoid social horror.
  • Nope (2022) — Jordan Peele again. Spectacle as entity.
  • Don't Look Now (1973) — Nicolas Roeg. Venice in winter. The red coat.
  • The Thing (1982) — John Carpenter again. Practical effects at their peak.
  • Se7en (1995) — Fincher's serial-killer thriller crosses into horror in the third act.
  • It Follows (2014) — David Robert Mitchell. The teen-sex-as-curse premise played for genuine dread.

What the genre has been doing lately

The 2010s marked a return of horror as a serious critical category. A24's success with The Witch (2015), Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), and Talk to Me (2022) re-established the prestige-horror tradition. Jordan Peele's three features positioned horror as a vehicle for sustained social commentary in a way the genre hadn't carried since Romero's Living Dead films.

The mid-budget horror film is also one of the few remaining categories of American cinema with a working economic model. Films made for $10-20m can still profit in cinemas — which is why Universal, Blumhouse and A24 have made horror their consistent output.