Psycho
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1960
The film that invented modern horror: Hitchcock broke an unspoken rule about how a story is meant to behave, and every thriller since has been working in the space he opened.
★ 9.5
The Movies canon
Sourced and screened.
Every film chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Jaws
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1975
Summer blockbusters start here: the mechanical shark kept breaking, so Spielberg hid it, and accidentally proved that what you cannot see is worse than what you can.
★ 9.2
The Shining
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1980
Whole documentaries exist about what this film means: Kubrick threw out most of King's novel, sent a Steadicam gliding down those corridors, and left a dread nobody can explain away.
★ 9.2
Alien
Directed by Ridley Scott
1979
Giger's creature is still the most frightening thing anyone has designed for a screen: Scott fused haunted house and space opera, and put a woman at the center of both.
★ 9.0
The Silence of the Lambs
Directed by Jonathan Demme
1991
Hopkins is on screen for a fraction of the film and won an Oscar anyway: Demme shot the interviews straight down the lens so Lecter looks directly at you.
★ 8.9
The Exorcist
Directed by William Friedkin
1973
Still the one people watch with the lights on fifty years later: Friedkin shot a possession story like a documentary, and the restraint is what makes it unbearable.
★ 8.6
Aliens
Directed by James Cameron
1986
Almost no sequel changes genre and survives it: Cameron turned Scott's haunted house into a war picture, and an action performance drew a rare Academy Award nomination.
★ 8.6
Nosferatu
Directed by F. W. Murnau
1922
A court ordered every print destroyed and the film survived anyway: Murnau's unauthorized Dracula gave horror its first permanent image, a shadow climbing a staircase toward a door.
★ 8.4
Rosemary's Baby
Directed by Roman Polanski
1968
Horror discovered it did not need monsters: Polanski built two hours out of a young wife nobody believes, and the dread comes entirely from politeness and closed doors.
★ 8.3
Frankenstein
Directed by James Whale
1931
Karloff's monster became the face everyone pictures, which is not what Mary Shelley wrote: Whale made a horror film that keeps asking who the actual monster is.
★ 7.1
The Sixth Sense
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
1999
The ending changed how an entire generation watched films, and it is genuinely unguessable: a child psychologist takes on a boy who is frightened of something very specific.
★ 6.8
Black Swan
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
2010
Aronofsky filmed ballet as body horror and somehow made it work: a dancer's discipline turns on her, and Natalie Portman trained for a year to make it convincing.
★ 6.8
Shaun of the Dead
Directed by Edgar Wright
2004 · United Kingdom
A zombie comedy that works as an actual zombie film: Wright plants every joke twice, so the second half pays off setups you laughed at an hour earlier without noticing they were setups.
★ 6.7
The Birds
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1963
Alfred Hitchcock threw live gulls at Tippi Hedren for five days and gave the film no conventional score: only electronic shrieks, a quiet California town, and crows gathering on a schoolyard jungle gym.
★ 6.4
Carrie
Directed by Brian De Palma
1976
Stephen King's first novel became this, and no adaptation since has been meaner: De Palma films high-school cruelty in slow motion and split screen, and the prom is a fifteen-minute held breath.
★ 6.2
Misery
Directed by Rob Reiner
1990
Kathy Bates turned a fan into the most frightening character of the decade: a novelist wakes up in the house of the reader who saved him, and she has opinions about his ending.
★ 6.1
Scream
Directed by Wes Craven
1996
Wes Craven revived a dead genre by having the characters name its rules out loud: the opening twelve minutes tell you this film knows every slasher convention and intends to use them anyway.
★ 5.8
Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage)
Directed by Georges Franju
1960 · France
Viewers fainted at its first festival screenings and horror has been quietly borrowing from it ever since: a surgeon keeps trying to give his daughter a face, and her mask is unforgettable.
★ 5.8
The Innocents
Directed by Jack Clayton
1961 · United Kingdom
Freddie Francis lit it so the corners of every frame stay dark and you keep looking into them: a governess with two children in a huge house becomes certain they are being visited.
★ 5.8
Evil Dead II
Directed by Sam Raimi
1987
Sam Raimi rebuilt his own debut as a Three Stooges routine with blood: Bruce Campbell spends an entire sequence fighting his own hand, and the camera moves like something chasing him.
★ 5.0