Each and every horror movie poses a challenge. Can you handle what’s about to happen in the next few hours? Probably. But can you handle it on your own? Probably not. At least not when it comes to the scariest movies of all time.
In our opinion, horror movies are best consumed as a group activity. Go to the theaters in packs. Jolt at the jump scares. Emerge with your heart beating a bit too fast. Pretend, for a while, that you won’t have to face the darkness alone. Inevitably, of course, you will. At some point after the movie, you’ll separate from your friends and find yourself alone in your bedroom to sleep. Scenes from the movie might nip at your memory, reminding you of its creepiest moments and that the horrors might just exist outside of the movie theater, too. That’s when the fun of the horror movie really begins.
So, if you’re looking for a spooky flick to watch with friends and then keep you up all night, here are our picks for the 30 scariest movies ever — if you dare.
A little bit goofy and a whole lot of scary, Longlegs follows FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as she takes on the trials and tribulations of an unsolved serial killer case. Things take a twisted turn when she encounters a connection to the killer and has to race against time (almost as fast as your beating heart) before he mercilessly claims another family as victims.
Perhaps the best horror movie to come out of Australia since The Babadook (more on that one later), Talk To Me combines A24 film style with a skin-crawlingly twisted story. The premise is that a group of childhood friends discover an embalmed hand that lets them communicate with spirits, which they then turn into a thrilling party game. However, things take a dark turn when the high-stakes game goes too far.
The debut film by now-notable horror director Robert Eggers, The Witch tells the story of a family in 1600s New England whose youngest son suddenly disappears. Since the eldest daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), was the last person with the baby, the family blames her and suspicions of witchcraft begin to swirl. Slowly, paranoia ensues and the family unravels.
From the horror genius mind of Ari Aster, Midsommar follows the story of Dani (Florence Pugh) as she journeys to a rural village in Sweden with her boyfriend and his friends. What starts off as a picturesque trip to take part in a midsummer festival turns into a freaky hellscape run by a violent cult. Perhaps the most unsettling part of this movie is the mix of the sunny, idyllic setting with truly terrifying, dark scenes.
Rosemary (Mia Farrow), a pregnant newlywed living in a Manhattan brownstone, has a feeling that something isn’t right with her baby — or with her neighbors. Though she’s told not to take those suspicions seriously by the more “rational” people in her life, aka her husband (John Cassavetes), Rosemary should listen to her gut, call her mom, and get out of that apartment. Alas. Instead, she’s impregnated by the devil, and her baby is to be used in a Satanic ritual. Rosemary’s Baby conjures up an unforgettable atmosphere of second-guessing that bleeds into outright fear.
After stealing money from her boss, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) leaves town. After a day of traveling, she seeks refuge in a decrepit motel — but danger she encounters at this hotel is far worse than law enforcement. Marion never could’ve guessed the secrets the hotel’s innocuous-seeming manager, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), was hiding. Psycho manages to be one of the scariest movies ever without any gore whatsoever. Instead, the movie will make you question where all of your casual decisions might be leading you.
John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) are devastated when their daughter dies. In the aftermath, John takes a job restoring a church in Venice. There, they meet two strange old women who claim to see their daughter. Don’t Look Now is a stunning work of psychological horror adapted from a story by Daphne du Maurier, the author of Rebecca. It’s light on gore but big on scares.
Hush is a creative entry into the horror genre. The movie follows an intense cat-and-mouse game between a stalker and his unwilling victim. Maddie (Kate Siegel) is a deaf author who lives alone. John Gallagher Jr. is the masked killer who thinks she’s going to be an easy target. He’s wrong.
Good luck getting Regan’s (Linda Blair) ravings out of your mind after seeing The Exorcist. Over the course of this horror classic, Regan goes from being a sweet elementary-schooler to a foul-mouth demon. And no, puberty isn’t to blame. The devil is.
What would the zombie apocalypse actually look like? How would it reshape the world? After a virus contaminates the population, civilization quickly crumbles. 28 Days Later is a movie about the flimsiness of our institutions, and how susceptible we are to something like the rage virus. Oh, and it stars a young Cillian Murphy.
So many horror movies are structured around the idea that something is coming for the main characters. In Alien, it’s the xenomorph. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, it’s Freddy Krueger. It Follows cleverly updates the tropes seen in these movies. After Jay (Maika Monroe) sleeps with her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary) for the first time, she contracts a terrible STD: Death is following her, until she passes it on to someone else. If it kills Jay, it kills everyone who came before her, too.
Ever babysit a kid and just get the shivers? The Omen will confirm that, indeed, some children are just bad eggs — and of that set, Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) is the baddest egg of all. After Katherine (Lee Remick) gives birth to a stillborn baby boy, her husband Robert (Gregory Peck) and doctor conspire to replace him with an orphan — and not tell Katherine. Soon, everyone around baby Damien starts dying. That’s right: Robert may have accidentally adopted the antichrist.
What begins as a road trip turns into a nightmare after Sally (Marilyn Burns), her brother, and two of their friends encounter a group of outcasts living in a barn — one of whom is a serial killer. In this movie, you can catch Leatherface at the beginning of his long franchise life. Horrifyingly, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is based on the true story of Ed Gein, who made masks from the skins of his victims.
Taking place in Rhode Island in the ‘70s, The Conjuring details the events of real-life paranormal investigators and demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren as they are called upon to investigate a family being terrorized in their new haunted house. Plus, this movie is a gateway into the entire Conjuring film universe, which includes Annabelle, The Nun and The Conjuring sequels, all of which are based on the Warrens’ supposed exploits.
If only a movie could come with a seatbelt. In the case of Hereditary, we’d want one. The movie begins with the death of the Graham family matriarch. As the family grieves, they’re haunted by a malevolent presence. Get ready for a jolting, shocking ride. This is the aforementioned Ari Aster’s first film — and it will certainly keep you up at night.
Carrie takes the inherent horrors of high school seriously. For Carrie (Sissy Spacek), high school is a waking nightmare. She’s relentlessly bullied at school. At home, her uber-religious mother punishes her constantly. Carrie’s head is a swirling mess of repression. Eventually, she finds release at the high school prom, where she’s christened Prom Queen in an outpouring of pig’s blood. The movie culminates in one of the most memorable, horrifying climaxes in cinematic history.
The original Halloween, released 50 years ago, is a stalwart in the slasher genre. Michael Myers, recently freed from a mental institution, runs amok in the town of Haddonfield, IL targeting teenagers especially. Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is a babysitter who manages to outsmart (or maybe just outrun) him. Watch it so you can have a whole Halloween marathon that includes the final entry from 2022 in the recent reboot trilogy, which takes place when Laurie is older, waiting for the return of her tormentor. The final girl lives on.
The game: survival. The players: the hapless human crew of the spaceship Nostromo and the xenomorph, a slimy alien with rows of fangs for teeth. Alien is a gore-fest, reminding us that death could (literally) be around any corner. The movie also introduced one of the most iconic woman heroes and final girls of all time: Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver).
Where art house cinema meets horror meets psychological thriller, that’s where you’ll find Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) relocates his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and his psychic son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), to Colorado’s Overlook Hotel for the winter. They think they’re alone, but they’re not. Ghosts populate the Overlook Hotel. And soon, so does madness.
Jordan Peele’s Oscar-nominated directorial debut is certainly scary because of the jump scares and unexpected twists. But what sets Get Out apart from every other horror movie is its incisive — and terrifying — commentary about race in America. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) goes with his white girlfriend, Rose (Alison Williams), to meet her family in their upstate mansion. He can’t shake the feeling that something’s off with her family. He’s incredibly right. If you like Peele’s work, then you also need to watch Us (2019) and Nope (2022).
By introducing the concept of “found footage,” The Blair Witch Project reshaped the entire horror movie genre. Paranormal Activity brought the found footage feeling right to your living room. CCTV catches each creepy haunting that preys on the Sloat family in their new house.
Sleep is where we go to retreat from the world. Except in A Nightmare on Elm Street, sleep is where you’re most susceptible to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a demon who kills teenagers in their dreams — and then ensures their death in reality.
In The Silence of the Lambs, FBI investigators realize the only way they can catch the serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is by consulting someone who knows the killer mind intimately: Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a convicted cannibalistic serial killer already locked up. Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is forced to get close to the masked, smooth-talking Dr. Lecter who could — and does — eat a human as casually as he eats a lamb chop.
Good luck staring at a TV set after watching Ring. The premise of this Japanese movie — which was later turned into the 2002 American movie The Ring — is terrifying: Watch a cursed video tape, and have seven days to live, unless you make a copy of the tape and pass it on. In that case, you’ve cursed someone else. In Ring, the boundaries between what we watch and our fate is tied together inherently. Fortunately that’s not normally the case — otherwise fans of serial killer shows would be in trouble.
The Orphanage is a thought-provoking and thrilling entry into the horror genre which will appeal to all movie buffs. At the start of the movie, Laura (Belén Rueda), her husband (Fernando Cayo), and adoptive son (Roger Princep) return to the orphanage where she was raised. She hopes to convert the orphanage into a home for disabled children. Instead, she stumbles upon the orphanage’s dark history, which manifests in ghost form.
“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” So goes the rhyme which repeats, like an unforgettable motif, throughout this Australian movie. In The Babadook, a single mother (Essie Davis) and her son (Noah Wiseman) live together in an old house that is already scary — and then becomes super scary when a long-limbed monster called the Babadook makes his presence known. The Babadook is a chilling story about loss and trauma nestled inside a conventional horror movie format.
The Blair Witch Project could be the scariest movie on this list, simply because of how real it seems. Typically, while watching a horror movie, you can rationalize some of the fears away by reminding yourself of its fictional nature. But that’s harder to do when watching a movie like Blair Witch. The movie depicts three film students (Michael Williams, Joshua Leonard, and Heather Donohue) who supposedly set forth to find the Blair Witch in 1994; the movie is the footage they left behind. When it premiered at Sundance in 1999, some viewers really did think it was a documentary.
You haven’t seen a revenge movie until you’ve seen Audition. In this Japanese movie, a widowed film producer sets about finding a wife very methodically. He’ll interview women for a nonexistent movie part. When he finds a properly submissive woman, he’ll ask her out on a date. But he wasn’t prepared for Asami (Eihi Shiina), the 28th auditionee of the day with a gruesome plan of her own.
Some might say that Open Water is the scariest movie on this list, but not because it’s a classic horror movie. A couple goes on a scuba diving expedition during a beach vacation. Then, the boat leaves them in the middle of the ocean. On the surface of the water, they panic and bicker. Beneath them, sharks start to circle. No movie will inspire more existential dread than this one, watching people face the inevitability of their death. On a final note: Open Water is based on a true story, which makes it all the more scary.
Every 27 years, the children of Derry are preyed on by a shape-shifting force of evil who typically takes the form of a painted clown (Bill Skarsgård). The year IT comes back, a group of misfits called the Loser’s Club decides to take the monster on. IT is set in a world in which no one can protect kids but themselves.
Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s classic horror film is a deeply unsettling tale of witchcraft, ballet, and violence. Warning: There is one particularly gruesome scene that some viewers found so repulsing they actually got physically ill. It involves a dancer’s bones breaking as a dancer in a second room inadvertently controls her grotesque movements. If you’re prone to squeamishness, maybe steer clear of this movie.
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This article was originally published on refinery29.com.
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