The 100 best horror movies of all time

Director: Andy Muschietti  

Cast: Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgård, Sophia Lillis

Clowning around
For some, Tim Curry will always embody Pennywise the dancing clown, a manifestation of fear itself. But in this 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s epic novel, replanted in the 1980s instead of the ’50s, it’s Bill Skarsgård who scares you witless. As Pennywise, Skarsgård’s eyes roam in two different directions, making the character look truly monstrous and deranged. When he interacts with the children, he drools, as if starved, ravenous to consume them and their fear. Great performances from the young cast also prevent any ‘child acting’ awkwardness, while the themes of friendship and the loss of innocence are reminiscent of Stand By Me (another King adaptation) and ET. It might be sentimental at times, but when it scares – and it really does scare – it’s a chilling reminder that, no matter your age, clowns are terrifying. 

Director: Leigh Whannell

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Oliver Jackson-Cohen

What we do in the shadows
Leigh Whannell’s canny retooling of HG Wells’s sci-fi novel offers a tart statement on toxic men and their gaslighting ways. Elisabeth Moss plays Cecilia, an architect traumatised by her abusive tech entrepreneur husband Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Soon, Griffin is reported dead by suicide. But is he? And why have things started going bump in the night? Whannell is respectful to the classic Universal monster movie with which it shares its name (look out for a cameo from those trademark bandages), but this is no reverential retread. It has ideas of its own, specifically around the way an abusive relationship can turn life into a prison. Moss, needless to say, makes a killer scream-queen.

Director: Frank Darabont

Cast: Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Toby Jones

Situation normal: all fogged up
Having tackled Stephen King twice already – in The Shawshank Redemption and its inferior follow-up The Green Mile – Frank Darabont made his first out-and-out horror movie with this bleak, pointed adaptation of King’s novella about a mysterious fog which swamps a small town, forcing the inhabitants to take shelter in the local supermarket. On one level this is pure throwback, an old-school tentacles-and-all monster movie which really comes alive in its glittering monochrome DVD version. But it’s also a ferociously modern drama, picking apart the political and social threads which just about held America together under the Bush administration. Religious dogma, political division and – finally and devastatingly – military intervention all go under Darabont’s shakeycam microscope, resulting in perhaps the most intelligent, compelling and heartbreaking horror movie of the century so far. 

Director: Larry Cohen

Cast: Tony Lo Bianco, Deborah Raffin

Jesus kills 
Cult favourite Larry Cohen earned a reputation for turning schlock into gold. Whether it’s a movie about a mythical avian beast, a mutant baby or a brain-eating dessert treat, his films frequently have some extra element – a smart script, an inspired performance, a sharp satirical edge – that makes them far better than they should be. In the case of arguably his best movie, though, it’s simply a wonder why it’s not more broadly thought of as a top-tier horror-thriller of the 1970s. While investigating a string of seemingly random acts of violence, a New York police detective (Lo Bianco) keeps hearing the same chilling refrain from the perpetrators: ‘God told me to.’ Is it mass psychosis, a religious cult or something stranger? Cohen matches gritty NYC location photography with a supernatural sci-fi twist that presages M Night Shyamalan. It’s upsetting, bizarre and, like most of the director’s work, truly one of a kind. Keep an eye out for the random Andy Kaufman cameo, too.

Director: Rose Glass

Cast: Morfydd Clark, Jennifer Ehle

Nurse me back to health
This brilliantly unsettling debut from Rose Glass (Love Lies Bleeding) sweeps in on a humdrum English coastal town with a fierce cargo of religious mania, psychological power games and the odd moment of nightmarish ickiness. Morfydd Clark is astonishing as the deeply religious Maud, a live-in nurse whose first private assignment takes her to the house of Jennifer Ehle’s terminally ill and terminally spiky ex-dancer. The ensuing dance between troubled ascetic and ciggy-smoking sensualist has shades of the psychological frictions of Persona, a major influence on Saint Maud, and goes downhill fast from there. Ehle is great and in a just world Clark would be winning awards for her remarkable piece of physical acting. The result is the best British horror since Under the Skin.

Director: Stuart Gordon

Cast: Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott

I am the resurrection
A kind of madcap blend of the original HP Lovecraft short story with National Lampoon’s Animal House, Re-Animator is horror as cartoon, combining gore and guffaws in a giddy parade of grotesque imagery. Jeffrey ‘the thinking man’s Bruce Campbell’ Combs plays disturbed anti-hero Herbert West (even the way he says his name is funny), the science graduate who stumbles across a glowing green resurrection serum and opts to try it out on the overbearing Dean and his nubile, leggy daughter. Re-Animator is a prime example of the home video horror boom in action: it’s weird, wild, unpredictable and frequently very silly, the kind of imaginative but slickly constructed offbeat horror film which seems to have gone entirely out of fashion. 

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Timothy Balme, Diana Peñalver, Elizabeth Moody

Abbott and Costello meet The Evil Dead
Before he got bogged down in endless Hobbitry, Peter Jackson was one of the world’s most ferociously inventive independent exploitation filmmakers, a worthy successor to the George Romero and Sam Raimi school of DIY gore. His first movie, Bad Taste, was filmed over four years of weekends with a band of enthusiastic mates, but by the time of Braindead (AKA Dead Alive) Jackson had a budget – of sorts – and a professional crew. The result is one of the most relentlessly, gleefully nasty movies ever released, incorporating mutant monkeys, zombie flesh-eaters, death by lawnmower, kung-fu priests and jokes about ‘The Archers’. It also contains the queasiest dinner scene since La Grande Bouffe, involving spurting blood, dissolving flesh, human ears and bowls of claggy rice pudding. 

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold

The same, but different
More than any other Cronenberg film, Dead Ringers tests the limits of what constitutes a horror movie. Yes it has blood, ‘tools for operating on mutant women’ and a general tone of deep disquiet, but it’s first and foremost a study of domestic psychosis under unique circumstances. It’s also an unparalleled acting showcase: using computer-controlled camera technology, Jeremy Irons was able to portray both lead characters, twin gynaecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle. What’s remarkable is how clearly he delineates between them: Elliot the steely, ‘masculine’ shark; Beverly the passive ‘feminine’ carer. As in