The 75 greatest horror movies of all time

In building IndieWire’s new list of the greatest horror movies ever made, we opted to omit some films that straddle the nebulous line between the horror and thriller genres (so you won’t find “The Silence of the Lambs” here, to get a particularly major example out of the way), at least for now. We paid attention to films that paved the way for the genre and for filmmaking as a whole, as well as to modern classics that bring something new and brilliant to the canon today. What every film on this list has in common is that their horrors are more than just boogeymen and spirits projected upon a silver screen, but a conduit into which deeper real-life fears are made manifest. From social discontent to primal fear of the unknown, horror is a genre that reflects on humanity’s most potent paranoia, and the eternal darkness that rests within us. Read on for our list of the 75 greatest horror movies ever made.

1. “Possession” (dir. Andrzej Żuławski, 1981)
2. “The Thing” (dir. John Carpenter, 1982)
3. “Don’t Look Now” (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
4. “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920)
5. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (dir. Tobe Hopper, 1974)
6. “House” (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)
7. “Trouble Every Day” (dir. Claire Denis, 2001)
8. “The Shining” (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
9. “The Blair Witch Project” (dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
10. “Videodrome” (dir. David Cronenberg, 1983)
11. “Alien” (dir. Ridley Scott, 1979)
12. “Get Out” (dir. Jordan Peele, 2017)
13. “Night of the Living Dead” (dir. George Romero, 1968)
14. “Eyes Without a Face” (dir. Georges Franju, 1960)
15. “Funny Games” (dir. Michael Haneke, 1997)
16. “Deep Red” (dir. Dario Argento, 1975)
17. “I Walked with a Zombie” (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
18. “Halloween” (dir. John Carpenter, 1978)
19. “Evil Dead II” (dir. Sam Raimi, 1987)
20. “The Host” (dir. Bong Joon-Ho, 2006)
21. “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” (dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)
22. “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” (dir. John McNaughton, 1986)
23. “The Haunting” (dir. Robert Wise, 1963)
24. “Vampyr” (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)
25. “Raw” (dir. Julia Ducournau, 2016)
26. “Bride of Frankenstein” (dir. James Whale, 1935)
27. “Ganja & Hess” (dir. William Gunn, 1973)
28. “The Wicker Man” (dir. Robin Hardy, 1973)
29. “Near Dark” (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)
30. “Audition” (dir. Takashi Miike, 1999)
31. “Cat People” (dir. Jacques Turner, 1942)
32. “Under the Skin” (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
33. “Hellraiser” (dir. Clive Barker, 1987)
34. “The Beyond” (dir. Lucio Fulci, 1981)
35. “The Others” (dir. Alejandro Amenábar, 2001)
36. “Nosferatu the Vampyre” (dir. Werner Herzog, 1979)
37. “Freaks” (dir. Tod Browning, 1932)
38. “Psycho” (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
39. “Hour of the Wolf” (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
40. “Nosferatu” (dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922)
41. “The Innocents” (dir. Jack Clayton, 1961)
42. “Rosemary’s Baby” (dir. Roman Polanski, 1968)
43. “Arrebato” (dir. Ivan Zulueta, 1979)
44. “Cure” (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)
45. “Brain Dead” (dir. Peter Jackson, 1992)
46. “Night of the Demon” (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1957)
47. “Let the Right One In” (dir. Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
48. “The Fly” (dir. David Cronenberg, 1986)
49. “Carrie” (dir. Brian De Palma, 1976)
50. “Candyman” (dir. Bernard Rose, 1992)
51. “The Exorcist” (dir. William Friedkin, 1973)
52. “Kwaidan” (dir. Masaki Kobayashi, 1964)
53. “Häxan” (dir. Benjamin Christensen, 1922)
54. “The Seventh Victim” (dir. Mark Robson, 1943)
55. “Carnival of Souls” (dir. Herk Harvey, 1962)
56. “Santa Sangre” (dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1989)
57. “The Cremator” (dir. Juraj Herz, 1969)
58. “The Devil’s Backbone” (dir. Guillermo Del Toro, 2001)
59. “Onibaba” (dir. Kaneto Shindō, 1964)
60. “An American Werewolf in London” (dir. John Landis, 1981)
61. “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night” (dir. Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)
62. “The Phantom Carriage” (dir. Victor Sjöström, 1921)
63. “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers” (dir. Phillip Kaufman, 1978)
64. “Shaun of the Dead” (dir. Edgar Wright, 2004)
65. “The Babadook” (dir. Jennifer Kent, 2014)
66. “Suspiria” (dir. Dario Argento, 1977)
67. “Dawn of the Dead” (dir. George Romero, 1978)
68. “Jaws” (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1975)
69. “In the Mouth of Madness” (dir. John Carpenter, 1994)
70. “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (dir. David Lynch, 1992)
71. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
72. “The Birds” (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)
73. “A Tale of Two Sisters” (dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2003)
74. “Scream” (dir. Wes Craven, 1996)
75. “Hereditary” (dir. Ari Aster, 2018)