Classic Horror Movies
Every horror film made today is borrowing from the ones below. These are the classics, all released before 1990, that invented the rules everyone else still follows: the masked killer, the haunted house, the zombie, the body that won't stay human. Some are still among the most frightening things ever filmed. A few are more fascinating than frightening now, and the notes say which.
The useful way to choose is by era. The silent and black-and-white films (Nosferatu, Frankenstein, The Haunting, Psycho) work through shadow and suggestion and ask for a little patience. The 1970s films (The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Don't Look Now) are raw, adult and haven't softened at all. The 1980s picks (The Thing, The Fly, An American Werewolf in London) are showcases for practical effects that still look more convincing than most computer work.
If you're new to older horror, start with The Thing or A Nightmare on Elm Street, which move like modern films, and save The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for when you know you like it. Several of these carry nudity or sexual violence that their age doesn't soften; the notes flag them. For the films these inspired, see Slasher Movies, Zombie Movies and Shows and Creature Features and Monster Movies.
Psycho
Movie · 1960The film that moved horror out of castles and into a roadside motel. Hitchcock breaks the rules of how a thriller is supposed to unfold, and the shower scene, with Bernard Herrmann's shrieking strings, still lands in context. Black and white, very little blood, and a first act that's doing more than it seems.
The Exorcist
Movie · 1973The first horror film nominated for best picture, and it plays like a serious drama about a desperate mother and a priest losing his faith. That slow, procedural first hour is the point: by the time the bedroom scenes arrive, you believe in these people completely.
Halloween
Movie · 1978Watch it as the blueprint: a masked killer with no motive, a babysitter, a small town that isn't paying attention. Carpenter also wrote the piano theme, which does half the work. It looks like a real suburb on a real autumn evening, which is why it still frightens.
Alien
Movie · 1979Science fiction on the surface, a slasher underneath: seven working stiffs on a cargo ship, hunted one at a time by something H.R. Giger designed. Sigourney Weaver's Ripley rewrote what a horror heroine could be. The pacing is pure 1979, and that patience is a feature.
The Shining
Movie · 1980A writer takes his wife and young son to mind a snowed-in mountain hotel for the winter, and the hotel takes an interest. Jack Nicholson goes enormous, Shelley Duvall goes raw, and the camera glides behind Danny's tricycle through the corridors. The more times you watch, the stranger it gets.
Night of the Living Dead
Movie · 1968Strangers barricade a farmhouse while the dead gather outside. George Romero shot it near Pittsburgh with local actors and very little money, and invented the modern zombie in the process. Casting Duane Jones, a Black actor, as the lead in 1968 gives it a charge it never spells out. Black and white, and grim.
Rosemary's Baby
Movie · 1968A young wife in a grand Manhattan apartment building gets pregnant, and her elderly neighbors take a very close interest. Almost nothing supernatural happens on screen; the horror is that nobody believes her. Ruth Gordon won an Oscar as the busybody next door. Includes a disturbing dream sequence depicting rape.
The Thing
Movie · 1982Twelve men at an Antarctic research station realize one of them may no longer be human. It flopped in 1982 and is now ranked among Carpenter's best, thanks to paranoia you can feel and creature effects that are still revolting. Keep track of who's standing where.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Movie · 1974Five young people on a road trip through rural Texas stop at the wrong house. Grimy, loud and relentless, it feels less like a movie than evidence. The surprise is how little blood is actually on screen: your imagination does the damage. The dinner scene is among the most unbearable in horror.
Carrie
Movie · 1976Stephen King's first novel, filmed by Brian De Palma: a bullied, sheltered teenager with telekinetic powers goes to the prom. For most of its length it's a sad high-school drama, and Sissy Spacek makes you ache for her. The opening locker-room scene has nudity, and the final minutes hold one of horror's great jumps.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Movie · 1984Wes Craven's best idea: a killer who can only reach you when you fall asleep, so his targets try to stay awake for days. Dream logic means anything can happen, and the bedroom effects are wildly inventive for the budget. Johnny Depp makes his screen debut as the boyfriend.
Poltergeist
Movie · 1982A family in a new suburban development finds their house turning on them, starting with the TV. Steven Spielberg co-wrote and produced, Tobe Hooper directed, and it's rated PG in the 1982 sense: the clown doll, the tree and one face-peeling hallucination have scarred plenty of kids. Treat it as PG-13.
An American Werewolf in London
Movie · 1981Two American backpackers ignore a warning at a Yorkshire pub, and one of them ends up in London as a werewolf. John Landis plays much of it for laughs, until the transformation scene, done in full light with Rick Baker's makeup, which won the first competitive Oscar for makeup. Frank nudity and plenty of gore.
The Fly (1986)
Movie · 1986A scientist's teleportation experiment goes wrong, and Jeff Goldblum spends the rest of the film becoming something else, one detail at a time. David Cronenberg makes it gross, tragic and oddly romantic, with Geena Davis watching it happen. Not for weak stomachs. A remake of a 1958 film, and much better.
The Evil Dead
Movie · 1981Five friends, a cabin in the woods, a tape of incantations they shouldn't play. Sam Raimi made it with friends and very little money, and his camera tears through the trees like a monster itself. Gory, frantic, cheap and charming. One scene involving a tree is a sexual assault, and genuinely upsetting. Evil Dead II reworks it as slapstick.
Suspiria
Movie · 1977An American dancer joins a ballet academy in Germany where students keep disappearing. Dario Argento treats it like an opera: saturated reds and blues, a pounding score by the band Goblin, and murders staged as set pieces. The plot barely holds together and the dubbing wobbles. You watch it for how it looks and sounds.
Don't Look Now
Movie · 1973A couple grieving their young daughter spend a wintry season in Venice, where an elderly blind woman claims to see her spirit. Nicolas Roeg cuts it like memory, so images repeat and rhyme until the dread is overwhelming. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland are superb. It has a famously frank sex scene and an ending that shocks.
The Haunting
Movie · 1963The first film of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, the novel the 2018 series also reworked. Robert Wise, who made The Sound of Music two years later, shows almost nothing: the fear lives in sound, a pounding in the hallway, a door that seems to breathe. Proof that what you don't see is worse.
Frankenstein
Movie · 1931Barely more than an hour long, and the source of nearly every Frankenstein image you know: the flat head, the bolts, the lab, "It's alive!" Boris Karloff makes the monster pitiful as much as frightening. More moving than scary now. Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is the sequel many people prefer.
Nosferatu
Movie · 1922The silent German film that turned Dracula into Count Orlok, a rat-like bringer of plague whose shadow climbs the stairs ahead of him. It was made without permission, and Bram Stoker's widow won a court order to destroy every print; some survived. Find a version with a good score, then try the 2024 remake.
Still can't decide? Let us pick →
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