1. The Exorcist (1973)
"The Exorcist" ranks third on our list of horror movies, and director William Friedkin utilized his experience directing documentaries, crime dramas, and experimental theatre to make it, telling the story of a young woman. Friedkin uses an unexpected technique to figuratively shred the nerves of one viewer after another. His trick is to make a real-world, impossible-to-treat disease look like the devil, and to reach the devil with aggression and horror.
2. NIGHT OF THE BLOODY DEAD (1987)
Kathryn Bigelow's "Night of the Bloody Dead" is the standard for all new vampire movies, and with plenty of gore mixed in, it's the story of a dusty demon on a killing spree. Young vampire Mae brings home Caleb with a fresh bite mark on his neck, and he must learn how to get along with the crowd before they make his thirst for human blood worse than death.
3. Psycho (1960)
No movie can shake Psycho's #1 ranking among horror movies. Alfred Hitchcock was a psychologist, someone who tried to channel the audience's emotions and reactions, and the images in his movies were the medium.
4. Blair Witch (1999)
After "The Blair Witch Project," the world changed forever. Without the Blair Witch Project, which made huge profits at a relatively small cost, and without the subgenre of footage it uncovered, mainstream horror horror would have cost millions of dollars more, and no filmmaker would ever have chosen to invest in it. It also proves how much fear you can inspire just by committing to what's waiting in the woods, which is where three filmmakers traveled to the woods to shoot a documentary about the Blair Witch saga.
5. The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
Wes Craven will be remembered for "The Scream" and "Nightmare on Elm Street," which brought postmodernism and gallows humor to American horror. But before that, he made movies that seemed really dangerous and are often cited as some of the greatest horror films of all time. His 1977 film "The Hills Have Eyes" is a great example of this, mixing hillbilly black comedy with no-convict violence and depravity. The Carter family's vacation is interrupted by a group of cannibals living in a radioactive desert. The residents of the suburb are brutally hunted by them if they want to survive, and the residents must learn to defend themselves.
6. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)
In 1968, George Romero looked around at a world in turmoil and let the ugliness seep into his first film, "Night of the Living Dead," an aggressive deconstruction of the righteous fury of passive suburban aggression. He constructed an ancient monster, a creature he found most reflective of a nation in crisis. It's often considered one of the greatest horror movies of all time, and the reason it's so chilling is that even though the zombies never stop banging on the doors and windows, the real monster is already in the house.
7. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is underrated as a work of superb craftsmanship and rich art. On a road trip, five kids discover a group of abandoned houses, and when they walk up to the nearest house and ask for gasoline, they encounter a homicidal maniac, and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is a thrilling movie.
8. Pre-Sequel (1982)
John Carpenter made this broken movie a must-see for families on Halloween. But for a "prequel," his remake of Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby's "Thing From Another World" is a nasty movie. He leads a dozen Kurt Russell's with honor against an alien alien who wakes up from a cold grave a thousand years later.
9. KanetoShind?(1968)
Japanese horror movies are generally long, filled with uncanny ghostly visions and distortions unrecognizable to the senses.Kuroneko finds a war veteran returning from the war to learn the whereabouts of his wife and mother who were killed by looting deserters and whose apparition now haunts the neighborhood of his family's grove, and the director controls the movie's pace perfectly.
10. The Shining (1980)
Stanley Kubrick's productivity slowed in the years after "The Shining," and in a sense, sadly, there was no better movie after it. Jack Torrance, a writer in search of inspiration, takes on the job of caretaker of the creepy 'OverlookHotel', and soon there's a disturbing unease. Creativity leaves him and is replaced by the violent insanity inherited by the hotel's guests, and his nerves are pinched in every corridor.