65 Greatest Horror Movies of the 21st Century

Lots of directors pledge allegiance to old-school horror flicks like The Exorcist; James Wan is one of the few capable of making something worthy of his influences. This ghost story par excellence works from the same true-life sources that gave us The Amityville Horror: In the early 1970s, paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) visit a Rhode Island family who believe their home is haunted. The Conjuring isn’t merely a spot-on period re-creation — it’s a fiendishly effective throwback to Seventies-style studio horror, back when methodical pacing and an icy tone trumped cheap gore. Stately, sophisticated dread permeates every frame, with Wan devilishly toying with his audience as they jump at every creaky floorboard and random trip to the super-creepy basement. TGWatch The Conjuring on HBO Max here

H.G. Wells classic man-who-wasn’t-there tale gets a modern update in the form of a #MeToo parable: Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss, in what’s arguably her best performance to date) is stuck in an abusive relationship with a bleeding-edge tech giant (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). She goes into hiding, he’s found dead, and everything seems to be headed toward a happy ending. Except Cecilia has the strange feeling that her ex is still tormenting her somehow, which may have something to do with what he’d been working on in his laboratory … as well as all of those objects mysteriously moving of their own accord …. Director Leigh Whannell’s chilling, beautifully calculated nightmare turns an old Universal Horror property into something a lot scarier than monsters running amuck: a gaslighting tale, in which no one believes you’re suffering simply because they can’t see what’s causing it themselves. Bravo. DFWatch The Invisible Man on Amazon Prime here

Jennifer Kent’s debut was not only one of the most assured in years but one of the most conceptually sound: She not only knows how to scare people, but why. The story of a widowed mother (Essie Davis) whose son is menaced by an angular demon that’s literally straight out of a children’s book begins as a nerve-scraping parable of grief; it becomes truly terrifying, however, when the subject shifts to how quickly parental love can turn to hate. It’s a monster movie in which everyone takes turns being the monster. SAWatch The Babadook on Amazon Prime here

Beautiful, bleak and deeply affecting, Tomas Alfredson’s stunning 2008 film gave the vampire genre a much-needed tweak with its somber depiction of one of the more unusual relationships in horror history – an alienated 12 year-old boy who inadvertently bonds with the “young” female bloodsucker next door. Filled with enough Swedish angst to make Ingmar Bergman proud and enough genuine scares to appeal to jaded horror fanatics, Let the Right One In moves quietly and deliberately, which makes its feeding scenes and set pieces such as swimming-pool massacre seem all the more jarring. Even more frightening, perhaps, is the film’s assertion that adolescent males have the capacity to be far more monstrous than actual monsters. DEWatch Let the Right One In on Hulu here

Whether you think it’s “the scariest film since The Exorcist” or simply one of the best horror films in the last deacde, Ari Aster’s debut feature is one remarkably self-assured, genuinely disturbing take on family dynamics. It knows exactly when and how to jump headfirst into insanity. Its mix of grief, grotesquerie and ghost-story dread feels nigh unbeatable. Toni Collette’s performance as an artist dealing with loss(es) is a masterclass in how to play someone slowly losing their mind; Alex Wolff’s portrayal as her son, equally heading off the rails, matches her step for step. Everything from the cinematography to the score suggests a bad dream you can’t wake up from. The movie requires several viewings at least, so you can see how impressively the film is planting clues at what’s really going on the whole time. And then there’s the climax, which references numerous supernatural horror-movie ancestors without once seeming like it’s ripping them off. A new master has blown into town. Hail Paimon. DFWatch Hereditary on Amazon Prime here

As with many great horror movies, Danny Boyle’s eviscerating zombie thriller grew out of real-world terrors. “Danny was particularly interested in issues that had to do with social rage – the increase of rage in our society, road rage and other things,” screenwriter Alex Garland explained. Out of that came 28 Days Later…, in which a handful of survivors (including Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris) try to stay a step ahead of unstoppable hordes of rampaging undead, who don’t just feast on the living but seem to be filled with an unquenchable anger, ferociously chasing after our heroes with the lunatic logic of a nightmare. Shot on MiniDV to emphasize the grubby, post-apocalyptic ugliness, the film is a marvel of handheld camerawork and jittery editing. But in the wake of 9/11’s jolting tragedy, this prescient horror film also spoke to unconscious anxieties about a world in which simmering tensions and seething paranoia felt like a terrible new normal. TGWatch 28 Days Later on Hulu here

It was an instant classic and the inescapable horror movie of 2017 — both a pitch-perfect throwback to writer-director Jordan Peele’s beloved Seventies “social thrillers” and a right-now racial state-of-the-nation address that touched a raw nerve. A lesser filmmaker might have reduced the story of an African-American photographer (Daniel Kaluuya, giving great cry-face) going to meet his white girlfriend’s liberal parents — and having the strange feeling that something is very wrong — to little more than a collection of socially conscious jump scares. Instead, Peele turned Get Out into something unique: A straight-up nightmare that laced its satirical jabs with genuine menace, weaponized a gleeful sense of tweaking “woke” folks and gave form to all the free-floating communal dread of the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” era. Released right after a racist President was sworn in to office and still playing in theaters when white supremacists marched in Southern streets, this hit horror film remains emblematic of our warped moment. We all live in the Sunken Place now. DFWatch Get Out on Amazon Prime here