65 Greatest Horror Movies of the 21st Century

Three years after he made his feature-film debut with a surprisingly good Evil Dead reboot, filmmaker Fede Alvarez directed and co-wrote his own gripping, original addition to the horror canon. A trio of teens attempt to rob the house of a blind man. It’s only then they learn about their target’s past: He’s is a bereft Army vet (Avatar‘s Stephen Lang) whose daughter has died and, to cope with his lost, has subsequently taken some dark turns in his life. Tables get turned, and predators become prey – it’s abject, twisted and totally compelling. KGWatch Don’t Breathe on Hulu here

Desperate for a hit, a true-crime author (Ethan Hawke) takes on a project involving a serial killer; coming across a box of Super-8 films in the basement, he discovers that the house he’s staying in may help him with his research in the worst possible ways. This return to the good ol’ hard-R horror trend after a long line of anodyne mid-‘aughts thrillers felt like a sucker-punch to the abdomen, working a gruesome legacy of snuff films, occult nastiness and literary vanity to incredible scary-movie effect. STWatch Sinister on Amazon Prime here

The first Saw, released only a year earlier, was a hit with a branding-ready bad guy called Jigsaw, so a sequel was all but inevitable. Fortuitously, screenwriter Darren Lynn Bousman had been attempting to shop around a script called The Desperate that was close enough to the 2004 movie that the franchise could easily repurpose it – and in the process, make a far better film than the original. Stronger characters, a greater sense of panic, that stark giallo-inspired look and Donnie Wahlberg losing his shit while his son struggle with one of the killer’s games – this was a superior Saw in every imaginable way. It was such a hit Bousman directed the next two sequels. KGWatch Saw II on HBO Max here

If you took the best parts of your pals and put them together, you could make the perfect friend, right? That’s literally what the titular character of May attempts to do to cure her crushing loneliness. Angela Bettis channels her heroine’s inner Carrie White, evoking empathy as her character’s metal state deteriorates. With each rejection, the audience becomes more complicit in her craziness as May kills and dismembers people in an attempt to achieve the impossible: finding someone to have and to hold. Mad props to director Lucky McKee for creating a character so relatable that we want nothing more than for her to succeed. JVWatch May on Amazon Prime here

Cartel-related violence has turned a Mexican city into a virtual ghost town; overnight, a young girl named Estrella (Paola Lora) finds herself orphaned when her mother “disappears.” Out of desperation, she falls in with a roving band of similarly homeless kids, led by a boy named Shine (Juan Ramón López). A stolen cellphone has put all of them in the narco gang’s crosshairs. Luckily, Estrella has spirits of the dead on her side, all of whom would like a word with the men who killed them. Writer-director Issa López’s supernaturally tinged survival tale has attracted its share of attention (Guillermo del Toro is one of its biggest fans and most vocal advocates). It’s an absolutely brilliant, heartbreaking example of how to use horror in the service of chills and social commentary without slighting either. DFWatch Tigers Are No Afraid on Amazon Prime here

An eerie empowerment parable embedded in a domestic horror movie (or is it the other way around?), writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ unsettling portrait of an unraveling presents us with the “picture-perfect” housewife Hunter Conrad (Haley Bennett). She’s quiet, dresses like a ’50s sitcom spouse and seems one casserole away from going full Stepford. Then she begin ingesting items like marbles, push-pins, chess pieces … and suddenly, Hunter feels like she has some tiny semblance of power over her life. Anchored by a genuinely fearless performance, this is straight-outta-the DSM body horror that touches a nerve — and gives viewers a lot to chew on. DFWatch Swallow on Amazon Prime here

Sure, many children are innately creepy, and identical youngsters are vessels for evil pretty much without exception. (It’s called science, people.) But the little rascals in this sleek debut from Austrian duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala are in a class all their own. When Mom starts acting volatile after returning from an intensive surgery, the boys suspect she’s not the woman she claims to be — look up “capgras delusion” in your DSM — so they go to work on violently interrogating her. The boys’ unusual weapons speak to the directors’ originality in this front-to-back novel work: Krazy Glue, a DIY crossbow, and a goosebump-raising jar of cockroaches, to name a few. Trust no twin. CBWatch Goodnight Mommy on Amazon Prime here

Spain throws its hat into the “found-footage” horror ring (sort of) with this nice ‘n’ nasty tale of a TV news reporter (Manuela Velasco) doing a human-interest story on a local fire station. She tags along for a routine call involving an elderly woman stuck in her apartment; little does she know there’s a mysterious epidemic, a quarantine and an infected feeding frenzy in her future as well. Told entirely through a cameraman’s recordings, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s tweaked take on zombie flicks takes its time setting up the mayhem, only to hit the accelerator in its chaotic final act. And it arguably features the most effective horror-movie use of a little girl since Night of the Living Dead. DFWatch [REC] on Sling TV here

Forget entering the void — welcome to the abyss. Gaspar Noe’s dance party in hell starts off innocently enough, with Sofia Boutella and a host of real-life underground scenesters voguing and krumping up a storm. Soon, however, it becomes apparent that somebody has spiked their punch with some powerful hallucinogens — and that’s when the screaming (not to mention paranoia, depravity, beatings, and extreme self-harm) starts. The entire second half devolves into a portrait of mass derangement, based on a real-life incident in which a dance troupe went off the rails after being dosed. Noe had set out to make a doc about that story, before pivoting to an attempt to recreate one very bad trip sans the drugs. He succeeds. It’s Busby Berkeley by way of Hieronymus Bosch. DFWatch Climax on Amazon Prime here

Sure, teens have outrun hockey-mask-wearing homicidal maniacs and unstoppable killing machines – but what happens when they have to face off against the Grim Reaper? Having avoided a plane crash, a high-school student (Devon Sawa) and several fellow passengers find out first-hand that Death does not like being cheated – and as one character says, “you don’t wanna fuck with that mack daddy.” This durable horror franchise would up the ante on baroque “accidental” killings as it racked up entries (Runaway roller coasters! Decapitating elevators! Tanning machines turned into broilers!), but its first installment remains eerily prescient, kicking off a decade that’d be characterized by IRL instances of horrific, random acts of violence on a large scale. DFWatch Final Destination on Amazon Prime here

Both director Zack Snyder (Watchmen) and writer James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) would go on to superhero superstardom. But this unlikely duo’s reimagining of George A. Romero’s sacrosanct zombies-in-a-mall masterpiece defies everything you know about the often dire horror-remake trend. Credit to the film’s opening sequence, an absolute showstopper of mounting terror as the undead apocalypse takes hold in Sarah Polley’s suburban neighborhood; it’s one of the scariest 10 minute set pieces in the history of the subgenre. And if that wasn’t dread-inducing enough, it culminates in an opening-credit sequence that use Johnny Cash’s Bible-quoting song “The Man Comes Around” to further the sense of Armageddon. Bravo. STCWatch Dawn of the Dead on Amazon Prime here

An elderly Guatemalan general (Julio Diaz) is appearing before a war-crimes tribunal to account for decades of persecuting, imprisoning and torturing political dissidents. “The past is in the past,” declares his wife (Margarita Kenéfic), who may or may not lead a coven that’s helped keep him in power and out of trouble. Except the past is always here, sitting right beside us, and so are its ghosts — a concept that filmmaker Jayro Bustamante brilliantly mines for slow-burning dread and a sense of chickens finally coming home to roost. And if you think that the unexpected appearance of a young Mayan woman (María Mercedes Coroy) claiming to be the family’s new maid suggests some sort of return-of-the-repressed revenge, you’re absolutely right. It’s the kind of tale of mystery and imagination that prefers to get under your skin rather than shock your central nervous system, which only makes its near-suffocating feeling of foreboding more potent. DFWatch La Llorona on Hulu here

It spawned five sequels and numerous parodies, but neither time nor imitation have diminished the scares of Oren Pelli’s directorial debut. Initially released in 2007 (though given a much wider release two years later in a drastically altered version), Paranormal Activity breathed new life into the popular found-footage concept, setting its tale of demonic harassment not in an obviously creepy locale a la The Blair Witch Project, but rather in the bland confines of a Southern California tract home. Never has the unexpected click of a hallway light been so disconcerting. DEWatch Paranormal Activity on Starz here

Based on the divisive, frequently repulsive serial-killer satire of Reagan-era excess by novelist Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Harron’s adaptation of the saga of Wall Street psychopath Patrick Bateman locates the source text’s feminist subtext about objectification and consumption, then drags it into the light. Part Tom Cruise–pastiche and part yuppie Norman Bates, Christian Bale’s performance as the title character was instantly iconic and endlessly quotable (“Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?”). But the sequence that best represents the movie’s message involves no dialogue at all: Bateman running through the halls of his apartment building, nude except for a strategically positioned chainsaw – which he drops on the head of a fleeing woman with a howl of ugly, pointless triumph. STCWatch American Psycho on Amazon Prime here

The first Purge movie took a genius idea – a government-mandated annual holiday in which every violent act is legal from dusk until dawn – and fashioned a tense home-invasion thriller out of its high-concept premise. James DeMonaco’s sequel beautifully drops the free-for-all mayhem into more of a Grand Theft Auto-style sandbox-game template, adds another layer of social commentary and gives us a new genre hero in Frank Grillo’s vengeful badass. But wisely, he didn’t forget the oh-shit! scares as well, and ended up with a superior follow-up that expands the movie’s universe while still delivering the folks-in-creepy-masks primal fears. DFWatch The Purge: Anarchy on Amazon Prime here

You could definitely see Coralie Fargeat’s nasty little nugget of a debut slotting nicely into the middle section of a vintage Forty-Deuce triple feature, sandwiched between the Russ Meyer-sterpiece Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45; the latter is practically a spirit animal to this French take on the subgenre known as the “rape revenge” movie. A businessman (Kevin Janssens) takes his mistress (Matilda Lutz) along for an out-of-the-way guy’s weekend for some extra alone time. Then his buddies show up early, the woman is assaulted and the trio of dudes leave her for dead in the desert. Except this heroine is not planning on going gently into the night, because she’s got some apex-predator douchebags to hunt first. Every age gets the I Spit on Your Grave it needs. We now have ours. DFWatch Revenge on Amazon Prime now

A female ghost with long, black hair, the grotesque loom of fright on the faces of those she comes for, home video – Gore Verbinski’s remake of influential Japanese horror Ringu transposes the story from Tokyo to Seatlle, but the song (and more importantly, the scares) remain the same. A VHS tape begins circulating that, upon viewing, allegedly kills whoever views it seven days after watching it. Quicker than you can say “urban legend,” bodies begin piling up and an angry spirit is crawling out of a TV set. Rarely has an American remake of a foreign horror film captured the original spirit so spot on. SZWatch The Ring on Amazon Prime here

For over a century, Massachusetts’ Danvers State Hospital was hell for mental patients, the site of gruesome experiments and unspeakably heinous abuses. It’s all (undoubtedly haunted) luxury condos now, but the sadism lives on in director Brad Anderson’s homemade nightmare about a group of asbestos removers sorting through the madhouse’s remains. As it blurs the line between dissociative identity disorder and demonic possession, the movie uses the cheapo look of digital videotape as an effective source for terror – long before such notions became passé. CBWatch Session 9 on Amazon Prime here

In which literal demon bikers, Manson-like cult leaders, homicidal hippies and your run-of-the-mill “crazy eee-vil” go up against a blood-splattered Nicolas Cage, and none of them stand a chance in hell against him. This grungy revenge story from director Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow) may double as a museum of underground artifacts, cult-flick references and personal psychotronic esoterica. But once hesher goddess Andrea Risborough is kidnapped by netherworld minions and Cage goes into beast mode, the horror elements go into overdrive along with everything else. Best onscreen chainsaw duel ever. DFWatch Mandy on Amazon Prime here

Alexandre Aja’s remake of Joe Dante’s 1978 Jaws–rip-off simply retains the original’s name and toothy little predators – and it’s all the better for it. The French director is less interested in redoing that Corman quickie and more interested in channeling that old-fashioned grindhouse mix of copious nudity and abundant gore, as well as embedding a handful of in-jokes into the mix (just when you thought it was safe for Richard Dreyfuss to go back in the water …). But anyone that thinks this is merely a goof should go directly to the scene of a woman getting her hair caught in an outboard motor. You’ve been warned. DFWatch Piranha 3D on Amazon Prime here

Though a sequel of sorts to his ragged debut feature House of 1,000 Corpses, Rob Zombie’s grindhouse throwback was a huge leap forward – a nod to the grit and grim of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and 1970s drive-in sleaze that nonetheless speaks to contemporary worries about torture and revenge. The rocker-turned-filmmaker’s boldness pays off in a bizarre scene where a movie critic is called in for his expertise on the Marx Brothers, as well as in a finale that features perhaps the only acceptable use of “Free Bird” outside a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. STWatch The Devil’s Rejects on Vudu here

Werewolves and womanhood walk arm-in-arm in this Canadian B-movie classic, which stars hip scream queen Katharine Isabelle as a teenage nerd who becomes sexier and more popular after she’s bitten by a snarling canine. Screenwriter Karen Walton and director John Fawcett (who’d later work on Orphan Black, another genre piece about feminine identity) turn the story of the newly cool Ginger and her concerned younger sister Brigitte into a bloody black comedy. Never mind the scary wolf-attacks and grotesque transformations; this is really about the everyday horror girls go through whenever their best friends change in front of their eyes. NMWatch Ginger Snaps on Amazon Prime here

A mockumentary about vampires might seem like low-hanging fruit, but New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi and collaborator/co-director/Flight of the Conchords member Jemaine Clement manages to make it both hilarious and genuinely frightening. The Real World-style friction between several undead housemates, including an 8,000-year-old Nosferatu-like bloodsucker, is sharply satirical and yet strangely poignant; you end up feeling for these creatures of the night, even when they have to rip some poor soul’s throat out to survive. Bonus: A sequel focusing on the pack of uptight werewolves (not swear-wolves) led by comedian Rhys Darby is supposedly on the way. SAWatch What We do in the Shadows on Hulu here

As spellbinding a debut movie as you’re likely to see, Ana Lily Armipour’s melding of spaghetti Westerns, John Hughes misfit odes, black-and-white art movies and vampire stories definitely announced a major new talent. But the fact that horror is but one of the film’s many flavors doesn’t dilute the thrills or chills at all; you can swoon to its Type-O–craving heroine dancing with her crush one second and then shudder as she goes fangs-first ballistic on someone several scenes later. Consider this the punk-rock, girl-power Twilight you didn’t know you needed. DFWatch A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night on Amazon Prime here

A genius riff on Italian giallo movies, Belgian filmmakers Hélène Cattete & Bruno Forzani’s debut uses the genre’s visual motifs – black gloves, blood-red lips, razor blades – and a gorgeously garish aesthetic to chart the life of a young woman named Ana in three acts. It’s stylish, terrifying and ironic to the extreme, a kaleidoscope of color and a sensory overload. But more importantly, this free-form exercise takes a form associated with masculine menace and uses it to explore how a woman feels to be scared, or aroused, or preyed upon. SZWatch Amer on Apple TV here

The enigmatic title, the found-footage format, and the viral Internet trickery typical of of executive producer/Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams are what drove Cloverfield to the front of the zeitgeist (and the box office). But the film stands on its own as perhaps the first giant-monster movie since the original Japanese Gojira to convey the horror of a creature’s sheer scale. The panic-inducing you-are-there approach to an attack on Manhattan by a berserk, bizarre alien monstrosity – leveling landmarks, unleashing a secondary onslaught of parasites, and inviting increasingly indiscriminate attacks from the desperate military – found the dark and desperate heart of a genre too frequently limited to kaiju camp. STCWatch Cloverfield on Amazon Prime here

Adam Wingard’s neo-slasher film revives the “home invasion” horror of such classic 1970s films as The Last House on the Left and When A Stranger Calls — only this time, instead of teenage girls, it’s a cozy family reunion that’s being menaced. There’s more gore here than you can shake a severed head at, but the script’s dark humor and clever plot twists elevate it far above your typical retro-splatter fare. And Sharni Vinson is one seriously ass-kicking horror heroine. DEWatch You’re Next on Hulu here

Do not underestimate the power of that pale, bleached-out mask. David Gordon Green’s sequel/reboot/franchise rejuvenation returns to the scene of the crime 40 years later, giving Michael Myers numerous sharp objects to play with and setting him loose once more on the quaint suburbs of Haddonfield, Illinois. Only someone’s waiting for him this time. The thrill of seeing Jamie Lee Curtis, all wild white hair and sinew, turn Laurie Strode from victim to angel of vengeance would be reason enough to have show up — her performance gives the film an unexpected depth. (Ditto that parting shot of a sorority of final girls.) But Green has not forgotten the primal thrill of John Carpenter’s original, or the fact that a Halloween movie is required to scare the living shit out of you. This was the transfusion of fresh blood and spilled Caro syrup the series needed. DFWatch Halloween on Amazon Prime here

One of the most extreme of neo-extreme French horror films – which is saying something – Pascal Laugier’s cinematic endurance test is something to be watched on a dare, even for those jaded horror fans who think they’ve seen it all. What begins as a quest for revenge against a group of bourgeois sickos morphs into wrenching exercise in cult sadism, with one young woman’s pain opening the door to the transcendent. It’s either a bruising allegory for real-world torture or an irredeemable trip to the far end of exploitation. What it’s not is forgettable. STWatch Martyrs on Apple TV here

A couple, a house in the woods, a few masked invaders – standard horror-movie stuff. But it’s a great example of why style often matters when it comes to scaring the beejesus out of audiences. Doling out suspense in agonizing drips and drabs, director Bryan Bertino takes his sweet time to get to the mayhem, teasing out the conflict between the victims and the looming threat of their mysterious attackers. The quietest moments are the most effective, built on the eerie discord of composing duo tomandandy’s score and compositions that tuck the bad guys in the corners of the frame, swaddled in shadow. STWatch The Strangers on Amazon Prime here

How do you follow a dark, shadow-filled fever dream like Hereditary? If you’re Ari Aster, you drag your horror into the light — specifically, a Scandinavian summer festival where the sun hardly sets at all. A group of Americans, including a lone female (viva Florence Pugh!), have come to this far-away, once-in-a-lifetime event to study folkloric customs and mythology; quicker than you can say The Wicker Man, the sense that there’s something wicked happening right below the smiley, happy surface starts to take hold. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better answer film to contemporary toxic masculinity, a bleaker breaking-up-is-hard-to-do parable or a more unnerving look at the rites of spring. Most of all, however, Midsommar is the sort of movie that delights in turning its wheels so slowly that you’re not even sure it’s a horror story…until it confirms that yes, it is, and completely drops the floor out from under you. DFWatch Midsommar on Amazon Prime here

While Ringu may have kickstarted modern J-horror, it wasn’t the only franchise game in town – Takashi Shimizu’s bone-chilling tales of a ghostly curse that attaches itself to anyone entering a house with a homicidal history also helped spread the country’s new wave to vast shores.The third film in the series but the first to get a theatrical release and international attention, Ju-On didn’t change the subgenre’s conventions so much as refine them, adding a sickening sense of grace to its scenes of black-haired spirits creeping and crawling. And never underestimate the power of someone unexpectedly finding a hand on the back of their scalp. DFWatch Ju-On: The Grudge on Amazon Prime here

French director Claire Denis divided both fans and critics sharply with her relentlessly gruesome tale of love and cannibalism, casting the appropriately vampiric likes of Vincent Gallo and Beatrice Dalle as the afflicted halves of two separate couples torn apart by “the sickness.” This is where the Venn diagram of high art and extreme horror meet in the middle, and you will not find a better gut-punch allegory about love as a consuming passion. Literally. STWatch Trouble Every Day on Amazon Prime here

The story is basic: A secret service agent (Lee Byung-hun) goes after the psychopath (Oldboy‘s Choi Min-sik) who murdered his pregnant wife. They each take turns playing the cat and the mouse of the equation; torture, gory violence, decapitated heads, and some of the grisliest scenes of vengeance ensure. The film poses the question “How do good people destroy evil without becoming rotten themselves?,” but don’t look for answers to that philosophical query here — this is the sort of Asian exploitation cinema that takes pleasure in literally sticking its fingers in wounds. As for the killer, Choi plays him with such blasé soulnessness it’s chilling: He’s the personification of the abyss staring back. TGWatch I Saw the Devil on Vudu here

The mighty Sam Raimi returned to the genre after a long absence with a story of a legendary witchy woman and a new-school heroine (Alison Lohman), then drops them in to a characteristically old-school funhouse of gypsy death vomit, atomic nosebleeds, deadite goats and possessed cakes. For fans who’d missed his signature splatter-meets-the-Three-Stooges approach, this was like a gift from the Fangoria gods. And just about the time Lohman tells an elderly corpse to “choke on it, bitch!” you realize we’d already got all the new Evil Dead movie we needed. SZWatch Drag Me to Hell on Peacock here

Enfant terribles Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo cut a deep gash in the French “extreme horror” new wave with their slasher film extraordanaire. Béatrice Dalle is La Femme — effectively the female version of Michael Myers, minus the cheap Shatner mask and coveralls. She’s got an axe to grind with Sarah (Alysson Paradis), who is pregnant, alone on Christmas Eve, and pretty much relentlessly terrorized for 82 minutes straight. It’s a gory Gallic violence party of household weapons including knitting needles, a lamp, Lysol, sewing shears and – bonus points – the very creative use of a toaster. JVWatch Inside on Amazon Prime here

It starts as a stark domestic drama and slowly morphs into a just one-last-job hit-man thriller; the fact that Ben Wheatley’s jaw-dropping second movie ends as a spiral into hell attests to the gent’s ability to meld genres while dropping the rug out from you. The less said about how it gets to that point, of course, the better; what we can say is that the director makes dread part of the movie’s DNA from the get-go, and that you understand why it’s a horror-film list long before the end credits. SZWatch Kill List on Amazon Prime here

You know the drill: Careless scientists dump unstable chemicals into a nearby body of water and presto-change-o, some supersized mutant’s off devouring the nearest metropolis and its helpless, screaming citizens. South Korean genre chameleon Bong Joon-ho works his singularly wonky sense of black humor (several killings play like punch lines) and sharp sense of social satire, and fashions a giant-monster-movie for our ecologically fraught, precariously unstable moment. Not to mention that the film assigns more fully-formed identities to the characters terrorized by the seaweedy beast than usual for the subgenre. It’s a funnier, smarter sort of Godzilla-style B-movie. CBWatch The Host on Amazon Prime here

Guillermo del Toro was insistent that the story of a 19th-century woman who marries into a doomed aristocratic family was a “Gothic romance” rather than a traditional horror film. Fair enough. By the time skinless ghosts starting crawling along the floors and roaming the halls of their crumbling mansion while threatening a pale-skinned new bride (Mia Wasikowska), however, that distinction seems rather moot. The movie’s high style and use of color harkens back to old-school Maria Bava movies and Hammer flicks, while an expert cast — including Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain — play out the macabre storyline in a way that would make Edgar Allan Poe positively beam. SAWatch Crimson Peak on Netflix here

Nicole Kidman’s intense turn as a widowed mother anchors Alejandro Amenábar’s supernatural mystery, which updates the time-honored haunted house genre – think The Haunting or The Turn of the Screw – with a Sixth Sense-type spin. The scares here are low-key but immensely effective, thanks to the film’s dreamlike pacing and creepy atmosphere. (Remote Victorian country house, anyone?) Amenábar uses his subtle way with clues and metaphors to alert us that all may not be entirely as it seems, yet he never telegraphs the surprise ending. DEWatch The Others on Amazon Prime here