The 10 best horror films of all time

Horror cinema is a monster. Mistreated, misunderstood and subjected to vicious critical attacks, somehow it keeps lumbering forward, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. For some, horror films are little better than pornography, focused purely on evoking a reaction – be it terror, disquiet or disgust – with little thought for 'higher' aspirations. For others, they're just a bit of fun: a chance to shriek and snigger at someone's second-hand nightmare.

But look again, and the story of horror is also the story of innovation and non-conformity in cinema, a place where dangerous ideas can be expressed, radical techniques can be explored, and filmmakers outside the mainstream can still make a big cultural splash. If cinema itself has an unconscious, a dark little corner from which new ideas emerge, blinking and malformed, it must be horror. The question is – which are the best horror films?

Here is Time Out's top ten... 

10. Jaws (1975)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss

Live every week like it’s shark week

‘A perfect engine…’ These words, used by Richard Dreyfuss’s geeky ichthyologist to describe the merciless Great White Shark, could just as easily be used to describe Steven Spielberg’s peerless, relentless nature-horror masterpiece. Jaws is a work of almost preternatural precision, a film where everything from the script to the performances to the photography to the special effects are just flawless, working in machine-like harmony to deliver the ultimate audience experience. Is it high art? Perhaps, perhaps not. But it is without doubt one of the pinnacles of cinematic craftsmanship.

Which is even more of a miracle when you consider the odds against it. Spielberg was 26 years old when he was hired, a veteran of a handful of TV shows and one moderately successful movie, The Sugarland Express. The production problems were legendary, the budget ballooning from 4 million USD to 9 million USD over months of rewrites, malfunctioning effects and natural disasters. Nonetheless, on release Jaws swiftly became the biggest movie of all time, and the most commercially successful director in the history of cinema was up and running.

9. Dawn of the Dead (1974)

Director: George A Romero

Cast: Ken Foree, Gaylen Ross, David Emge

Supermarket sweep

Now that’s he’s become a one-man zombie factory (with steeply diminishing returns), it’s hard to remember that George Romero was, at first, dubious about the idea of making a sequel to his 1969 game-changer Night of the Living Dead. But with his most personal project (and, perhaps, his masterpiece), Martin, failing miserably at the box office, Romero decided to bite the bullet – and reinvigorated his career in the process. Though Night changed the face of horror, this is the film he’ll be remembered for: the wildest, most deliriously exciting zombie flick of them all, and the movie which pretty much defines the concept of socially aware, politically astute horror cinema. Its influence has been felt in every zombie film since (and even on TV in The Walking Dead), and it remains a near-flawless piece of fist-pumping ultraviolence.

8. Halloween (1978)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis

Is that a carving knife in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

Movie snobs always have to point out that Bob Clark’s Black Christmas actually birthed the slasher subgenre, but it was the astonishing success of John Carpenter’s breakthrough indie (70 million USD worldwide on a 300,000 USD budget) that really set things in motion. But forget all the masked wannabes and knife-wielding suburban loonies that came after, and marvel at the streamlined power of Carpenter’s film: the gliding camera, the concealing shadows, the single-minded presence of masked villain Michael Myers, as perfect a killer as the shark in Jaws. Almost four decades later, it’s still close to flawless. 

7. Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Director: Roman Polanski

Cast: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon

The hoof that rocks the cradle

It’s hard enough moving into a flat and trying to start a family without having to wrestle with the enveloping suspicion that your new neighbours might be satanists dead-set on parenting a demon child via you. This is the intelligent, subtle face of horror, as Polanski limits the specifics to a minimum and keeps us guessing as to how much is going on merely in the mind of Mia Farrow’s character as she comes to believe she’s been impregnated by a creepy bunch of well-to-do Manhattanites with a connection to the occult. There are some more explicit key scenes – a potential nighttime rape and a chilling climax – that serve to get right under our skin without making the whole premise seem ridiculous. Farrow and Cassavetes’s performances as a couple disintegrating serve Polanski well in his attempt to make the potential alienation of everyday family life feel horrific, and the faux-naive score, evoking lullabies, makes the whole affair feel doubly creepy in the most heady way possible.

6. The Thing (1982)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley

Change you can believe in

Like many future horror classics, The Thing was hated on first release, dismissed as an Alien clone more interested in pushing the boundaries of SFX than in character or tension. It was a disastrous flop, and threatened Carpenter’s once unassailable reputation as the king of the new horror. It’s hard to imagine now: with the benefit of hindsight (and, more importantly, repeat viewings), The Thing has emerged as one of our most potent modern terrors, combining the icy-cold chill of suspicion and uncertainty with those magnificently imaginative, pre-CG effects blowouts. 

5. Psycho (1960)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh

What would mother think?

A few years back, David Thomson’s book The Moment of Psycho argued that Alfred Hitchcock’s blackly comic serial killer masterpiece didn’t just change cinema, but society itself. By confronting audiences with everyday horrors; by knowingly manipulating them into sympathising with a murderer; by offering an amoral, adulterous heroine then bumping her off so savagely; by mocking Freudian psychology and the pompous stuffed-shirts who practice it; by pushing an image of America as a trap-laden labyrinth populated by creepy cops and nice-as-pie psychopaths; and by implying that women (brace yourself now) actually use the toilet sometimes, Hitch helped pave the way for all the cultural earthquakes and moral rebalancing acts that the coming decade had to offer. And he did it all with a wink and a smile. Now that’s showbusiness. 

4. Alien (1979)

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm

The miracle of birth

Talk about above and beyond: Ridley Scott was hired by Twentieth Century Fox to make 'Jaws in space’, and came back with one of the most stylish, subversive, downright beautiful films in either the horror or sci-fi genre. The masterstroke, of course, was hiring Swiss madman HR Giger as the film’s chief designer – his work brings a slippery, organic grotesquerie to what could’ve been a straight-up bug hunt (© Aliens). But let’s not overlook Dan O’Bannon’s script, which builds character without assigning age, race or even gender – plus one of the finest casts ever assembled.

3. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Director: Tobe Hooper

Cast: Gunnar Hansen, Marilyn Burns

Sounds like the neighbours are doing DIY again

‘Who will survive… and what will be left of them?’ It’s a question that applies as much to the audience for Tobe Hooper’s relentless stalk-and-saw shocker as to its doomed, hapless characters. Horror had never been this raw before, and it could be argued that it hasn’t since, the sheer grimy ugliness of the piece leading some to walk out, others to cry sadism and many more to acclaim the film as a modern masterpiece; horror in its purest, most unforgiving form. Sequels and remakes have come thick and fast, but nothing will ever match your first encounter with the original and its brutal, hammer-over-the-head power. 

2. The Shining (1980)

Director: Stanley Kubrick 

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall 

Do not disturb

The scariest moments in The Shining are so iconic they’ve become in-jokes: Jack Nicholson leering psychotically from posters on the walls of student bedrooms everywhere... ‘Here’s Johnny’. Even so, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of execution and claustrophobia still retains the power to frighten audiences out of their wits. Nicholson is Jack Torrance, a writer working as a caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains over winter. Stephen King, on whose novel the film was based, was famously unimpressed. The problem, he said, was that ghost-sceptic Kubrick was ‘a man who thinks too much and feels too little’. He resented Kubrick for stripping out the supernatural elements of his story. Torrance is not tortured by ghosts but by inadequacy and alcoholism. And for many, it’s as a study of insanity and failure that The Shining is so chilling.

1. The Exorcist (1973)

Director: William Friedkin

Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow

Forty years of sucking c**ks in hell

By the ’70s, horror had divided into two camps: on one hand, there were the ‘real life’ terrors of Psycho and Night of the Living Dead, films that brought horror into the realm of the everyday, making it all the more shocking. On the other, there were the more outrageous dream-horrors popular in Europe, the work of Hammer Studios in the UK and Mario Bava and Dario Argento in Italy, films that prized artistry, oddity and explicit gore over narrative logic. The first film to attempt to bring the two together was Rosemary’s Baby, but Polanski’s heart clearly belonged to the surreal. The first to achieve that blend with absolute certainty was The Exorcist – which perhaps explains its position as the unassailable winner of this poll.

In cutting from the clanging bazaars of Iraq to the quiet streets of Georgetown, in blending dizzying dream sequences with starkly believable human drama, Friedkin created a horror movie like no other – both brutal and beautiful, artful and exploitative, exploring wacked-out religious concepts with the clinical precision of an agnostic scientist. And make no mistake: The Exorcist is most definitely a horror film: though it may be filled with rigorously examined ideas and wonderfully observed character moments, its primary concern is with shocking, scaring and, yes, horrifying its audience out of their wits – does mainstream cinema contain a more upsetting image than the crucifix scene? That it still succeeds, almost four decades later, is testament to Friedkin’s remarkable vision.

More from Time Out Shanghai

Click below for more Halloween