20. “Inside” (2007)
The little sub-genre of pregnancy horror is always a potent one: the idea of carrying a person inside you is a strange and terrifying one, and from “Rosemary’s Baby” to the recent “Prevenge,” filmmakers have had a ton of fun with capitalizing on the universal fears that come with gestating a baby. But trust the New French Extremity movement, which took the horror world by storm in the mid-00s, to come up with a particularly disturbing version of it with “Inside.” Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s film sees a grieving woman (Alysson Paradis), set to give birth at any minute, interrupted by a mysterious intruder (Beatrice Dalle) who wants the unborn child for herself. It’s an undeniably cruel and sadistic film (not just in its plentiful violence: Paradis accidentally stabbing her mother to death feels like a particularly unwarranted twist of the knife), but leaves you on an absolute knife-edge as a result, and the craft is inarguable: it’s surprising that Maury and Bustillo haven’t done more since. Maybe everyone just thinks they’re maniacs…
19. “Goodnight Mommy” (2014)
The ‘creepy kid’ movie is another horror staple, and few have been creepier than “Goodnight Mommy,” the most recent film on this list. Directed by Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, the film is about two twin boys (Elias and Lukas Schwarz), whose mother (Susanne Wuest) returns heavily bandaged after cosmetic surgery, and they become increasingly convinced that she’s an impostor. It’s a slow burner, sowing terror into space and silence, that smartly twists around on itself, less to surprise you and more to bring a sense of sad inevitability into what happens. It feels like a truly European horror film, from the bright modernist setting to the clean, crisp filmmaking, but it’s something pleasingly accessible too — the film proved to be something of a minor surprise hit. The final twist might be something familiar, but that particular conceit has rarely had as much punch as it does here.
18. “Hour of the Wolf” (1968)
Widely billed as Bergman’s only horror movie, ‘Hour of the Wolf’ sees Bergman take on the trappings of the Gothic horror tradition and attempt to meld it with more recognisably Bergmanian concerns about the value of art, guilt, and the line between genius and madness. It’s not wholly successful, and the film splits rather too neatly into two parts, but both parts have their separate strengths. Renowned painter Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) is recuperating on a isolated island with his wife Alma (an unusually underwritten Liv Ullmann). They are invited to the nearby castle and discover that the lady of the house owns one of Borg’s paintings (which we never see), of Veronika, the woman he loved and lost and whose memory begins to obsess him all over again, despite Alma’s steady, practical devotion. The surreal touches — including a positively Lynchian walking-on-the-wall sequence — are striking, but as you might imagine with Bergman, the most horrifying are often the most mundane.
17. “Santa Sangre” (1989)
Though he’s never been afraid of disturbing, we tend to associate Alejandro Jodorowsky with trippy psychedelia rather than horror, but “Santa Sangre” showed that the two things don’t necessarily have to be mutually exclusive. His first movie since “The Holy Mountain” sixteen years earlier (and, aside from the disowned “The Rainbow Thief” his last until “The Dance Of Reality” in 2013), and again only existing in dubbed versions, the film is in part a sort of coming of age story, told in flashback by a mental asylum patient, about Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky), who was raised in a circus by his parents, a knife-thrower and a trapeze artist. Oh, but the circus is also a cult. And his mom burned his dad’s genitals off with sulphuric acid and his dad cut his mom’s arms off. And he’s a serial killer. Nodding to “Psycho,” “Freaks” and more but giving them a very Jodorowskian twist, it’s a beguiling, beautiful film that might be the director’s most accessible, in a strange way (and is reportedly his favorite of his own works).
16. “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night” (2014)
It’s a testament to the enduring power of the vampire myth that this enormously promising genre-bending debut from director Ana Lily Amirpour can feel both so classic and so fresh. The film follows a lonesome hijab-wearing vampire, the boy who loves her, his drug-addicted father and a prostitute in the fictional Bad City, but is in Persian and set in Iran. Yet being shot in California, it has more in common with Jarmusch than Kiarostami, thanks to a high-contrast B&W look and emphasis on woozy atmosphere above plotting. And also largely above scares — it may be a vampire horror loosely speaking, but it’s one in which the horror is an ancient loneliness and the knowledge that, while you fear that you might hurt the thing you love, you don’t fear it enough to stop swooning into them. If it’s far from the scariest film on this list, it might just be the sexiest, with scarcely an inch of flesh revealed.
15. “Black Sunday” (1960)
Having had a career as a cinematographer already, Italian director and giallo pioneer Mario Bava finally got to make his solo directorial debut with “Black Sunday.” Starring scream queen Barbara Steele (best overbite in the business) as a witch put to death only to be resurrected 200 years later as a vampire, the result is campy and gleeful, rather than terrifying, but earns its place here through the expressive gorgeousness of the lensing, and the affectionate way it appropriates and revitalizes classic-era Universal horror filmmaking. Its inclusion is a little tenuous as, like many Italian films of the period (like “Suspiria” below) it was comprehensively post-dubbed in both English and Italian versions, and the English-language version is easier to find these days, but the sensibility is all Bava. Its flair and atmosphere went on to influence films from helmers like Francis Ford Coppola and Tim Burton, while Martin Scorsese counts it as a favorite too. And while later Bava films like “Blood and Lace” and cult comic book classic “Danger: Diabolik” may be favorites with Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright, among others, it really feels like Bava’s first film was his best, a delicious heaving-breast blast from a more beautiful past.
14. “Nosferatu The Vampyre” (1979)
Considering that, well, he’s Werner Herzog, it’s surprising that the legendary filmmaker has only made one film that fits neatly in the horror genre pocket. Typically, Herzog didn’t shy away from grand ambitions, remaking, in 1979, F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” one of the earliest, and still best, examples of the genre, itself a copyright-baiting adaptation of Bram Stoker’s seminal “Dracula” (thanks to the rights expiring, the director is able to bring elements of the novel back in). It’s one of the most-adapted tales of all time, but Herzog finds fresh blood, as it were. It’s partly thanks to Herzog’s regular collaborator/tormentor Klaus Kinski, in their second film together. Not for Kinski is the suave aristocrat of Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee’s portrayals; here, the Count is a true monster, an inhuman creep. It’s not, it should be said, the scariest vampire movie you’ll ever see, with the director finding a very different pace, one that instills dread rather than fear, but there’s plenty of that dread to go around.
13. “Hausu” (1977)
A film so gloriously insane that it can only really be experienced in a packed late-night screening while on some form of suspect substance, “Hausu” or “House” doesn’t seem all that original in premise — six teenage girls go to stay at the house of one of their aunts, a house that proves out to have sinister elements to it. But Nobuhiko Obayashi’s demented horror film (inspired by, of all things, “Jaws”) is honestly like nothing else you’ve seen, a hallucinatory everything-but-the-kitchen-sink experience closer to a mixed-media art installation stitched together from old Hanna-Barbera cartoons than to traditional horror. You might argue that it’s not quite scary, to which we’d say 1) you’re clearly more ok with the idea of being eaten by a piano than we are and 2) Obayashi unstitches reality to such an extent that you end up if not actively terrified, than filled with a kind of existential dread by the end. Any way around, if you’ve never seen this, you really must.
12. “Ring” (1998)
Artful, well-acted and almost surreal in its imagery, Gore Verbinski’s “The Ring” is something like the gold standard of how to remake a foreign-language horror and do it justice. But Hideo Nakata’s original “Ring” (or “Ringu”) remains the high watermark as far as terrifying ghost girls crawling out of the TV go. The film’s premise was undeniable: a journalist (Nanako Matsushima) investigates the deaths of a group of teenagers who died on the same night, who all watched the same videotape full of bizarre images. From structuring the story as a mystery to the gut-punch moral quandary of an ending, Nakata executes the film in an incredibly smart way, and brings the traditional ghost story firmly into the modern day by melding folklore and technology. It birthed a million J-horror imitators (and ten sequels and remakes of various kinds), but the original is still patently the best.
11. “A Tale Of Two Sisters” (2003)
His most recent film, the blisteringly good spy caper “Age of Shadows” sees Kim Jee-woon at the very peak of his considerable powers, but “A Tale Of Two Sisters,” his most definitive horror offering, is not too far behind. Riffing on a famous Korean folk story it centers on a pair of sisters, Su-mi (Im Soo-jung) and Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young) who become suspicious of their new stepmother (Yeom Jeong-ah), when Su-mi begins suffering from terrifying visions. From there, things get complicated: this isn’t a simple murder mystery or ghost tale but a first-rate Kubrick-remakes-”Haesu” mindfuck that lingers in the mind and down your spine, not so much for what you can see (though there are some horrifying sights), but for what’s just on the other side of frame. This is slow, artful and legitimately unnerving horror, and the de rigueur tepid U.S. remake “The Uninvited” only serves to make you admire Kim Jee-woon’s brilliance even more.