The 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time

Alisa Goa for Variety

If cinema is like dreaming with our eyes open, then horror movies could rightly be viewed as waking nightmares: an opportunity to confront our unconscious fears directly — most often as entertainment, but sometimes with the express purpose of terrifying ourselves. On-screen frights take every form imaginable, from iconic boogeymen like Frankenstein and Freddy Krueger to real-world threats, be it psychosis, contagion or off-putting in-laws (“Get Out,” anyone?).

In compiling a list of the genre’s highest achievements, we considered it all, from highbrow to lo-fi, pure schlock to Hitchcock (whose “Psycho” topped our “Greatest Films” list, but not this one), reaching back to the advent of cinema. Well, maybe not quite the beginning. According to legend, 1895 audiences recoiled in fear when they saw the train pull into La Ciotat station in the Lumière brothers’ early actuality film. We don’t count that as horror, though it certainly demonstrated the medium’s capacity to startle people.

The question “What is horror?” echoed at the center of every discussion, with long hours spent arguing over where the boundaries lie for a genre that has launched many a career. How often has one of these waking nightmares upset you enough to resurface in your dreams? If we’ve done our job, you’ll want to join the debate.

Take practically any other horror movie from the 1960s, and a character like Catherine Deneuve’s Carol — absent-minded, blond, a foreign-born manicurist living alone in London — would be dead meat. In Roman Polanski’s second feature, however, she’s not a disposable victim, but the film’s subject and a point of uneasy identification: a woman persecuted by the big city who retreats into a squalid little apartment. But even that space doesn’t feel safe, as the walls crack, ooze and eventually reach out to grope her. The first jolt comes not quite an hour in, as Carol shuts the closet door and, for a split second, sees the shadow of a man reflected in its mirror. Later, she imagines someone assaulting her in bed. If these visions can’t be trusted, then what of the murders she commits? The slow unraveling of her mind set the template for so many hallucinatory imitators, from “The Babadook” to “Black Swan.” Great horror plays with our minds, which is often a scary enough place to be already.

Dario Argento’s garishly overripe bat-house thriller is an occult head trip whose pleasures are all on the surface. It’s schlock — the giallo film gone grade-Z psychedelic. The story is so threadbare it would have been sent back for a rewrite by Roger Corman, yet that’s part of the film’s aesthetic, because it allows “Suspiria” to be a movie that’s all style, all psychotic-Italian-horror-movie frosting: the sets that still dazzle with their Satan-gone-Liberace decor, the 14-note evil-music-box theme by Goblin that can play in your head for decades. Jessica Harper is the American ballet student who transfers to a German dance academy that turns out to be a front for a coven of witches. In its lurid way, the matriarchal premise was decades ahead of its time.

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