The 25 Best Horror Movies of the 21st Century, Ranked

Luca Guadagnino’s sumptuous horror romance, adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis, is a love story bathed in the pools of blood spilled during the cannibal protagonists’ feeding times. The Italian director also bathes the movie in unexpected sweetness, poetry, lush sensuality and emotional depth. Evincing simmering chemistry, Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet play the protein-diet drifters on a cross-country road trip, feasting whenever they can, “bones and all,” on human flesh. Separating and reuniting, they find a home in each other and attempt to live a normal life, until the past — in the maximum-eccentricity form of Mark Rylance — catches up with them in a shattering final act. Guadagnino cites Terrence Malick’s Badlands as an influence, but this oddly tender trail of death evokes a whole panoply of American outsider tales.

Australian twins Danny and Michael Philippou vaulted from viral YouTube videos to features with this possession spook show, a violent cautionary tale warning us not to mess with the spirit world. A group of Adelaide teens who never met a frightening moment unsuitable for social media sharing somehow get a hold of what’s allegedly a severed forearm encased in ceramic. By clutching the hand and saying the three words of the title, they invite the dead to occupy their bodies. But there’s a strict 90-second limit before the presence puts down roots. In a knockout big-screen debut, Sophie Wilde plays Mia, whose mother’s apparent suicide makes her especially receptive to spiritual exploration. But a crisis explodes when Mia’s surrogate little brother stays too long at the party. The talented Philippous handily sidestepped the sophomore jinx with this year’s Bring Her Back.

As co-writer, director and co-star alongside his wife Emily Blunt, John Krasinski revealed a flair for first-rate genre filmmaking with this modestly budgeted alien-invasion chiller that became a sizable worldwide hit. With solid support from Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe, the suspenseful film tracks a family’s survival ordeal in a post-apocalyptic America overrun with spindly, blind extraterrestrials whose acute sense of hearing allows them to pinpoint their doomed targets in seconds. Early on, Krasinski folds in shattering tragedy that many films might have saved for the climax. Instead, here it raises a pulse rate that seldom slows down. The sequel, A Quiet Place: Part II, and prequel, A Quiet Place: Day One, are not half bad either.

Babak Anvari made a splash at Sundance with this spellbinding story of supernatural siege, inspired by the British Iranian director’s Tehran childhood. Set in 1988 as post-revolutionary conflict rages on, the movie plays like one of Asghar Farhadi’s intense domestic dramas deftly crossed with paranormal horror in the vein of Poltergeist or The Babadook. The cultural specificity of its political turmoil and the feminist view of a society that oppresses women turn up the alarm of a former leftist radical (played with fierce grit by Narges Rashidi) trying to save herself and her young daughter from a seemingly inescapable war and an infestation of djinn — Middle Eastern spirits carried by the wind — bent on dividing or destroying them. The most haunting image of this white-knuckle watch is a faceless figure in a whirling chador that threatens to engulf the mother.

British horror has yielded a strong crop in the past quarter-century, including Saint Maud, Romola Garai’s Argento-esque Amulet, Peter Strickland’s beguilingly weird Berberian Sound Studio and Joe Cornish’s Spielbergian sci-fi monster comedy, Attack the Block. One of the best is Remi Weekes’ debut, a highly original marriage of haunted house terror with harrowing social realism. The film depicts the refugee experience as its own kind of horror — fleeing the violent massacres of a war-torn country; making a perilous crossing in an overcrowded boat; surviving, albeit with sacrifices and guilt; and then facing the endless bureaucratic red tape that asylum seekers are required to navigate, along with the myriad anxieties of cultural displacement. Wunmi Mosaku (a standout in Sinners) and Sope Dirisu bring agonizing depth of feeling to their roles as South Sudanese refugees. Their adjustment to life in England goes from difficult to hellish when they discover that their dilapidated government-assigned housing is inhabited by an “apeth,” a night witch that has followed them from East Africa to claim retribution for their sins.

Macabre humor and gross-out gore often go hand in hand with Sam Raimi, but the lurid jolt of hag horror in this return to the dark side after six years on Spider-Man duty makes it one of the most madly entertaining entries in the influential director’s canon. Alison Lohman plays Christine, a loan officer angling for a promotion, who needs to convince her boss she’s no soft touch. But when she refuses to extend Sylvia Ganush’s mortgage, even after the elderly European Roma woman begs not to have her house repossessed, Christine finds herself saddled with a curse — a “lamia,” to be precise — promising three days of demonic torment before she’s dragged to you know where. The epic tussle in the parking lot between Christine and Sylvia (played with ferocious cruelty by a stage veteran with the fantastic name of Lorna Raver) is one for the ages. A black-hearted delight.

Sex in the slasher glory days of the 1970s and ‘80s was usually an invitation to evil, which gave us the trope of the virginal holdout as the “Final Girl.” In David Robert Mitchell’s bone-chilling lo-fi fright feast, sex is the means of transference for a dark force bringing certain death to whomever is last on the copulation conquest list. The only escape is by sleeping with someone else and letting them fend off the lethal entity, which can take on any form, including that of friends and family. Maika Monroe stars as the young Detroit suburbanite with a target on her back, who enlists her friends to help thwart the possibly supernatural assailant. Mitchell cited George A. Romero, John Carpenter and still photographer Gregory Crewdson as influences on the taut, almost unbearably tense film’s seductive visual compositions, full of virtuosic pans and voyeuristic tracking sequences. It’s a surreal fusion of 1950s horror with dreamy adolescent limbo.

It takes a supremely assured director and an equally accomplished screenwriter to start with one basic core idea and build it into a contemporary haunted house movie as gripping and scary as this low-budget quickie from Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp. That central spark is the choice to shoot the entire single-location film in first-person perspective, with the camera standing in for the unseen entity of the title. In a sense that also makes us the ghost that gives a chilly welcome to the home’s new owners, gradually slamming the family with the full force of its diabolical intent. It’s a dazzling exercise in sustained tension and steadily mounting dread, with a terrific ensemble led by Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan.

While 1999’s The Mummy, with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, is a lot of fun and has plenty of passionate fans, my pick for best of Universal’s classic monster remakes is Leigh Whannell’s spine-tingling reimagining of H.G. Wells’ novel about an unseen aggressor, previously the source for horror titan James Whale’s 1933 film. Along with casting Elisabeth Moss, Whannell’s best idea was firmly anchoring his modern version in the #MeToo age, focusing not on the title character, a mad tech scientist who fakes his own death after cracking the invisibility code, but on the girlfriend traumatized by his abusive behavior. Not since Peggy Olson has Moss been so enthrallingly subsumed by a role as she is playing Cecilia Kass, increasingly freaked by her ex’s stalking and gaslighting until she turns vengeful.

After getting the Rocky franchise off life support with Creed and showing that a Marvel movie could have seriousness and soul with Black Panther, Ryan Coogler delivered his first entirely original blockbuster — not based on real-life events or existing IP — with this genre-crossing panorama of the Jim Crow South. It stars a magnetic Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers known as Smoke and Stack, Chicago gangland veterans returning to the Mississippi Delta to open a juke joint. But beyond that compelling narrative spine, the movie is a soaring ode to the spiritual and supernatural power of the blues, an allegory about the elusiveness of freedom and an orgy of vampire violence. The time and care spent on character and milieu make the explosive carnage pop in a pulse-racing thriller with a lot on its mind.

Brit director Rose Glass’ crackling debut tests the boundaries between faith and insanity via a palliative care nurse who becomes a Christian convert and assumes the godly name of the title after the shock of losing a patient at her former hospital job. Welsh actress Morfydd Clark plays the tightly wound Maud as a zealous self-appointed savior, obsessed with rescuing the darkened soul of her private patient Amanda, who is slowly succumbing to cancer. Played by a never-better Jennifer Ehle with a cymbal clash of withering hauteur and fearful neediness, the once-celebrated dancer seems an unlikely candidate for absolution — she’s an unapologetic hedonist, a non-believer and a fiend for sins of the flesh, indulging during regular visits from her girlfriend. The enthralling interplay between the principal characters steers them toward mutual destruction as Glass orchestrates a crescendo in which demonic visions and splinters of the supernatural collide with religious ecstasy.

There have been countless screen riffs on The Turn of the Screw, and while Alejandro Amenábar’s supernatural psychodrama is inspired by, rather than adapted from, Henry James’ 1898 gothic horror novella, it’s probably the most effective retelling since Jack Clayton’s The Innocents in 1961. Switching the protagonist from a governess to the World War II-era mother of two photosensitive children, the movie gives Nicole Kidman one of her finest roles, her porcelain beauty and emotional fragility lending a tragic grandeur to the character’s isolation, breakdown and collapse into perceived madness. Conjuring a dreamy atmosphere out of the hushed, candlelit manor, the Chilean-Spanish director honors the classic ghost story while deepening its trauma with suffocating repression.

The title is a clear indication of Robert Eggers’ reverence for F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent masterwork. This ravishingly beautiful, devilishly repellent take on Bram Stoker’s immortal vampire tale travels the same tar-black depths, but casts its own unique spell. Bill Skarsgard plays the lugubrious Count Orlok with Lily-Rose Depp as the young woman who becomes his “affliction,” her seeming purity masking a raw sexuality and innate darkness that bind them together with a heady erotic charge. A fever dream of a movie steeped in disturbing poetry and intoxicating imagery, it’s a triumph of design, atmosphere and malevolent intent, with a superlative cast also featuring Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

“Once upon a time there was a girl, and the girl had a shadow.” Those words, spoken in a half-strangulated rasp by Lupita Nyong’o in Jordan Peele’s superbly acted cryptic creep show, can still spark shudders years later. The Wilson family’s beach vacation is interrupted one night when Adelaide (Nyong’o), her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two kids are startled to see four doppelgängers silhouetted in their driveway. Those uncanny twins — sadistic, animalistic, feral versions of the Wilsons wearing red jump suits — are known as “the Tethered,” shadows connected to their counterparts, set on untethering themselves by the bloodiest means possible. I confess I cackled at the double of Elisabeth Moss’ Kitty clumsily applying lipstick with a maniacal smile, but mostly I cowered. A deeply distressing reflection on the enemy within us that mercilessly skewers the “Kumbayah” spirit of “Hands Across America.”

In his astonishingly confident debut, Robert Eggers’ binding grasp of horror, folklore, history and mythology elevates an unsettling tale of a Puritan family in 1630s New England, expelled from their community over a religious dispute. They build a farm in the nearby woods, where an evil force attaches itself to them — grim news for the outcasts, starting with their infant son. The focus gradually settles on spirited teenager Thomasin, played by Anya Taylor-Joy in a revelatory breakthrough, her unholy alliance with a talking goat named Black Phillip bringing this slow-burn folk horror to its shivery conclusion. Eggers’ attention to authenticity and detail in the language, lore and design of the film has become a hallmark of his work across four idiosyncratic period pieces to date.

Ari Aster burst onto the scene as an exciting new horror craftsman with this ingenious domestic shocker about a family hammered by sinister events after the death of their secretive grandmother. Having contributed an indelible portrait of a sensitive but spiky mother in one of the ’90s’ most iconic horror hits, The Sixth Sense, Toni Collette reaches almost operatic heights of hysteria as another spooked mom, Annie, notably in a spectacularly angry meltdown with her traumatized teenage son, played by Alex Wolff. The entire ensemble, which also includes Gabriel Byrne, Milly Shapiro and Ann Dowd, is exceptional. Making Annie a mixed-media miniature artist specializing in architectural models allows Aster to frame the entire story as if in a dollhouse, depicting the home not as a refuge but a point of entry for a malevolent coven. Thanks a lot, Grandma.

Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren’s logbook partly inspired 1979’s The Amityville Horror, memorable solely for its fabulous tagline: “For God’s sake, get out!” While a 2005 remake made marginal improvements, the trillion sequels and spinoffs did not. But James Wan’s petrifying, franchise-launching supernatural freakout ushered in the Warrens as central characters, played with an optimal balance of grave seriousness and warmth by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. The intelligence, conviction and mounting heebie-jeebies with which the married couple approach their work anchors the movie as the Warrens in 1971 battle to save a Rhode Island family whose house stands on land cursed by the Satanist witch who died there. Old-fashioned in the best possible sense of favoring practical over digital effects, it locks the viewer in a stranglehold of fear. My blood froze as the Warrens attempted to communicate with the mother possessed by the dark entity (Lili Taylor in spectacular form), and she wheeled around snarling, “She’s already gone.”

Guillermo del Toro proved himself a gifted fabulist with The Devil’s Backbone, weaving a ghost story into a political allegory set at the end of the Spanish Civil War. This tenebrous fairy tale unfolds soon after, in the early days of the Franco regime. It parallels the ruthless efforts of a sadistic Civil Guard officer to eradicate rebel freedom fighters with the fantastical wanderings of his 10-year-old stepdaughter through an ancient stone labyrinth. Among the magical beings there, she meets a faun. Believing her to be the reincarnation of an underworld princess, the creature assigns her three tasks to complete in order to acquire immortality and return to her kingdom. A work of unbridled imagination and breathtaking beauty.

The zombies are fast on their feet in Yeon Sang-Ho’s unrelenting adrenaline rush of an action thriller about flesh-eater mayhem on a high-speed inter-city train from Seoul. That claustrophobic setting, along with the gratifying amount of time and attention allotted to character establishment, gives the thrill ride an entertaining kinship with ‘70s disaster movies. Among the passengers is a workaholic finance manager trying to repair the broken bond with his daughter, a blue-collar couple expecting a child, a snaky COO, a high school baseball team and a homeless stowaway. Yeon fosters genuine investment even in the stock characters and their ordeal as they band together — or look out for themselves — in the fight to survive.

George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was an undisputed game-changer. But that film’s shambling undead, shuffling along with a stiffness that indicates rigor mortis well underway, seem almost harmless next to the lethal zombie sprinters of director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland’s low-budget post-apocalyptic smash. Cillian Murphy stars as a bicycle courier in a coma after a traffic accident, who awakens to find society collapsed and the streets of London deserted — in what now seems an eerie premonition of the Brit capital under pandemic lockdown. All because an obstinate animal rights activist released a rabid monkey from a cage in Cambridge, unleashing a highly contagious “rage virus.” I’ll confess I watched half this film through the cracks between my fingers.

Long before his international sensation Parasite bagged Oscars for best picture, director and original screenplay in 2020, Korean maestro Bong Joon Ho cooked up this riveting monster movie inspired by a real-life incident in which an American civilian under contract to the U.S. military ordered the illegal dumping of toxic waste into the Han River near Seoul. The great Song Kang-ho stars in a wicked blend of environmental and political satire with big creature-feature scares, drawing on the marauding Godzilla tradition while imprinting it with Bong’s signature affection for goofy humor and a touching family dynamic. The sequence in which the giant mutant tadpole emerges from the water to spread panic along the riverbanks is an all-timer.

Jennifer Kent’s nerve-rattling debut finds psychological complexity and visceral fear in a child’s imagination — fueled by a gothic picture book right out of Edward Gorey — and in the 6-year-old boy’s fraught relationship with his depressed mother, a widow played in a wrenching whirl of despair, rage and helplessness by Essie Davis. The Australian director artfully blurs fantasy and reality in a story that’s as much about grief and the dread of parental failure as it is about the malevolent, black-hatted, steampunk-styled entity that emerges from the clothbound pages of that creepy kid-lit volume. It’s a gruesome assault on the senses with a hand-tooled aesthetic that evokes pre-digital horror stretching back to the German Expressionists.

The desaturated colors, the setting in Stockholm’s snow-blanketed suburbs and the bulky Scandinavian winter-wear make Tomas Alfredson’s transfixing thriller look at first glance like dour Nordic arthouse drama. But this emotionally penetrating adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel (which has since birthed an enjoyable U.S. remake, a stage version and a Showtime series) is one of the most distinctive and delicately textured vampire movies in decades. A bullied 12-year-old boy finds companionship when a pale, mysterious girl who appears to be around his age moves in next door. While never edging away from pre-sexual innocence, their friendship evolves into love, even as gruesomely murdered bodies mount up and she is revealed to be an ancient vampire with an insatiable bloodlust. Light years away from the surging teen hormones of Twilight, this mortal-undead romance is equal parts melancholy, tender and bracingly scary.

Jordan Peele’s sketch-comedy background provided an unorthodox but strangely apposite springboard to his fiendishly clever first feature, with its provocative reflections on racial divisions, loss of identity and Black bodies treated as commodities by the white privileged class. The writer-director uses horror tropes to address needling questions that hung in the air at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency and have been steadily amplified in the years since. Daniel Kaluuya stars as a photographer meeting the parents of his white girlfriend (Alison Williams), thrust into a nightmarish reality in which the aggressively welcoming, seemingly ultra-liberal WASPs — played to insidious perfection by Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener — have other plans for him. Both terrifying and hilarious, it’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers with well-heeled upstate New Yorkers as the predators.

With a slender output of just four features over 25 years, Brit director Jonathan Glazer has established himself as an exacting craftsman across different genres. It’s no surprise that he would make the most original and enigmatic horror movie of the new century — also among the most polarizing — with this experiential adaptation of the Michel Faber novel. Scarlett Johansson is in quiet command as an extraterrestrial female in Scotland, preying on lone men whom she lures into an inky abyss, until the discovery of human empathy scrambles her instincts. The scene in which the alien seduces and then spares the life of a facially disfigured man played by Adam Pearson is as affecting as it is disturbing. Few films deliver more hypnotically on the promise of their title.