It is officially October. Spooky season. There are a lot of elements to the season of Halloween, but one essential part of Halloween is of course, horror movies. Me and horror movies have a complicated relationship. It feels like for every good horror movie I watch, I watch three mediocre or bad ones. So many horror movies these days feel like they aren’t treated like real movies and are just low effort slop that studios pump out because they know almost no matter what, a horror movie will do pretty well in theaters financially . There’s a reason why almost every horror movie that comes out now seems to be very close to an hour and a half, the shortest a feature lengthened movie can be. A good sign for a horror movie is when it is around two hours long, because it shows that the studio treated the movie as a real movie and the director actually had passion and creativity. Not to say that no short horror movies are good, just that is a quality of many rushed horror films. However, good horror, tense, fierce, unnerving horror, is one of the things that excites me most when it comes to cinema. Every time I watch a horror movie, I am chasing the high that my favorite horror movies have given me, and I am usually disappointed. But that incredible horror that comes out here and there definitely deserves to be celebrated, so here are my top 5 horror movies of all time.
Quickly, two horror movies that I didn’t include that are definitely honorable mentions are Creep 2, a cringe comedy found footage horror movie that is very well acted and much better than its already pretty great predecessor, and The Faculty, a campy fun 90s horror film that has some surprisingly tense and heartfelt moments that really impressed me.
#5. X (2022)
Directed by Ti West, X is a slasher horror film that follows a group of actors and filmmakers making a film in a small, religious town that is unfamiliar to them. This film started a trilogy, as it was followed up by the wonderful thriller film 2022’s Pearl and one of the most disappointing films of the year so far, 2024’s MaXXXine. X though is a wildly entertaining and charming slasher. The characters have so much chemistry with each other and there are some really endearing and memorable lines throughout. There is some incredibly impressive makeup in this film, as Mia Goth plays both a young actress and an elderly woman, and the makeup used to age her up just looks so real. All of the performances in this film are pretty great (Jenna Ortega is in this film and she kills it), but the standout is definitely Mia Goth, who is wonderful as both the protagonist Maxine, who is one of the most likable and charming scream queens of all time in my opinion, and the villain Pearl, a very interesting and well written antagonist. Goth gives one of the best horror performances I have ever seen. The film culminates in a satisfying and exhilarating finale and I would call X a modern horror classic.
#4. The Substance (2024)
I had a hard time deciding if I was gonna put this above or below X, but I have decided that Coralie Fargeat’s body horror film The Substance, is my number four. It follows Elizabeth Sparkle, a sixty year old actress and television personality, who when fired because of her older age from the exercise show she currently hosts, takes an experimental black market drug that creates a younger version of herself. The film focuses on body image issues and female beauty standards, but it doesn’t really engage with those concepts seriously in favor of being a fun, gross time, which came off a little bit distasteful to me, as it somewhat felt like it was trivializing these issues at times, but that’s a conversation for another day. When I said this film was a body horror film, I meant it. This movie goes all in with disgusting imagery and insanely impressive and gross practical makeup that makes the film oh so disturbing and oh so morbidly enjoyable. I had just such a fun time with this film. It has really great performances from Margaret Qualley, Demi Moore, and Dennis Quaid. The final shot was brilliant. This is a movie that is genuinely insane, and if you have a weak stomach or are sensitive to this kind of body horror thing, I would highly recommend steering clear of this film, but if this movie sounds like your type of thing, I highly recommend The Substance. I think you will have a blast with it.
#3. Evil Dead (1981)
Directed by Sam Raimi (in his directorial debut, Jesus Christ), Evil Dead is a demonic horror film that went on to start a franchise of not nearly as good movies as the first one. Evil Dead is an unrelenting film that follows a man named Ash and his friends who find a mysterious book in a remote cabin they are staying in that releases a demonic force onto them. Most of the runtime is dedicated to torturing Ash and messing with his head, which is really upsetting, but also weirdly satisfying to the audience. The ways in which the director messes with Ash are just so clever and well executed, that it becomes really fun to watch. There is a scene involving a mirror that really blew me away. The practical effects were the star of the show a lot of the time for me. The effects were very impressive and also very unique in a way that was really enjoyable. Like the gore is filled to the brim with personality, which is something I don’t think I have ever really seen before. It’s a kind of film that I feel like we don’t get nowadays, where it is kinda dumb and silly at times, but it is so confident that these dumb and silly things are cool and scary that it makes you just go along with it. A really inventive, unique horror film! There is a reason it’s a classic.
#2. Funny Games (1997)
Micheal Haneke’s Funny Games is an Austrian satirical home invasion horror film about a family of three who’s vacation home is broken into by two strangers, who then proceed to torture the family with different “games”. Something that is very important to note about these two strangers is that they are very goofy and make jokes all the time, and the actors perform the characters like they are in a pure comedy, while the actors of the family give some of the most intense and authentic portrayals of misery that I have ever seen. It’s like you’re watching two different movies. This movie is hilarious and very upsetting at the same time, and that’s what makes it fascinating. This film is a horror satire, and it has a lot to say about the nature of people’s fascination towards horror movies and violence, and conveys these ideas brilliantly. The ending is genius and uses the medium of film in order to criticize other horror movies in an incredibly creative way that really blew me away on first viewing. It is a very well directed film too. There is an intense and long one shot take that is perfectly executed. I fully believe that Funny Games is not only one of the best horror movies of all time, but also one of the best movies of all time.
#1. Scream (1996)
Wes Craven’s comedy slasher murder mystery horror classic Scream is honestly in contention for the best movie of all time in my opinion, and I think it’s so bizarre that it is not treated that way by modern film critics and film fans. It is a perfect movie from start to finish. It kicks off with one of the most intense, captivating, well acted (Drew Barrymore is insanely good in this), and well shot movie intros I have ever seen. It then takes a turn into a hilarious absurdist comedy, with memorable and witty dialogue from the screenwriter Kevin Williamson. The acting continues to be as good as it was in the intro, with the entire ensemble being consistently hilarious. Neve Campbell, Rose McGowan, Henry Winkler, and Matthew Lillard all shine, but Skeet Ulrich is the standout to me, delivering both one of my favorite horror performances of all time and one of my favorite comedic performances of all time. Every line delivery by Ulrich is just so perfect, portraying the weirdness of his character very well. Scream isn’t only funny though, it is also very tense when it tries to be. The horror scenes are very well done, mainly because of Wes Craven’s brilliant direction, probably the best I have ever seen in a horror film. This movie is also a masterful whodunnit. The reason it works so well as murder mystery is that the characters are so likable that you begin to feel dread at the idea of any of them being killed off. The cherry on top is the commentary that this film makes on other horror movies, making fun of the tropes of horror films at the time in such clever ways, which completely culminates in this film’s delightful and satisfying ending. Wow, the top two movies on this list are both horror satires. Interesting. Scream is one of those movies that was exhilarating to watch, because the sheer excitement it gave me at seeing a horror film executed that well, with that much love and care put into it. A true horror comedy masterpiece.
You probably noticed something about this list, and that is that the top three on this list are from before the 21st Century, and yeah, I think horror movies are a lot worse now than they once were. Since horror is like the only genre of movies these days that are almost guaranteed to make their money back at the box office, studios just pump them out as fast as they can in order to make a quick buck. The genre has become so commercialized that the gems have become hard to find amongst all the garbage. So yeah, if you are interested in the horror genre, give some of the lesser known films I talked about in this article a try this Halloween season.
