Perhaps more than any other genre, horror inspires extraordinary passion among cinema-goers. It was the first to bounce back commercially after the Covid closures, with releases like M3GAN , Smile and the fifth Scream film all pulling crowds in the UK and elsewhere. Yet it’s also seen by many cinephiles as a leprous adjunct to cinema proper: even some professional reviewers can’t or won’t cover it, so much do they detest its effect on their bodies and brains.
As for your critic, only one horror film has ever terrorised me so completely that I didn’t sleep at all the night after watching it. It’s at number 37 on the top 50 below, which is an attempt to sort 125 years of the form (Georges Méliès’s The House of the Devil, released in 1896, is generally agreed to be its starting point) into an objective order of (de)merit. Along the way, some terrific edge cases had to be excluded, including Ridley Scott’s Alien, which contains enough sci-fi to feel like it doesn’t quite belong here, and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill , which is more of a psychological thriller with slashings, even though it owes an enormous debt – spoiler alert – to one of our top three.
The final list is deeply partial – but, I hope, also a fair overview of a genre which, even in another 50 years’ time, will surely still be causing as much distress and delight as it always has. 50. The Witches (1990) Horror for kids! There isn’t enough of it around, though Nicolas Roeg ’s imm.
