30. “The Ring” (2002)
In the early ’00s, J-horror was big news and Hollywood was quick to catch on, with studios greenlighting remakes of everything that had been even mildly successful in Asia, but with CW-friendly casts. For the most part, the results of movies like “Pulse,” and “The Grudge” were disastrous, but the first of the batch, “The Ring,” is excellent against the odds. Directed by a pre-”Pirates of the Caribbean” Gore Verbinski, the film follows roughly the same plot as the original, with a journalist and single mother (Naomi Watts) discovering that her niece has died a mysterious death, her body frozen in a position of horror. Digging into the case, she finds that the death may have been linked to the urban legend of a mysterious videotape that causes the death of anyone who watches it after seven days. It’s probably not superior to the 1998 original as such, but Verbinski retains much of what worked about Hideo Nakata’s film and beautifully amps up the atmosphere with an almost painterly feel to the photography by Bojan Bazelli and a halting, jolting score by Hans Zimmer. And though the shock of the film’s ending was probably lessened for those who’d seen the original, those coming to the remake fresh almost certainly never forgot it.
29. “You’re Next” (2011)
If the names Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett aren’t familiar, then you should bookmark their IMDB pages. On the strength of this clever, funny, subversive home invasion movie, “The Guest” and even the pair’s decent “Blair Witch” reboot, they’re two genre filmmakers whose careers you’ll want to follow. Their breakthrough film is a thrill ride, a reminder of when horror films were fun, and almost never disappoints. It stars a rogue’s gallery of former mumblecore elites and current/past indie mainstays —Joe Swanberg, Amy Seimetz, Ti West, AJ Bowan, Kate Lyn Sheil, Larry Fessenden— all upstaged by the film’s MVP Sharni Vinson, who takes what must have already been a great character on the page and infuses it with humor, bloodlust and urgency. We’ll leave it for you to discover what we’re getting at, because “You’re Next” works best when characters turn the tables and expectations are upended.
28. “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night”
Sure, it’s more sad than scary, and more swoony even than sad, but Ana Lily Amirpour‘s inky, dreamlike Iranian vampiress tale also feels like such a brilliantly inspired combination/hybridization of horror tropes that it earns the categorization. Shot in liquid black and white and scored to a throbbingly cool, gothic soundtrack, there is the sense that it’s something of a “hipster horror,” an idea heightened by the film’s ineffably loose-limbed, Jarmuschian Americana vibe, despite its setting in fictional Iranian metropolis Bad City. But though it has elements of art-school cool, there’s also sensitivity and texture in how Amirpour conveys her feeling for her characters (a hijab-wearing vampire, her lovelorn mortal boyfriend, his drug-addicted father and a prostitute) and also for the genre filmmaking she clearly loves. So the resulting movie is not just vampire horror and feminist commentary, but a doomed romance and even a genre western, all blended into a sweet, dark, licorice treat.
27. “It Follows” (2014)
Indie-horror sensation “It Follows,” directed by David Robert Mitchell (“Myth of the American Sleepover“) is many things. It’s a fairly on-the-nose metaphor for the dangers of promiscuity, a superb modern campfire tale, and a loose imagining of what would happen if the cast of “The Breakfast Club” banded together to fight a horrifying otherworldly evil. It is also scary as hell. Mitchell captures the action in a series of queasy long takes, a welcome reprieve from the quick-cutting assault that helped define the “torture porn” slate of films, so the viewer is waiting for something terrible to happen instead of being bludgeoned with it; it’s artful and eerie at the same time. The mythology that Mitchell sets up makes a whimsical kind of sense (hopefully, it will be left mercifully unexplored, should sequels be in the cards) and Maika Monroe is one of the most compelling female horror icons since Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween.”
26. “Berberian Sound Studio” (2012)
Influenced by both David Lynch and classic giallo horror, Peter Strickland’s “Berberian Sound Studio” stars the great Toby Jones as Gilderoy, a sound engineer who travels to Italy to work on a horror picture called “The Equestrian Vortex” (the film’s director takes exception at calling it a horror film: one imagines Strickland might say the same). Gilderoy begins his meticulous work, but finds himself rapidly unraveling. This is in part a horror film about the effect of horror films, and that we barely see anything of the film-within-the-film only lets your imagination play havoc with the unpleasant squelches and screams that are being created by the sonic wizard (and Jones is absolutely terrific in the part). Pure genre fans might come away disappointed with the lack of jump-scares or actual gore, but this is a truer kind of horror, one that reaches in and shakes your skeleton through your ears.
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25. “We Are What We Are” (2010)
It’s been a good century for Spanish language horror thus far, as we’ll see further down the list, but one film that never quite got the audience it deserved is Mexican director Jorge Michel Grau’s gripping, rich and beautifully made “We Are What We Are.” Selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, the film begins with a humble watchmaker dying on the street. The police discover that he had a human finger in his stomach (in a scene that sees Daniel Gimenez Cacho reprise his role from Guillermo Del Toro’s debut “Cronos”), while the man’s children are left to wonder who’ll provide for them now their father’s gone. And not just financially: the family eats humans in a strange ritual. Devilishly plotted and made with real flair by Grau (who surely should have had a bigger gig by now) and finding fresh meat, so to speak, in the well-worn cannibalism trope, it’s one of the best foreign language genre pictures in recent years. Of course, that made it inevitable that a U.S. remake would come along: the surprise was that Jim Mickle’s redo, released last year and also picked for Cannes, was so strong. Reversing most of the genders, changing up the setting and story considerably, it’s a distinctive and well-executed take, though not quite on the level of originality of its predecessor.
24. “Shaun Of The Dead” (2004)
In advance or from a distance, you could have mistaken “Shaun Of The Dead” for a parody —a director and cast known principally for comedy and its punning title surely bestowed that impression. But Edgar Wright’s second feature “Shaun Of The Dead” works because it’s an honest-to-god zombie movie that happens to be mostly comic, and does it ever work. Wright and star Simon Pegg’s screenplay about a slacker who sets out to save his ex-girlfriend (Kate Ashfield) from an undead apocalypse in London, with his weed-dealing best mate (Nick Frost) in tow, is watertight and packed with gags, but it always keeps a sense of reality and very real stakes: you might have expected some scares from the horror-comedy label, but you might not have expected to cry, which you may well do by the end. Wright’s been flirting with the idea of making a pure horror film for a while, and on this evidence, we really hope he does.
23. “The House Of The Devil” (2009)
In Ti West’s masterwork of delayed horror, “one thing leads to another,” just like the song says. The 1982 Fixx hit single makes an appearance in “House of the Devil,” but like the film itself, it’s far beyond dull, lazy ’80s nostalgia. Here we have the tip of the post-“Grindhouse” iceberg, a truly low-budget modern horror film that faithfully renders its 1980s period with precise accuracy. It would’ve been right at home third billed alongside “Death Proof” and “Planet Terror,” but West’s take feels truer in spirit and budget restrictions, aping its aesthetic from the past but also finding a fresh take on its many influences, achieving a horror film equivalent of the Lisa Simpson line: “You have to listen to the notes she’s not playing.” However, if the climax didn’t deliver, West’s “scary movie” with almost zero traditional scary movie moments would be all for naught. But oh boy, does it ever deliver at the end, making good on that evocative title and giving the audience what they crave, who by the time it arrives are starving for anything (barring one shocking moment of violence at the end of the first act) bad to happen to its lead character. ‘Devil’ is so good at sustaining tension through very little that it almost becomes a study of the what you-don’t-see-is-far-scarier philosophy, and also a total subversion of the “final girl” concept.
22. “Cabin in the Woods” (2012)
It looked for a while like “Cabin in the Woods” might not actually ever see the light of day, with the film spending literally years gathering dust in a drawer. When it finally did come out, it was like a bomb had been detonated within the horror genre. Both a loving homage and ruthless deconstruction of what makes scary movies so compelling, the film throws a group of hapless coeds into a rickety cabin and then shows you the behind-the-scenes forces rooting for their assured destruction (led by a couple of white collar dorks played by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford). Few films could pull of this tricky tonal balancing act, somewhere between celebratory and satirical, but director Drew Goddard and his co-writer Joss Whedon manage the feat. The filmmakers simultaneously wag their fingers at viewers and give them exactly what they want (particularly in the gore-soaked, monster-filled final act). If you’ve never seen “Cabin in the Woods,” do yourself a favor: it’s like an all-day horror movie marathon crammed into one movie (with additional sociopolitical commentary).
21. “The Mist” (2007)
Director Frank Darabont had tackled Stephen King twice before, with Oscar-nominated prison films “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” but “The Mist,” based on a beloved 1980 novella, had long been the filmmaker’s passion project. After attempts to mount a starry, big budget production proved fruitless, the writer/director assembled a rough-and-tumble crew and set about on a low budget, less-is-more rendition, which centers around a small New England town trapped by a mysterious, monster-filled mist. The resulting film is one of the finest King adaptations ever, with a heartbreaking ending that does the unthinkable —it actually improves upon the original story. While it’s not what he originally intended, Darabont’s down-and-dirty approach here serves the story well, giving it a feeling of gripping immediacy that might have been finessed out if it had wound up being a manicured studio production. Plus the cast, while hardly attention-grabbing, is uniformly excellent, particularly Marcia Gay Harden as a religious zealot that proves to be as bad as anything out in the mist.