Horror films of the 2000s

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Dumplings

An ageing actress buys rejuvenating dumplings from a woman in a housing estate. You know what is in them.

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Lake Mungo

Barely a horror film for an hour. Then there is a shot on a mobile phone people do not forget.

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Marebito

Takashi Shimizu, between Grudge films, shot this in eight days about a cameraman who brings something home from the underworld.

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Noroi: The Curse

A documentary film-maker investigates a demon called Kagutaba and does not come back.

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Pontypool

The infection is carried by the English language, and the whole film happens in a radio booth.

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The House of the Devil

Ti West made a 1983 film in 2009, on 16mm, and the first hour is a girl walking around a house alone.

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Trouble Every Day

Claire Denis made a vampire film with no vampires, and it was booed at Cannes.

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Uzumaki

A town becomes obsessed with spirals. Junji Ito adapted before his manga had finished.

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Sleepless

Argento's late return to the giallo, with Max von Sydow as a retired detective and a genuine nursery-rhyme killer.

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The Loved Ones

An Australian teenager says no to a girl for the school dance, and she holds her own dance instead.

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Session 9

Shot in a real abandoned asylum, and the building does most of the work.

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Frontier(s)

New French Extremity meets Texas Chain Saw, against the backdrop of a real French election.

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Save the Green Planet!

A man convinced aliens are infiltrating Earth kidnaps a CEO to torture the truth out of him. Nothing prepares you for where it goes.

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Shutter

A photographer starts finding a figure in his negatives. The reveal about the neck pain is the best in Asian horror.

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Them

A French couple terrorised in a house at night, 77 minutes, and it claims to be true.

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Kairo

The best J-horror film and the least seen. About loneliness and the internet, and genuinely despairing.

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May

A lonely young woman decides that if she cannot find a whole person to love, she will assemble one.

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Ju-On: The Grudge

No plot to speak of, structured as loops. Either its weakness or the reason it works.

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Suicide Club

Fifty-four schoolgirls hold hands and step in front of a train in the first three minutes.

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Dark Water

Nakata again, and the saddest of the cycle. A custody battle with a damp patch on the ceiling.

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Inside

The most extreme film on this site. A pregnant woman, her house, and a woman with scissors.

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The Chaser

A former detective running an escort agency works out that his missing women all went to the same client.

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Dagon

Stuart Gordon adapting The Shadow over Innsmouth, relocated to a rotting Spanish fishing town.

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Ichi the Killer

Miike at his most gleefully unpleasant, and the sickbag handed out at Toronto was a marketing stunt that worked.

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Open Water

Real sharks, no cages, 130,000 dollars. The horror is arithmetic: how long does a person float?

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The Ruins

Tourists, a Mayan pyramid and a plant with intent. Nastier than its reputation.

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A Tale of Two Sisters

The highest-grossing Korean horror film ever, and it is really a family drama with a haunting in it.

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REC 2

The sequel picks up minutes after the first, sends a SWAT team into the sealed building, and reframes the whole outbreak.

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Thirst

A priest volunteers for a vaccine trial, dies, and comes back needing blood. Park Chan-wook adapting Zola.

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Triangle

A yacht, a storm, an ocean liner, and a loop that keeps folding back on a single mother.

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Trick 'r Treat

Four interlocking Halloween stories and the best anthology since Creepshow. Warner shelved it for two years.

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Bug

William Friedkin directing a two-hander in a motel room about shared delusion, and it is not what the trailer sold.

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Ginger Snaps

The puberty metaphor made completely explicit, very funny, and unusually well acted.

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High Tension

The film that named New French Extremity in the popular imagination, and its ending is still being argued about.

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The Devil's Rejects

Rob Zombie's second film, and it turns the killers from his first into the protagonists, which should not work.

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Wolf Creek

Three backpackers in the Australian outback. The first hour is a holiday film and it is not padding.

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Dead Snow

Nazi zombies in the Norwegian mountains, and it knows exactly how silly it is.

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The Devil's Backbone

Del Toro's other Spanish Civil War film, and he has called it the companion to Pan's Labyrinth.

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Dog Soldiers

A squad on exercise in the Highlands versus werewolves, and it is closer to a war film than to horror.

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Martyrs

Two films stapled together, and it takes its argument about suffering completely seriously.

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Let the Right One In

The horror is the grooming of a lonely child by something very old, and the film is clear about it.

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REC

A Barcelona apartment block, a news crew, and eighty minutes with no let-up.

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The Host

Opens with a real incident: formaldehyde poured into the Han river in 2000. Funny, which nothing else here manages.

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The Orphanage

Produced by del Toro, and it is a film about a mother rather than a house.

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The Descent

Six women, an uncharted cave, and a group dynamic already poisoned before anything goes wrong.

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The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Structured as a courtroom drama, which is a smarter frame than the subgenre usually gets.

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1408

John Cusack alone in a hotel room for most of the running time, and it is the best single-location King film.

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Irréversible

Runs backwards and uses infrasound to make you physically unwell. About 200 walked out at Cannes.

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The Mist

Frank Darabont's third King adaptation, and the ending he changed is one of the cruellest in cinema.

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Wrong Turn

Competent, well shot, and exactly what it says. Stan Winston did the mutants.

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Battle Royale

A class of Japanese schoolchildren are dropped on an island and made to kill each other. Kinji Fukasaku's last major film.

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Cloverfield

A monster attacks New York, filmed on a camcorder from street level, and the marketing invented a genre of mystery.

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Paranormal Activity

15,000 dollars into 193 million, and a decade of imitators nobody asked for.

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The Others

A twist that survives a second viewing, which is rarer than it sounds.

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28 Days Later

Shot on DV, made them fast, and restarted the whole genre for fifteen years.

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Oldboy

A man is imprisoned in a room for fifteen years with no explanation, released, and given five days to find out why.

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Saw

Two men chained in a bathroom, made for 1.2 million dollars in eighteen days, and it is far better than its franchise.