The films

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M3GAN

A robotics engineer builds an AI doll to parent her orphaned niece, and the doll takes the job seriously.

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Nope

Peele's best-looking film. About spectacle, and about what happens to the people who handle the animals.

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Smile

A curse that passes by witnessing. Cheap scares, but the mechanism is sound and the ending commits.

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The Fog

Carpenter's follow-up to Halloween: a Californian coastal town, a hundredth anniversary, and something owed.

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The Last House on the Left

Craven remaking Bergman on no money. To avoid fainting, keep repeating: it's only a movie.

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The Lost Boys

Joel Schumacher's MTV vampires in a California beach town, and it made the genre cool for a decade.

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Oculus

A haunted mirror, and a sister trying to prove it killed her parents by filming it destroying her too.

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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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The Lighthouse

Shot on black and white 35mm in a 1.19:1 box. Two men, a rock, and a great deal of drinking.

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The Witch

Most of the dialogue comes from court records, then it commits fully to the supernatural.

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Angel Heart

Mickey Rourke hunts a missing crooner for a client called Louis Cyphre, and the answer is the worst possible one.

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Bride of Frankenstein

The Universal cycle's best film. Whale is openly funny and openly on the monster's side.

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Hellraiser

Clive Barker adapting his own novella, and the Cenobites are on screen for about eight minutes.

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Hereditary

A film about grief that turns out to be a film about a cult. Toni Collette should have won everything.

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Sinister

The super-8 reels are the film. Everything between them is a man in an office not turning the lights on.

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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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Crimson Peak

Del Toro doing full gothic romance. The house is the best thing in it and it is sinking.

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Event Horizon

A haunted house film in space, hated on release, and the studio destroyed roughly thirty minutes of it.

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The best paranoia film ever made, and it works whichever politics you bring to it.

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Nosferatu

Eggers going back to Murnau rather than to Stoker. Filthy, plague-ridden, and Orlok has a moustache.

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The Invisible Man

Reworks Universal's monster into a film about being disbelieved. The empty corners of the frame do the work.

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Us

The premise does not survive scrutiny and the film is so well made you will not care until afterwards.

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Weapons

Seventeen children leave their houses at 2.17am. Cregger structures it as overlapping chapters and it pays off.

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28 Years Later

Boyle and Garland back together, shot largely on iPhones rigged in arrays. Stranger than the sequel anybody expected.

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Alien: Romulus

Fede Alvarez taking the franchise back to basics: young colonists, a derelict station, and one very bad idea.

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An American Werewolf in London

Rick Baker won the first ever Academy Award for makeup for a transformation that hurts to watch.

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Christine

Carpenter directing King's killer car in the same year he made almost nothing else work.

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Deliverance

Not marketed as horror and the founding text of an entire horror subgenre.

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Evil Dead II

Half remake, half sequel, and it turns the first film into slapstick without losing the nastiness.

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Midsommar

Runs the folk horror formula in constant daylight. Everyone is perfectly hospitable throughout.

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Poltergeist

A suburban family, a television, and a chair-stacking sequence that has never stopped being copied.

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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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The Omen

A film about a man realising his son is not his. Jerry Goldsmith won the Oscar and earned it.

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They Live

Carpenter's angriest film, disguised as a B-movie, about sunglasses that let you see the ads underneath everything.

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Wrong Turn

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

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Annihilation

No villain at all, only a process. The last twenty minutes are the closest film has come to Lovecraft.