The films

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Audition

Spends an hour as a gentle romantic comedy. That is not an accident.

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Beau Is Afraid

Ari Aster's three-hour anxiety odyssey, and it is horror only in the sense that being alive is.

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Black Christmas

Four years before Halloween and still the most frightening film in the category.

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Creature from the Black Lagoon

The last great Universal monster, and a suit design nobody has improved on in seventy years.

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Day of the Dead

The bleakest of Romero's trilogy, hated on release, and Tom Savini's best work.

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Heretic

Two missionaries, one house, and Hugh Grant enjoying himself enormously as the worst man alive.

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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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Longlegs

Marketed better than almost any horror film this decade. The first hour earns it, the last act is arguable.

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Peeping Tom

Ended Powell's career in Britain because it puts the audience behind the camera and knows it.

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Perfect Blue

Satoshi Kon's animated thriller about a pop idol losing herself, and Aronofsky bought the remake rights just to reuse a shot.

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Prince of Darkness

The second of Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy, and it is quantum physics as a book of the dead.

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Ready or Not

A bride versus her new in-laws and their family obligation. Very funny and mean.

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REC

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

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Repulsion

Polanski's first English film. A flat, a woman, and hands coming out of the walls.

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Videodrome

Predicted most of what people now say about the internet, using a Betamax slot in a man's stomach.

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X

A porn crew shoot on a Texas farm in 1979. Ti West doing the texture of the era properly.

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Barbarian

Go in knowing nothing. The structure is the point and every synopsis ruins it.

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Candyman

Philip Glass wrote the score believing it was an art film. That mistake is why it sounds like nothing else.

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Doctor Sleep

Reconciles King's novel with Kubrick's film, which should not have been possible.

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Eyes Without a Face

A surgeon steals faces for his disfigured daughter. Filmed with a tenderness that makes it far worse.

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Fright Night

A teenager works out his new neighbour is a vampire and no adult will believe him, so he hires a washed-up TV host.

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Gerald's Game

The King novel everyone said was unfilmable. One bed, two handcuffs, and a degloving.

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Suspiria

Not a remake so much as an argument with the original. Colder, longer, and about postwar German guilt.

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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 Platform

A vertical prison and a descending table of food. The metaphor is a brick and the film is effective anyway.

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Trap

Shyamalan's high-concept swing: a serial killer takes his daughter to a pop concert that is a police trap for him.

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Cocaine Bear

A black bear ingests a fortune in dropped cocaine and goes on a rampage. Loosely, very loosely, based on a true event.

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Companion

A weekend away with a reveal in the first act rather than the third, which is the smart choice.

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Dawn of the Dead

The best zombie film ever made, set in a shopping mall, and much funnier than people remember.

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Dead Ringers

Jeremy Irons plays twin gynaecologists who share everything, and Cronenberg's coldest, saddest film.

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Evil Dead Rise

Moves the cabin to a Los Angeles tower block. The cheese grater is the sequence people talk about.

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Horror of Dracula

Christopher Lee plays Dracula as a physical threat rather than a foreign gentleman, and it is over in 82 minutes.

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It Follows

One rule, followed exactly. The most frightening use of a wide shot in modern horror.

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The Dead Zone

Cronenberg's most restrained film, and Christopher Walken plays a man who can see how it ends.

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The Wolf Man

Most werewolf folklore you think is ancient was invented for this script in 1941.