The films

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Freaks

Tod Browning cast real sideshow performers, MGM cut a third of it, and it ended his career.

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In the Mouth of Madness

The third of Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy and the most explicitly Lovecraftian thing he made.

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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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Ringu

A cursed videotape and seven days. Reset the entire international horror market.

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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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Suspiria

Barely a plot and possibly the most beautiful horror film ever shot.

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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 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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The Wicker Man

A musical about a policeman with no sense of humour. The best British horror film ever made.

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Les Diaboliques

The film Hitchcock tried to buy and missed. Ends with a title card asking you not to spoil it.

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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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Titane

Won the Palme d'Or. A film about a woman, a car and a grieving fireman, and it is not a comedy.

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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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Don't Look Now

Grief, Venice, and an edit that keeps showing you the ending before you can read it.

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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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Irréversible

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

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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.