The films

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Opera

Argento's last great film, and the needles taped under the eyes are the image of his career.

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The Burning

The best film on the prosecuted list. Savini's raft scene is why it was on it.

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Pearl

Technicolor melodrama with a pitchfork. Mia Goth's final monologue is a single unbroken take.

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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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A Bay of Blood

The hinge between giallo and slasher. Friday the 13th Part 2 lifts two murders almost shot for shot.

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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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Tenebrae

Argento's last great giallo, and the one with the three-minute crane shot up the side of a house.

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Thanksgiving

A fake trailer from Grindhouse turned into a real slasher, and it is a very good one.

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MaXXXine

The weakest of West's trilogy and still a better-shot 1985 Los Angeles than most films manage.

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Terrifier 3

Unrated, made for very little, outgrossed studio horror, and the effects are the entire proposition.

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Candyman

The shadow-puppet sequences are the best thing in it. A sequel that is actually about the original.

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Black Christmas

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

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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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X

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

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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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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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It Follows

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

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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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Wrong Turn

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

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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Almost bloodless and completely unbearable. Heat, noise and exhaustion doing all the work.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street

Craven's best idea: a killer who gets you where you cannot stay awake to avoid him.

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Friday the 13th

Copied Halloween without any of the craft, added Savini, and proved the formula worked anyway.

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The Cabin in the Woods

A machine for explaining why every other film on this site is shaped the way it is.

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Halloween

Cost 300,000 dollars, took 70 million, and contains almost no blood at all.

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Scream

Characters who know the rules. Worked exactly once and produced a decade of films that mistook referencing for wit.