The films

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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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Gerald's Game

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

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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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Companion

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

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Dead Ringers

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

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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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In the Mouth of Madness

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

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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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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 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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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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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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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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Don't Look Now

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

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

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Cube

Six strangers in a lethal maze of identical rooms, shot on one set for under 400,000 Canadian dollars.

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The Skin I Live In

Almodóvar's only horror film, and it is a revenge story disguised as a mad-scientist melodrama.

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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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Eraserhead

Five years of weekend shooting, and it is about being a father and being terrified of it.

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Misery

Kathy Bates won the Academy Award, which is one of two horror performances ever to do it.

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Rosemary's Baby

A film about a woman whose body and doctor and husband are all making decisions without her.

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Carrie

De Palma's split screens, a bucket of blood, and the last thirty seconds that made an entire genre of ending.

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Get Out

Won the screenplay Oscar, which horror never does. The sunken place is the best new image in the genre this century.

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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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The Shining

King hated it. Everyone else was right. The geography of the hotel is deliberately impossible.

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The Silence of the Lambs

The only horror film to win Best Picture, and it wins the argument about whether it is one.

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The Sixth Sense

The twist made it famous and the film does not need it. It is about a boy nobody believes and a marriage that ended.