The films

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A Chinese Ghost Story

A tax collector shelters in a haunted temple and falls in love with a ghost enslaved by a tree demon with a very long tongue.

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Alligator

A baby alligator flushed down a toilet grows huge on discarded lab animals in the sewers. John Sayles wrote it and it is a delight.

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Confessions

A teacher calmly tells her class she knows two of them killed her daughter, and that she has already taken revenge.

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Fresh

The title card arrives 33 minutes in, which tells you what kind of film it intends to be.

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Frozen

Three people stuck on a chairlift. Almost nothing else, and that is enough.

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Man Bites Dog

A Belgian film crew follow a serial killer and gradually start holding the equipment for him.

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Onibaba

Two women murder soldiers in a sea of susuki grass in fourteenth-century Japan. The grass is the antagonist.

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Open Water

Real sharks, no cages, 130,000 dollars. The horror is arithmetic: how long does a person float?

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Overlord

Nazi zombies with a real budget and a unusually good first act. Better than the premise deserves.

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Presence

Soderbergh shoots the entire film from the ghost's point of view, handheld, in long takes. It works.

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Revenge

Reworks the structure with the assault largely off screen, which removes nothing it needs.

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Sleep Tight

The concierge of a Barcelona apartment block cannot bear that a tenant is happy, so he makes sure she is not.

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The Bad Seed

The Production Code would not let a child murderer go free, so it ends with a spanking. See it anyway.

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The Cat o' Nine Tails

The middle of Argento's Animal Trilogy, and the one he liked least. A blind man and a reporter chase a killer.

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The Invitation

A dinner party where you spend ninety minutes unsure whether the host is grieving or dangerous.

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The Ruins

Tourists, a Mayan pyramid and a plant with intent. Nastier than its reputation.

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The Serpent and the Rainbow

Wes Craven in Haiti, adapting a real ethnobotanist's account of the drug behind zombie folklore.

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The Vanishing

A man spends three years looking for his girlfriend and is finally offered the answer on one condition.

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Apostle

Gareth Evans doing folk horror with the fight choreography left in. Much nastier than expected.

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A Tale of Two Sisters

The highest-grossing Korean horror film ever, and it is really a family drama with a haunting in it.

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Blood and Black Lace

The giallo template, and still the best-looking film in the category.

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Bring Her Back

The Philippou brothers' second, and considerably harder to sit through than the first. Sally Hawkins is the reason.

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Climax

A dance troupe, spiked sangria, and Gaspar Noé's camera refusing to cut. Unbearable by design.

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Green Room

A punk band plays the wrong venue. Jeremy Saulnier does not flinch and neither does the film.

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Infinity Pool

Brandon Cronenberg again. Wealthy tourists, a legal loophole and Mia Goth having a wonderful time.

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REC 2

The sequel picks up minutes after the first, sends a SWAT team into the sealed building, and reframes the whole outbreak.

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The Autopsy of Jane Doe

Two coroners, one body, one basement. A masterclass in escalating a single location.

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Thelma

A Norwegian student with a repressive religious upbringing discovers her desire has physical consequences.

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Thirst

A priest volunteers for a vaccine trial, dies, and comes back needing blood. Park Chan-wook adapting Zola.

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Village of the Damned

Blonde children with glowing eyes and no interest in you. Efficient, cold, 77 minutes.

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Inferno

The Suspiria sequel. Less coherent, more beautiful, and has the best underwater sequence Argento shot.

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I Walked with a Zombie

Jane Eyre relocated to a Caribbean sugar plantation, and it is the most beautiful film in this category.

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Lamb

Icelandic, extremely slow, and entirely dependent on you accepting the thing in the second act.

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Near Dark

Kathryn Bigelow's vampires are a violent family in a camper van. The word is never used.

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Pearl

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

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Possession

A divorce film with a tentacle in it. Adjani's U-Bahn scene is the most extreme acting on this site.