Psychological

WATCHcanon

1408

John Cusack alone in a hotel room for most of the running time, and it is the best single-location King film.

WATCHcult

A Field in England

Deserters in the English Civil War eat mushrooms and dig for treasure while reality dissolves. Shot in black and white in twelve days.

WATCHknown

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

An Iranian vampire western shot in California, in Farsi, in black and white. Nothing else looks like it.

WATCHknown

A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

Fulci's best giallo, a fever of LSD dreams and a murder that may not have happened.

WATCHcanon

Angel Heart

Mickey Rourke hunts a missing crooner for a client called Louis Cyphre, and the answer is the worst possible one.

WATCHcult

Angst

An Austrian film about a killer released from prison, shot with a camera rig nobody had used before.

WATCHknown

A Tale of Two Sisters

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

WATCHcanon

Beau Is Afraid

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

WATCHcult

Berberian Sound Studio

A meek British sound engineer comes apart while dubbing an Italian horror film he can hear but never see.

WATCHknown

Bug

William Friedkin directing a two-hander in a motel room about shared delusion, and it is not what the trailer sold.

cult

Cam

A camgirl finds an identical copy of herself has taken over her account and locked her out.

WATCHknown

Candyman

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

WATCHcanon

Candyman

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

WATCHknown

Carnival of Souls

Made for 33,000 dollars by an industrial film-maker in Kansas, and it looks like a dream somebody had.

WATCHcanon

Carrie

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

WATCHknown

Cat People

Val Lewton was told to make a film from a title and a poster. He made one about a woman afraid of her own desire.

WATCHknown

Cemetery Man

The last great Italian horror film, and it is a romantic comedy about a man who shoots the dead for a living.

WATCHcult

Censor

A BBFC examiner during the video nasties panic starts to come apart. Essential viewing for this site specifically.

WATCHcanon

Christine

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

WATCHknown

Climax

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

WATCHknown

Coherence

A dinner party the night a comet passes, and reality starts to fork. Shot in one house in five nights.

WATCHcanon

Companion

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

known

Confessions

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

WATCHknown

Creep

Two actors, a cabin and a camera. Mark Duplass is the most unsettling thing in modern horror.

WATCHcanon

Cube

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

WATCHknown

Cuckoo

A German alpine resort, Hunter Schafer, and Dan Stevens doing an accent. Deeply strange.

WATCHknown

Cure

A detective investigating identical murders committed by unconnected people who cannot say why.

WATCHknown

Dead & Buried

Eerie, well made, and completely undeserving of the list. Stan Winston's effects.

WATCHknown

Dead of Night

The British portmanteau that every anthology since has copied, and the ventriloquist episode has never been bettered.

WATCHcanon

Dead Ringers

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

WATCHdeep cut

Delirium

A Vietnam veteran, a vigilante group and a plot that gives up. Not the Lamberto Bava one.

WATCHcanon

Doctor Sleep

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

WATCHcult

Don't Go in the House

A man with a flamethrower and a steel room. The mother is the point and the film knows it.

WATCHcult

Don't Look in the Basement

An asylum where you cannot tell staff from patients. Shot in twelve days in Texas and quite effective.

WATCHcult

Enys Men

A lone woman on a Cornish island in 1973, a flower, a standing stone, and time coming apart.

WATCHcanon

Eraserhead

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

WATCHobscure

Exposé

The only British film on the DPP list. A novelist, a typist and Fiona Richmond in a farmhouse.

WATCHobscure

Frozen Scream

Every line is dubbed, including scenes with nobody talking. Almost hypnotically incompetent.

WATCHcanon

Gerald's Game

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

WATCHcanon

Get Out

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

WATCHknown

Goodnight Mommy

Austrian, cold, and it works out its own twist early enough that the dread is the point.

WATCHcult

Hatchet for the Honeymoon

Bava's first-person portrait of a killer who murders brides to recover a childhood memory. Genuinely strange.

WATCHcanon

Hereditary

A film about grief that turns out to be a film about a cult. Toni Collette should have won everything.

WATCHcanon

Heretic

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

WATCHknown

His House

A South Sudanese couple in British asylum housing. The haunting and the bureaucracy are the same thing.

WATCHknown

Ichi the Killer

Miike at his most gleefully unpleasant, and the sickbag handed out at Toronto was a marketing stunt that worked.

WATCHobscure

I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses

A Canadian courtroom drama about a real murder. Its presence on the list is inexplicable.

WATCHknown

In Fabric

A haunted red dress moves from customer to customer through a nightmarish department store.

WATCHcanon

In the Mouth of Madness

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

WATCHcanon

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The best paranoia film ever made, and it works whichever politics you bring to it.

WATCHknown

I Saw the TV Glow

Barely a horror film and one of the most upsetting things on this site. About a life not lived.

WATCHcanon

It Follows

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

WATCHknown

Jacob's Ladder

A Vietnam veteran in New York whose reality will not stay put, and the demons move wrong on purpose.

WATCHcult

Killer Nun

Anita Ekberg as a morphine-addicted nun in a hospital. Nunsploitation with an actual performance in it.

WATCHcult

Lake Mungo

Barely a horror film for an hour. Then there is a shot on a mobile phone people do not forget.

WATCHcult

Let's Scare Jessica to Death

A woman fresh out of a psychiatric hospital moves to a Connecticut farmhouse, and the film never confirms what is real.

WATCHcanon

Longlegs

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

WATCHknown

Malignant

James Wan spending studio money on something deranged. The third act is one of the great swerves.