Diving headfirst into the horror library of Tubi is a dizzying, potentially nauseating experience, not just for the gory horror films you’ll find there, but for the sheer haphazardness of the journey. As a free, ad-supported streaming service, Tubi horror has one major thing going for it: Pure scale. Their horror library is utterly massive, with close to 1,000 films available, but the functionality and ability to browse those films in a logical way is practically nonexistent. It’s a library that eclipses other streamers—much bigger than Netflix, and bigger even than the likes of a genre-specific streamer like Shudder. But man, what a clumsy UI.
You’ll notice this as soon as you tell Tubi to show you the results of a particular genre. Choose “horror movies,” and there’s no way to further refine that selection of almost 1,000 films. You can’t reorder the list alphabetically. There are no subgenres, or further categories. Dubs and different language cuts of the same film appear multiple times throughout the list, nowhere near each other. It appears to have been arranged in completely random order.
That’s why our guide to the best Tubi horror movies is so important—do you really want to scroll through 1,000 movies looking for something to watch? Or do you want to go straight to the cream of the crop? Check out our picks for some Tubi horror hidden gems below, and then check out our lists of the best horror content available on a bevy of other streamers.
You may also want to consult the following horror-centric lists:
The 100 best horror films of all time.
The 100 best vampire movies of all time.
The 50 best zombie movies of all time.
The 50 best movies about serial killers.
The 50 best slasher movies of all time
The 50 best ghost movies of all time.
The best horror movies streaming on Netflix.
The best horror movies streaming on Amazon Prime.
The best horror movies streaming on Hulu.
The best horror movies streaming on Shudder.
The 50 Best Tubi Horror Movies
1. The Thing
Year: 1982
Director: John Carpenter
Stars: Kurt Russell, Keith David, Donald Moffat, Wilford Brimley
Rating: R
No disrespect to the classic Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks version of The Thing From Another World from 1951, but John Carpenter’s 1982 reimagining of that story into The Thing is one of cinema’s greatest acts of modernization. In a manner that was mimicked six years later by the remake of The Blob, Carpenter took a thinly veiled Cold War allegory and cloaked it in his taut, atmospheric style, ratcheting up both suspense and the lurid payoff delivered by groundbreaking FX work, while expanding the mythology and capabilities of the titular monster. Every frame is a visual puzzle, as Carpenter’s camera drifts over empty hallways, open door frames and cloaked figures in the arctic air. Who is The Thing, and more contentiously, when and how did they become The Thing? The theories spiral endlessly into dark corners of the internet, as Carpenter’s visual clues and Bill Lancaster’s script seem to provide the audience with most—but never quite all—of the information they need to be certain. Rob Bottin delivers what may be the literal zenith of practical effects in the history of horror cinema during The Thing’s several transformation scenes, and particularly in the mind-blowing sequence featuring the severed head of Norris (Charles Hallahan) sprouting legs to become a crab-like creature, which attempts to scuttle away. The Thing has become an artifact of big-budget ’80s horror purity: Next-level special effects, a mind-expanding mystery, masterful direction and the awesomeness that is Kurt Russell/R.J. MacReady as the cherry on top. —Jim Vorel
2. The Changeling
Year: 1980
Director: Peter Medak
Stars: George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas, John Colicos
Rating: R
George C. Scott tempers his natural irascibility to play a melancholy composer grieving for his recently deceased wife and daughter in Peter Medak’s conflation of haunted house movie and supernatural whodunit. Dubbed one of the scariest movies of all time by Martin Scorsese, The Changeling deals the terror out in spades, with Medak playing up the tightening fear of the unknown with the precision of a horror maestro. (Indeed, it’s amazing Medak had never even been near the genre before.) Having moved into a new home, a century-old manor also occupied by the restless spirit of a young boy, Scott’s John Russell digs to discover the tale of an institutional cover-up, and of power wielded monstrously in the name of financial gain. The Changeling may be a showcase for an effortlessly magnetic veteran lead, but it’s also a mystery thriller that engrosses as it frightens. What begins as another haunted house story ends as a commentary on the history of America: a nation built not just on hard work, but also on blood and not-always-heroic sacrifice. —Brogan Morris
3. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Year: 1974
Director: Tobe Hooper
Stars: Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, Gunnar Hansen
Rating: R
One of the most brutal mainstream horror films ever released, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, based on notorious Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, resembles art-house verité built on the grainy physicality of its flat Texas setting. Plus, it introduced the superlatively sinister Leatherface, the iconic chainsaw-wielding giant of a man who wears a mask made of human skin, whose freakish sadism is upstaged only by the introduction of his cannibalistic family with whom he resides in a dilapidated house in the middle of the Texas wilderness, together chowing on the meat Leatherface and his brothers harvest, while Grandpa drinks blood and fashions furniture from victims’ bones. Still, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre might not be the goriest horror film ever made, but as an imaginal excavation of the subterranean anxieties of a post-Vietnam rural American populace, it’s pretty much unparalleled. Twisted, dark and beautiful all at once, it careens through a wide variety of tones and techniques without ever losing its singular intensity. (And there are few scenes in this era of horror with more disturbing sound design than the bit where Leatherface ambushes a guy with a single dull hammer strike to the head before slamming the metal door shut behind him.) —Rachel Haas and Brent Ables
4. Day of the Dead
Year: 1985
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Lordi Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Richard Liberty
Rating: R
Although Dawn will probably always have more esteem, and is significantly more culturally important, Day of the Dead is my personal favorite of George Romero’s zombie films, and I don’t think it ever quite gets the respect it deserves. It comes along at a sort of sweet spot—bigger budget, more ambitious ideas and Tom Savini at the zenith of his powers as a practical effects artist. The human characters this time are scientists and military living in an underground bunker, which for the first time in the series gives us a wider view of what’s been going on since the dead rose. This film reintroduces the science back into zombie flicks, finally making one of the main characters a researcher (Matthew “Frankenstein” Logan) who has had some time to study the zombies in the relative safety of a lab. As such, the movie redefines the attributes of the classic Romero ghoul—they’re dumb, but not entirely unintelligent, and some of them can even be trained to use tools and possibly remember certain aspects of their previous lives. That of course brings us to “Bub,” maybe the single most iconic zombie in Romero’s oeuvre, who displays a unique level of personality and even humor. Day of the Dead ultimately takes a monster that audiences thought they knew pretty well at this point and suggests that perhaps they were only just scratching the surface of zombies’ potential. —Jim Vorel
5. Ginger Snaps
Year: 2000
Director: John Fawcett
Stars: Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Kris Lemche, Mimi Rogers
Rating: N/A
Ginger Snaps is a high school werewolf story, but before you go making any Twilight comparisons, let me state for the record: Where Twilight is maudlin, Ginger Snaps is vicious. A pair of death-obsessed, outsider sisters, Ginger and Brigitte, are faced with issues of maturation and sexual awakening when Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) is bitten by a werewolf. As she begins to become bolder and more animalistic in her desires, the second, meeker sister (Emily Perkins) searches for a way to reverse the damages before Ginger carves a path of destruction through their community. Reflecting the influence of Cronenberg-style body horror and especially John Landis’s American Werewolf in London, Ginger Snaps is a surprisingly effective horror movie and mix of drama/black comedy that brought the werewolf mythos into suburbia in the same sort of way Fright Night managed to do so with vampires. It also made a genre star of Isabelle, who has since appeared in several sequels and above-average horror flicks such as American Mary. Even if the condition of lycanthropism is an obvious parallel to the struggles of adolescence and puberty, Ginger Snaps is the one film that has taken that rich vein of source material and imbued it with the same kind of punk spirit as Heathers. —Jim Vorel
6. Get Out
Year: 2017
Director: Jordan Peele
Stars: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener, Caleb Landry Jones, Stephen Root, Lil Rel Howery
Rating: R
Peele’s a natural behind the camera, but Get Out benefits most from its deceptively trim premise, a simplicity which belies rich thematic depth. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams) go to spend a weekend with her folks in their lavish upstate New York mansion, where they’re throwing the annual Armitage bash with all their friends in attendance. Chris immediately feels out of place; events escalate from there, taking the narrative in a ghastly direction that ultimately ties back to the unsettling sensation of being the “other” in a room full of people who aren’t like you—and never let you forget it. Put indelicately, Get Out is about being black and surrounded by whites who squeeze your biceps without asking, who fetishize you to your face, who analyze your blackness as if it’s a fashion trend. At best Chris’s ordeal is bizarre and dizzying, the kind of thing he might bitterly chuckle about in retrospect. At worst it’s a setup for such macabre developments as are found in the domain of horror. That’s the finest of lines Peele and Get Out walk without stumbling. —Andy Crump
7. Re-Animator
Year: 1985
Director: Stuart Gordon
Stars: Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Bruce Abbott, David Gale
Rating: R
Ironically, the most entertaining take on H.P. Lovecraft is the least “Lovecrafty.” Stuart Gordon established himself as cinema’s leading Lovecraft adaptor with a juicy take on the story “Herbert West, Re-Animator,” about a student who concocts a disturbingly flawed means of reviving the dead. Re-Animator more closely resembles a zombie film than Lovecraft’s signature brand of occult sci-fi, but it boasts masterful suspense scenes, great jokes and Barbara Crampton as a smart, totally hot love interest. Jeffrey Combs is brilliant, establishing himself as the Anthony Perkins of his generation as West, a hilariously insolent and reckless genius whom he played in two Re-Animator sequels. The actor even played Lovecraft in the anthology film Necronomicon. The film is a near-perfect crystallization of best aspects of ’80s horror, from its delight in perversion to its awesome practical effects. —Curt Holman
8. The Invitation
Year: 2016
Director: Karyn Kusama
Stars: Logan Marshall-Green, Tammy Blanchard, Michiel Huisman, Emayatzy Corinealdi, John Carroll Lynch
Rating: N/A
The less you know about Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, the better. This is true of slow-burn cinema of any stripe, but Kusama slow-burns to perfection. The key, it seems, to successful slow-burning in narrative fiction is the narrative rather than the actual slow-burn. In the case of The Invitation, that involves a tale of deep and intimate heartache, the kind that none of us hopes to ever have to endure in our own lives. The film taps into a nightmare vein of real-life dread, of loss so profound and pervasive that it fundamentally changes who you are as a human being. That’s where we begin: with an examination of grief. It’s remarkable for its foundation, for all of the substantive storytelling infrastructure that Kusama builds the film upon in the first place. The film starts in earnest as Will (Logan Marshall-Green in top form) arrives at a dinner party his ex-wife, Eden (Tammy Blanchard), is throwing at what once was their house. He has brought his girlfriend, Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi), along with him. But something is undeniably off at Eden’s place, and because Will is the lens through which Kusama’s audience engages with the film, we cannot tell what that something is. There is oh so much more to be said about The Invitation, especially its climax, where all is revealed and we see Will’s fears and Eden’s spiritual affirmations for what they are. Until then you’ll remain on tenterhooks, but to Kusama, jitters and thrills are sensations worth savoring. Where we end is obviously best left unsaid, but The Invitation is remarkable neither for its ending nor for the direction we take to arrive at its ending. Instead, it is remarkable for its foundation, for all of the substantive storytelling infrastructure that Kusama builds the film upon in the first place. —Andy Crump
9. The Return of the Living Dead
Year: 1985
Director: Dan O’Bannon
Stars: Clu Gulager, James Karen, Thom Matthews, Don Calfa
Rating: R
John Russo is a huge unknown in terms of important figures in zombie cinema, at least among those who aren’t big horror geeks. Russo is the man who created the original story for Night of the Living Dead alongside George Romero, and thus is essentially one half of the driving force for the most famous zombie film of all time. After the two parted ways post-NOTLD, their settlement dictated that Russo would retain the rights to any future films with the phrase “living dead” in the title. Thus, Romero’s “of the dead” monikers in future films. Russo, meanwhile, wrote his sequel as a novel, which was then finally adapted as a film 17 years after the original NOTLD with extensive rewrites by director Dan O’Bannon. The result is one of the all-time zombie classics, a film that is equal parts gory and hilarious while making a concerted effort to capture the youth movement, art aesthetic and, especially, music of the mid-’80s. It’s influential in so many different ways: the comedic tone; the youth focus; the scapegoating of an American military experiment gone wrong as the genesis of the zombies. The zombies too have been completely redesigned with all-new capabilities–they’re intelligent, they can speak, they can move fast and, for the first time ever, they’re specifically targeting human brains. That last point was so influential and so ubiquitous in the genre after 1985 that it’s incorrectly been assumed by many people for decades that the Romero zombies are brain-eaters. For these reasons, ROTLD is undoubtedly one of the most significant zombie films ever. And by the way–with ROTLD, Day of the Dead, Demons and Re-Animator all being released in 1985, is it safe to say this was the greatest year in the history of zombie cinema? —Jim Vorel
10. Possessor
Year: 2020
Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Stars: Andrea Riseborough, Christopher Abbott, Sean Bean, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Rating: R
The barren, lonely, modest urban landscapes of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor reflect a familiar perspective. Brandon is, as you either already know or have surely guessed, David’s son; he shares his father’s interest in corporeal grotesquery, physical transformation representing mental transformation, and an unnerving, topical preoccupation with viruses. Brandon cuts deeper than daddy, though, if not (yet) with the same incisiveness, then with a clinical precision that only intensifies the oneiric oddness coursing intractably through Possessor. This disturbing horror/thriller follows Tasya (Andrea Riseborough), an assassin working for a shady organization that carries out its hits via remote cerebral link between assassin and unwitting host—in this case Colin (Christopher Abbott). Cronenberg charts a horrific journey from mind to mind, plotted along neural pathways but predictably expressed along physical routes. It veers off into an arterial journey, the narrow vessels containing the stuff of life—and death—in a larger body. The film has the feel of a grand sci-fi spectacle shrunk down to a dark, dingy miniature; its crude efficiency belies the potency of Cronenberg’s ruminations on the theme of a foreign invader corrupting a wayward soul in a poisonous society.–Paddy Mulholland
11. Train to Busan
Year: 2016
Director: Yeon Sang-ho
Stars: Gong Yoo, Ma Dong-seok, Jung Yu-mi, Kim Su-an, Kim Eui-sung, Choi Woo-shik, Ahn So-hee
Rating: N/A
Love them or hate them, zombies are still a constant of the horror genre in 2016, dependable enough to set your conductor’s watch by. And although I’ve probably seen enough indie zombie films at this point to eschew them from my viewing habits for the rest of my life, there is still usually at least one great zombie movie every other year. In 2016, that was Train to Busan, a film that has since been added to our list of the 50 Best Zombie Movies of All Time. There’s no need for speculation: Train to Busan would undoubtedly have made the list. This South Korean story of a career-minded father attempting to protect his young daughter on a train full of rampaging zombies is equal parts suspenseful popcorn entertainment and genuinely affecting family drama. It concludes with several action elements that I’ve never seen before, or even considered for a zombie film, and any time you can add something truly novel to the genre of the walking dead, then you’re definitely doing something right. With a few memorable, empathetic supporting characters and some top-notch makeup FX, you’ve got one of the best zombie movies of the past decade. —Jim Vorel
12. Goodnight Mommy
Year: 2014
Directors: Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
Stars: Susanne Wuest, Elias Schwartz, Lukas Schwartz
Rating: R
We begin by joining twin, tow-headed nine-year-old brothers Lukas (Lukas Schwarz) and Elias (Elias Schwarz) as they explore the rural paradise of their new home, swimming in azure-pure lakes and casually spelunking through nearby caves ostensibly untouched for centuries. Though the twins seem to be perfectly content letting their Edenic nature occupy them, a near-ineffable pall of tragedy hangs over the film from the start. It’s unexplainable but slightly pungent, as if at any moment one of the boys will fall down a ravine or stumble into a hornet’s nest. Maybe it’s because they bow to seemingly no adult supervision—that is, until their mother (Susanne Wuest) returns to their ceaselessly modern home after going away for a surgery of some sort. Her face covered in bandages, her eyes red-rimmed and limned with a shadow of dread, “Mommy” greets her boys with reticence and anxiety. Gradually, of course, the boys suspect that something is up with their mommy, especially when, as a form of punishment for their suspicious behavior (as well as, we assume, behavior and transgressions we have yet to understand), she pretends that Lukas doesn’t exist. Goodnight Mommy, for all of its familiar notions, isn’t exactly a traditional horror film, more in tune with the eerie, silent moral plays of Carl Theodor Dreyer than with the Grand Guignol schlock of an Eli Roth in heat. In fact, you may be able to figure out the “twist” by the end of the first act; while the filmmakers do nothing to bury the lede, they still take great pains to juggle their high-minded concept with an eye for burrowing certain notions about the very fabric of our human race within the subcutaneous folds of our most firmly held beliefs about how life—family, love, trust—should work. The true horror of Goodnight Mommy isn’t about who she is, but what happens to her—how easily we can set fire to the bedrock of even our basest notions of what it means to be human. And there really is nothing scarier than that. —Dom Sinacola
13. Opera
Year: 1987
Director: Dario Argento
Stars: Cristina Marsillach, Urbano Barberini, Daria Nicolodi, Ian Charleson
Rating: R
Giallo is not the kind of genre in which directors end up receiving a lot of critical aplomb—with the occasional exception of Dario Argento. He is to the bloody, Italian precursor to slasher films as, say, someone like Clive Barker is to more westernized horrors: an auteur willing to take chances, whose gaudy works are occasionally brilliant but just as often fall flat. Opera, though, is one of Argento’s most purely watchable films, following a young actress (Cristina Marsillach) who seems to have developed a rather homicidal admirer. Anyone who gets in the way of her career has a funny way of ending up dead, and her constant nightmares hint at a long-buried connection to the killer. Essentially the giallo equivalent of Phantom of the Opera, Opera’s canvas is splashed with Argento’s signature color palette of bright, lurid tones and over-the-top deaths. If you love a good whodunnit, and especially if you have an interest in cinematography, Opera is a primer in horror craftsmanship. —Jim Vorel
14. Starry Eyes
Year: 2014
Director: Kevin Kölsch
Stars: Alexandra Essoe, Amanda Fuller, Noah Segan
Rating: N/A
Starry Eyes is a harrowing film experience, an ordeal, in the same way its protagonist’s journey is a major transformation. At the beginning, you think you have a pretty decent idea of the surface-level points Starry Eyes is trying to make; you get its “Hollywood against Hollywood” bitterness and cynicism about fame and the film industry’s pettiness. Then everything gets so much more destructive and subversive. Sarah (Alex Essoe) is a tragic figure, and this is a “horror tragedy,” if such a thing exists, made worse by the fact that she brings it all onto herself, fueled by deep-seated inadequacy and a crushing lack of self-identity. Her ambition turns her into a monster because she has nothing else: Her life is so devoid of meaning that doing the unthinkable has no downside. Hers, then, is a horrific self-destruction that leads into an abandonment of self and an orgy of truly grotesque violence, but there’s no joy or titillation in any of the ways it’s depicted. No one is going to describe Starry Eyes as light viewing, and no one is going to laugh at the deaths. You don’t show this thing at a party—you dwell on it in the depth of night while self-identifying with its horrors. —Jim Vorel
15. Hellraiser
Year: 1987
Director: Clive Barker
Stars: Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence
Rating: R
The head villain/eventual hero (there’s a sickening number of terrible Hellraiser sequels) behind Clive Barker’s Hellraiser franchise is the Cenobite Pinhead, sent from the pits of his own personal hell dimension to drag you down into the depths with him. Where he tortures you. For eternity. All because you opened a fancy Rubik’s Cube. Pinhead has zero remorse, looking you dead in the eye as he delivers a deadpan promise to “tear your soul apart.” Oh yeah, and the Cenobites are indestructible. Personally, it turned me off to puzzle boxes forever. As in his fiction, Barker’s obsessions with the duality of pain and pleasure are on full display in Hellraiser, an icky story of sick hate and sicker love. —Rachel Haas
16. We Are What We Are
Year: 2013
Director: Jim Mickle
Stars: Bill Sage, Julia Garner, Ambyr Childers, Kelly McGillis
Rating: R
Jim Mickle is the best horror director to consistently get left out of discussions of “best horror directors.” His remake of this 2010 Mexican film of the same name is a brooding, tense blend of thriller and horror, the story of a seemingly normal (if stuffy) rural family that harbors a dark secret of religious observances based around yearly acts of cannibalism. When a family member dies and the long-held tradition is threatened, allegiances come into question, familial ties crumble and the younger generation faces an extremely difficult decision in potentially breaking away from the customs that have bound the family together for many generations. It’s part crime story, part grisly, gutsy horror, and features Michael Parks in a role that is about 100 times better than what he was sentenced to do in Kevin Smith’s Tusk. In particular, the conclusion and final 20-30 minutes of We Are What We Are is shocking in both its brutality and emotional impact, an intimate case study of family dysfunction driven by the changing times and the impracticality of the archaic traditions that sustain us. Look too closely, and you’ll end up questioning your own familial routine. —Jim Vorel
17. The Lighthouse
Year: 2019
Director: Robert Eggers
Stars: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, Valeriia Karaman
Rating: R
Sometimes a film is so bizarre, so elegantly shot and masterfully performed, that despite its helter-skelter pace and muddled messaging I can’t help but fall in love with it. So it was with the latest film by Robert Eggers. An exceptional, frightening duet between Robert Pattinson and Willam Dafoe, The Lighthouse sees two sailors push one another to the brink of absolute madness, threatening to take the audience with them. Fresh off the sea, Thomas Wake (Dafoe) and Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson) arrive at the isolated locale and immediately get to work cleaning, maintaining and fixing up their new home. Everything comes in twos: two cups, two plates, two bowls, two beds. The pair work on the same schedule every day, only deviating when Thomas decides something different needs Ephraim’s attention. Like newlyweds sharing meals across from one another each morning and every evening, the men begin to develop a relationship. It takes a long time for either of the men to speak. They’re both accustomed to working long days in relative silence. They may not possess the inner peace of a Zen monk, but their thought processes are singular and focused. Only the lighthouse and getting back to the mainland matters. Eggers uses the sound of the wind and the ocean to create a soundscape of harsh conditions and natural quarantine. The first words spoken invoke a well-worn prayer, not for a happy life, or a fast workday, but to stave off death. A visceral ride, The Lighthouse explores man’s relationship to the sea, specifically through the lens of backbreaking labor. Thomas and Ephraim’s relationship is like a Rorschach test. At times they are manager and worker, partners, enemies, father and son, competitors, master and pet, and victim and abuser. In many ways Eggers’ latest reminds of Last Tango in Paris, which explored a similar unhealthy relationship dynamic. Just as captivating, The Lighthouse shines. —Joelle Monique
18. Lake Mungo
Year: 2008
Director: Joel Anderson
Stars: Talia Zucker, Rosie Traynor, David Pledger
Rating: R
And speaking of found footage, here’s another entry in the genre that has had considerably more positive critical attention. Lake Mungo could scarcely be more different from something like Grave Encounters—there are no ghosts or demons chasing screaming people down the hall, and it’s chiefly a story about family, emotion and our desire to seek closure after death. You could call it a member of the “mumblegore” family, without the gore. It centers around a family that has been shattered by a daughter’s drowning, and the family’s subsequent entanglement in what may or may not be a haunting, and the mother’s desire to determine what kind of life her daughter had been living. Powerfully acted and subtly shot, it’s a tense (if grainy) family drama with hints of the supernatural drifting around the fraying edges of their sanity. If there’s such a thing as “horror drama,” this documentary-style film deserves the title. —Jim Vorel
19. The Beyond
Year: 1981
Director: Lucio Fulci
Stars: Katherine MacColl, David Warbeck, Sarah Keller, Antoine Saint-John, Veronica Lazar
Rating: R
It’s hard to describe Fulci’s The Beyond in absolutes. Some would contend that it isn’t a “zombie movie.” Which isn’t to say there aren’t any zombies in it, but it’s not a Romero-style zombie movie, as Fulci pulled off in Zombi 2. The Beyond is the middle entry in Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy, and takes place in and around a crumbling old hotel that just happens to have one of those gates to hell located in its cellar. When it opens, all hell starts to break loose in the building, in a film that combines a haunted house aesthetic with demonic possession, the living dead and ghostly apparitions. As with so many of the other films in this mold, it’s not always entirely clear what’s going on … and honestly, the plot is more or less irrelevant. You’re watching it to see zombies gouge the eyes out of unsuspecting innocents or watch heads being blown off, and there’s no shortage of either of those things. Thinking back to Lucio Fulci movies after the fact, you won’t remember any of the story structure. You’ll just remember the ultra gory highlights, splattering across the screen in a way that continues to influence filmmakers to this day. Modern horror films such as We Are Still Here show heavy inspiration from Fulci, and The Beyond in particular. It’s one of the most stylish of the Italian, zombie-featuring horror flicks. —Jim Vorel
20. Stake Land
Year: 2010
Director: Jim Mickle
Stars: Nick Damici, Connor Paolo, Michael Cerveris, Sean Nelson, Kelly McGillis, Danielle Harris
Rating: R
Starting with his debut work Mulberry Street, Jim Mickle has become one of the leading auteurs of low-budget horror, still striving for ambitious ideas, and Stake Land is all about ambition rather than exploitation. Lord knows how many cheapo zombie movies have been made in the last decade, but Mickle essentially makes a post-apocalypse zombie film, except with vampires. Still, Stake Land’s greatest achievement is inarguably its wonderful design and evocative landscapes, easily standing up to more obviously expensive productions. It’s a genius work of minimalism, to be able to suggest such a fleshed-out universe, where small pockets of humanity survive in barricaded cities and barter for goods with the teeth of dead vampires. Our characters and story are extremely simple—a veteran hunter (Nick Damici) and young protege (Conor Paolo) travel across the wasteland looking for safe refuge—but it’s exactly what the film needs to be: a sober-minded film that accomplishes so much with so little. —Jim Vorel
21. Grave Encounters
Year: 2011
Directors: Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz, “The Vicious Brothers”
Stars: Sean Rogerson, Ashleigh Gryzko, Mackenzie Gray, Juan Riedinger, Merwin Mondesir, Matthew K. McBride
Rating: N/A
It’s hard to understand why Grave Encounters doesn’t have a better reputation among horror geeks, who largely seem to be aware of it but deride the found-footage movie as either derivative or cheesy. In our own estimation, it’s one of the best found footage offerings of the last decade, and certainly one of the most legitimately frightening, as well as humorous when it wants to be. It’s structured as a pitch-perfect parody of inane TV ghost-hunting shows, in the style of Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures, and imagines the satisfying results of what might happen when one of these crews full of charlatans is subjected to a genuinely evil location. But Grave Encounters goes beyond what is expected of it—you hear that premise and expect some frantic, handicam running around and screaming in the dark, but it delivers far more. The FX work, on a small budget, is some of the best you’re ever going to see in a found-footage film, and the nature of the haunting is significantly more mind-bending and ambitious than it first appears. We’ll continue to defend this film, although you should steer clear of the less inspired sequel. —Jim Vorel
22. The Bad Seed
Year: 1956
Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Stars: Patty McCormack, Nancy Kelly, Henry Jones, Evelyn Varden
Rating: NR
The Bad Seed is one of the most disturbing American portraits of pure psychopathy or sociopathy, coming from the least suspected of all sources: an 8-year-old girl. The piercing eyes of little blonde, pigtailed Rhoda (Patty McCormack) are terrifying to behold, moreso once we begin to suspect what lies behind her facade. Rhoda’s ability to function and hide her true self with wily cunning presages the likes of Patrick Bateman or the already mentioned Henry in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. There could be no We Need to Talk About Kevin without The Bad Seed there to ask the question: What is the nature of innate evil? The menace and sheer, unflinching look into human cruelty in The Bad Seed is truly unique for its time period, with young McCormack’s performance ranking among the all-time greats for children in a horror film. The Bad Seed is about the horrors of responsibility as a parent, when there’s something you know needs to be done but the act of carrying it out is something the world will never be able to understand. It’s a film that may turn you off of pigtails for life. —Jim Vorel
23. Triangle
Year: 2009
Director: Christopher Smith
Stars: Melissa George, Michael Dorman, Rachael Carpani, Henry Nixon, Emma Lung, Liam Hemsworth
Rating: R
Time-loop films are hard. In a sub-genre of comedy and horror utterly defined by comparisons (mostly to Groundhog Day), it’s a tall task to justify any new time-loop movie’s need to exist. At the very least, a modern film with the time-looping mechanism at its core requires some kind of hook, some kernel of uniqueness; a way to approach the scenario from a perspective or angle we haven’t seen a dozen times before. This is where 2009’s underrated Triangle shines—it not only manages to present a serious, time-looping horror film with a unique setting that never descends into self-parody or comedy, but it does it with a character whose motives for participating in “the loop” have never really been explored before. If you’re going to draw a comparison this time, the best is almost certainly Nacho Vigalondo’s indie sci-fi classic Timecrimes from 2007, but Triangle is much more informed by American slasher sensibilities, and it’s more purely entertaining to boot. Melissa George shines as a viewpoint character whose archetype we think we know from the start, but Triangle will mess with your certainties in short order. —Jim Vorel
24. The Canal
Year: 2014
Director: Ivan Kavanagh
Stars: Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Rupert Evans, Steve Oram
Rating: N/A
This indie Irish horror film announces Ivan Kavanagh as a serious talent and remarkably skilled director—I watched it for the first time recently and it blew all my expectations away. Nominally a “ghost story” of sorts about a man who discovers a century old grisly crime that occurred in his house, it is actually much more of a psychologically intense minefield—the sort of film that Polanski would have made, if he was shooting a ghost story. Combining elements that remind one of The Shining’s superb sound design with the the red-and-blue color palette of a film by Dario Argento, it is impeccably put together and beautiful to look at. The story, unfortunately, gets just a little bit too literal and wraps things up a bit neatly in the last 15 minutes, but the movie crafts an extremely effective web of dread and genuine fear through its entire runtime. Here’s hoping that we see another horror film from Kavanagh very soon. —Jim Vorel
25. Black Christmas
Year: 1974
Director: Bob Clark
Stars: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon
Rating: R
Fun fact: Nine years before he directed holiday classic A Christmas Story, Bob Clark created the first true, unassailable “slasher movie” in Black Christmas. Yes, the same person who gave TBS its annual Christmas Eve marathon fodder was also responsible for the first major cinematic application of the phrase “The calls are coming from inside the house!” Black Christmas, which was insipidly remade in 2006, predates John Carpenter’s Halloween by four years and features many of the same elements, especially visually. Like Halloween, it lingers heavily on POV shots from the killer’s eyes as he prowls through a dimly lit sorority house and spies on his future victims. As the mentally deranged killer calls the house and engages in obscene phone calls with the female residents, one can’t help but also be reminded of the scene in Carpenter’s film where Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) calls her friend Lynda, only to hear her strangled with the telephone cord. Black Christmas is also instrumental, and practically archetypal, in solidifying the slasher trope of the so-called “final girl.” Jessica Bradford (Olivia Hussey) is actually among the better-realized of these final girls in the history of the genre, a remarkably strong and resourceful young woman who can take care of herself in both her relationships and deadly scenarios. It’s questionable how many subsequent slashers have been able to create protagonists who are such a believable combination of capable and realistic. —Jim Vorel
26. The Burning
Year: 1981
Director: Tony Maylam
Stars: Brian Matthews, Leah Ayres, Brian Backer, Larry Joshua, Jason Alexander
Rating: R
If Halloween codified many of the slasher conventions in 1978, then Friday the 13th opened the floodgates wide with its unexpected success and profitability in 1980. A slew of imitators and low-rent slashers poured into drive-ins and grindhouses in the decade that followed, but The Burning is one of the few to rise above the scrum. At first it seems just like one of the pale Friday the 13th imitators, aping the summer camp setting much in the same way as Sleepaway Camp would later do, but there’s an artistry and shocking quality to the violence and gore here that isn’t present in most of the copycats, which were more interested in titillation rather than genuine surprise. Drawing upon the New York urban legend/campfire story of “Cropsey,” which tells of a disfigured camp counselor returned from a presumed grave to seek vengeance on counselors, The Burning takes its time and lures the audience into a rather effective false sense of security through establishing a lighthearted tone and scenes of counselors scaring each other. That status quo is eventually shattered in one of the more amazing early-’80s scenes of slasher carnage, which occurs when Cropsey (Lou David) ambushes an entire raft full of counselors and campers and systematically dispatches them in the most grisly format imaginable. It must have had audience members excusing themselves to flee the theater at the time. —Jim Vorel
27. Stage Fright, a.k.a. Aquarius
Year: 1987
Director: Michele Soavi
Stars: David Brandon, Barbara Cupisti, Mary Sellers, Giovanni Lombardo Radice
Rating: NR
Stage Fright is what it looks like when Italian giallo films inform the American slasher genre, and then American slasher films return the favor by inspiring Italian imitation. Michele Soavi, perhaps better known in horror circles for 1994’s truly unique Cemetery Man, created this fusion of Argento-esque Italian horror (he was second unit director on Tenebrae and Argento’s similar film Opera) and American “escaped maniac on the loose” movies as an imaginative, gory dreamscape, and one that stands out as much for its ethereal visuals as it does for its shocking gore factor. Set overnight in a theater, where a troupe of actors is working overtime to premiere a new show about a homicidal killer, life of course ends up imitating art. The killer stalks the various nubile young actors dressed in an unusual owl costume, increasingly mottled with blood in its feathers as he impales or disembowels them. There’s a fantastical quality to Stage Fright that is its signature—a painterly quality to its beautiful set pieces that elevates it beyond the gratuitous violence. Although it takes a while to get going, once the killings begin, Stage Fright becomes a waking nightmare. —Jim Vorel
28. House on Haunted Hill
Year: 1959
Director: William Castle
Stars: Vincent Price, Carol Ohmart, Elisha Cook, Carolyn Craig, Alan Marshal, Julie Mitchum, Richard Long
Rating: N/A
Every William Castle movie has its own campy charms, but House on Haunted Hill is the guy’s masterpiece. It’s got it all: Vincent Price at his goofiest, a big spooky house, a mystery and a profoundly non-frightening walking skeleton. The gimmick this time around was referred to by Castle as “Emergo,” and it amounted to a plastic skeleton on a pulley system being flown over the audience—not his most creative, but shameless enough that only Castle would stoop so low. To me, this is the quintessential 1950s horror film, even though it comes at the end of the decade. It’s totally tame by today’s standards but has some fun, over-the-top performances, a bit of witty dialog and a large helping of cheese. I can watch this thing over and over without ever getting tired of it. It’s like horror comfort food. The colorized version is even more fun, replacing the static black-and-white original with an unrealistic palette of brightly color-coded characters who will remind you of the cast of Clue. —Jim Vorel
29. The Taking of Deborah Logan
Year: 2014
Director: Adam Robitel
Stars: Jill Larson, Anne Ramsay, Michelle Ang, Ryan Cutrona
Rating: R
This recent spin on the extremely crowded possession genre is the real definition of a mixed bag. Its initial premise is solid, as it follows a college film crew documenting the titular senior citizen, who is battling Alzheimer’s disease. What they don’t realize is that someone or something else may have been welcomed into Deborah’s mind as her mental faculties weaken. The film gets points for stylishness on a budget, and especially for the chilling, nuanced performance by Jill Larson as Deborah, but it’s eventually unable to sustain itself in the last third, becoming increasingly divorced from logic. There are moments of great, disturbing imagery, but that’s counterbalanced by characters who act incredibly irrationally—even for a horror film. It becomes more and more difficult to find reasons for any of the story being filmed at all, which leads to an ending that some might label a cop-out. But with that said, it’s still a far cry better than most entries in either the found footage or possession subgenres, with inherent style winning out over tight scripting. —Jim Vorel
30. Late Phases
Year: 2014
Director: Adrian Garcia Bogliano
Stars: Nick Damici, Ethan Embry, Lance Guest
Rating: N/A
Late Phases is a limited but kind of brilliant take on the werewolf movie, featuring a truly outstanding performance by screenwriter-turned-actor Nick Damici (from Stake Land) as an elderly, blind Vietnam veteran who moves to a retiree community currently being menaced by a lycanthrope. After beginning with a bang, it unfolds slowly, developing the strained relationship between the protagonist and his son, the difficulties presented by his blindness and the search for the werewolf’s identity. The characterization of the embittered protagonist is very well developed, and the film shines with lots of the “little things”—great sound design, great dialog, well-cast minor roles. It even features a pretty awesome werewolf transformation scene that, if not quite in American Werewolf in London territory, is one of the best I’ve seen in quite a while. The actual werewolf costumes, it must be noted, look just a little bit ridiculous—like a man in a wolf-bat hybrid suit, and nowhere near as good as say, Dog Soldiers—but the blood effects are top notch. It’s far above most indie horror films in terms of performances, though, and even tugs at the heartstrings a bit with some effective drama. If werewolves are your movie monster of choice, it has to vault up your must-see list. —Jim Vorel
31. Sleepaway Camp
Year: 1983
Director: Robert Hiltzik
Stars: Felissa Rose, Mike Kellin, Katherin Kamhi, Paul DeAngelo, Jonathan Tiersten
Rating: R
Of all the camp-based Friday the 13th rip-offs, Sleepaway Camp is probably the best one that isn’t The Burning. Our main character is Angela, a troubled girl who absolutely everyone picks on for no good reason. Seriously—it’s one of those ’80s era movies with a main character who is an “outsider” constantly harassed by dozens of people, but without any impetus or explanation—it’s just Angela’s lot in life. Everyone who meets her immediately hates her guts and subjects her to cruel taunting. But soon, the people at the camp who were mean to Angela start getting knocked off. The movie seems calculated to come off as a straight horror film, but the death scenes are often so outlandish that it veers pleasurably into horror comedy, as well. Highlights include the lecherous camp cook, who gets a giant vat of boiling water dumped on his face, or the kid who gets a beehive dropped into the outhouse with him. If you love classic slashers, it’s a must-see, especially for the ending. I won’t spoil anything, but Sleepaway Camp can proudly lay claim to one of the most shocking, WTF endings in slasher movie history. —Jim Vorel
32. From Beyond
Year: 1986
Director: Stuart Gordon
Stars: Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, Ted Sorel
Rating: R
From Beyond might actually be one of the most spiritually authentic attempts Stuart Gordon made in adapting the works of Lovecraft–he ignores the setting of the original story, but the basic plots and themes are preserved quite faithfully. It asks a simple question: What if a scientific breakthrough allowed us to see into another world, only to find the denizens of that world looking right back at us? Like so many other Lovecraft stories, it posits the possibility that it’s only our relative ignorance and insignificance that is protecting the human race in the grand scheme of things, and that if we advance enough to draw the interest of higher lifeforms, that will ultimately be our undoing.
From Beyond also most definitely feels like a spiritual sequel of sorts to Gordon’s own Re-Animator from a year earlier, with both Barbara Crampton and the incomparable Jeffrey Combs returning for another gory go-round. Combs’ character here doesn’t quite have the haughty, imperious antihero energy of a Dr. Herbert West, but he still brings the goods playing more of a straight man who witnesses his mentor transformed into a hideous, shapeshifting creature. Like most Gordon movies of this era, it’s distinctly gross, with gooey sci-fi practical effects that still hold up nicely today. —Jim Vorel
33. Tourist Trap
Year: 1979
Director: David Schmoeller
Stars: Jocelyn Jones, Jon Van Ness, Robin Sherwood, Tanya Roberts, Dawn Jeffory, Keith McDermott, Chuck Connors
Rating: PG
Tourist Trap is a weird one, there’s no getting around that. It has a structure that is extremely familiar for the genre—the “teens go off the beaten path and end up somewhere they shouldn’t be” outline of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and many others—but rather than your standard backwoods killer or psycho cannibal family, the situation these kids run across is considerably more convoluted and bizarre. Even after the identity of the killer is revealed two thirds of the way through, Tourist Trap continues to evolve in unorthodox directions rather than simply coasting to the finish line. It’s actually a bit hard to decide whether it should really be called a “slasher” proper, or more of a supernatural thriller or fucked-up psychological drama. If the latter, it would surely hold some kind of record for “most mannequins.”
If you’re a horror geek who has heard occasional references to Tourist Trap over the years, perhaps because it’s always mentioned as having the admiration of Stephen King in particular, then you’ve no doubt heard about the mannequins. And even after you’ve seen Tourist Trap, it’s difficult to decide what to make of the mannequins—they’re the most memorably creepy thing about the film, but it’s never entirely clear if they’re actually “alive” or not, in addition to our psychopathic killer. Why’s that? Well, it’s because we come to realize that the killer seems to possess unlimited telekinetic powers, which calls into question whether any of the mannequins ever move on their own, or are simply controlled by the killer from a distance. This, he’s apparently capable of doing, in addition to throwing his voice with the skill of a Vegas street performer. It adds up to a scenario that is significantly weirder than simply telling a story about killer mannequins—not willing to settle for that simple, Twilight Zone-style premise, this is instead “insane telekinetic cowboy with dual personalities, controlling mannequins.” Try finding another slasher film with THAT particular premise. —Jim Vorel
34. Intruder
Year: 1989
Director: Scott Spiegel
Stars: Dan Hicks, David Byrnes, Elizabeth Cox, Renee Estevez, Bruce Campbell
Rating: R
The slasher genre was winding down and becoming increasingly silly and comedy inflected by the time Intruder arrived in 1989, but this supermarket-based tale instead hews very much to the mold set earlier in the decade—it’s thoroughly conventional, makes a legitimate attempt to be scary, but mostly stands out for the sheer brutality of its death sequences and gory kills. Directed by longtime Sam Raimi associate and Evil Dead II co-writer Scott Spiegel, Intruder has a somewhat scraped-together feel to it, but it benefits from its unique grocery store setting, as the entire production was filmed in the evenings in an actual supermarket. Both Raimi brothers are here on screen, both destined to become corpses, and even Bruce Campbell pops in for a brief cameo. What makes Intruder stand out, after a fairly tepid opening (and obvious red herring setups), is its incredibly gross and over-the-top deaths, which are delivered via practical effects that are genuinely disturbing. If you’re a seasoned slasher buff, you’ve probably seen things like a head being crushed, or a man’s face being sawed in half, but you probably haven’t seen it shot in nearly such a gross and unflinching way as it is here, I assure you. How Intruder ultimately bore an “R” rather than “X” rating is anyone’s guess, but it remains an underrated entry among late 1980s slashers that is far more brutal than most of the competitors of this particular moment in the genre’s history. —Jim Vorel
35. American Mary
Year: 2012
Directors: Jen and Sylvia Soska
Stars: Katherine Isabelle, Tristan Risk, Antonio Cupo
Rating: R
The best work to date from the directorial duo of Canadian sisters, Jen and Sylvia Soska, American Mary is a cool, gutsy horror story that tackles a topic I’ve never really seen elsewhere in a horror flick—extreme, unregulated body modification surgery. The lead character, played by Katharine Isabelle of teen horror classic Ginger Snaps, is a young surgical student who leaves school and supports herself by doing the kind of back-room (although technically proficient) plastic surgeries that decent hospitals just won’t do. Unsurprisingly, this brings her into some very shady, weird circles, from criminals needing life-saving operations to her best friend, who has paid a fortune to freakishly resemble ’30s cartoon character Betty Boop. The tone incorporates a subtle charge of black humor, but it’s still undoubtedly horror at heart, with a fine leading performance by a talented actress, plenty of blood and more than a little titillation. —Jim Vorel
36. Housebound
Year: 2014
Director: Gerard Johnstone
Stars: Morgana O’Reilly, Rima Te Wiata, Glen-Paul Waru
Rating: NR
New Zealand’s Housebound describes itself as a horror-comedy, but this is the unusual case where that label is actually fairly light on “comedy” and leans a touch more on horror. It’s an interesting, well-plotted film that initially seems a little slow: A troubled woman is sentenced to house arrest in her childhood home, which her mother believes is haunted. When unexplained phenomena begin stacking up and the house’s sordid history comes out, though, it kindles an intriguing mystery. The third-act twists in particular send the story hurtling forward into delightfully unexpected territory in ways that are alternatingly emotional, scary, gory, funny and uniformly entertaining. The film does a great job of establishing our heroine as genuinely unlikable at first before slowly and thoroughly transforming her without dropping the core of her surly, acerbic personality. On some level, it’s almost more “horror dramedy” than “horror comedy,” and that’s not a bad thing. —Jim Vorel
37. Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum
Year: 2018
Director: Jung Bum-shik
Stars: Wi Ha-joon, Park Ji-hyun, Oh Ah-yeon, Moon Ye-won, Park Sung-hoon, Yoo Je-yoon, Lee Seung-wook, Park Ji-a
Rating: NR
With the rise of social media and other technological advancements came a revitalization of found footage horror, with Gonjian: Haunted Asylum taking a unique approach for a new age. The film follows a horror YouTuber who, upon learning of the disappearance of two amateur ghost hunters after they visited an abandoned psychiatric hospital, pays the facility a visit and livestreams it. Much like some of the other films in the genre, the fake scares planted by channel owner Ha-Joon are no match for the real horror within the hospital’s walls as it consumes each member of his crew. The film does its best to address found footage gripes, by explaining professional camerawork through the characters’ backgrounds as well as utilizing an impressive arsenal of equipment ranging from drones to night vision cameras. Each hospital room becomes more familiar with each scene until it becomes etched into your brain, and as the real threat of these entities becomes clear, it is easy to pinpoint each character’s growing disgust with the voyeuristic premise as they start to wonder what is and isn’t staged. At Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum’s heart is a lesson about greed which definitely welcomes multiple eye rolls, but it is nonetheless an ambitious and effective entry into the genre that balances its self-awareness with genuine fear. —Jade Gomez
38. Night of the Comet
Year: 1984
Director: Thom Eberhardt
Stars: Catherine Mary Stewart, Robert Beltran, Kelli Maroney, Sharon Farrell, Mary Woronox, Geoffrey Lewis
Rating: R
Night of a Comet is thoroughly B-movie in budget, but you can feel it yearning to be a bit more. It’s an able mash-up of ’50s and ‘80s sci-fi tropes, all jumbled together and viewed through the lens of ’80s teen culture. When a comet passes close to Earth, exposure to some form of radiation literally vaporizes almost everyone on Earth, turning them to dust. Those few who got partial exposure instead become zombies, although this film is notable on a zombie list for being one of the least zombie-heavy. It’s a film that often feels like a big action scene is approaching, but never quite arrives. That’s not a criticism, as what you get instead is a character-driven, frequently funny, quirky little story with great art direction that evokes an abandoned Los Angeles. Protagonist Reggie in particular is like a parody of the ’80s nerd’s perfect woman—a gorgeous but overlooked girl obsessed with arcade game high scores, who also knows comic books better than her unappreciative doof of a boyfriend. In the end, it often feels like one of the several “everyone has disappeared” episodes of The Twilight Zone, except set in 1984. Odd tidbit: Co-star Kelli Maroney went on to appear in the very amusing Chopping Mall two years later in 1986, which also happened to feature her firing Uzis in a mall. —Jim Vorel
39. The Innkeepers
Year: 2011
Director: Ti West
Stars: Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis
Rating: R
When you’re working in indie horror, a big part of success is learning how to turn your budgetary limitations into a positive—to rely less heavily on effects and setting and more on characterization and filmcraft. Ti West understands this better than most, which is part of what made his earlier House of the Devil so effective. The Inkeepers has some of the same DNA, but it’s rawer and more “real,” following the mostly unremarkable exploits of two friends as they work in a dingy old bed & breakfast and conduct nightly paranormal research in their place of business. They’re well-cast and feel like two of the most “real people” you’re likely to see in a horror film—West, feeling in moments like a horror Tarantino, enjoys lingering on them during their conversations and small-talk, which builds a sense of casual camaraderie present between long-time co-workers. Of course, things do eventually start going bump in the night, and the film ratchets up into a classically inflected ghost story. Some will accuse it of being slow, or of spending too much time dawdling with things that are unimportant, but that’s “mumblegore” for you. Ultimately, the reality imbued into the characters justifies the time it takes to give them characterization, and you still get some spooky “boo!” moments in the final third. It succeeds on the back of strong performances. —Jim Vorel
40. Bad Moon
Year: 1996
Director: Eric Red
Stars: Mariel Hemingway, Michael Paré
Rating: R
May we present what is arguably the most underrated werewolf movie of all time: Bad Moon. From the premise, which revolves around a single mom and her precocious little boy living out in the woods when their werewolf uncle comes to visit, you might for a moment think that this film will be treating its subject with kiddie gloves, but man would you be mistaken. This is made clear enough within the opening minutes, which not only includes a fairly explicit sex scene but then features a camp full of people being torn limb from limb by a werewolf before its head is blown off with a shotgun. It’s a fist-pumping, Peter Jackson-esque “FUCK, YEAH!” moment that sets the tone for what is a campy, stupid but very fun feature. In some sense, the actual main character is the family’s overgrown and defensive German shepard, who is the only one to suss out the werewolf’s identity, pitting dog vs. wolf in a battle of wits. Featuring a whole lot of bloodletting, Bad Moon is entertaining despite (or perhaps because of) its melodramatic performances, and it also happens to feature one of the best physical werewolf suits you’ll ever see. Why the filmmakers used any of the atrocious CGI you’ll see in the transformation scene is beyond me, given how spectacular the actual suit looks. Don’t sleep on Bad Moon—it’s the best werewolf movie you’ve never heard of. —Jim Vorel
41. Absentia
Year: 2011
Director: Mike Flanagan
Stars: Katie Parker, Courtney Bell, Dave Levine
Rating: R
Before he became Netflix’s go-to guy for horror, in projects such as Gerald’s Game and The Haunting of Hill House, Mike Flanagan completed his first feature, Absentia, which may very well be the best horror film you’ll ever see that raised its initial budget on Kickstarter. The film’s most notable achievement, though, is just how little it happens to be constrained by the extremely meager budget—at least until the third act gets a bit overambitious. Still, Absentia is a really impressive piece of indie filmmaking, with steady direction and fantastic performances from actresses Courtney Bell and Katie Parker, the former playing a woman who is finally going through the steps of declaring her husband dead after he went missing seven years earlier. Only now, she seems to be seeing him everywhere she looks. Part psychological thriller and part urban legend fantasy, it hinges almost entirely on the skillful, naturalistic performances of its leads and a collection of well-timed, unexpected scares that are sprung on the viewer when you’re least expecting them. Only in the big finale does its reach exceed its grasp, which makes us wish that perhaps Flanagan could remake Absentia someday, complete with the budget it needs. —Jim Vorel
42. Better Watch Out
Year: 2016
Director: Chris Peckover
Stars: Olivia DeJonge, Levi Miller, Ed Oxenbould
Rating: R
Attractively directed and shot, but wonkily scripted, Chris Peckover’s Better Watch Out puts a twist on the tropes of home invasion horror while simultaneously lashing itself to the Christmas holiday as an additional framing device. Its central twist and gimmick display a fair bit of promise, which I won’t spoil here, except by saying that it’s a challenging role for young actor Levi Miller, who can’t quite match leading lady Olivia DeJonge as the resourceful babysitter-in-peril. It’s also clearly intended as a rather searing portrait of toxic masculinity, latent sociopathy and the internet era’s caricature of the so-called “nice guy” archetype, which it doesn’t exactly handle with much subtlety. At its weakest, the contrived plans of Better Watch Out’s antagonist have a tendency to beggar belief in their overwrought complexity, but when it’s able to simply let its characters bounce off each other, it proves surprisingly effective. That goes doubly for when the blood starts flowing in disturbingly realistic fashion. A tonal upheaval by design, the film is not always on point, but it’s easy to admire the effort, particularly when the gore is appropriately visceral. —Jim Vorel
43. Hellbound: Hellraiser 2
Year: 1988
Director: Tony Randel
Stars: Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence, Kenneth Cranham
Rating: R
Hellbound is a somewhat divisive sequel among horror fans, but we can all at least agree on one thing: It’s much, much better than any of the approximately 57 additional Hellraiser sequels that followed, most of which will make you wish the Cenobites were gouging your eyes out with their rusty hooks. It’s actually a more ambitious, somewhat less intimate film than the first Hellraiser, greatly expanding upon the mythos of the series as Kirsty must journey to the hellish dimension of the demonic Cenobites to oppose an evil doctor whose dreams of power transform him into a Cenobite himself. The lovely Ashley Laurence returns as the protagonist, along with a young, emotionally disturbed girl who is adept at solving puzzles, which almost gives it the feel of a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel such as Dream Warriors. The Cenobites themselves get a little bit watered down from their nigh omnipotence in the original film, but the settings and effects are great for the meager budget and do as good a job as anyone could reasonably do of translating the twisted vision of Clive Barker to the screen. —Jim Vorel
44. Terror Train
Year: 1980
Director: Roger Spottiswoode
Stars: Ben Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Hart Bochner
Rating: R
The executive producer of Terror Train reportedly instructed his crew to make “Halloween on a train,” and although you can at times feel the effort being made, John Carpenter this ain’t. Without the atmosphere provided by one of horror’s greats at the helm, this film instead has to rely on concept, location and casting—namely, the presence of scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis as the lead, right after she had finished shooting the very similar Prom Night. Today, this mostly run-of-the-mill slasher is buoyed by several oddities: First, by the fact that magician David Copperfield is present, literally playing a magician red herring; and secondly by the novel concept of a masked killer who is regularly switching masks throughout the movie, leaving the characters guessing. If you’ve seen it, you know there’s something about a killer in a Groucho Marx mask that is oddly mesmerizing. —Jim Vorel
45. Creepshow 2
Year: 1987
Director: Michael Gornick
Stars: Lois Chiles, George Kennedy, Dorothy Lamour, Tam Savini
Rating: R
Creepshow 2 is very much a 1980s horror sequel in the sense that it attempts to largely replicate what audiences enjoyed about the first film in its series without mucking around too much with the formula, and produces a good (but not quite great) effort in the process. Things are hurt a bit here by the reduction in overall stories from five to three, which puts more weight on each individual entry. “Old Chief Wood’nhead” and “The Hitch-hiker” each have their moments, the first feeling like an HBO Tales From the Crypt episode and the latter like a Twilight Zone entry, but it’s “The Raft” that is really worth the price of admission here. One of Stephen King’s most simple stories makes for superb anthology content, with a premise that just can’t be beat: A group of teens are trapped on a raft in the middle of a lake, stalked by a blob-like creature that dissolves everything it touches, with spectacularly gory results. It’s like the 1980s remake of The Blob from Chuck Russell, simply cutting out backstory and subtext to focus on pure, primal action. Will the kids survive, or will they all be reduced to a pile of bones at the bottom of the lake? —Jim Vorel
46. The Void
Year: 2016
Directors: Steven Kostanski, Jeremy Gillespie
Stars: Aaron Poole, Kenneth Welsh, Daniel Fathers, Kathleen Munroe, Ellen Wong
Rating: NR
Viewers should grade writer-directors Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie’s The Void on a curve: While the low-budget Canadian production earns an “A” for ambition, its mélange of The Thing-inspired body horror, ‘80s nostalgia and Lovecraftian cosmic terror doesn’t quite cohere into a satisfying whole by the time its chief antagonist peels away his skin to reveal a bodysuit that looks like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers’ Lord Zedd. The first half of the film demonstrates much more restraint, building tension as triangle-branded cultists isolate a mismatched group of (mostly) innocent people—led by Aaron Poole as an out-of-his-depth small-town cop—in a (mostly) vacant hospital. Kotanski and Gillespie build in too many potentially conflicting twists—who, exactly, is impregnated with what?—but the grotesque practical effects and descent-into-Hell structure at times pass for a solid Silent Hill adaptation. Some of horror’s most recent, popularly memorable features (say: It Follows, The Babadook) have wisely employed relatively narrow scopes. Instead, The Void attempts to push audiences into another dimension, but manages at least a few successful frights along the way. —Steve Foxe
47. Hell Night
Year: 1981
Director: Tom DeSimone
Stars: Linda Blair, Vincent Van Patten, Peter Barton
Rating: R
1981 was almost certainly the most prolific single year of the early 1980s slasher boom, but already by this point some of the films were getting a bit on the derivative side. Hell Night is one that stands out mostly for its oddities—a “college hazing” story that feels like the result of a producer wondering what would happen if you mixed the emergent slasher genre with older horror film styles, like Hammer gothic horror films and American “old dark house” films of the 1930s-1940s. Consequently, the cast of young college students spending the night in abandoned “Garth Manor” are dressed in frilly period clothing, which gives an odd flavor to a film about these teens being stalked by the still-living, deformed monster known as “Andrew Garth.” Designed as a star vehicle for Linda Blair (in full-on Jamie Lee Curtis mode), 8 years after The Exorcist, it’s a bit uncomfortable to watch a grown-up Regan rocking some gaudy cleavage, but her performance really isn’t as bad as contemporary audiences made out—certainly not deserving of the Razzie Award for which she was nominated, anyway. The direction and production design, meanwhile, are actually quite good, taking advantage of the unusual slasher film setting with some atmospheric lighting and moody set-ups. As for “Andrew Garth,” he’s a pretty stock slasher villain of the day, with little motivation besides “kills people who come to Garth Manor,” but at least he gets a memorable denouement. —Jim Vorel
48. Hell House LLC
Year: 2015
Director: Stephen Cognetti
Stars: Ryan Jennifer, Danny Bellini, Gore Abrams, Jared Hacker, Adam Schneider, Alice Bahlke
Rating: N/A
This is just about as lean and minimalist a concept as you can choose for a modern found footage horror movie, but Hell House LLC is much more a practice in execution than imaginative settings. It’s the documentary-style story of a haunted house crew that picks a decidedly wrong location for their attraction, and boom—they all wind up dead. Very standard set-up for a “no one gets out alive” entry in the found footage genre, but Hell House LLC actually does have some inspiring scares and performances. It gets a whole lot out of very small set-ups and deliveries, such as the shifting positioning of props and the life-size (and appropriately horrifying) clown costumes, shooting scenes in what looks very much like “real time,” with no cuts. There’s a naturalistic air to the actors’ sense of frustration and unease as weird events start to mount, but of course it all goes quite off the deep end and into unintentional humor in the closing moments. Still, there are many islands of genuine, blood pressure-raising fear in this well-executed film. Certainly, it’s better than most found footage efforts in the post-Paranormal Activity landscape. —Jim Vorel
49. Maniac Cop
Year: 1988
Director: William Lustig
Stars: Bruce Campbell, Robert Z’Dar, Tom Atkins, Richard Roundtree
Rating: R
Maniac Cop is the rather unusual intersection between slasher film and “buddy cop” movie–it’s like Lethal Weapon, if the villain were Jason Voorhees and the commissioner was Shaft. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as fun as that description would make it sound, but it’s a tough premise to live up to. A young Bruce Campbell, fresh off Evil Dead 2, plays the lead, but he’s tuned down a bit from the frenetic energy of his work with Sam Raimi. The film revolves around a serial killer wearing a police officer’s uniform, eventually revealed as Robert “The Chin” Z’Dar–always a welcome, deranged face to see in this sort of movie. Opinion on whether the film is cult-worthy is often divided, but with Campbell, Z’Dar and plenty of gore, it’s an essential entry for the genre as the golden age of the slasher movie as winding down in the late ’80s. —Jim Vorel
50. Terrifier
Year: 2016
Director: Damien Leone
Stars: Jenna Kanell, Samantha Scaffidi, David Howard Thornton
Rating: NR
It’s really no easy feat to put together a modern slasher movie with retro inspiration, walking the delicate line between genre parody and loving homage. Too many have tried exactly this and ended up with a result that spends all its time winking at genre tropes, rather than simply delivering the goods. Terrifier is one of the few that at least partially works in the spirit in which it was intended, thanks to its depraved attitude, stylish bloodletting and key central performance. This movie hinges entirely around the quality of David Howard Thornton’s performance as “Art the Clown,” elevating it from what could be perceived as simply a riff on Stephen King’s It to a genuine genre effort of merit. Much of that just boils down to Thornton’s terrific facial expressions as Art, and his stellar costuming and design—he is tailor made to be a recurring slasher film character, and had this series first cropped up in 1982, we probably would have seen half a dozen Art the Clown sequels. The rest of the production is on the cheap side—it often feels like they’re going for the degraded film stock look of Tarantino’s Death Proof, but can’t quite pull it off—but there’s more than enough gore to satisfy any horror fan’s hunger. If killer clowns are your thing, it’s essential. Tubi horror —Jim Vorel