25 Scariest Movies of All Time (2022 Edition) – Cultured Vultures

Any article or conversation on the scariest movies of all time is going to get chaotic fast. Possibly even contentious, as were talking about thousands of possible candidates from more than a century of the history of the medium of film itself.

Were also talking about a very broad topic in the most subjective terms possible. Whats truly scary? What are the commonalities among the movies that scare you most? Everyone has their own picks, and there are enough horror movies out there to ensure you will only see but so much overlap of film titles.

Taking all of that into account, all we can really do is try to create a list that draws mainly from films that are widely considered to be among the scariest. Well also try to highlight some lesser-known works wherever possible, in case youve been meaning to watch some spooky classics, and youre looking for a scary movie list to get you started.

Directors: Jack Clayton

The Innocents hasnt lost a step over the past several decades.

A woman (Deborah Kerr in one of her strongest performances) takes on the role of governess for two small children in a Victorian household. Almost at once she finds herself unable to shake the notion that someone or something beyond her comprehension exists throughout the property. It doesnt help either that the children are being weird as hell.

The Innocents is psychological horror at its finest. Paranoia becomes so potent, as the governess slowly comes to learn about the dark secrets buried throughout the history of the home, you may feel yourself trying to shrug off your own nervous breakdown. The Innocents doesnt jump out at you, as many of the movies in this article do, but it leaves you feeling as though your own sanity has been challenged. The dissolution of the governess into hopeless insanity is something that stays with you for a while.

Director: Robin Hardy

A police sergeant (the late, great Edward Woodward) investigates a missing little girl on a small Scottish island inhabited by a reclusive pagan society. The Wicker Man starts very intensely with the feeling that nothing is quite right.

Our protagonist in The Wicker Man is a deeply conservative Christian, becoming slightly and then increasingly unnerved by everything he experiences during his investigation. The intensity of his own belief is disconcerting enough, but hes also right. Theres a lot going on with the island of Summerisle, and it becomes apparent that none of it is good.

A lot of people like to talk about the ending of The Wicker Man. Despite the movie being released some 50 years ago, the last 15 or so minutes of the film still has the punch of being maddening and sincerely scary in its execution.

However, and this includes an unhinged and charming performance by the legendary Christopher Lee, there are so many other components to The Wicker Man that makes it one of the scariest movies ever made.

Director: Danny Boyle

Two movies are largely responsible for kicking off a renewed interest in zombie movies that hasnt really gone away since. One is the remake of Dawn of the Dead, while the other is the bleak and brutal 28 Days Later. Both are scary, but only one made the cut, and thats because 28 Days Later not only creates faster and somehow more ravenous zombies, but it also grounds them in a particularly haunting vision of humanity.

Its also to the strength of 28 Days Later that it so realistically and strikingly portrayed London after the apocalypse. A bike courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) is forced to deal with this world after falling into a coma when things were relatively fine. His discoveries build on not only the hopelessness of everything, but also a kind of tension that 28 Days Later can call its own.

Exceptional performances and characterization throughout 28 Days Later manage the impressive feat of creating stakes, or even a diminished idea of hope, even as we know that Jims journey is utterly and unflinchingly doomed.

Director: J.A. Bayona

The setup of The Orphanage has a woman named Laura (Beln Rueda) buying the orphanage of her youth with the desire to turn the place into a home for sick kids. We can already imagine a grim gothic homestead with dark, horrific secrets.

The Orphanage opens in a fog of considerable mystery, as well as the foreboding notion that something old and angry breathes beneath the wallpaper. When her adopted son goes missing, Lauras dreams become clouded with fear and the desperate realization that something or someone is trying to communicate with her.

The Orphanage is a story about repression and reconciliation. The journey to the heart of these themes can make for one of the best haunted house experiences youve ever had at the movies. Watching Laura become increasingly frayed as the supernatural disturbances intensify, seemingly in response to the increasing fragmentation and disintegration, is only part of the atmosphere this deeply satisfying horror film creates.

Director: Guillermo Del Toro

As personal as it is viscerally scary, The Devils Backbone might be the best pure horror movie in the career of Guillermo Del Toro. While his movies are often lush and deeply compelling in the characters and their stories, they generally dont lean into actually being scary. The Devils Backbone, one of the earliest works by Del Toro, is an exception.

Without much in the way of the fantasy elements that dominate his later works, The Devils Backbone leaves us with a lean, very unsettling ghost story concerning a young boy being suddenly orphaned by the monstrous social and political climate of his time. The boy Carlos soon finds himself being forced to confront not only his reality as he knows it, but the world beyond his own, which is suddenly demanding his attention for initially unknown reasons.

The Devils Backbone boasts a tremendous performance from Fernando Tielve as Carlos, putting him into moments that are exceptionally difficult to sit through.

Director: Neil Marshall

You can make the argument that its easy to get scares out of trapping a woman named Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) and her friends in an underground space with some sort of monster lurking. However, The Descent continues to absolutely terrify audiences because while it nails that element of its plot to perfection, the film isnt just an overtly frightening situation.

The Descent establishes Sarah as someone who has endured tremendous trauma in her recent past. Thats hard to forget, as a mystery begins to emerge in a locale thats already rife with the possibility that something horrible has happened down there.

The Descent works so well because it compels us to seriously care about the people who are in a singular form of harms way. Sarahs situation becomes increasingly dangerous, with something truly monstrous and unknown pursuing her. The Descent never lets up on the tension of watching her try to survive a situation we can scarcely comprehend ourselves.

Director: Ari Aster

Ascending to the top of many scariest movies ever lists in short order, Hereditary finds its effectiveness being realized in several dynamic ways.

The death of a grandmother has awful and deep ramifications for her family, particularly her daughter (an unforgettable Toni Collette), her husband (a brilliantly understated Gabriel Byrne), and their children. The movie boasts at least two or three scenes in which this family experiences tragedies and revelations that prove difficult for the film to shake off. Not quite jump scares, but exclamation points in the form of an audacious visual choice by the director.

Modern horror movies like Hereditary often seemingly prefer a crescendo of something uniquely unforgettable to a hand suddenly reaching out to you from a dark corner. Thats fine, because with something like Hereditary, we also have complex, engaging characters, a fantastic degree of attention being paid to psychological horror, and a commitment to a steady atmosphere of dread.

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Everything old is new again. Or, as is the case with the 1997 science fiction horror cult favorite Event Horizon, everything old and poorly received is new and scary as hell.

Event Horizon is now considered by many to be a fun, deranged encounter with the damned in the endless expanse of outer space. In some spots, and in terms of creating a disconcerting environment built on the pretense that something truly powerful and ravenously evil can exist in the void of infinity, Event Horizon reveals a truly scary viewing experience.

A spaceship crew and a scientist (Sam Neill, somehow finding new ways to be a fearful lunatic) investigate a spacecraft known as the Event Horizon. The darn thing disappeared a few years earlier, and were going to find out just what in the hell happened.

As it turns out, Hell actually did happen. Or a form of it, at least, as Event Horizon soon descends into a chaos youll find makes up one of the most disturbing movies ever released.

Director: William Lustig

The brutality of Maniac, featuring iconic gore and carnage creations by the master Tom Savini, is certainly part of its scariness. This is a movie that gets at least some of its power from being noticeably and singularly hideous, not just in terms of how the world of the film looks, but in almost every character we meet.

None more so than the character actor folk hero (who also wrote Maniacs story) Joe Spinell as Frank Zito. There are few souls in the history of cinema uglier than that of Frank, a mamas boy with a desire to build a collection of mannequin trophies of his victims. Spinells extraordinarily uncomfortable performance emphasizes that again and again.

Maniac creates despair in all of these elements, unleashing them in the form of Franks furious killing of people, particularly women, and getting ever deeper into your psyche.

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Setting up the internet and technology itself as conduits for the endless hunger and loneliness of the departed, Pulse is one of the scariest visions of the apocalypse youre ever going to watch.

A rash of suicides throughout Tokyo are occurring without a fathomable explanation. The characters of Pulse, seemingly unrelated to one another, struggle to make sense of a mystery that may prove to be more than anyone can actually handle.

Pulse has some notable and well-timed jump scares, but its the descent into a new world that completely eradicates the old guard (that would be us) and how its told at a languid pace that really gets to you.

By the time we get to the last 15 minutes, weve emotionally exhausted ourselves, and in a way that makes our connection to Pulse something different and profoundly troubling. The films final moments of cosmic horror may just leave you in shambles.

Director: George Sluizer

After his girlfriend Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) disappears during a service station stop on their vacation, Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets) embarks on a truly harrowing journey to find her. As we travel along with him in this particularly grim noir thriller from the Netherlands, were never far from the sense that something horrible has happened to her. The movie essentially guarantees this from the very nature and tone of any synopsis you might read beforehand.

Of course, the exploration of the premise is where The Vanishing becomes a masterwork of the specific achievement of being very, very scary. The menace and fear of unknown forces controlling Rexs efforts, which are consistently met with failure, dead-ends, and the realization that the answer is now more important than anything in his life, propel The Vanishing into the kind of tension that can actually enhance your own claustrophobic feelings.

The Vanishings ending highlights this claustrophobia with a conclusion that is truly and utterly haunting.

Director: John McNaughton

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer can feel more like a true crime documentary than a horror movie at times, but it still meets the basic requirements for the genre.

Besides that, there really isnt any other genre that makes sense for horror for something as violent and depraved-on-its-grimy-surface as Henry. Its not only one of the scariest movies of all time, but also perhaps the most realistic of anything featured here.

It doesnt hurt the realism of this story of a serial killer (the movies title is very clear on what youre going to get) named Henry that its loosely based on real-life monster Henry Lee Lucas. However, the movie is really its own horrible entity. In this context, horrible is simply being used to describe the intentionally casual tone the film takes to Henrys relationships with the tragic or hideous people in his life, to his attitude towards life, and to the work he considers to be so important.

Director: Jordan Peele

A writer and performer mostly known for comedy, Jordan Peeles first horror movie Get Out proved to be popular with just about everybody. Some of the scariest horror movies are the ones that are very clear in their social and political commentary, finding ways to make that scary on par with the actual horror tropes theyre also utilizing.

Get Out is one of the strongest examples of this cooperation in recent memory, with the story of a young black man named Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) meeting the wealthy and entirely-too-polite family of his white girlfriend Rose being a perfect starting point. The film begins building palpable tension almost immediately, with the actual horror movie components emerging slowly but steadily. Everything gets nightmarish from there on the visual and atmospheric fronts.

However, without Peeles attention to making some very striking points on the reality many experience while being black in America, Get Out would just be a loose collection of genuinely unnerving scenes and performances.

Director: Clive Barker

A mysterious puzzle box falls into the hands of a sexually disturbed man named Frank (Sean Champman). He solves the box, gets to experience the brisk sensation of being ripped apart by hooked chains appearing seemingly out of nowhere, and disappears. Turns out Frank went to Hell, but dont worry because hell be back pretty soon.

To those who have never seen Hellraiser, Franks going to be missing some skin when we meet him again, and this visual is just one of the ways in which Hellraiser disturbed audiences in 1987. Hellraiser is disturbing not just for its visuals and gore, which are uniquely executed and profoundly disgusting, but for showing a type of humanity that is as dark as it is gleeful in its vile appetites.

Franks brother (Andrew Robinson) soon moves into his old place, bringing his daughter Kirsty (Ashely Laurence) and wife Julia (Clare Higgins). Of course, things being what they are, Julias past relationship with Frank becomes the foundation of Franks desperate bid to return to the mortal realm.

Unfortunately for the men Julia seduces in his honor, resurrection seemingly involves a body count and gallons and gallons of blood. It also eventually means a confrontation with a demonic priest entity known by fans as Pinhead. A physical manifestation of whats waiting for those who open the puzzle box, Pinhead is pure malevolent pleasure fully realized.

This isnt the first time weve talked about the Hellraiser series, but performances and a deranged depiction of devotion emphasize why this first entry remains the best.

Director: David Robert Mitchell

It Follows is one of the most compelling subversions of genre expectations of the 2010s. Taking the horror inherent in being pursued by something that doesnt stop until the task is finished, It Follows creates a terrifying world in which nothing can actively protect you. There are no safeguards you simply run and survive until you cant run anymore.

Teenage Jays sexual encounter with a relative stranger (her very new boyfriend) leaves her with a curse. The movie doesnt spend too much explaining the nature of this curse. It simply sets Jay, played with memorable anxiety and confusion by Maika Monroe, upon running as fast as she can from whatever is pursuing her.

But she cant get away. Of course not. And she certainly cant run forever. The buildup of these questions to the films transformative climax is almost madness-inducing.

Director: George A. Romero

Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romeros follow-up to his genre-defining 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, can seem a little slow when compared to contemporary zombie movies like 28 Days Later. The movie more often than not moves at a gradual pace, punctuated with a handful of key moments of zombie chaos and mass destruction, the most intense of which occur at the beginning and end of the movie.

However, Dawn of the Dead gets under your skin in a variety of ways. Whether our protagonists are participating in a siege of a building filled with zombies, or wandering around a department store looking at new outfits, Dawn of the Dead is never not a dizzying, disconcerting experience. It presents the end of times as an organic, believable burn that consumes everything and cannot be stopped in any form or fashion.

Our protagonists eventually make their way to a shopping mall, where they try to stay distracted while the world continues to crumble all around them. Even in these gentler, sometimes humorous moments, Romeros extraordinary ability to create a situation in which hope has completely left town remains front and center.

Director: Dario Argento

Obviously, components like cinematography, music, and set design are vital to the energy and appeal of many of the scariest movies being covered here. Suspiria is a good emphasis on the fact that the director is only one part of what makes these films so powerful and so memorable.

Certainly, the Italian horror maestros most famous movie bears his influence in every possible way, but it would be impossible to talk about just how electrifying a horror experience Suspiria is without also mentioning the soundtrack by Goblin.

A young woman (an amazing Jessica Harper performance) begins studying ballet school in Germany, shortly after another student at the school has been murdered under ferocious and mysterious circumstances. She soon finds herself targeted by these same forces, and as you can imagine, her life becomes a waking nightmare at the hands of what we learn is one of three witches. Suspiria would be the first in Argentos famed Three Mothers Trilogy, and it stands as the entry that grips audiences the hardest. To watch Suspiria in particular is to visit a world that feels like a sadistic, beautiful fairytale.

Does it all make sense? Well.

Is it all terrifying in a way that can only come from facing the total unknown? Yes.

Director: Bernard Rose

In the early 90s, films like Candyman found success by combining different elements to create something quite different from what audiences were generally expecting from horror at this point.

Candyman himself, played to iconic perfection by the legend himself Tony Todd, is the star of this show. Hes just not quite the standard boogeyman people had come to enjoy. There are no quips. There is no sense of irony or humor, as he sets about stalking a graduate student (Virginia Madsen, who is absolutely perfect) who has begun investigating the story behind his urban legend. There is simply a force of anger and racially-motivated vengeance who demands the world know his story.

As Candyman brilliantly explains, hes more than just a ghost who stabs people to death when they look into a mirror and say his name five times.

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25 Scariest Movies of All Time (2022 Edition) - Cultured Vultures

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero