Articles and lists

The 25 Best Indie Horror Movies Independent is a financing fact, not a compliment, and half the lists using the word mean nothing more than small. So here is our test, stated plainly: films made outside studio financing where the constraint became t... 25 films The 25 Best Western Horror Movies Western horror is not a novelty crossover. It is the western finally admitting what it spent a century refusing to say: that settlement was a horror story shot in golden light with the sympathetic character holding th... 25 films The 25 Best Southern Gothic Movies Southern gothic is not a synonym for backwoods slasher, and the difference is the whole page. It is a literary inheritance, running from Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor through Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams, ... 25 films The 25 Best Forest Horror Movies The forest is the oldest room in horror. Before the haunted house, before the spaceship, there was the place past the last field where the rules of the village stopped applying, and every culture with trees built some... 25 films The 25 Best Valentine's Day Horror Movies Horror set on Valentine's Day amounts to a Nova Scotian mining town, a cherub mask, an elevator and a couple of remakes. That is not a page. What is a page: the far larger body of films where love itself is the monste... 25 films The 25 Best Thanksgiving Horror Movies There are maybe seven horror films actually set on Thanksgiving, and you can watch all of them in a single afternoon. Anyone claiming thirty is counting turkeys in the background. So the test here is narrower and more... 25 films The 25 Best Sea Monster Movies A shark is not a sea monster. It is an animal with a jaw and a habitat, and an entire subgenre exists to film it accurately. The sea monster is what people put in the water once accuracy stops being available. That wa... 25 films The 25 Best Animal Horror Movies Animal horror only works once you decide what an animal is. The test for this list was narrow and mechanical: the antagonist has to be a real species behaving roughly like itself, recognisable to anyone who has read a... 25 films The 25 Worst Horror Movies We already keep a list of underrated horror. This is the other end of the same shelf, and it needs a stricter test than "bad", because bad has two meanings and only one of them is interesting. Plan 9 from Outer Space ... 25 films The 25 Horror Movies to Watch Alone This is not a list of the scariest films ever made. It is a list of films that get worse company. Every entry had to pass one test: does it lose something when a room full of people is watching? If a film is better wi... 25 films The 21 Best Turkish Horror Movies Turkish horror runs on a different metaphysics than the one most viewers bring to it. The threat is usually a jinn, a created being the Qur'an places alongside humanity rather than beneath it, and the response is ruqy... 21 films The 25 Best Post-Apocalyptic Horror Movies Apocalypse is an event; dystopia is a system. This list is about the event and the long morning after it, when electricity is a memory and the only surviving institution is whoever happens to be holding the keys. The ... 25 films The 25 Best Thai Horror Movies Thai horror runs on a metaphysics the Western exorcism film cannot use. A ghost here is not an intruder to be expelled by an authorised priest; it is a being stuck in the wrong condition, owed something, and the work ... 25 films The 25 Best Argentinian Horror Movies Argentine horror grew up in a country that spent the late 1970s making people disappear, and the genre never pretended otherwise. The state is the monster's landlord here: bodies that cannot be found, neighbours who s... 25 films The 25 Best Creature Feature Movies A monster film is only as good as the object at the centre of it. That is the organising idea here: films where somebody welded, sculpted, cast, cabled or wore the thing, and where the craft of making it move is the r... 25 films The 25 Best 1950s Horror Movies The 1950s did not invent horror, it re-tooled it for the atomic age. The monster stopped arriving from a Carpathian castle and started coming out of a test site in Nevada, a Pacific trench or the house next door, and ... 25 films The 22 Best Paranormal Movies Supernatural is a big tent. Paranormal is narrower and far more useful: it means the investigable. Something is happening in this house, and someone has arrived with a tape recorder, a thermal camera, a stenographer o... 22 films The 25 Best Horror Thriller Movies A thriller withholds. It runs on suspense, competence and the gap between what a character knows and what you do, and the pleasure is watching someone work a problem faster than the problem works them. Horror does not... 25 films The 25 Best Irish Horror Movies Irish horror had almost no industry before the middle of the 2000s. Dead Meat, Isolation and Boy Eats Girl all landed within a year of each other, made cheap and made locally, and twenty years on the country turns out... 25 films The 25 Best British Horror Movies British horror is a national tradition with its own factories. Hammer put Universal's monsters into colour and gave them appetite, Amicus turned the anthology into a production line, and by the end of the 1960s the co... 25 films The 25 Best 1960s Horror Movies The 1960s is the decade horror stopped being a costume genre. Psycho and Peeping Tom both opened in 1960, and both moved the threat out of the crypt and into a rented room with a working lock, while Hammer was proving... 25 films The 25 Best Survival Horror Movies Survival horror is not a monster category, it is an accounting problem. The films worth ranking are the ones that itemise the cost: what gets abandoned in the cave, who gets voted out of the supermarket, which lie the... 25 films The 25 Best Cannibal Movies Cannibal cinema is almost never about eating. It is about who gets designated as edible, and the answer changes with the filmmaker: the poor for Brian Yuzna, the colonised for Umberto Lenzi, the dead for Juan Antonio ... 25 films The 25 Goriest Horror Movies Ever Made Gore is a craft discipline before it is a shock tactic. The films ranked here earn their place on what the effects achieve and on why the film needs them: a Savini evisceration staged in wide shot, a Bottin creature t... 25 films