Do you like scaring yourself? Fancy celebrating this Halloween (or any Sunday afternoon) with a good horror film marathon? Well plump up your pillows and get your blanket and bowl of popcorn ready and make sure no-one’s spying on you through the window, because we have some films to recommend…
The choice has been difficult. Lots of good films and some classics have had to have been left out because there wasn’t space for everything on our Halloween film list. So after over-analysing our choices, these are the 30 best horror films or, at least, some of our favourites, in no particular order.
30 top horror films
1. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
2. Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
3. The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
4. The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976)
5. Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)
6. Saw (James Wan, 2004)
7. The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
8. The Changeling (Peter Medak,1980)
9. Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984)
10. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
11. Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987)
12. The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1976)
13. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
14. Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1985)
15. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
16. The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001)
17. Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005)
18. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
19. The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2000)
20. It (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1990)
21. REC (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza 2007)
22. Into the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter, 1995)
23. Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004)
24. The Legend of Hell House (John Hough, 1973)
25. Let the Right One in (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
26. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
27. The Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998)
28. The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1982)
29. Evil Dead II (Sam Raimi, 1987)
30. Child’s Play (Tom Holland, 1988)
Would you throw any films off this list? Which would you add? And now, one final question… Which, for you, is the best horror film in the history of cinema?
