The 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time

Take practically any other horror movie from the 1960s, and a character like Catherine Deneuve’s Carol — absent-minded, blond, a foreign-born manicurist living alone in London — would be dead meat. In Roman Polanski’s second feature, however, she’s not a disposable victim, but the film’s subject and a point of uneasy identification: a woman persecuted by the big city who retreats into a squalid little apartment. But even that space doesn’t feel safe, as the walls crack, ooze and eventually reach out to grope her. The first jolt comes not quite an hour in, as Carol shuts the closet door and, for a split second, sees the shadow of a man reflected in its mirror. Later, she imagines someone assaulting her in bed. If these visions can’t be trusted, then what of the murders she commits? The slow unraveling of her mind set the template for so many hallucinatory imitators, from “The Babadook” to “Black Swan.” Great horror plays with our minds, which is often a scary enough place to be already.

Dario Argento’s garishly overripe bat-house thriller is an occult head trip whose pleasures are all on the surface. It’s schlock — the giallo film gone grade-Z psychedelic. The story is so threadbare it would have been sent back for a rewrite by Roger Corman, yet that’s part of the film’s aesthetic, because it allows “Suspiria” to be a movie that’s all style, all psychotic-Italian-horror-movie frosting: the sets that still dazzle with their Satan-gone-Liberace decor, the 14-note evil-music-box theme by Goblin that can play in your head for decades. Jessica Harper is the American ballet student who transfers to a German dance academy that turns out to be a front for a coven of witches. In its lurid way, the matriarchal premise was decades ahead of its time.

Guillermo del Toro’s dark supernatural fable about a young boy meeting a ghost at an orphanage at the end of the Spanish Civil War is a prime example of the director’s love of fantasy as a form of escape. Directing in a time of personal turbulence, del Toro paints life at the orphanage as both futile and distressing, represented by the large, undetonated bomb that has half penetrated the ground in the middle of the courtyard. Ultimately, the haunting points to the secret, unfinished business of a sinister chapter of the orphanage’s history. An allegory for the destruction of war, “The Devil’s Backbone” elevates complex material by juxtaposing its harsh realities with a child’s more limited point of view, à la “Come and See,” as the boy can’t comprehend the horrors he’s experiencing.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re holding the right hand in the dark, you might be perennially possessed by Robert Wise’s “The Haunting.” A slow-burn adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel “The Haunting of Hill House,” the goosebump-inducing ghost story brings together a group of strangers participating in a paranormal experiment at a diabolical New England estate of Gothic tinges. In many ways, Wise’s perennial is everything the dreadful 1999 remake is not: sophisticatedly restrained and free of cheap jump scares. It prickles the skin with creaky doors, sinister whispers and a dexterous handle on shadow and light. Led by an unforgettably nervy Julie Harris as the mentally frail Eleanor and ahead of its time in featuring a queer character with Claire Bloom’s Theo (whose rapport with Eleanor has a sensual undercurrent), “The Haunting” is among the pinnacles of supernatural horror.

Philip Kaufman’s ingenious, lushly crafted remake of the 1956 B-movie classic updates the original’s alien-vegetable-from-hell visual effects, but it flips the metaphor of the premise. The setting is now San Francisco in the heady late ’70s — a city of freaks and obsessives. What was once a sci-fi nightmare of ’50s conformity gone amok is now a horrific takeoff on the fruitcake orthodoxy of life in the post-counterculture world. Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams are vibrant as the token normies trying to hold on to their souls. Kaufman stages it all with a resounding tension (you won’t believe the dog with a man’s face), building to one of the most chilling finales in horror-film history: Sutherland holding up his accusatory hand, his mouth agape, as we realize that no one is safe.

Building on the cartoonish creativity of Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” movies, Kiwi director Peter Jackson spent much of the ’80s testing just how far he could push the medium from his remote outpost in New Zealand. Alien-takeover satire “Bad Taste” was an acquired taste, while puppet musical “Meet the Feebles” perverted the Muppets. But it was swollen-tongue-in-peeling-cheek splatter movie “Dead Alive” that really proved his potential — even if no one could have predicted he would go on to make anything as massive or mainstream as the “Lord of the Rings” movies. (“The Frighteners” felt much more his speed.) “Dead Alive” is gleefully over-the-top, from the cursed stop-motion Sumatran rat-monkey whose bite sets all the mayhem in motion to the film’s excessive Grand Guignol finale, in which stuttering star Timothy Balme’s newly orphaned wimp heroically lifts a lawn mower and covers the floors and walls with zombie guts.

Centered on a rescue team sent to retrieve a possessed spaceship from the brink of what just might be hell, Paul W.S. Anderson’s haunted-house-in-space story delivers more jump scares across its tight 97-minute running time than one might deem medically advisable. Not that the movie is the least bit concerned with actual science, bending physics to the breaking point in favor of delirious oh-no-they-didn’t thrills. Early on, a traumatic recording of the previous crew tearing themselves apart teases the horrors ahead. Anderson draws from a bonanza of influences — including “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Hellraiser” and “Solaris” — to imagine a wickedly designed series of corridors and chambers that grow increasingly hostile as Sam Neill’s once-rational character turns against the others. Even with his eyes ripped out and skin lacerated (a look not unlike Neill covered in crosses for “In the Mouth of Madness”), the demented doctor keeps coming back.

Suggestion, ambiguity and a few artfully designed shadows prove infinitely more effective than showing the title creature in the first of producer Val Lewton’s classy low-budget horror movies for RKO Pictures. Bypassing the relatively tame charms of a co-worker (Jane Randolph), New York bachelor Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) falls for an alluring foreigner, Serbian-born Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), in the film noir-styled spook show. Right from the start, there are warning signs that courting this particular femme fatale might be trickier than Oliver anticipated: Cats freak out in her presence. Come to find, Irena turns into a leopard when aroused. But rather than show the transformation (à la Universal’s “The Wolf Man”), director Jacques Tourneur implies it, resulting in scenes — like a wonderful swimming pool set-piece — where strategic lighting and sound design are what make us squirm. The script introduces an arcane superstition, but our imagination does most of the work.

In 2009, when the Dutch Guignol prankster Tom Six directed “The Human Centipede (First Sequence),” a movie about a lunatic German physician who kidnaps a trio of tourists and carries out a mad “experiment” to conjoin them, mouth to anus, it felt as if the cinema of sick horror had gone as far as it could go. But that was just the appetizer. The sequel makes the earlier film look restrained, from its seething protagonist — a parking attendant played with mentally damaged sweat-soaked conviction by Laurence R. Harvey — to the now 12 characters he traps in an East London garage so that he can conjoin them and create the ultimate in barf-bag mutilation. At this point you may be asking: Why does “The Human Centipede 2” count as forceful horror rather than unspeakable junk? The answer is that Tom Six very cannily taps not just our disgust but our voyeurism, our desire to see the unseeable.

Like Saki’s most satisfying short stories, horror movies are hardest to shake when they pack a “sting in the tail” — a reveal or twist that catches us off guard, scarring our psyche in the process. The work of four directors across five clever episodes, plus a dream-within-a-dream framing device, “Dead of Night” packs more than its share of rug-yanking surprises. In subsequent decades, “The Twilight Zone” and “Tales From the Crypt” would try to do the same on television (while “Creepshow” and the “V/H/S” series extended the tradition in theaters), but this upscale British anthology set the bar with its supernatural conceits and downbeat endings. Imitators are lucky to score one good segment, whereas this film works as a whole, its two most effective chapters involving an antique mirror, possessed by the abusive side of its previous owner, and an unusually powerful ventriloquist’s dummy, who forces his owner’s hand … to murder.

Over the decades, horror subgenres have become codified through repetition, scaring and surprising in the way they bend the rules set by earlier iterations. So what do you do with a total outlier like the asylum-set Japanese silent “A Page of Madness,” which inspired no imitators and follows no formula? Lost for nearly half a century, this jagged black-and-white portrayal of mental illness — specifically, of an ex-sailor trying to reconnect with his wife, who’d been driven insane by his long absences — is an early avant-garde experiment from Teinosuke Kinugasa (“Gate of Hell”). With its delirious lapses into daydream and nightmare, the tricky-to-follow film can feel like watching the cursed tape from “Ringu,” stimulating the subconscious while defying easy interpretation. Decades before “Shock Corridor” or “Titicut Follies,” it puts audiences in the place of its patients, challenging them to lose their minds just a little in the process.

Of the countless films inspired by Bram Stoker’s novel, few can match the image of Christopher Lee, his fangs flaring, his engorged eyes bulging out of his head, rivulets of blood streaking from his mouth. He’s abominable. The follow-up to Hammer Film Productions’ 1957 “The Curse of Frankenstein,” the second pairing of director Terence Fisher and screenwriter Jimmy Sangster is arguably their finest. The movie takes plentiful liberties with the original text, tweaked to maximize scares (and deaths) while eliminating some of the Count’s most outlandish powers. Peter Cushing is a driven, no-nonsense Dr. Van Helsing, venerable vampire hunter, this time capable of the occasional stunt. The cinematography by Jack Asher (another Hammer stalwart) is lush and colorful, matching the film’s heaving, lurid horror. But it’s Lee’s Dracula who drives the picture’s evil heart, even though he has no dialogue after the first 15 minutes. He’s a feral beast — an elegant, hideous monstrosity.

How do you invent the splatter movie? Herschell Gordon Lewis, the deliriously crude schlockmeister who did that very thing, had no real goal but to turn a profit. He made his films for drive-in theaters (you might call them sub-grindhouse), and with the shrewdness of a semi-underground exploitation P.T. Barnum he figured: the more crazy-extreme the better. So he cobbled together this solemnly preposterous no-budget thriller about an Egyptian caterer named Fuad Ramses, who needs bodies for his religious sacrifices, and voilà! — the splatter film was born, and the slasher movie too. What’s remarkable about “Blood Feast” is that as chintzy and artless as it is, you can feel the power of cinematic creation at work in it. Using cut-up mannequin parts, blood that looked like it came out of a ketchup bottle and the cheesiest organ score this side of a daytime soap, Lewis tapped into something that was out there in the collective moviegoing id: a voyeuristic bloodlust that would change popular culture.

Sometimes, you can’t be entirely sure you’re watching a horror movie until the very last scene. Director George Sluizer’s nonlinear Euro thriller gets progressively darker as it goes along. It opens with a woman (Johanna ter Steege) going missing at a highway rest stop, then skips forward to find her boyfriend Rex (Gene Bervoets) still tormented by her disappearance. Audiences don’t have to wonder long who’s responsible, as the culprit (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) reaches out to Rex and, with sociopathic calm, offers to show him what happened. Only then does Sluizer reveal what the woman went through, as Rex inexorably submits himself to her same fate, while audiences discover all the ways it might have gone differently … and maybe still could. In a perverse twist on the old adage, by wanting to learn about the past, Rex’s character winds up doomed to repeat it.

The 1950s nearly overdid it with alien-invasion hysteria. At the top of the next decade came the most disturbing example yet — a deathly serious adaptation of John Wyndham’s “The Midwich Cuckoos” — since it implicated the children. A cosmic disruption knocks out an entire town, resulting in a dozen unexplained pregnancies. A few years later, the hyperintelligent blond spawn use mind control to manipulate others and protect their own. The film’s signature glowing-eyes effect was judged so intense that director Wolf Rilla was obliged to remove it for the U.K. release. Meanwhile, U.S. audiences watched the frosty, Hitler Youth-like horde stare down one unlucky citizen, forcing him to commit suicide by shotgun. It’s since become a horror movie cliché that kids can’t be trusted, but at the time, they were thought innocent and sacred — an assumption this film shattered, effectively giving birth to the demon-child subgenre.

These days, practically all genre cinema is remixing or otherwise reacting to what has come before. That might make it tricky to fully appreciate how gleefully arch Stuart Gordon’s approach to horror was when he made low-cost, “more is more” body-horror pictures “Re-Animator” and “From Beyond” back-to-back in the mid-’80s. Casting Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton and roughly the same ensemble on both projects, Gordon punched up a classic story by pulp legend H. P. Lovecraft for his Frankenstein-esque mad-scientist debut. By that point, Gordon had been goofing around onstage for more than a decade with his Chicago-based Organic Theater Company, whose “Warp” trilogy flopped on Broadway. He intended “Re-Animator” to be more serious, but couldn’t resist his more gore-giastic impulses: serum that glowed green like coolant, a disembodied head (with a mind of its own) and buckets of stage blood.

There’s no doubt that David Cronenberg’s brilliantly executed thriller, starring Jeremy Irons as swanky identical-twin gynecologists who specialize in treating women with fertility problems, taps into a kind of anatomical paranoia. Yet the real horror lies in everything that connects, and disrupts, the minds of these two brothers. Elliot, the lady-killer, will seduce one of his patients, like the actress Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold), then pass her on to his shy brother, Beverly, who she first thinks is Elliot. It’s a recipe for disaster (not to mention an ethics violation worthy of incarceration), and Cronenberg merges a fixation on birth and feminine sexuality, featuring gynecological tools out of a bad acid trip, with an unrelieved sense of the worst things that men can imagine and do.

It was the ultimate Roger Corman cheapie, shot in two days and a night; the whole thing looks like it was made up on the spot. Yet such is the alchemy of movie horror that it attained an indelible sick-joke oddity that has outlasted the cardboard terror of Corman’s more “serious” horror films. As everyone who has seen the musical version knows, it’s about a nebbishy plant-store worker named Seymour (Jonathan Haze) who breeds a man-eating flower named Audrey that turns into a giant insatiable Venus flytrap. In between giggling at the film’s borscht belt insanity (which includes the young Jack Nicholson as a dentist-office pain freak), you realize, with a kind of cuddly dismay, that you’re watching a movie about the world’s goofiest serial killer.

It’s that rarity: a mainstream horror movie, with major stars and lavish visual effects, that brings off something shivery and captivating because of how much it sneaks up on you. Robert Zemeckis’ cunning thriller starts off as a kind of marital soap opera, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford as a longtime couple who are living with their share of emotional demons — and that’s before the ghost shows up. Zemeckis stages scenes of pure terror (like one in a bathtub that’s exquisitely shot and timed), but the scariest thing about “What Lies Beneath” is the way it uses the specter of the supernatural to shine a light on the black spaces between people who thought they knew each other. Ford seems a bit sleepy until you see what he’s up to, at which point you realize it’s one of his most daring performances.

Universal Pictures’ monster-movie hey-day kicked off in 1931 (sparing the studio from the Great Depression, but not from the excessive costs of “Show Boat”) and stretched for a full decade, culminating with the ultimate werewolf movie. Questionable-taste tag teams extended the lives of the studio’s most popular ghouls (including comedic appearances opposite Abbott and Costello), though the best Wolf Man movie is the one that bears his name, featuring the son of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” star Lon Chaney as the doomed lycanthrope. The role of Larry Talbot differs from other Universal monsters in that the curse befalls a would-be hero, bitten defending a woman from beastly attack. That lends an especially tragic dimension to his transformation — the franchise’s most spectacular, courtesy of makeup guru Jack Pierce, whose shape-shifting technique went unmatched for half a century, till Rick Baker got his hands on “An American Werewolf in London.”

Vincent Price, an accomplished actor who had appeared in everything from “Laura” to “Leave Her to Heaven,” launched the most popular part of his career — horror film icon — with this portrayal of the owner of a wax museum where the displays reenact bloody murders. Eventually, some of those murders turn out to be more than mere replicas. The first 3D film released by a major Hollywood studio, “House of Wax” is stuffed with coming-at-you images, including the requisite paddleball aimed directly at the camera. Even without the benefit of the visual gimmick, the film serves as a showcase for Price, who hits notes of sheer delirium as the mad wax man but maintains a grip on his twisted character that goes beyond shtick — a wonderful performance that happens to be pitched to the skies. The 2005 remake is much better known, but only the original can boast the rebirth of a new-again star.

Of all the unholy phenomena unleashed by “The Exorcist,” none is more dispiriting than the glut of hacky imitators and hokey sequels that appeared in its wake. Most are abominations, though 20th Century Fox’s big-budget variation — featuring Gregory Peck and Lee Remick as parents who unwittingly adopt the Antichrist — not only managed to seize the zeitgeist, but established a sturdy enough foundation to support its own franchise (up to and including this year’s prequel). As young Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) inspires others to sacrifice themselves for him, or else hastens the deaths of those who stand in his way, composer Jerry Goldsmith’s Gothic score lends gravity to director Richard Donner’s straight-faced (and genuinely shocking) approach. Photographs snapped of the victims anticipate the ways in which they die, keeping us on our toes while making the grisly deaths — including a priest impaled by a lightning rod — seem preordained.

Like “Psycho” (loosely inspired by Ed Gein’s crimes) and “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,” Austrian director Gerald Kargl’s tough-to-stomach film is based on a series of real-life murders — the notorious “Kniesek case,” in which a criminal was given early release, using his newfound freedom to break into a house and slay its three occupants. What sets Kargl’s treatment apart is how the filmmaker refrains from trying to aestheticize his subject. Instead, he matter-of-factly depicts — and distressingly obliges us to identify with — the man’s actions in almost real time, alternating between subjective camerawork (where we see what the killer does), reverse angles of lead actor Erwin Leder’s face (shot via a chest- mounted, backward-facing camera rig) and disembodied surveillance-style footage recorded from high above. Iron-gutted admirers include Gaspar Noé (see “I Stand Alone”) and Yorgos Lanthimos, who nicked DP Zbigniew Rybczyński’s high-angle technique for “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.”

It’s thought of as a camp classic — and it is, though knowingly so. The title song, co-written by Burt Bacharach (“It creeps, and leaps, and glides and slides across the floor”) is the first sign that this low-budget teenage ’50s freak-out, about a meteorite that crashes in a Pennsylvania small town, carrying a glob of extraterrestrial jelly that grows and grows and grows, has a healthy sense of its own absurdity. But that doesn’t mean it’s less than an intoxicating invasion-of-the-goo fantasy. Steve McQueen, in his first lead role, anchors the American-graffiti-on-acid plot, and when the Blob, which really does look like something you could spread on toast, oozes out of the projection booth of a movie theater, it bypasses all logic to tap into the wide-eyed child who lives in every moviegoer.

An eerily atmospheric entry in the Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur school of dark-shadowed understatement: It’s like “Jane Eyre” reimagined as a midnight voodoo dream. Miss Connell (Frances Dee), a young nurse, travels to the West Indies island of Saint Sebastian to take care of Jessica (Christine Gordon), the mysteriously catatonic wife of a sugar-plantation owner (Tom Conway). There’s a hidden adulterous domestic trauma, but Jessica, it soon becomes clear, is a zombie, caught in a trance between life and death. You might assume that the voodoo plot (drums beating in the distance, a priest casting spells) smacks of 1940s racial insensitivity, but in fact the film is rooted in an intense awareness of the legacy of oppression. Darby Jones, the remarkable actor who plays Carrefour, the spindly-tall, bulgy-eyed zombie guard, creates an image of disconcerting stillness that makes him a suggestive icon of slavery’s horrors.

There’s nothing more classically traumatic — or tantalizing, for horror fans — than watching a group of friends meet their gruesome ends. Writer-director Neil Marshall captures a girls-weekend spelunking expedition gone horribly awry, as adrenaline junkies face hellacious circumstances while stuck in a labyrinthine network of caves. It’s a bloody, brisk white-knuckler for claustrophobes with characters you actually care about. Marshall upends tropes and expectations, as his capable heroines adapt to their new environments and avoid nonsensical decisions. The atmospheric film makes vivid use of darkness and directional light sources to tease suspense, while the symphonic score classes up the proceedings. By the end of “The Descent,” you’re emotionally exhausted in the best of ways.

Wes Craven’s low-budget supernatural slasher unleashed an indelible icon by conjuring Freddy Krueger into the world. Brought to life by the charismatic Robert Englund, Freddy became legendary for children of the ’80s with his burn scars, metal claws, fedora and striped sweater. Beyond Freddy’s look, “Nightmare” had a chilling concept: He lived in the dream world, and if you fell asleep and he killed you, you died for real. This unleashed surreal imagery as the tortured teens of Springwood nod off: A bloody body bag is pulled by an invisible force across the slick floors of the school, a girl is dragged up and down the walls and ceiling of her room, a bed erupts with a geyser of gore. Though silly sequels would lessen Freddy’s pop culture currency, the original “Nightmare” still infiltrates our dreams.

More than any other genre, horror invites us to take pleasure from such transgressively deviant elements as wooden acting, preposterous scripts and unconvincing effects. Hastily made on the heels of “Flesh for Frankenstein” at Cinecittà, outsider director Paul Morrissey’s X-rated Dracula riff goes for the jugular where good taste is concerned. As the title character in this overtly erotic retelling, ultra-committed Udo Kier is slowly wasting away for lack of virgin blood (which the handsome, heavily ccented German actor pronounces “wuhr-gin”). The count’s undoing is not a stake but a stud: The reason Dracula can’t find any virgins is that Joe Dallesandro, playing a Marxist peasant with a New York drawl, is too busy deflowering them. The impudent, underground-cinema stunt was designed to capitalize on Andy Warhol’s “involvement,” although the art-world star had little to do with its actual making. Still, his name continues to draw crowds to this steamy camp treat.

The image of a monster cradling a helpless woman in his arms goes back a long way. But by the 1950s, when Universal was supplanting the Victorian-tinged fables of “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” with its 3D shocker about an aquatic monster known as the Gill-man, times had evolved to the point where this slithery half-amphibian, half-human stalker had a presence that was, in its comic book way, weirdly libidinous. His look is a big part of it: the scowling face and bald head, the gills that are like long hair, the lips stretched into a giant leer. During a geology expedition to the Amazon, the Creature kills several assistants, but he’s most interested in Kay (Julie Adams), the white-bathing-suited beauty he menaces as she’s swimming, just missing her with a swipe of his oversize claws. Jack Arnold’s original “Creature” film is standard in many ways, but with the title character lying in wait, its underwater sequences have a poetic dread.

Of all the phrases that could be used to describe an insanely gory slasher movie, “so real you can believe it” isn’t the first that leaps to mind. Yet what distinguishes Eli Roth’s ultraviolent thriller is how queasily plausible it is, in both premise and execution. On the dark web, it’s often said that you can buy anything you want, and “Hostel 2” presents us with the fantasy — or is it a reality? — that the superrich, among other things, might want to commit the grisliest of homicides for sport. Somewhere in the wilderness of Slovakia, a giant warehouse conceals a dungeon, where victims are kidnapped and imprisoned, and where wealthy sickos pay to indulge their most excruciating fantasies of murder and mayhem. Roth’s staging, replete with power tools and the awkwardness of violent amateurs, gathers a disquieting force.

Korean director Bong Joon Ho may be better known in the West, thanks to “Parasite” and tentacled goof “The Host.” When it comes to horror, however, Na Hong-jin has the edge, here introducing an unnamed and impossible-to-define epidemic to an otherwise peaceful rural community. With echoes of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cure” (in which infected people are compelled to kill those around them) and M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening” (about a plague of unexplained suicides), the film captures the terrifying way new diseases operate in the real world: Collective fear is met by uncertainty, superstition and competing theories as to how best to manage the contagion. In the film, the police struggle to explain a series of violent murders, while a shaman claims to have a solution — but his rituals only make things worse. Suffused with desperation and dread, Na’s bleak vision anticipated the COVID-19 hysteria that followed all too soon afterward.

Kathryn Bigelow had to cut a hard bargain to make her genre-smashing cowboy-biker-bloodsucker movie, a moody, brutal gorefest that never once mentions the word “vampire” or touches on tropes like coffins and bats. If the producers weren’t happy with the first day of dailies on her first-ever feature, she herself would get the ax, killing her career before it began. We know now she’d go on to win an Oscar, but “Near Dark” is infused with that sense of desperation and risk. These Oklahoma predators feed on society’s bottom rungs, and there’s a sense that even the humans who aren’t dinner are still just grist for the oil companies gobbling up their towns. Here, life is cheap, and death by Bill Paxton’s swaggering villain Severen at least gives you the glamour-by-proxy of the film’s fabulous Tangerine Dream score.

Ghosts are terrifying. But grief and regret? Those deeply human concerns that incessantly haunt the living — and according to many a supernatural film, torment the dead as well — may be several shades scarier. This notion is at the heart of the petrifying film that made M. Night Shyamalan’s name synonymous with horror (and twist endings), launched its dead-people-seeing young actor Haley Joel Osment into temporary child stardom and gave Toni Collette one of the most heartbreaking roles of her career as a troubled single mom still grieving the loss of her own mother. Led by an ethereal Bruce Willis through a soul-crushing revelation and its merciful resolution, and caressed by studious Gothic hues, “The Sixth Sense” grasps that the best ghost stories are ultimately ones about all of us earthbound creatures with unresolved aches.

The demise of a romantic commitment can be frighteningly complicated. Those psychosexual and guttural frights bleed out wildly in Andrzej Żuławski’s unclassifiable horror, one that puts various scenes from a disemboweling marriage on merciless display. Banned in the U.K. on its release, “Possession” follows a couple — Sam Neill’s Mark, just back from an espionage mission, and Isabelle Adjani’s Anna, who’s been having an affair in Cold War Berlin — as they confront one another in increasingly bloody and destructive brawls. From the brutally frigid design of the duo’s decrepit apartment in a colorlessly chilly city to the paranoia-infused freak-out episodes involving carving knives, eerie body doubles and savagely mutating monsters, “Possession” is scarring and hallucinatory, with its enduring DNA present in some of the most provocative horror movies today — most recently, Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance.”

Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent was already in the headspace of her script about a mother exhausted by her disturbed young son when a Melbourne father hurled his 5-year-old daughter off a bridge. This, she thought grimly, was exactly what her movie wanted to explore: how a person — a parent — becomes a monster. Her 2014 breakout hit is named for its actual monster, a gangly, clattery creation that could have escaped from a German Expressionist horror film. Yet audiences were more shocked by Essie Davis and her harrowing performance as a single mom who can’t bear another minute of tending to her difficult child. William Friedkin claimed he’d never seen a more terrifying film. But some women told Kent it was comforting to see that they weren’t alone.

The horror films of the ’50s were full of things that got too big — and, on occasion, too small. In Jack Arnold’s adaptation of a Richard Matheson novel, Scott (Grant Williams) is enveloped by a mysterious fog that causes him to start shrinking. That turns him into a national media sensation; his nightmare becomes everyone else’s tabloid obsession. The movie is a delirious tapestry of then-state-of-the-art effects, whether the hero is living in a dollhouse or battling a giant spider for food. But what invests it with a poignant pop dread is that it’s such a Kafka-gone-Hollywood parable of Atomic Age man dwarfed by the world around him, gradually vanishing into the void.

The most talked-about half of “Grindhouse” is Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof.” But taken as a stand-alone movie, Robert Rodriguez’s deadpan-droll bottom-of-the-barrel living-dead thriller, set in a present day that feels like the late ’70s or early ’80s, is such a meticulous re-creation of a certain kind of logy zombie programmer that it’s as if Rodriguez had made the “Far From Heaven” of schlock. The movie is full of zombies that get shot and spurt raspberry Jell-O blood, but Rodriguez also captures how much inaction there was in an action-horror movie of 45 years ago. (When a title announces that there’s a missing reel, it hardly matters; the film cuts to an apocalyptic inferno at a barbecue joint, and it’s as if we’d lost nothing.) Like “Ed Wood” and “Boogie Nights,” “Planet Terror” celebrates the innocence of yesteryear’s trash by highlighting the handmade quality of it in a world not yet ruled by corporate technology.

He’s the quintessential monster as metaphor: a pure Freudian projection of polite civilization and the roiling, insatiable id beneath. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella has been spun into dozens of movies about the light-and-dark, good-and-evil sides of human nature. But never more potently than in Rouben Mamoulian’s early sound version. Made before the Production Code, it has a seething, let-it-rip quality, as well as a powerful performance by Fredric March as the kindly Victorian London doctor who takes an experimental drug that turns him into a leering simian sociopath. Hyde, in his terroristic lust and violence, takes up with a bar singer, Ivy (Miriam Hopkins), and it’s no exaggeration to say that she becomes his domestic-abuse victim. At the same time, he almost seems to be taunting the overly genteel Jekyll. The transformation scenes, a decade ahead of those of “The Wolf Man,” were revolutionary in their visceral expression of the beast within.

Not all horror flicks are made with adult audiences in mind. In fact, the words “impressionable age” may as well have been coined for however old you were when certain movies left their scars on your psyche. In the early ’80s, before in-home VCRs and cable television gave kids access to movies their parents never would have taken them to see in theaters, none other than Steven Spielberg shepherded a handful of chillers meant for family consumption. Two years after unleashing possessed-suburban-home shocker “Poltergeist,” Spielberg produced this cautionary horror-comedy, directed by Joe Dante (“The Howling”). Desperate for a Christmas gift, Dad brings home a bat-eared, piebald critter called a Mogwai and promptly disregards the care instructions. (Don’t get them wet, don’t feed them after midnight, etc.) The havoc that ensues on-screen was grown-up enough that the MPAA went and created a PG-13 rating for movies considered too intense for tots.

Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden” inspired this supernatural thriller with much more on its mind than a kill count. Tony Todd commands the screen as the title boogeyman, the son of a slave who impregnated a white woman in the 1800s. His punishment? Getting his hand cut off, being swarmed by bees that sting him to death and having his body burned. Grad student Helen (Virginia Madsen) is researching the Candyman legend and how it has spread, used to explain inequality and the difficulties of life to children in Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green projects. As Helen goes deeper into the legend and the community, dark twists and turns await, including a truly macabre ending. Writer-director Bernard Rose uses the film as an opportunity to explore social issues not usually discussed in the genre, while supplying enough gore to satisfy horror purists.

As the horror genre grew in popularity and respect in the 21st century, some filmmakers took direct aim at what they saw as a nihilistic form. Michael Haneke’s clinical cat-and-mouse thriller can be consumed at face value — as a cold riff on home-invasion movies, wherein sadistic intruders prey on victims — or taken as a meta critique of exploitation movies at large. In that sense, “Funny Games” questions why we take pleasure in seeing strangers terrorized thus. The giveaway moment comes immediately after the mother gets the upper hand, grabs a shotgun and kills one of her tormentors: The dead guy’s accomplice reaches for the remote control and rewinds the scene, allowing these two sickos to alter the outcome in their favor. If that twist infuriates you, then Haneke has succeeded, tweaking audiences into questioning the contract between filmmaker and viewer by violating the unspoken rules being broken here.

“Try to remember this is only a motion picture,” cautioned the trailer for Robert Aldrich’s scabrous portrait of two former stars — and sisters — shackled together in a Hollywood mansion. Fat chance, especially when its leads, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, had publicly feuded for decades. Davis once sniffed, “The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs” in this vicious psychological thriller. For her part (as the paraplegic Blanche), Crawford readied herself for a scene where twisted sister Baby Jane (Davis) dragged her across the floor by shoving rocks in her pockets. Still, this team-up was Crawford’s idea. She had a hunch their real venom could make real money — and she was right. Filled with deliciously wicked in-fighting (rats for dinner, anyone?), the endlessly rewatchable camp classic seethes with genuine resentment for an industry that scraps its talent when they’re no longer cash cows.

The scariest moments in “Raw” are not the scenes of cannibalism — although the relish with which veterinary school freshman Justine (Garance Marillier) consumes her sister’s severed fingertip is unsettling to be sure. It’s the peer pressure that’s most freaky in Julia Ducournau’s unconventional coming-of-age story: We cringe alongside this relative introvert as she steps out of the protective sphere of family to confront her rowdy new social circle, where young people far more confident than Justine participate in extreme hazing rituals. Thrust from her comfort zone, she doesn’t know how to behave, and making the wrong decision (like tearing off her roommate’s lip with her teeth at a party) impacts the way others treat her going forward. As in the director’s Palme d’Or winning follow-up, “Titane,” Ducournau asks audiences to identify with the monster, who still doesn’t know what she’s capable of.

The year “Psycho” was released saw another film about a deranged killer who liked to watch his victims. But unlike Alfred Hitchcock’s instant hit, Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” — an unsparing and vividly colorful exploration of a voyeur’s disturbing psyche — only claimed its iconic status upon later reappraisals. In fact, the controversially violent picture practically ended Powell’s career, on account of the hostile reactions that greeted its release. Following a lowly movie-set focus puller (Carl Boehm) as he films women under false pretenses and then stabs them with a phallic weapon, “Peeping Tom” is one of the earliest slasher movies presented from the killer’s POV — an approach that implicates the audience in the slaughter.

David Cronenberg’s most popular body-horror film is equal parts disgusting and romantic. Jeff Goldblum plays scientist Seth Brundle, who takes the testing of his teleportation device too far and accidentally merges his genes with those of a fly. He slowly becomes a nauseating hybrid of both, to the dismay of his lover (Geena Davis). Initially, Brundle feels better than ever, with increased strength and a libido that causes him to act on animal instinct. But once he starts growing coarse hair and losing teeth, his humanity begins to disappear along with his physical features. Goldblum is the perfect lead, balancing ambition, arrogance and depravity. Davis is a deeply empathetic foil, and once the special effects extravaganza foments Brundle’s transformation into an insect, her front seat to his downfall is both horrifying and tragic.

Robert Wiene’s landmark silent German horror film can be a bit stiff-jointed, but it’s still a nervy tone poem that opened a great many skewed doors. It’s effectively the first zombie movie, the first psycho-killer movie, the first “OMG, it was all happening in his head” movie and the first — and maybe last — film to be shot on warped-perspective, life-is-an-insane-asylum hand-painted expressionist sets that look like something out of Dr. Seuss’ “The Homicidal Hypnotist in the Hat.” Caligari (Werner Krauss) sets himself up as a carnival sideshow attraction built around Cesare, a somnambulist he directs to go on a killing spree. Yet Cesare, as played by Conrad Veidt, remains weirdly sympathetic, like Rudolf Nureyev brought back from the dead to lead a nostalgia tour by the Cure.

Tomas Alfredson’s bittersweet vampire movie is a stunning and tragic modern highlight of the genre, released at a time when it was being defanged by oversaturation. The film enacts its coming-of-age premise through a tenderness, and loneliness, that exist in close proximity to violent brutality, as a bullied adolescent boy (Kåre Hedebrant) befriends a neighbor girl his age (Lina Leandersson) — unbeknownst to him, a sweet but bloodthirsty creature kept isolated by her father. As charming as it is vicious, Alfredson’s frigid drama is carefully composed, but leaves room for a thrilling volatility that bursts forth from its icy stillness.

David Lynch’s mesmerizing, snail-paced surrealist movie was his first feature (it took him six years to complete), and you can feel his obsessive attention to mood and detail in every shot, and every sound, of this shivery hallucinatory domestic parable. Jack Nance, wearing a wedge of hair that stands up as if goosed by anxiety, is the title character, who wanders through a bombed-out industrial landscape and winds up as a single father taking care of a baby that looks like a jellied calf ’s head. (It’s as horrifying as anything in “Alien.”) No movie has ever come closer to achieving the sensation of a dream. The meditative pace, the whooshing ambient white-noise soundtrack and beyond-the-bizarre images like the Lady in the Radiator singing “In Heaven Everything Is Fine” — it all lulls you into a trance, though only because Lynch the twisted fabulist is a storyteller of skewed sublimity.

Mario Bava began his career with more traditional, supernatural horror tales, 55 stuffing three potent examples into 1963’s “Black Sabbath.” That fright collection was his first color feature and a test run of sorts for the chromatic exuberance of “Blood and Black Lace,” a gory murder mystery set in Rome’s cutthroat fashion industry. From the supersaturated opening credits to a stylish sequence in which the masked killer stalks his model victim, Bava fully embraced the giallo spirit — a radical approach to the emerging slasher genre, in which excess (in the looks, blood and kink departments) served to dress up disreputable material. Decency standards had shielded audiences from the kind of violence Bava uncorks here, as in a torture scene where the perp presses a woman’s face against a red-hot furnace. But the lighting! Audiences were meant to notice (and appreciate) such details, as Bava led a movement that was artful in its depravity.

Gaspar Noé’s epically sinister film drops us into a world of lurid and evil things, but such is Noé’s skill that you feel they’re literally happening before your eyes. Early on, the camera descends into the inferno of a sex club, where the atmosphere of assault climaxes with a head-bashing murder that’s one of the most hideously terrifying visions ever seen in a movie. (The scariest thing about it is the suggestion that the murder victim enjoyed it.) Noé is like Kubrick crossed with Sade for the age of underground vérité porn. Yet he’s also a moralist. “Irreversible” turns out to be the tale of a rape and revenge told in reverse order, and the sexual assault, staged in a single excruciating nine-minute take (Monica Bellucci’s performance is nothing short of heroic), is unsettling in a way that’s profound. “Irreversible” is a true-life horror movie that should come with a warning label. It’s powerful, but it’s also a movie you can’t unsee.

In Japanese director Kaneto Shindō’s 1968 ghost story “Kuroneko,” a woman and her daughter-in-law are raped and killed by soldiers, then come back in feline form for revenge. That’s a more overtly supernatural scenario than the one depicted in Shindō’s earlier art-house horror fable “Onibaba,” whose main characters are also a mother (Nobuko Otowa) and her absent son’s wife (Jitsuko Yoshimura). While civil war consumes their men off-screen, the pair survive by luring passing samurai, whom they murder for their supplies and drop down a deep pit — a disturbing allegory for compromises required of ordinary citizens during World War II. Shindō blends modern touches (abstract shots of moonlit fields at night) with ancient tradition (including Noh theater devices), as the older woman steals a twisted Hannya mask and cloak, hoping to scare her companion into behaving. In the process, she becomes the very thing she’s imitating: a “demon hag” destroyed by jealousy.

Robert Eggers’ New England folk drama distills the conservative underpinnings of horror — the fears of the feminine and the sexual, in particular — and makes them intoxicating. “The Witch” feels cursed at every turn, from its banished puritanical protagonists to the overt child murder that incites their story, committed by a witch the movie has no qualms about revealing early on. It discards mystery and substitutes the stench of death, along with unsettling close-ups of animals. Anya Taylor-Joy first made her mark as the family’s teenage daughter Thomasin, who is confronted with the temptation to “live deliciously,” a devilish offer that flies in the face of everything she knows and believes. It’s a film whose blood-curdling imagery seeps beneath your skin and lingers there long after, like an act of cinematic possession.

You would need to have a preexisting fear of birds to be much frightened by Alfred Hitchcock’s technically brilliant (but practically rather silly) exercise in suspense. And yet, you’ll never look at crows perched on electric wires the same way again after seeing how Hitch turns such benign sights into threats. The project poses significant logistical challenges for any filmmaker, not least of which involves conveying the malicious intent of creatures that have no way of speaking their minds. But Hitchcock wasn’t just any filmmaker, and he loads this never-explained eco-warning with masterful set-pieces, like the one in which Tippi Hedren uneasily passes a playground covered in ominous black birds. The director opted to do without the help of composer Bernard Herrmann (so essential on “Psycho”), tweaking the tension through sound design instead — a strategy that has since become central to the genre.

He’s one of the most spectacular of all movie monsters — and also one of the most grandly preposterous. It’s between those two poles that Godzilla lives, occupying an uncanny valley of kitsch awe. Towering over the buildings, elevated trains and telephone wires he smashes through as if they were toy models (actually, now that you mention it …), with skin like shag carpeting, plates that line his back like small fir Christmas trees and eyes so beady they’re just this side of puppyish, the radioactive beast who stomped Tokyo is a walking metaphor for the nuclear devastation suffered by Japan during World War II. As such, he’s as serious a figment of 20th-century horror as the cinema ever gave us. But he’s played by a man in a dinosaur suit, and on some level we always know that we’re watching a tacky ingenious apocalyptic puppet show. The original kaiju film is still the most compelling, a lavishly somber orgy of destruction.

One of the hardest things to do in horror is to conjure something new for audiences to be afraid of — an original species of monster. Technically, John Carpenter’s first big-studio assignment was a remake (of early-’50s sci-fi chiller “The Thing From Another World”), and a poorly reviewed one at that. What set his paranoid Antarctica-set terror apart, however, was a shape-shifting alien predator that imitates its victims, synthesizing aspects of the many species it has encountered throughout the galaxy. Every time we see the Thing, it has taken on a freakish new form: a mix of tentacles, teeth, sinew and spider legs, fused with whatever it has assimilated from its last victim. Credit practical effects maven Rob Bottin (“The Howling”) for constructing each of these hostile whatsits, from a crab-like decapitated head to a dog-like beast that turns itself inside out. Scarier still: When each mutation is complete, it can go undetected.

Claude Rains played the most handsome of all the Universal Monsters, although the irony — and tragedy — is that audiences don’t see his face until the last shot of “The Invisible Man,” when the mad scientist slowly reappears in death. The role marked Rains’ screen debut: As Dr. Jack Griffin, he appears under heavy bandages and dark glasses at first. After taunting from the strangers in the tavern, he removes this disguise to reveal … nothing underneath — a trick achieved by covering the actor’s “invisible” parts in black velvet and shooting him against a pure black background, then superimposing the rest upon the scene. Unlike so many monster stories (and later, superhero ones), “The Invisible Man” skips past the part where Griffin first assumes his powers, concentrating on how the compound robs him of his sanity. Fun fact: Rains’ maniacal laugh later inspired Mark Hamill’s performance as the Joker in the animated “Batman” series.

The most famous film to showcase Hannibal Lecter is Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs.” Five years before that, though, director Michael Mann adapted Thomas Harris’ first Lecter novel, “Red Dragon,” into a serial-killer mystery that carries its own raptly forensic, dread-soaked atmosphere of dark-side-of-the-moon horror. Brian Cox plays Lecter (brilliantly), establishing the character as a gallows-humor troll from the British Isles in a way that Anthony Hopkins followed. But the film’s key performance is that of Tom Noonan as Francis Dollarhyde, slayer of whole families, who turns out to be a towering wraith with a scarred lip and a rage he keeps hidden under the halting voice of an office drone. He may be the most scarily authentic serial killer in movie history, and the hunt for him, led by William Petersen’s nerve-shattered FBI investigator Will Graham, becomes queasily cathartic in its bad vibes.

Old horror films often have a stately and nearly rarefied classicism; they’re about disruptive demons, but they tend to unfold in an orderly world. That’s not the case with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s hallucinatory vampire film. It was made in the early sound era, but there’s very little dialogue, and not all that much coherence — which may throw you and seem, at first, like a flaw. But if you accept this 73-minute movie for what it is, not a tidy narrative but a fantastical tone poem of violence and sublimated anxiety, it may start to look hauntingly modern. It’s a vampire tale told in luscious fragments of half-remembered dread. In the most remarkable sequence, the hero, played by the divinely beady-eyed Julian West, has an out-of-body experience in which he watches himself being carried in a windowed coffin and buried. No horror film has ever made death so real.

The greatest horror movies don’t merely scare us; they help to illuminate what scares us about modern life. In the case of Danny Boyle’s genre-redefining zombie movie, the threat of contagion from an unfamiliar disease — the “rage virus,” anticipating COVID-19 by almost two decades — takes ruthlessly fast form. Gone are the listless “walking dead” of George Romero movies, moaning for brains, or the trope where everyone patiently waits for a compromised member of their party to slowly transform into a flesh-eater himself. Everything is super-accelerated here, which Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland make clear from the moment Naomie Harris is forced to machete-chop a friend, a split-second after realizing he’s infected — which comes as a shock to Cillian Murphy’s wide-eyed coma survivor. Shot on tiny, versatile Mini DV cameras, the film puts audiences on the front lines of a postapocalyptic London, eerily anticipating the 2020 lockdown.

In the ’70s, the British director Ken Russell was a self-styled madman whose movies pushed everything over the edge — the lives of classical composers (“The Music Lovers,” “Mahler”), the rock opera (“Tommy”), the eroticism of D.H. Lawrence (“Women in Love”). But his most extreme movie was “The Devils,” an adaptation of John Whiting’s play about a 17th-century Roman Catholic witch hunt, which Russell festooned into a scaldingly grotesque vision of repressed eroticism returning with a vengeance. Oliver Reed is the strutting libertine priest destined for a fall, and Vanessa Redgrave plays the humpbacked abbess who’s obsessed with him. Out of jealousy, she unleashes a sexual frenzy among her nuns — as well as a reign of accusation that spirals into dark terror. Look closely and you’ll see a bent humanity pulsating beneath Russell’s ghastly flesh-torn savagery.

You can feel director James Whale having fun with one of the eternal challenges of the horror genre: how to resurrect a villain who’d been vanquished at the end of the original movie. In the first sequel of the Universal Monsters series, not only Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) but also his monster (Boris Karloff) survive the burning windmill — as they will the exploding laboratory at the end of this film. Like the original, the movie features tender scenes of human connection, as when the monster befriends a blind hermit (O.P. Heggie) who “sees” him as no one else can. As Bill Condon explored in “Gods and Monsters,” Whale was gay when such things couldn’t be said, and there’s poignancy to the monster’s frustrated search for a mate — and an electric thrill to the process by which his doomed bride (Elsa Lanchester) is born, with a bolt of white through her hair.

One expects horror movies to look a certain way. Dark and ominous, perhaps, with deep, evocative shadows. Certainly not as colorful as an MGM musical, staged to look like some kind of expressionistic stage opera and then captured in ravishing anamorphic widescreen. But that’s how Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi approached his three-hour collection of four classic ghost stories, frequently cited as one of the most beautiful films ever made. The third chapter, which features a bald man whose every inch of skin is covered in calligraphic script (save his ears, which serve as a weakness), is the most dreamlike in a film that may as well have been conjured from a parallel dimension. It’s worth noting: From “Ugetsu” to “Pitfall,” midcentury Japanese movies were doing far more artistic things with ghost stories than their Western peers. Still, nothing could prepare audiences for the exquisite aesthetic touch Kobayashi brought to the form.

“Dracula” may have been the more successful film for director Tod Browning, but “Freaks” (made for MGM) is ultimately more haunting. Set amid a group of sideshow performers, the film embraces its outsider ensemble. While rival studio Universal was having luck with monster movies, Browning presented an alternative where the only monsters were gold-digging beauty Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) and her strongman boyfriend Hercules (Henry Victor), who conspire for her to marry and murder a little person named Hans (Harry Earles). Presented as more than oddities, Hans’ friends gang up to defend him. Browning initially took it further, but test audiences were rattled by the characters and their actions (they castrated Hercules!), so the studio recut the picture. After years of cult status, it now looks prescient, anticipating the beauty-in-the-beast themes of “The Shape of Water” and “A Different Man.”

Dario Argento wastes no time, upsetting audiences from the opening shot of his fashionable Italian slasher, as children’s singing accompanies a Christmas stabbing. The film’s music (by prog rock legends Goblin) only gets funkier from there, as does its plot: David Hemmings plays an English pianist who witnesses a murder, which he feels compelled to investigate, even if such meddling seems destined to make him a target for a sadistic assassin, or two — Argento sprang that twist long before “Scream.” At the pinnacle of the giallo form he all but perfected, the Italian helmer luxuriates in stylistic overkill: black gloves, creepy dolls, an ominous mansion and all sorts of cranial trauma as heads are slashed, smashed and, in one triumphant moment, crushed by a speeding car. Those in it for the gore will find blood aplenty, bright as housepaint, as Argento pushes things to graphic new extremes.

Ari Aster’s deeply freaky trance-out of a supernatural thriller starts off as a sinister but familiar tale of a family being torn apart by ghosts. It’s full of things that would look right at home in the megaplex horror-bash-of-the-week: séances with moving objects, decapitated bodies and crawling ants, and the way that Charlie (Milly Shapiro), a gawky odd duck of a girl, glimpses apparitions who could be figures out of a “Smile” sequel. But Aster stages it all with a meditative menace (Toni Collette gives a performance as the anguished mother worthy of Liv Ullmann). And as the film’s mystery shifts over to Peter (Alex Wolff), the family’s morose pothead of a high schooler, you realize that what we’re seeing is a vision of the afterlife taking over the here and now. The climactic sequence is a stunner that makes you feel like you’ve passed through the looking glass.

In Don Siegel’s allegorical B-movie classic, aliens arrive in the form of vegetable-like seed pods that hatch and replace the residents of a small California town. And the thing is, no one can tell the difference! The film’s pod-people-fall-into-line scenario has often been called a metaphor for McCarthyism, but the real meaning of it is less political and more socio-behavioral. The movie, for all the primitive ickiness of its visual effects, is about the conformity of the 1950s, an era so drenched in clean-cut good manners that it was getting hard to spot the messy human emotion beneath. Near the end, when Kevin McCarthy’s desperate doctor looks into the camera and shouts, “They’re here already! You’re next!,” the “they” he’s referring to are the aliens — but really, they came from within.

Don’t let the “2” in the title fool you: Sam Raimi’s outrageous follow-up to shoestring splatter classic “The Evil Dead” is technically a “re-quel,” albeit an unapologetically campy one. That explains how it is that Bruce Campbell’s character Ash (who died in the original) is back, dragging fresh victims to the remote cabin where they’re destined to meet their wildly inventive ends. Left behind at the scene is an ancient text that, once opened, unleashes all manner of unholy mayhem. Armed first with an ax and later a chain saw, Ash takes on his possessed guests, whose over-the-top transformations are now the stuff of legend, courtesy of Greg Nicotero and Raimi’s previous collaborator Tom Sullivan. While “The Evil Dead” had its fans (including Stephen King), its relatively gonzo reboot became a full-blown midnight-movie phenomenon, giving other horror helmers (like Peter Jackson) license to go as far over the top as their imaginations allowed.

Openly critical of Weimar Germany, Fritz Lang’s expressionistic portrait of a society terrorized by a serial killer at large depicts the perils of urbanization. In the big city, vice can slink around undetected, preying on the most vulnerable. Audiences discover the identity of the culprit, memorably embodied by Peter Lorre, early on; though the tormented character’s deeds are unforgivable — he targets children, after all — we’re also meant to recoil as the mob rises up to take its revenge on such a pathetic figure. In the transition from silent cinema to sound, Lang shared Alfred Hitchcock’s instincts for composition and suspense, actively looking to disconcert his audience with oblique angles, oppressive shadows and a new trick: tracking shots. The movie’s greatest horrors are left off-screen but chillingly implied — not just the murders, but the rising specter of Nazi groupthink, a phenomenon the soon-to-be expat feared was reshaping German society for the worse.

While not a conventional horror film, Charles Laughton’s deeply unsettling directorial debut features one of the most terrifying antagonists in all of cinema, courtesy of Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell — a malevolent force who leaves prison with a plan to wed and murder his cellmate’s widow (Shelley Winters). Clad in black and white, the tall, baritone-voiced actor cuts a menacing figure, looming over the other characters, but especially the two orphans, whose surrealistic escape in the latter part of the film marks its most original and oft-copied sequence. Floating down the river with Mitchum’s “preacher” in pursuit, the kids seem to be navigating a waking nightmare. It’s a movie you wouldn’t want to see at their age. Even taken in with adult eyes, it leaves audiences with certain images they’ll never shake, like the sight of “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed across Powell’s knuckles.

Based on a Koji Suzuki bestseller, Hideo Nakata’s ink-black wicked-spirit thriller launched the J-horror trend of the aughts in earnest with its fiercely original and infinitely adaptable premise. “Ringu” yielded a very effective American remake from Gore Verbinski in 2002 as well as various sequels and similar English-language do-overs, such as “Ju-On”-inspired “The Grudge” and “Chakushin Ari” remake “One Missed Call.” Playing on the consequences of watching something you know you shouldn’t — in this case, an illicit VHS tape that kills all who view it within one week — Nakata’s original delivers an anxiety-inducing, David Lynchian marriage of atmosphere and existential terror, most clearly defined by the sight of a ghostly long-haired girl crawling out of a television set. Complex in structure and designed to rattle rather than conjure up short-lived scares, “Ringu” kicked off a brief but influential segment of 21st-century horror.

The most lyrical movie ever made about the dark side of cosmetic surgery. In Georges Franju’s queasy yet disarmingly elegant French shocker, Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), a plastic surgeon in Paris, goes to extreme lengths to restore the face of his daughter, Christine (Édith Scob), who was disfigured in a car accident. He kidnaps and sedates a series of young women, surgically removing each of their faces so that it can be grafted onto Christine’s ruined visage. But none of the transplanted faces work — they get rejected by her body, like a failed heart transplant, which is why he must keep repeating the grisly procedure. Franju uses masks — such as the eerie one Christine wears, which mimics her features — to create a supreme horror of suggestion, tinged with just enough bloody surgical explicitness to get under your skin.

There are horror movies that became infamous for one sequence (like the “Psycho” shower scene), but Rupert Julian’s venerable silent chiller startled audiences as they never had been with one shot: that of the Phantom of the Opera playing his organ, in the catacombs of the Paris Opera House, when Christine — the singer he loves and has made his protégé — reaches from behind his head to see what he looks like. As she rips off his mask, he sits there, screaming in woeful rage, and the revelation of his disfigured face — hair drooping over a corpse-like head, sunken black eyes, the teeth of a madman — is one of the most transfixing images in all of cinema. Lon Chaney, who turned ghastly makeup into an art form, really was the man of a thousand faces, but this face was his most indelible and terrifying. And the movie itself does full justice to a tale that was remade several times, famously on Broadway, though none of them struck the primal chord of the original.

A slow-burn real-world horror film that, when it came out, was unlike any movie that had ever been made. (It still is, despite numerous imitations.) It’s framed as a detective story, with a police officer (Edward Woodward) visiting the Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl. Once there, he learns that the island’s residents have abandoned Christianity to practice a form of Celtic pagan ism, and he tussles with their leaders, Lord Summerisle, played with sinister puckishness by Christopher Lee. The action is all quite low-key and believable, which is what makes the film’s last act so uniquely haunting. It’s not just that we’re witnessing an act of group-sanctioned murder. What we experience, at the climax of “The Wicker Man,” is the unleashing of the cult mentality into the world.

With the exception of Boris Karloff ’s monster in “Frankenstein,” there has never been a Hollywood horror character as undead-yet-larger-than-life as Bela Lugosi’s grandly tuxedoed, rotting-grinned, Hungarian-accented version of Bram Stoker’s legendary vampire. Tod Browning’s film may now appear a bit stagy, yet the cobwebby stillness of Dracula’s castle casts its own timeless spell. From the moment the strains of “Swan Lake” play over the opening credits, we’re drawn into a blood fable of majestic evil, sealed by Lugosi’s gargoyle face and his ominous acting, which turned his very awkwardness with the English language into something otherworldly.

The pinnacle of the Gothic horror genre, Jack Clayton’s atmospheric adaptation of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” follows Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, a dedicated governess entirely unprepared for the challenge of managing two motherless kids. The gig takes her to an eerie mansion on a remote English estate, which just might be haunted. Kerr’s well-cast co-stars suggest that something is not quite right beneath Miles and Flora’s well-mannered behavior — although the film’s genius lies in the ambiguity left around whether something supernatural could be manipulating the children. Or maybe their actions are responsible for the slow unraveling of Miss Giddens’ mind. Either way, “The Innocents” destabilizes mostly on a psychological level, packing a couple armrest-wrenching frights (that face in the window!). Clayton’s elegant classic set a high bar, influencing everything from “The Others” to Mike Flanagan’s Netflix miniseries “The Haunting of Bly Manor.”

Wes Craven harnessed ’90s irony into this meta masterpiece: a slasher with a cast of characters who have all seen these movies before. Quickly throwing off audience expectations by killing off presumed star Drew Barrymore in the first scene, “Scream” bucked expectations throughout. The gorgeous young cast was smart and capable, the killer could be knocked down during fights and the mystery was solved by the crew’s obsession with scary flicks and the tropes therein. Craven effectively rewrote the rules of horror by acknowledging them and shocking audiences too hip to be fooled by classic Hollywood. Beyond introducing a Halloween costume for the ages in the killer Ghostface, “Scream” revitalized the genre: Kevin Williamson’s script proved that, in addition to dead teens, gory movies could be quippy and have heart.

By the end of the ’90s, slasher movies had drained all surprise from the horror genre. Audiences could predict every kill — until three actors trekked into the woods with a 35-page script and no clue what might happen to them. A bad found-footage movie — which “The Blair Witch Project” inspired in droves — is the same old schlock that we always see filmed on a shaky camera. But this film is a triumph of frustration and suspense. We, too, can barely see past the next tree, making us as jumpy as the characters. Consider this stat: In 1999, 11% of all internet users had visited the movie’s website, and Heather Donahue’s centerpiece monologue became an instant meme. Yet her largely improvised role is one of horror’s great performances. On your next watch, frame it as a nightmare about a female director desperate to break into the biz.

A decade after “Night of the Living Dead,” George A. Romero returned to horror and the zombie genre he’d effectively invented, this time with a very different message. Now in color — with blood as crimson as melted crayons and dull gray makeup (both courtesy of Tom Savini) for the lumbering dead — the bigger-budget, much-gorier sequel is still keenly attuned to conflict between Black and white characters. But it’s the masses’ mindless relationship to consumerism that underlies the film’s social critique, as a small group of survivors chooses an abandoned shopping mall to hole up and resupply in. Well, not quite abandoned: The place is crawling with zombies, who swarm the doors like rabid Black Friday shoppers. “This was an important place in their lives,” speculates David Emge’s character. But it’s also an important place for the living, who play out a capitalist fantasy — the no-limits shopping spree — while society crumbles around them.

A transcendently spooky, one-of-a-kind shoestring gem. Produced and directed by Herk Harvey, an industrial filmmaker who shot it in Lawrence, Kan., for $33,000, “Carnival of Souls” has a grainy pre-media dread, and a weirdness quotient that makes it the ultimate midnight movie to watch on TV. It follows a young woman named Mary (Candace Hilligoss) who survives a car accident and moves to Salt Lake City, where she’s hired as a church organist. But she’s drawn, inexorably, to the abandoned pavilion on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, a looming found-object movie set out of a dream. The film’s stilted expressionistic atmosphere is equal parts Bergman and Ed Wood as it turns into a symphony of scary faces, culminating in a twist that will floor you.

Mario Bava, the maestro of Italian horror, was the key stylistic progenitor of the giallo film. Yet even as his style grew ever more florid and violent and baroque, he never made a movie more powerful than his first. Shot in the moodiest of studio-system black and white, it was originally called (in Italy) “La Maschera del Demonio” (“The mask of the demon”), and that title nods to its arresting image of gruesome terror: In the opening interlude, set in 1630s Moldavia, Asa, a witch played by the spooky-eyed Barbara Steele, is sentenced to death for sorcery — but before she can be burned at the stake, a bronze mask with a spike on the inside is hammered into her face. What follows is her tale of vengeance, set two centuries later, one that moves with the fog-filled logic of a backlot dream. That spiked mask will come back to chill us, as Bava summons a force of horror that was notably rare in 1960: the power of feminine wrath.

Writer-director Jordan Peele takes a simple premise — a Black man (Daniel Kaluuya) meets the rich family of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) — and turns it into a funny, bold and unnerving look at race and identity in America. But in the second half of the film, the veneer of good manners gradually melts away, and Peele reveals the full scope of the evil he’s conjured. What previously felt like a barbed satire of casual everyday racism blows up into a full-on freak show, complete with monsters who happen to be sadly, recognizably human. Peele returned to the horror-arena-as-metaphor in “Us” and “Nope,” but none of his follow-up films reached the id-shaking heights of his debut, for which won Peele a much-deserved original screenplay Oscar for its ingenuity and complex yet accessible ideas. It’s a crowd-pleaser with something on its mind: the intractable bigotry of white Americans, which finds ways to persevere no matter how much society advances.

The mythic image of the Mummy, one of the most fabled of Universal Pictures’ gallery of 1930s monsters, is that of a humanoid figure, wrapped in ancient moldy bandages, stalking his victims through the night. But the revelation of Karl Freund’s moody original “Mummy” film, starring Boris Karloff as Imhotep, an Egyptian from 1290 B.C. who’s brought to life by a team of modern archaeologists, is what a disturbingly suggestive and even romantic movie it is. Karloff ’s Imhotep, with skin like rotting wallpaper and eyes that burn through the ages, is an ardent soul trapped in the body of a man who’d been buried alive for the crime of trying to resurrect his dead lover (a soap-opera plot, though not one you ever saw on “The Days of Our Lives”). No other “Mummy” movie can touch its insidious blend of terror and despair.

Although it debuted to mixed reactions — and was panned by author Stephen King — Stanley Kubrick’s crazy-making adaptation is dense and deranged enough to inspire repeat viewings, launching decades of conspiracy theories and obsessive analysis. Hack writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) and his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), are tasked with care-taking the isolated — and very haunted — Overlook Hotel. While his son (Danny Lloyd) explores the corridors, Jack begins to lose his mind, taking suggestions from the ghosts around him. Duvall and Nicholson are acting to the rafters. But the real star is the Overlook, where indescribable terror lurks behind every corner: an elevator exploding in a river of blood, spooky twins, the dead guest in the green bathroom — and that’s all before Nicholson lifts his ax. Infusing every frame with a suffocating dread, Kubrick delivers a master class in visual storytelling and pace, tantalizing audiences as they anticipate the horrible delights in store.

Only in France would a man’s wife and mistress team up to do him in. But it’s what happens next that makes Henri-Georges Clouzot’s black-and-white shocker most interesting. Véra Clouzot (who was married to the director at the time) and Simone Signoret drown Paul Meurisse’s character in the tub, then dump his corpse in the school pool. Instead of being discovered there, as they’d planned, the body goes missing — and eerie, impossible things start to happen. Seconds after the twist ending plays out, a warning appears: “Don’t be diabolical,” pleads the message, instructing viewers not to spoil the surprise for others. We wouldn’t dare, other than to say what makes the movie so effective even today is that audiences don’t know what they’re watching. Is it a murder mystery? A ghost story? No wonder Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make the movie himself — but Clouzot beat him to it.

Roger Ebert referred to them as “dead teenager movies,” demoralized by the number of “Black Christmas” knockoffs he was obliged to sit through during the 1980s (and resenting them even more once “Friday the 13th” applied giallo-level gore to the genre). Conceptually, John Carpenter’s quickie copy-cat script — originally titled “The Babysitter Murders” — was no better, but he executed it so well, “Halloween” set the template for all that followed. Its tricks became so codified over the next quarter century, Kevin Williamson could rip them off in his script for “Scream,” describing the typical no-talent girl “who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door” (the exception being future Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis, who outsmarted masked killer Michael Myers in one installment after another). Carpenter’s creative choices were the treat, from creepy tracking shots that suggested the killer’s POV to the director’s suspense-amplifying synthesizer score.

Nicolas Roeg’s splendidly creepy thriller is full of sinister portents and disturbing cuts, all driven by Roeg’s visionary skill as a cinematic manipulator of time and memory. The stars, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, were considered deliriously sexy at the time, but seen now they look more or less like what they were playing — a handsome but ordinary middle-class couple still reeling in grief from the accidental death of their young daughter. The film is set in Venice, where Sutherland’s character, an art restorer, renovates an old church, and Roeg’s depiction of Venice as a city of ghosts is the film’s secret weapon — a landscape so eerie and foreboding that menace haunts every canal, until it finally jumps out of the shadows and grabs you. Adapting Daphne du Maurier’s short story, Roeg creates the cinema’s first modern Gothic, the first portrayal of a supernatural world that seems to be unfolding in a place where such things were too corny to exist. A free-floating dread drapes “Don’t Look Now” like a fog, but the movie is about something more than scaring you (though it does that brilliantly at the climax, which might be the mother of all jump scares). It’s about a tear in the cosmic fabric.

Last year’s “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” may have found a loophole in copyright law, allowing its makers to butcher someone else’s characters, but thinly disguised rip-offs are hardly new in the horror genre. German director F.W. Murnau oversaw the best example more than a century ago, merely changing a few names, while lifting the rest from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”: a visit to the Transylvanian vampire’s castle, the transfer of its coffin by ship, etc. His producers didn’t bother to obtain the rights, which landed them in court with the author’s estate — and yet, what makes “Nosferatu” remarkable are the elements it invented. Through body language alone, silent actor Max Schreck created a terrifying figure, trusting the silhouette to intimidate: His pointed ears and bulging eyes peer out above hunched shoulders, while his long bony fingers curl like talons. Of course, now that “Nosferatu” has entered the public domain, others are free to exploit the character.

Hannibal Lecter is not the serial killer the Feds are seeking in Jonathan Demme’s top-of-its-class psychological thriller. That would be Ted Levine’s Buffalo Bill. Still, it says a lot that we find Anthony Hopkins’ criminally insane shrink even more diabolical than the twisted headcase assembling a flesh suit from his female victims’ hides. Tough and visibly daunted by the task at hand, Jodie Foster aces the role of a rookie assigned to enlist a psychopath’s help. Lecter may be the one locked behind bulletproof glass, and yet, he holds all the power (to the extent that he can convince the prisoner next door to off himself). Credit Hopkins with infusing his cold-blooded character with such a sophisticated sense of menace, which makes his mind games feel rigged from the start — and in fact, they are, as he’s several steps ahead the whole way … and roaming free at the end.

A monster movie as grand and terrifying and dreamy and awesome as its title character. Kong, the giant gorilla who is uprooted from his prehistoric home and brought to New York City to be the ultimate sideshow attraction, is a fearsome beast — but he’s also a gargantuan innocent who becomes a figure of touching and tragic circumstance. In scenes set in the primeval dinosaur jungles of Skull Island, Willis O’Brien’s revolutionary stop-motion effects have retained every bit of their wonder, and the miracle of Kong’s presence is the emotion it conjures. When he grabs the original scream queen, the beguiling Fay Wray, and climbs to the top of the Empire State Building, battling the propeller planes that want to shoot him down, no film about an otherworldly creature of elemental fear was ever so moving.

Two years after “Star Wars” gave us a family-friendly dose of science fiction, director Ridley Scott swung audiences hard in the opposite direction, depicting as dark and threatening an image of space travel as had ever been seen. Dan O’Bannon hatched the script as a low-budget B movie (to be called “Star Beast”), but Fox bought into the concept in a big way, resulting in an unprecedented sci-fi experiment: a well-funded, R-rated monster movie, directed by a relatively unproven director of TV commercials. Scott had made just one feature, “The Duellists,” but he had a gift for atmosphere and shared O’Bannon’s belief in Swiss artist H.R. Giger’s nightmarish designs. And thus, the single scariest creature in film history was born, as if dredged from our unconscious, still dripping in toxic amniotic fluids. Throw in an epic jump scare (the chest burster) and a titanium-tough female protagonist (Sigourney Weaver), and the sci-fi horror genre would never be the same.

Pure fairy-tale horror bliss. Adapting Stephen King’s first novel, a kind of Cinderella-goes-to-the-prom-and-gets-a-bloodbath, Brian De Palma made a movie mired in suspense, yet he also connected fully with the human side of the story in a way that’s rare for him. Sissy Spacek’s Carrie, the cringing high school wallflower who suffers a sort of scene-to-scene PTSD at the hands of her raging fundamentalist mother (not to mention the mean girls at school), is so touching in her freckled-geek vulnerability that Spacek’s performance is transporting. What she and Piper Laurie, as the psycho mama, play out is nothing less than “The Glass Menagerie” with “dirty pillows” and flying knives. And the climactic sequence at the prom is suffused with such teetering romance that when it turns into a massacre, the audience feels like it’s fusing with the demons of Carrie’s telekinetic vengeance. The final shocker effectively set up the end of “Halloween,” and it’s the scariest outro of any horror movie.

Even sight unseen, no film in the history of cinema intimidates audiences more than Italian agit-poet Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final attack on decadent society. A scathing rebuke of both fascism (hence the location, a villa on Lake Garda, where Mussolini spent his last two years) and neo-capitalism (in which even the human body becomes a commodity for consumption), Pasolini’s obscene art-house endurance test mirrors the Marquis de Sade’s most controversial work, as 16 nubile innocents are rounded up and subjected to unspeakable degradation — from graphic mutilation to a demented coprophilic banquet — not by libertines (as in the novel) but by four intellectual elites: Duke, Bishop, Magistrate and President. For years, this incendiary and widely banned object was all but impossible to see, taunting the imagination with its illicit reputation and explicit stills of unflinching torture scenes. For those daring enough to track it down, “Salò” has lost none of its power to shock. It depicts cruel and extreme perversions, to be sure, but “Salò” should not be mistaken for pornography. Rather, Pasolini’s twisted litmus test implicates the viewer in its violence. By confronting the worst, we must also reckon with that which attracts us to it.

The ultimate and perfect monster movie. Let’s not forget that in the early ’30s, Boris Karloff ’s creature, now the quintessential overfamiliar icon of Old Hollywood horror, was an image of pure disfigured terror, with dead eyes embedded in a head that was a square block of flesh, and a hulking physique that was homicidal almost by happenstance. Adapting Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, director James Whale made a Gothic Faustian sci-fi drama that’s a masterpiece of storytelling (so much happens in the film … and it’s only 69 minutes long). Colin Clive’s performance as the mad doctor, possessed by his desire to bring what is dead to life, is driven by a hysteria at once cracked and reverent (“It’s alive!”). And Karloff ’s genius, under all that makeup, was to give the creature a wounded vulnerability without ever quite making him conscious.

It’s no secret that a great many horror films are rooted in the depiction of male rage against women. You don’t see the reverse too often, but it would be no exaggeration to say that Takashi Miike’s ultraviolent thriller is the “Citizen Kane” of visionary sadistic feminist revenge fantasies. The film lures us in with restrained cunning, as it conjures a sympathy for Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi), a widower whose movie- producer friend arranges a mock casting audition for him so that he can find a new wife. He meets Asami (Eihi Shiina) and thinks he’s found the ideal mate. But don’t judge a geisha wife by her cover. Asami is a warped victim whose mission is to put men through the tortures of the damned. Miike stages the film like a suburban grand opera set in a pain-freak inferno. Your jaw will drop in horror, yet “Audition” is no exploitation movie. It’s a cathartic drama in which Shiina’s performance conjures a terrifying image of the dark side of empowerment.

From Dracula to Frankenstein to (real-world sicko) Jack the Ripper, so many of America’s most fearsome monsters were European in origin. But not the zombie. Despite in-name-only connections to Caribbean voodoo, the notion of brain-dead corpses rising from their graves — as presented in George A. Romero’s genre-defining classic — is as homegrown a fear as horror cinema has to offer, and like the vaguely defined contagion featured in “Night of the Living Dead,” it has spawned hordes of imitators. A lean, low-budget, black-and-white shocker (released at a time when nearly two-thirds of American films were made in color), the original remains the most potent: The world as we know it has spun out of control, and the only place to hide is a vulnerable farmhouse, where the flesh-eating remains of our fellow citizens have turned against us. By casting Black actor Duane Jones in the lead, Romero gave audiences additional social commentary to read into a film born at a time of racial tensions and civil unrest.

By the end of the 1960s, the idea that the devil was at large in the world didn’t seem like a far-fetched notion. Roman Polanski’s brilliantly disturbing thriller is rooted in a fearful vision of pregnancy that’s sympathetic to the very women it could give a nightmare to. But it also winks at a society that’s warming up to court the apocalypse. It’s the most intimate movie about Satan ever made. Mia Farrow, in a Vidal Sassoon haircut that becomes a ghoulish form of death-camp chic, gives a memorable performance as Rosemary, the innocent wife of an ambitious stage actor (John Cassavetes) who makes a deal with the cult of devil worshippers next door. They will summon Satan to make Rosemary pregnant, and he’ll get the career he wants. Ruth Gordon, as the devil’s noodge who assigns herself to look after Rosemary, personifies the banality of evil, and the film generates such supreme paranoia and suspense that it stands as one of the last great pieces of classical movie-making to emerge from the New Hollywood.

A good horror movie gives audiences a couple really good jolts. It might even motivate them to sleep with the lights on that night. But few have so fundamentally altered human behavior the way “Jaws” did, compelling millions to steer clear of the water. Sure, sharks had always been scary, but the young Steven Spielberg’s chaotic-to-make (but ultimately mega-successful) blockbuster gave normal folks reason to fear they might be attacked in the most unlikely of places: in lakes, pools and beaches where nary a fin had ever been sighted. The opening scene — an ill-fated midnight swim — hinted at what could be lurking beneath the surface, while the decision to shoot from the shark’s POV (plus John Williams’ pulse-accelerating score) let our imaginations do the work. By the time the giant prop shark attacks the boat at the end, audiences had invested the prehistoric species with nearly supernatural power. The danger may have been exaggerated, but the threat felt real.

Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest film is such a landmark of cinematic horror that it’s almost hard to believe how it was greeted in 1960: as an effective but decidedly low-rent affair, a kind of sordid fun house. Sixty-four years later, there’s a reason that every detail and motif of “Psycho” — birds, drains, eyes, windshield wipers, stairway, swamp, madly shrieking violins, not to mention Mrs. Bates’ Victorian-bunned head — is nothing less than iconic. Hitchcock took his TV crew and made a trapdoor Gothic mystery of primal terror that invites us to watch ourselves watching it. In the film’s most famous scene (78 shots of agonizingly protracted living death), he pulled the plastic shower curtain out from under us so profoundly that it’s as if the movie were killing off not just Marion Crane but God himself: the sense, going forward, that anyone’s goodness would be enough to protect them. From that moment on, we’re putty in the Master’s hands. The more you watch “Psycho,” the more you see that Anthony Perkins’ performance channels a cunning and terror for the ages.

Before director William Friedkin got his hands on William Peter Blatty’s novel, on-screen possession was little more than a parlor trick: glorified hypnosis, where a suggestible victim’s eyes glazed over and they did the bidding of someone else. Blatty tapped into something far more ancient, a phenomenon that even religious experts struggled to explain. Half a century later, Friedkin’s (reportedly faint-inducing) classic remains so compelling because everyone involved commits to the realism of demonic possession. As Linda Blair’s Regan slides ever deeper toward the dark side, Ellen Burstyn channels the parental panic of not knowing what’s wrong with your child. Her unflinching commitment to rational explanations sets up the unhinged bed-levitating, head-rotating shenanigans ahead, such that the sight of an arteriogram feels every bit as traumatic as Regan projectile vomiting. The evil feels extreme, but also believable. In this day and age, would you trust the Catholic Church to fix it?

Very few horror movies possess the quality of a true nightmare — that transcendently scary bad dream you can’t wake up from, because it feels like it’s really happening. In 1974, just the title of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” could put the fear into you. Hearing those four words — Texas. Chain. Saw. Massacre. — you could almost see the movie unspooling before your eyes, like some bat-house snuff film. Yet as more and more people experienced it, the most shocking thing about “Texas Chain Saw” turned out to be what a masterpiece of terror it was. Tobe Hooper directed it with a lyrical suspense worthy of an existential grindhouse Hitchcock. He took the story of five post- hippie teenagers driving a van through the Texas wilds and turned it into a plunge into the American abyss.

The film’s central image is that of a mentally arrested mute hulk named Leatherface, who wears a mask of human skin and wields a power tool that metes out torture and death in equal measure. He’s the granddaddy of the slasher genre’s masked killers (Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees), but they all operated out of rage. Leatherface was driven by something else — he was a butcher, killing people like cattle, going on a rampage that seemed to act out something larger than mere homicide. Call it the slaughter of empathy.

There’s a reason “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” has cast such a shadow over the last half-century of horror films. As much as “Psycho” or “The Exorcist,” it created a mythology of horror, one that feels even more resonant today than it did 50 years ago. The film channeled the descent of the American spirit that we can now feel all around us. In the end, what “Chain Saw” revels in with such disturbing majesty, and what makes it more indelible and haunting than any other horror film, is its image of madness as the driving energy of the world: Leatherface, swinging his chain saw around in front of the rising sun, his crazed dance of death not just a ritual but a warning — that the center will not hold. That something wicked this way comes.