The 10 Scariest Movies of All Time, Ranked
“Why are you doing this to us?”
“Because you were home.”
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Every horror fan seems to have a memory of a movie that still lurks in their imagination, making some prosaic part of their life full of fear. Jaws (1975) made people afraid to go in the water, The Exorcist (1973) sparked a worldwide fascination with demonic possession and The Ring (2002) made our ordinary television sets terrifying. To some extent, scares are subjective and what terrifies one viewer may seem banal to another. However, there are some movies that widely thought to be well-constructed and scarier than the rest.
Here are the 10 scariest movies ever made, ranked from least to most scary:
10. The Host (2006)
Academy Award winning director Bong Joon-ho made this creature feature about a South Korean family whose lives are disrupted by the sudden appearance of a monster from the Han river. The monster kidnaps Park Hyun-seo, the pre-teen daughter of Park Gang-du, a vendor who runs a snack bar with his father. The Park family search for Hyun-seo as the government disseminates misinformation via the media.
9. REC (2007)
An intense Spanish found-footage horror movie about a reporter, Ángela Vidal (Manuela Velasco), and her cameraman, Pablo (Pablo Rosso), who get quarantined inside an apartment building where an outbreak is occurring. The residents of the apartment building panic, and the infected become violent. Investigators believe one resident’s dog started a bizarre kind of rabies outbreak that spreads extremely fast, but, throughout the terrifying night, the bigger truth is eventually revealed.
8. Sinister (2012)
Sinister is a suspenseful supernatural horror movie about a true crime writer, Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), who moves his unwitting family into a murder house in order to research his next book. Unfortunately he uncovers a supernatural element to the murders, a demonic entity named Bughuul. Bughuul grooms children to murder their families and then allow him to consume their souls. Ellison races to piece together the series of family murders and Bughuul’s motive while living in the haunted murder scene.
7. Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018)
Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum is a South Korean found-footage ghost movie about a web series crew who do a live broadcast from a haunted psychiatric hospital hoping to gain views. At the asylum, they begin filming and notice a doll moving on its own. Things get stranger and scarier as they find coffins, footage they didn’t film, and one of the crew becomes catatonic.
6. Stephen King’s It (1990)
Originally a television miniseries, It terrorized many people’s childhoods as they thought “how scary can a movie about a clown be?” Years later those same people still feel uneasy when they walk by a sewer drain. It is about a group of outcast kids (“The Loser’s Club”) in Derry, Maine in 1960 who connect a string of missing children to an evil entity who surfaces in the town every 27 years to feed. After the kids manage defeat It as children, the entity reemerges when they are adults, and they must return to Derry to fight again.
5. Cure (1997)
This deeply unsettling Japanese psychological horror movie follows Detective Takabe (Kōji Yakusho) as he investigates a series of murders in which the individual culprits are easy to find, but seemingly have no motive other than a sudden urge to murder. The crimes are also connected by the murderers carving an ‘X’ into their victims. Unable to make sense of the crimes through reason, Takabe’s investigation leads him to the occult. Martin Scorsese said of the film: “There are startling images and moments in this picture that will haunt you for a long time to come, and I suppose I should say that it’s not for the faint of heart. But be brave, because it’s worth it.”
4. The Shining (1980)
Beginning in 1975, Stanley Kubrick began looking to make a horror movie that would be both terrifying and artistic. After reviewing dozens of horror novels he settled on Stephen King’s The Shining, which had not even gone into print yet. While Kubrick deviated from the novel, his film is still about a family of three (Jack, Wendy and Danny) who settle into a remote hotel, The Overlook, for winter where the family’s fledgling patriarch has found a job as the offseason caretaker. The hotel’s evil history, ghosts, Jack’s struggle with alcohol addiction, generational family abuse, and Danny’s psychic talent (“shining”) converge to create a story that is incredibly scary for both supernatural and real-life elements.
3. The Strangers (2008)
After a failed engagement at a friend’s wedding, couple James and Kristen plan to spend the night at James’ isolated family summer home. Despite being exceptionally late, the doorbell rings shortly after their arrival, and a young girl asks for someone the couple is unfamiliar with (“Is Tamara home?”). Through a series of jump scares, the couple realizes that they are being stalked by three masked assailants with seemingly no purpose other than to terrorize them.
2. The Ring (2002)
A remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film Ring, The Ring started the J-horror craze in America. The movie follows a single mother, Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts), who works as a journalist. Rachel investigates the death of her niece and her niece’s friends, who all died at 10pm the same night. She discovers an urban legend about a cursed videotape in which viewers die seven days after watching.
1. Hereditary (2018)
Hereditary is director Ari Aster’s feature debut, and he started off with a literal bang. Early in the film the character the audience presumes will be a main character is suddenly — and gruesomely — beheaded in an extremely upsetting accident that leaves the Graham family suffocating in the wake of trauma. The trauma fractures the family unit, leaving them vulnerable for a demon king named Paimon.
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