The 8 scariest movies of all time

Shauna Macdonald stars in 'The Descent' (2005)

(Image credit: Maximum Film / Alamy)

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'Annihilation'
'Audition'
'The Blair Witch Project'
'It Follows'
'Nope'
'Texas Chain Saw Massacre'
'The Descent'
'The Shining'

published 9 August 2024

Osgood Perkins' creepy flick "Longlegs," starring Nicolas Cage as a flamboyant serial killer with an occult sensibility, has been called the "scariest movie of the year" by some critics and fans. But not everyone is impressed, and its release has sparked a lively debate about what the scariest movies of all time are.

These eight movies are sure to chill and thrill you for years to come — and with autumn fast-approaching, now's a good time to start digging in.

A mangled bear who howls with the voice of a dead friend. An overgrown alligator with shark teeth. Your doppelganger cornering you in a lonely lighthouse. Alex Garland's "Annihilation" serves up images that linger and haunt. A mysterious phenomenon is spreading up the Florida coastline, perverting the landscape, and five women scientists dare to journey inside it. "The film has one eye on the 'final girl' structure of horror films throughout its expedition, and the ending takes that phrase, turns it inside out and shatters it into a thousand refracted points of light," said Vulture.

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Takashi Miike's Japanese horror flick is (in)famous in large part due to the spectacularly evil but seemingly sweet she-devil at its center. Pretty young Asami is "an avenger, bent on punishing" the male lead, Aoyama, for his "typically Japanese male arrogance, but also his self-pity and his incipient masochism," said The Guardian. Let's just say that his punishment involves slow, painful torture.

This classic kickstarted the found-footage trend and miraculously holds up 25 years later. Amid the desolation of a forest in late fall, three film students attempt to make a documentary about a witch known only by local legend. "It has no fancy special effects or digital monsters, but its characters get lost in the woods, hear noises in the night and find disturbing stick figures hanging from trees," said Robert Ebert. "The movie is like a celebration of rock-bottom production values — of how it doesn't take bells and whistles to scare us."

Sometimes an atmosphere of creeping dread is worse than any jump scare. The concept here is simple: What if a malevolent entity followed you, slowly but surely, always appearing in different human forms? Maika Monroe stars as a high schooler who sleeps with a guy, then learns he has passed her a hideous curse. The "single, relentlessly advancing figure" seems to represent the inevitability of death, said Gizmodo — "the entire movie is about realizing your own mortality."

In Jordan Peele's latest, a pair of siblings who own a California horse ranch encounter a giant UFO. "Nope" boasts some of the most visceral horror scenes ever, courtesy of two very different set pieces: the first is inside the flying saucer, after the beast devours a crowd of people and digests them alive; the second is on the soundstage of a television show after a seemingly trained chimp massacres the cast. "While off-camera attacks are only seen in shrewd glimpses," Peele's sound design suggests "scenes of grisly violence," said Kristy Puchko for Mashable. "I literally had nightmares just about these sounds."

Horror flicks set in broad daylight are impressive in that they cannot rely on the dark for cheap thrills. Tobe Hooper's sun-drenched and grimy masterpiece, about a group of friends who stumble on a family of cannibals, is one such movie. "Despite its unsubtle title, this is a formally exquisite art film, packed full of gorgeously nightmarish images, as poetic as they are deranged," said The New York Times. The most famous, of course, is the chainsaw-wielding "Leatherface."

If you are claustrophobic, you might want to sit this one out. Neil Marshall's spelunking movie is at once an ode to the power of female friendship, a creature feature and a (wo)man-versus-nature survival tale. A group of close friends do some cave exploration in the Appalachians, only to find themselves trapped underground and at the mercy of some very unpleasant monsters — and each other. The scares are effective because of how convincingly the relationships between the women are portrayed, for better and worse.

Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's novel packs a series of unsettling elements together like compressed snow: the isolation of a wintery landscape; a creepy kid with psychic powers; paralyzing writer's block; a toxic marriage. The most obvious scares come from Jack Nicholson's axe-wielding, but the more inexplicable frights — murdered twins, rotting women in bathtubs, a man in a bear suit — come courtesy of the haunted Overlook Hotel. The movie is "not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them," said Roger Ebert.

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Anya Jaremko-Greenwold has worked as a story editor at The Week since 2024. She previously worked at FLOOD Magazine, Woman's World, First for Women, DGO Magazine and BOMB Magazine. Anya's culture writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Jezebel, Vice and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.