The best Halloween movies of all time (updated for 2026)

Wes Craven spent the ‘80s slicing up teenagers, then reinvigorated his career the next decade by making a movie making fun of movies about killing teenagers. But for all its winking meta-humour, Scream is itself an all-time great slasher. Not only did it remind everyone of Craven’s brilliance, it made mainstream horror cool again – although it’d be a long while before Hollywood produced anything in the genre quite as good.

Let this be the year—if you haven’t already done so—to finally work up the courage to see Tobe Hooper’s criminally underrated classic, a top-rank satire of American class warfare (survival of the hungriest), teenage misadventure in the backwoods and one of the darkest masterpieces of the ’70s. Though shrouded in a gruesome reputation generated by that title, Texas isn’t particularly gory. It is, however, the scariest movie ever made.

Dario Argento’s grim fairy tale doesn’t sound like much on paper: a timid American dancer enrols at a spooky European ballet academy and soon discovers strange phenomena are afoot. But that simple premise allows the giallo master plenty of room to stretch out, splattering the screen with unreal colours, staging some gnarly death scenes and blowing out eardrums via the truly hair-raising score from spooky Italian prog rockers Goblin.

If you don’t watch Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the classic Stephen King novel at least once every October, you’re doing spooky season all wrong. Jack Nicholson is gleefully over the top as Jack Torrance, a writer who agrees to housesit a creepy old hotel during its winter offseason, along with his wife and kid, and finds himself beset by the worst case of cabin fever ever documented. You may know all the iconic scenes – the elevator full of blood, the ghost twins, ‘Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!’ – but the movie holds secrets that continually unveil themselves, even after dozens of viewings. For instance: why does Jack keep looking at me?  

Even with the volume pumped up, it’s less terrifying than creepy, but on those limited grounds, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s low-budget hit is pure gold. The scariest part is how these kids can’t put their cameras down, regardless of how much supernatural danger they’re in. Don’t say this movie wasn’t prophetic.

Hell hath no fury like a dream girl cursed to love. In this leftfield smash – the fifth highest grossing horror movie ever – a shy music-store clerk wishes upon a magic novelty toy to ‘win’ the affections of his crush, and gets far more than he bargained for. Inde Navarrette gives a startling breakout performance that’s both outsized and internalised, playing a woman in the throes of supernatural possession who seems to be pleading for freedom from just behind her eyes.

Ghost stories got a high-tech makeover in this punishing suburban smash, now seen as a secret critique of American materialism: Your TV set will eat you. (It’s all the more surprising that it was “ghost-directed” by family-friendly producer Steven Spielberg.) Production values were lavish, including some early blue-screen work and stunning lighting, but a possessed toy clown remains the unforgettable scare.

Presaging HBO’s Tales from the Crypt in bringing the goofily macabre vision of 1950s EC Comics to the screen, this George Romero-helmed anthology is Halloween in a nutshell: frightening, yes, but cut with enough knowing silliness that it’s more fun than truly traumatic. Admittedly, though, the first Creepshow does have some pretty freaky stuff in it, perhaps most memorably the segment in which a curmudgeonly germaphobe’s apartment is invaded by an army of cockroaches.     

Initially dismissed, John Carpenter’s bloody-disgusting remake of the ‘50s B-movie The Thing From Another World has come to be seen as a true sci-fi horror classic, and rightly so. It’s not entirely because of the awesomely gross special effects, either – although the various mutations devised by make-up whiz Rob Bottin are really some of the nastiest of all-time. What makes it so scary is the sense of deeply-felt paranoia that hangs over every scene. Infected by an alien organism capable of assimilating any other living being, a team of isolated Arctic researchers begin to turn on each other, building to an ambiguous finale as unsettling as anything Carpenter has done.   

In the era of so-called ‘elevated horror’, the Final Destination franchise has succeeded by never pretending to be anything other than what it is: effectively a glorified YouTube mixtape of anonymous youngsters getting slaughtered in hilariously convoluted ways. Some instalments are better than others, but the best might be the sixth and most recent film. Arriving after a 14-year pause, it almost certainly contains the single best kill of the series, a Rube Goldbergian mishap involving a shard of glass, a giant Jenga tower, a malfunctioning trampoline and a lawnmower.

So much more than just a vampire movie, Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster is bursting with big ideas about race, religion and cultural heritage, while still being an extremely kick-ass vampire movie full of blood, sex and Michael B Jordan shooting a Tommy gun. In the 1930s Mississippi Delta, a Black-owned juke joint is besieged by banjo-strumming, step-dancing bloodsuckers – a familiar narrative structure that Coogler electrifies with thrilling action sequences, nasty gore and a hallucinatory musical number for the ages.

What is up with these hippies, swearing at their parents, laughing at authority and vomiting up their dinner? They sure could use some talking to by a priest. (Never let anyone tell you that horror doesn’t express the anxieties of the moment.) The pea-soup industry still hasn’t recovered from its product’s memorable “cameo” in this film. The power of Christ compels you to see it again.

A woman arrives at a rental home one rainy night in a part of Detroit that redefines ‘bad neighbourhood’, only to discover an unexpected guest already staying there. If you think you know where this is going, you have no friggin’ idea. Writer-director Zach Cregger’s pre-Weapons breakthrough is a work of devilish misdirection, swerving into a #MeToo satire that’s equal parts funny, shocking and nauseating.

People remember the film’s look: motes of dust hanging in the air, Jerry Goldsmith’s shivery orchestral score, an atmosphere thick with dread. But Ridley Scott’s chest-bursting horror landmark has a lot more going for it under the hood. It’s a sexually radical sci-fi film that turns men into pregnant hosts—and a woman, Sigourney Weaver, into the most iconic hero in genre filmmaking.

Somewhere between a sequel, a remake and a reboot, Sam Raimi’s follow-up to his mega–influential low-budget gorefest nearly gives his own film the Scary Movie treatment, taking the same basic premise, of kids going into the woods and inadvertently conjuring demonic spirits, and adding heaping amounts of slapstick to the parade of viscera. And y’know, it’s probably the better of the two, in part because star Bruce Campbell is somehow Buster Keaton and Humphrey Bogart rolled into one, and because it features 100 percent less tree-rape.   

You know you’re watching a modern horror classic when the sudden decapitation of a child is only, like, the fourth most shocking thing to happen in a movie. Another good indicator: the movie is directed by Ari Aster. The New York horror wunderkind established himself as a master of the genre right out of the gate with this deeply unsettling debut feature about a family collapsing under the weight of its own buried secrets. You’ll be thinking about it far longer than is good for your mental wellbeing.  

What does a barely 20-year-old zoomer know about the 1990s, therapy, middle-age regret, male inadequacy and the strange unease conjured by homogenous suburban office spaces? Enough to make one of the singularly disquieting horror films of the 2020s. Director Kane Parsons adapted the viral YouTube series he made as a teen to the big screen, and lost little in the translation. Chiwetel Ejiofor is a furniture-store owner who stumbles upon an interdimensional labyrinth of carpeted floors, yellowish walls and fluorescent lights. As he explores further and further, his grip on reality slips — culminating in the most disturbing game of Is It Cake? ever played.

Proof that digital video and zombie apocalypses go together like moldy peaches and rancid cream (we mean that as a compliment), Danny Boyle’s epic portrait of a post-traumatic stress disordered Britain is near perfect. Here’s where all those fast-running zombies come from—the flip side to Trainspotting’s euphoric running. But there’s also real poetry in the movie’s empty London.

A zeitgeisty sensation, an Oscar winner and (most importantly) a timely culture changer that brought us all to the "sunken place," Jordan Peele's enormously confident directorial debut did more for the reputation of horror—as a vessel for sociopolitical commentary—than any movie since Night of the Living Dead.

Every expectant mother, deep down, worries about the relationship they’ll have with their child, but none expects to raise the literal son of Satan – at least, they didn’t, until the release of Richard Donner’s blockbuster, which forever has parents checking their new babies for the mark of the beast. It’s not as artful as Rosemary’s Baby, but it’s much easier to watch, and still chills to the bone.

An unabashed exercise in retro horror, director Ti West’s excellent throwback to the Satanic panic slashers of the 1980s gets so many period details right that halfway through you’re liable to think you’re watching a video nasty grabbed from a rental store shelf during the Reagan years. A financially desperate college student (Jocelin Donahue) takes a babysitting job at a creepy house in the country, and it’s all pizza and solo Walkman dance sessions…until she gets a bit too curious about what’s behind the locked door upstairs. 

Michael Dougherty’s franchise non-starter had a inglorious rollout, but has since accrued a cult following thanks to its status as a Halloween movie that actually ties into the sugar-powered holiday. LIke most anthology films, Trick ‘r Treat moves in fits and starts, but when it hits – especially in a segment featuring the great Dylan Baker as a school principal moonlighting as an inept serial killer – it’s a bloody great time. Meanwhile, the film’s mascot, a burlap sack-masked moppet named Sam (as in ‘Samhain’), is an all-time great Halloween ghoul who does incredibly nasty things with lollipops, making for a deliriously offbeat horror confection. 

The film that forever changed zombie cinema by introducing the undead’s hunger for braaaaains, Alien scribe Dan O’Bannon’s punk-rock zom-com is the rare hybrid that nails both the scares and the laughs. The former come courtesy of some of the goopiest reanimated cannibals ever put to film; the latter is courtesy of a game cast that knows to go full ham before themselves becoming dinner. 

It wasn’t the first slasher movie per se, but John Carpenter’s ingenious minimalist nugget about suburban teens and an unstoppable killer is easily one of the most influential horror films ever—especially for its percolating synth score, echoed as recently as It Follows. Jamie Lee Curtis is the last word in “final girls,” and that faded white mask still gives us the cold sweats.

Bernard Rose’s baroque Clive Barker adaptation has grown in status over the years thanks to its thoughtfully gruesome themes of gentrification and violence against the Black community (Nia DaCosta’s recent reboot tugged at the same threads and became a bona fide hit). But the real reason for Candyman’s staying power is simple: It’s scary as hell. In riffing on the old Bloody Mary urban legend – say his name five times and you’ll be hooked! – the film takes on its own mythological status as both a dare-to-watch sleepover staple and an eerie mood-setter for the season. 

Old-school horror fans rejoiced and forgave director James Wan for Saw: His summer sensation proved that certain tricks and devices won’t ever go out of style when deployed this stylishly. Conceived like a forgotten Nixon-era classic and set in the autumn of 1971, Wan’s possession shocker reminds us that if the creaky house ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

A decade-plus before Scream, director Amy Holden Jones made this slasher satire which stands, on its own, as a pretty good slasher itself. The plot, involving a serial killer terrorising a girl’s high-school basketball team, is purposefully rote, allowing Holden to poke fun at the tropes of the genre, from the gratuitous nudity to the fake-out jump-scares to the psychosexual undertones. Somehow, critics missed the joke, despite the killer brandishing an extra-long drill as his weapon of choice and a scene where the girls use a dead pizza guy’s corpse as a coffee table, but the movie’s cult fandom knows better.  

A classic vengeful-ghost story with Shining vibes, Peter Medak’s supernatural chiller about a grieving composer holed up in a creaky old house raises goosebumps with the barest of elements – at least until the fiery finale. Medak gets more out of a rubber ball bouncing down a set of dark stairs than other directors manage with a whole swimming pool full of stage blood.

This near-perfect blend of Jewish humor and horror from John Landis (Animal House) was a seminal movie for burgeoning cinegeeks and Fangoria subscribers in the ’80s; thankfully, it’s also one of the few scary comedies from the era that doesn’t seem dated. The transformation scene, ingeniously set to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising,” remains a highlight.

Horror movie villains don’t get more charismatic than Freddy Krueger – an admittedly odd thing to say about a razor-fingered child-killer. But the guy brings an undeniable joie de vivre to his dream-based murder sprees, especially in Wes Craven’s original film. Subsequent sequels would make him too much of a stand-up comedian, but his spirit of playful sadism lives on in the likes of Terrifier’s Art the Clown.

Flesh-eating “ghouls” (“Yeah, they’re dead—they’re all messed up”) terrorize a farmhouse in a movie that invented an entire subgenre: Today we know these creatures as zombies. George Romero’s budgetary limitations, far from being a hindrance, actually contribute to his film’s nightmarish atmosphere. There’s a racial allegory here, too, for those who want it.

Aussie Jennifer Kent’s supremely confident first feature already feels like a horror classic, restoring the genre to its psychological prestige while turning the monstrous-mommy gimmick on its head. Inventive, recognizably real and scary as fuck, the film staked out a shadowy domestic terrain last dominated by Roman Polanski—Kent may have actually outdone him.

A magnificent exercise in escalating unease, Polanski’s poker-faced adaptation of Ira Levin’s neogothic best-seller follows the harrowing gestation of Manhattan mom-to-be Mia Farrow as she unwittingly carries the devil’s offspring. We’re not quite in a documentary—Roman Polanski is too careful with his camera—but it might as well be one, set on the same wing as the Draper residence.

George Romero’s belated sequel to his first masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead (it’s coming), gives the zombie material a satirical spin, frequently undercutting the tension in order to poke fun at consumer culture: The heroes have barricaded themselves in a banal shopping mall where they live out their lives like birds in a gilded cage. Show this one to anyone who thinks horror is dumb.

J-horror, a millennial revolution in Japanese cinema, can be traced back to Hideo Nakata’s 1998 supernatural thriller about a cursed VHS tape that imposes a lot more than late fees on its unlucky viewers. When Hollywood decided to do a remake, an unusual amount of thought went into it, beginning with the casting of spooked Naomi Watts. Director Gore Verbinski actually improves on the original.

Vampirism has never looked cooler than in Joel Schumacher’s action horror-comedy. Sleep upside-down in a cave all day? Groove to an oiled-up sax-man at night, then swoop down and snack on some canoodling teenagers? Sign us up, even if it means having to fight the combined forces of the two Coreys and an off-brand Ralph Macchio. Seriously, though: it’s fun as hell. If you want a vampire flick that’s a bit grittier but no less cool, try Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, released the same year.

Or, as we like to call it, Three Men and a Carcharodon Carcharias. The original blockbuster and still one of the most immaculately constructed, Steven Spielberg’s scary AF sea movie lingers in the mind longer than most straight-up horror movies: anyone with an enduring phobia of sharks can probably trace it to Jaws. Robert Shaw’s account of the USS Indianapolis could be the spookiest campfire tale in the movies too.

In most respects, Sleepaway Camp is a standard post-Friday the 13th slasher flick about a killer running loose at a summer camp. But its psychosexual undertones build up to one of the most bizarre twist endings (and final images) in the entire horror canon – one that’d probably get thinkpieced to death if it came out now, but will still hit modern audiences with a visceral shock. 

Horribly disfigured and isolated in her rural mansion, a young woman aches for an identity that never formed. Her brilliant surgeon father, still guilty over the accident that caused her deformity, grafts the faces of unsuspecting victims onto his daughter. Beyond icky, this morose French masterpiece sneaks up on you. It may be greatest psychodrama not made by a Swede.

It’s the grossest love story ever told. When a brilliant but hubristic scientist’s (Jeff Goldblum) experiments with teleportation go awry, gradually transforming him into a grotesque human-insect hybrid, his journalist girlfriend (Geena Davis) stands by him, to the bitter, nauseating end. Normally, David Cronenberg’s signature body horror has an element of nasty cool to it. Not here: it’s all peeling skin, vomit and miscellaneous gloop. And yet, it’s in service of his most romantic, and oddly beautiful, film. Go figure.

Does anyone remember that time, in the 1970s, when that talk show had a possessed girl on, then all hell literally broke loose on live television? Seems like an event that wouldn’t get universally memory-holed, but that’s the conceit of this riotously fun mix of found footage and mockumentary. Desperate for ratings, flagging Carson competitor Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) decides to use his Halloween episode to conjure an actual demon on the air. What we see is the purported broadcast in full, plus panicked backstage footage, and footage from… well, best not spoil it. Let’s just say it’s a wild ride to hell and back. 

Working with his unfussy TV crew from Alfred Hitchcock Presents and shooting in black and white, Hitch ended up producing one of his more adventurous thrillers, brutal for its day and boldly perverse. This director runs circles around most of the filmmakers on our list; we’re only placing Psycho near the bottom because its horror comes in just a handful of scenes (one of which all but invented the slasher).

One of the underseen gems of 2024’s horror bumper crop, this modern-day Irish folk tale layers on the creepy elements to an almost cartoonish degree, from an escaped one-eyed mental patient to a terrifying mannequin to the main location, a dimly lit stone-walled cottage in the middle of nowhere. It plays a bit like an old Tales from the Crypt episode, but director Damian Mc Carthy sustains a high level of nerve-shredding dread, capped by a final jump scare that’d have the Crypt Keeper himself cackling with glee.

While not as faithful to Jack Finney’s novel as the 1956 adaptation, director Philip Kaufman’s Me Decade take on creepy conformity works sensationally well on its own terms, thanks to sharp, semisatirical work from Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldblum, Brooke Adams and Leonard Nimoy. The true star of the movie may be its ominously modern San Francisco, a place where the counterculture is dying.

A catastrophically awful date movie – you will keep it in your pants after sitting through this – but a brilliant horror movie that’s perfect for a Halloween night in. Maika Monroe is Jay, a college student frazzled by the discovery that her one-night stand has invited some kind of relentless shapeshifting demon into her life. Director David Robert Mitchell riffs on ’80s horrors but his debut film is very much its own thing. It Follows’s stylish, chilly atmosphere is, as they say, a mood.

Two Japanese men are getting drunk in a bar. They grouse about their industry (the movie biz), women, their country. “It’s like a game of torture,” one says. Suddenly, the other has an idea: auditioning hot chicks for a fake film. You know their scheme is bound to end badly, but just how badly places Takashi Miike’s comeuppance thriller in the pantheon of pure pain.

Shaun reads like a zombies-vs-slashers spoof, but Edgar Wright knew, even in his debut feature, that homage is much more effective than mockery. Shaun is a brilliantly kinetic and hysterically funny apocalypse comedy, but the true miracle is the balancing act pulled off by Wright, Simon Penn and Nick Frost: The movie is slathered in enough viscera to keep gorehounds happy, but it’s also funny enough that even the squeamish won’t be able to turn it off once the entrails start hitting the floor.

It came along a bit before the so-called ‘horror renaissance’ of the 2010s, but Neil Marshall’s subterranean nightmare presaged the coming wave of smartly made, well-executed and utterly terrifying crowdpleasers. Six women for God knows what reason decide to go spelunking in a North Carolina cave system, where they find themselves pursued by albino flesheaters – but really, the monsters are secondary to the sheer claustrophobia… and the threat of simmering tensions among friends boiling over at the absolute worst time.