The Scariest Movies From Each Decade
When you hear the word “scary”, what comes to mind? Creaking from a dark corner of the room? A man in a mask leaping from behind the corner? Losing a child? Taxes? What qualifies as “scary” differs from person to person and, ultimately, is subjective. While we try to be as objective as one realistically can be, the opinions in this article are just that — opinions. So no death threats, please.
Widely considered the first horror movie ever made, this 1896 three-minute short probably won’t keep you up at night. But as the only horror movie of the 1890s, this one was our easiest pick. The House of the Devil features the Devil (surprise) and various shenanigans occurring in his manor. Piano is the only sound you’ll hear, as was typical of the silent film era.
The House of the Devil is one of director Georges Méliès’ many “trick films”, where he shows off new and interesting special effects. Here, Méliès shows he can make things appear and disappear, with a neat smoke effect to boot. Interestingly, this film was almost lost to time before a copy was found in the New Zealand Film Archive.
In 1903, director George Méliès followed up The House of the Devil with The Infernal Cauldron. Slightly shorter than his previous horror film, Méliès shoots The Infernal Cauldron in color, unusual for the time. The plot has a demonic theme as before and Méliès shows us a number of new special effects, including the use of pyrotechnics. Like its predecessor, this film is not particularly scary — but it has virtually no competitors and so takes the prize.
At the time, American producers were pirating Méliès’ films to make money off his success. To combat this, he opened up an American studio. He then utilized a special camera with two lenses, one next to the other, in order to produce two sets of negatives: one for the American audience and one for international release. Though it was not intentional, the two negatives constitute a stereo filming technique, meaning one can watch The Infernal Cauldron in 3D.
Produced in 1913 by Paul Wegener, this silent film was historically important for a number of reasons, some surprising. The plot is rather simple: a man makes a Faustian bargain with an evil-looking man in exchange for money. The evil man steals Wegener’s reflection, releasing it in the form of a doppelgänger, which then proceeds to ruin Wegener’s life.
Many consider The Student of Prague to be Germany’s first art film. Previously, people saw German film as low-brow, “fairground” type of entertainment, not to be taken seriously. It was a huge success and audiences flocked to the theater. The film also helped stimulate interest in the then-new field of psychoanalysis, so much so that Freud had a paper discussing doppelgängers (as a psychological concept) in his journal. Finally, Wegener showed that chiaroscuro (a visual technique which juxtaposes light and dark) translates well to cinema and is one of the earliest cinematic examples demonstrating this technique.
You can watch the movie yourself here. While the on-screen text is in German, you can turn on subtitles to enjoy the film in English.
Around this time, we start seeing a number of horror films proliferate, but none have sustained the success that Nosferatu (1922) has seen. For those who have been living in a cave, Nosferatu is a silent film about Count Orlok and his efforts to prey on the wife of his real estate agent. Director F. W. Murnau portrayed Orlok as an unpleasant creature, bald and with bat-like ears. The screenwriter, Henrik Galeen, is notable for having worked on The Student of Prague, our pick for the 1910s.
A popular misconception claims that Nosferatu is a knock-off Dracula story with names changed only to avoid copyright infringement, but this is likely false. The film credits Dracula as inspiration on its German title card and Galeen likely made the changes because it was a low-budget German movie made for German people. By making the town and characters distinctly German, the audience could more easily relate to the film.
You can watch the film yourself here, as it’s currently in the public domain.
This is where our list gets controversial. The 1930s saw a number of successful horror films, including Lugosi’s Dracula (1931) and Freaks (1932). While modern audiences would likely not be frightened by any of these films, certain scenes in Frankenstein (1931) have become such iconic imagery in horror that it edges the movie into our top slot. Both the tropes of a “mad scientist” and a “misunderstood monster” Frankenstein established have been seen time and time again in horror.
The special effects used to create lightning in the creation scene were so successful that they became standard for every Frankenstein production. The devices generating the electricity were called “Strickfadens” after their creator and Strickfaden managed to acquire a Tesla coil directly from Nikola Tesla himself.
What’s that? You’ve never heard of the 1942 B-movie Cat People before? While that may be true, you have no doubt seen the impact it had on the horror industry, as numerous studios began using tropes originating from this film. Whereas horror movies of the past had relied on a more “direct” horror in the form of monsters and violence, Cat People leaned heavily toward psychological horror while exploring themes on psychology and the taboo.
Cat People tells the story of Irena and her new husband Oliver. Irena believes that she is the descendant of the Cat People, folks who would transform into violent panthers in moments of passion. She was unwilling to consummate her marriage for fear of transforming and hurting her husband, but this drives him into the arms of his secretary. (Why is it always the secretary??) The story escalates from there.
While the film was initially met with lukewarm reviews, today’s critics praise the film for the way it transformed the horror genre, opening the door to new ways to scare an audience.
This 1956 science fiction horror was adapted from the 1954 novel “The Body Snatchers” and tells the story of alien spores that grow into perfect, emotionless copies of the residents of a small town. Unlike previous entries in this list, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is still scary today, largely due to the horrifying nature of its premise: beings that look and act just like us, but aren’t us.
Though mostly ignored by critics when it premiered, Invasion would go on to be considered one of the best horror movies ever made. Not only was its premise unforgettable, but many saw it as a political allegory. This was not long after McCarthyism ran rampant, with the United States public largely turning a blind eye to its damaging effects. The film was originally framed as being anti-McCarthyism, but the studio forced writers to change it to anti-communism. This creates an interesting sort of paradox, where the film simultaneously critiques communist witch hunts while also portraying the fear of a slow, invisible invasion by foreigners.
Hitchcock’s Psycho released in 1960 and is widely considered one of the most important horror films ever made. To understand why, we need a brief history detour. In 1930, the U.S. government passed the Hays Code, legislation which required films to get a seal of approval from the government before they could be shown to audiences. This code was morally strict and substantially limited what directors were able to show on screen.
Psycho forever changed what was considered acceptable on film when it showed sexuality, violence, and deviant behavior that was not previously allowed. The Hays Code was already weakening at the time as directors pushed limits and the proliferation of television desensitized audiences to “deviant” content. Outside of the U.S., the film was still heavily censored. In particular, the toilet scene was considered a major concern, as a flushing toilet had never before appeared on television or in film.
The movie’s success is not wholly due to its portrayal of the taboo. In proper Hitchcock fashion, the cinematography, set design, and composition are all top-notch.
In 1973, director William Friedkin dropped The Exorcist and fundamentally changed the horror genre forever. Before 1973, most horror movies were, by today’s standards, “camp”. They were over-the-top, self-aware, intentionally gratuitous, and often had low budgets. Horror movies were not “for everyone”; their viewership skewed toward young kids looking for an edgy was of spending the evening at a drive in. But thanks to the massive success of William Blatty’s novel by the same name, recent exceptions like Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby, and Friedkin’s Best Director win with The French Connection, Warner Bros. was willing to give him a fully funded, large scale production.
Friedkin did not waste the opportunity. The Exorcist is a possession movie that happens to a perfectly ordinary, upper-middle class family. This family was not evil, they paid their taxes every year, and they had committed no generational sin. This family could have been yours, or the one next door. When Regan begins acting “odd” (read as: levitating and speaking in tongues), her mother worries something might be up. They call in doctors, they try medicine, they do all the normal things one does in this situation before even considering that a supernatural explanation might be at hand. By making the situation so mundane, it made the story all the more real to audiences.
When it finally became apparent that this was, in fact, a supernatural possession by a demon, Friedkin did not hold back. We see a 12-year-old girl masturbating with a crucifix, mutilating herself, screaming obscenities, rotating her head 360 degrees, and vomiting profusely. In the extended cut, we even get to see the “spider walk” that is so often featured in today’s horror movies. The majority of this hadn’t been seen by audiences before and the sight was both astonishing and utterly horrifying. Importantly, The Exorcist firmly established that horror was not an unserious B-genre for kids.
The ’80s were a great decade for horror. We had The Thing (’82), A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84), Poltergeist (’82), and The Evil Dead (’81). These movies were effective films that left us with tropes we still see in today’s horror movies. But one film in particular managed to create a sense of such intense anxiety while being accompanied by such beautiful, precise cinematography that it regularly tops lists of the “scariest movies of all time”. That, of course, is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).
In The Shining, author Jack Torrance moves with his family to become the winter caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel, hoping it will cure his writer’s block. The film establishes nearly immediately (though so subtly that it’s rarely noticed) that this hotel makes no sense. Windows and doors exist where they physically couldn’t and the floor plan makes no logical sense. What’s more, Kubrick masterfully creates a sense of impending dread, conditioning the audience to expect a scare around every corner.
Kubrick is known to be an exacting artist who demands perfection from his colleagues. Famously, the world record for “most takes” in a serious movie was during the kitchen scene where Dick Hallorann explains the “shining” concept to a young Danny — a scene which had to be recorded 148 times. Another scene where Wendy swings a baseball bat required 128 takes. (Though this should be taken with a grain of salt; Guinness is not known for their perfect accuracy.) And while Shelley Duvall may not have had a wonderful time working with Kubrick, it nevertheless allowed him to produce the masterpiece that is The Shining.
The Blair Witch Project (1999) enjoyed a success that probably can’t be repeated today, precisely because of the time in which it was released. The end of the ’90s was when the internet was beginning to see common usage, but before people developed any sort of skepticism about what they saw online. The BWP advertised itself as real found footage and, because this had never been done before, it largely worked. The creators made a website that included “real” police reports of the “missing” actors along with a trove of other evidence that would have looked convincing to a gullible audience.
Thus, when people went to see the film, many were under the impression that these people actually died. You’re not watching actors on screen, you’re watching the final moment’s of a person’s life. And while I dearly hope you have not, if you spent any time on the internet as a teen, you probably saw one or two videos of a person meeting an untimely demise. These videos are always grainy, poorly shot, and only a few seconds long. Despite this, they impact your soul in a way that horror movies simply can’t. If you remember how that felt at all, then you know what Blair Witch audiences were experiencing in theaters.
What’s more, an entire cultural substory began to develop around viewing BWP. Some audience members would vomit upon watching the film (likely from motion sickness rather than fear), so theaters began posting warnings about nausea. The audience (and media) widely reported this, leading people to believe that the movie was so scary, it’d make you puke. Then audiences, primed with this knowledge, entered the theater and would consequently find the movie so much scarier than they otherwise would have.
The Blair Witch Project ran a masterful ad campaign that was single-handedly responsible for the outsized fear reaction it generated in its audience. (And it’s success stories like these that remind us why companies are willing to spend so much on advertising. Sometimes it really pays off.)
When I was a kid, there was one movie that all the kids talked about, that they swore was the scariest thing they’d ever seen. In fact, there were whispers that even watching the movie could get you killed and my friends had heard of people dying from it. This narrative, of course, mirrors the plot of the movie to which it referred: The Ring (2002).
Just as The Exorcist showed that possessions can happen to anyone, The Ring tells us that something so innocent as watching a movie can lead to your demise. Not only could this happen to you, but it could happen entirely without your awareness, while performing a totally mundane task. This captured the imagination of the audience and enhanced the fear factor. Beyond this, The Ring had a few creepy tricks up its sleeve that audiences weren’t yet accustomed to. Most notably, there is an innocuous scene with a sudden cut to a jump scare. Films of the past gave audiences multiple warnings that something scary was about to happen: tense music, rising violins, and a sudden silence. The Ring broke that mold and taught audiences that terror can happen at literally any time, context be damned.
Another important horror innovation occurred in the famous “TV scene”. Someone is watching the tape and there is a haunted girl in the video. The haunted girl approaches the camera, closer and closer, before finally crawling out of the TV, escaping her digital confines and entering the real world. All the while the audience is watching this movie on none other than a screen, where they can’t help but wonder if something will crawl out of that. Like The Blair Witch Project, The Ring succeeds in making the horror feel real, like you’re one wrong step away from entering a hell of your own.
The 2010s and 2020s are particularly interesting because we can finally use some science to help us pick which movie is scariest. And thank goodness too: the number of horror movies being produced each year has continued to explode, with no clear end in sight. What’s more, studios’ improved ability to spy collect data on its audiences helps them produce films that are even more attention-grabbing and which boast ever-higher retention rates.
The Science of Scare is an experiment where an audience was hooked up to heart rate monitors and asked to watch various horror movies. Peak heart rate, heart rate variability, and average heart rate were all measured. This gave researchers a reasonable metric for determining which movies “scared” audiences the most. Of course, this measure isn’t perfect, as no measure is. The results were interesting and, while there wasn’t a clear winner overall, there was a standout from the 2010s: Sinister (2012).
In fact, Sinister ended up being the scariest movie tested by a very small margin. Plot-wise, Sinister is nothing special. An author with writer’s block finds a snuff film and decides he’s going to solve the murders therein. He then moves himself and his family (!) into the house where the murders happened. He quickly realizes that there is likely a supernatural component here, and things go south rather quickly. Sinister works by not only maintaining a sense of foreboding throughout the film, but also by including a grand total of 17 jump scares, six of which were “major scares”.
Are jump scares a cheap tricked used by directors to manipulate audiences into being afraid? Maybe. But they are inarguably a highly effective way of causing an invested person’s heart rate to skyrocket and, apparently, become the number one ranked scariest movie in a “scientific” experiment.
We have no choice but to offer you a tie here. Based on the Science of Scare data, Host technically beat Skinamarink, but the reason each was scary was different enough that’s it’s worth highlighting.
Host (2020) gets straight to the point, as this film is only 57 minutes long. In it, a group of friends have an online séance and accidentally attract the presence of a demonic entity. Of all the movies tested, this one had the highest average heart rate amongst audience members, about 24 beats per minute faster than their resting heart rate. The peak heart rate matched other top movies as well, implying that this movie was effective at delivering jump scares. As Sinister demonstrated, jump scares are an effective way of eliciting a response from the audience. What’s impressive, though, is that this film managed to pack all of this into a feature that’s only two-thirds the length of your average horror movie.
Skinamarink (2022) takes a different approach. In this film, some kids wake up to find that their father has vanished along with every window and door in the house. This film exploits one of humanity’s oldest fears, the fear of the dark. Shots tend to be pitch black and sounds are intentionally muted. The film doesn’t fill out the dark for you, knowing that your mind will invent things in those dark spaces, inventions that are specifically horrifying to you. While Sinister and Host had maximum heart rates around 130, Skinamarink only had a max of 113. This means that audiences spent more time in a tense, suspenseful state than in Host.
Thus, we might say that Host had the “biggest” scares of the 2020s, while Skinamarink offers the most “sustained” scare.
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