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The 25 Best Horror Films of the 2010s

Some of our great new horror movies look to the past for assistance, others resonate with bleak nihilism for our future.

The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts
Photo: Wild Bunch Distribution

The common wisdom, inherited thanks mostly to the 1968-1978 boom of great American horror movies that accompanied some of the nation’s most turbulent and hopeless years (at least among those that could be reflected via moving pictures), is that the worse off things are, the more relevant and powerful our cinematic nightmares become. That the halcyon days of horror are directly proportional to the index of actual human suffering. If that’s so, the entire world has spent the last decade counting down the few remaining seconds left on the Doomsday Clock. While the few years leading up to Y2K brought with them a set of snarky, masturbatorily meta slasher movies that ensured audiences not only felt superior to the movies they were raised on, but also absolved them of any sense of socio-political obligation, the dozens and dozens of new horror classics that have swarmed out of every corner of the globe since then (not unlike the teeming cockroaches that burst out of E.G. Marshall’s chest at the climax of Creepshow) seemed to impress upon us all that the biggest nightmare of all wasn’t that the world would end, but that we’d have to continue living on in the colossal mess we’ve cultivated.

Or, worse, that we’d have to continue cultivating a culture of killing. It’s both too glib and too jingoistic to suggest that 9/11 perhaps ushered in what has clearly become another golden age of horror, easy though it might be when we’re examining a time span during which political speechwriters used the word “terror” with more wanton relish than William Castle, Roger Corman, and the Crypt Keeper combined. Though the instantaneously repulsive spectacle in lower Manhattan and the deadening slow-mo retaliation certainly primed the world to absorb a whole lotta hurt, the new millennial horror paid forth brutalism in a multicultural banquet of carnage, grue, and dread. Some of our great new horror movies look to the past for assistance, others resonate with bleak nihilism for our future. Want stone proof the aughts sucked? Recue the blunt climax to the most diverting movie in our entire list of the 25 scariest post-2000 movies: Drag Me to Hell. We’re totally fucked. Eric Henderson.


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

25. The Orphanage

It’s difficult to talk about The Orphanage without talking about Guillermo del Toro. As melancholic as it is frightening, the film (which del Toro produced) makes us mournful even as we’re dreading whatever lies in wait on the other side of a door or tucked behind a crawlspace. This uncomfortable blend, an unfortunate rarity these days, is something the creature-obsessed del Toro excels at, and it finds a uniquely clear expression under the careful direction of J.A. Bayona. The Spanish director privileges character and quietude over corpses and cheap tricks, lending the film a feeling of transcendence over the genre that its makers understand so well. Michael Nordine


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

24. Drag Me to Hell

Many horror films from the 2000s are so eager to splatter and slice their way into our hearts that they end up covering their canvases in bloody clichés. Not so with Sam Raimi’s masterfully paced throwback, which is smart enough to withhold its more disturbing visceral elements until the very last moment. This directorial restraint allows the perfectly calibrated sound design and dread-inducing mise-en-scène to drive the viewer mad with anticipation. Anchored by Allison Lohman’s brilliant performance as a loan officer fated for Hades’s gallows, Drag Me to Hell is as much about greed as it is culpability, or more specifically our arrogant attempts to cover up sin even when the devil herself is staring us down. Glenn Heath Jr.


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

23. Visitor Q

A formally accomplished director when it suits him, Takashi Miike can be so shocking because he’s willing to discard his conventional gifts and dive face first in the muck; he doesn’t play the distancing art-house games that characterize the hypocritical Michael Haneke. Miike’s most popular contribution to the horror genre is Audition, which acted as a correction to the self-serving immorality of Fatal Attraction and its endless clones. Visitor Q, on the other hand, acts as a correction to the relentless popularity of reality TV, a phenomenon that invites us to vicariously feast on human misery as distraction from our own daily indignities. The story follows a family as they casually film one another indulging in incest and necrophilia as well as a long list of other similarly taboo activities, and Miike stages each escalating atrocity with a flip, tongue-in-cheek, and sometimes nearly slapstick manner that’s authentically horrifying. Yet, the filmmaker, as Audition made clear, is a moralist deep down, and the brilliant, surreal Visitor Q—so powerful and disgusting that many will probably find it unwatchable—is the ultimate middle-finger to media sponsored narcissism. Chuck Bowen

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The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

22. Suicide Club

Sion Sono kicks things off with one of the great openers in recent horror cinema: Holding hands and chanting “a one and a two,” 50 uniformed Japanese high school girls throw themselves under a subway train, drenching bystanders in gouts and gallons of gore. Investigations into the ensuing outbreak of teenage suicide pacts, headed by Detective Kuroda (Ryo Ishibashi), leads to a tween-idol girl group disseminating hidden messages that exhort listeners to promptly snuff it, concealed in the media blitzkrieg surrounding their ear-candy megahit “Mail Me.” Boasting plenty of splatter for the fanboys (much of it blatantly artificial CGI), Suicide Club at times deepens into an existential inquiry, even if it raises more questions about social media manipulation and interpersonal disconnect than it can hope to answer. An outrageous finale takes its audience behind the music, and through the looking glass, into a harsh realm filled with gerbils, raincoat-clad tykes, and new uses for woodworking tools. Budd Wilkins


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

21. The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

The most remarkable thing about Dutch writer-director Tom Six’s now-infamous provocation is that nobody seems to agree as to what it is. Even the critics that saw and despised it, of which there are many, don’t all think Six takes the film’s eponymous monster seriously. To be clear, he doesn’t, and that’s the crux of The Human Centipede (First Sequence), an effectively queasy chiller that constantly keeps you off-balance by anti-climactically pulling the rug out from under its viewers in almost every other scene. Dieter Laser’s evil Dr. Hieter is a hilariously campy mad scientist, but the threat that he poses to his very scared victims is very serious. Vile though it may be, Six’s vision is clever enough and jarring enough to make the story both rather funny and deeply unnerving. Simon Abrams


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

20. A History of Violence

Unconditional love and true evil are both core family values in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, a cinematic shotgun blast to the face that splits the classic American dream in half. After effortlessly dispatching two wayward thugs, father, husband, restaurant owner, and gangster-in-hiding Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) finds himself physically and emotionally cornered like a classic western outlaw. As Tom’s splintering identity sheds an outer layer of artifice to reveal a snakes skin underneath, brutal physical violence becomes his only communication device. But the real horror resides in the deafening silence of the film’s aching final shot: a quiet dinner table standoff foreshadowing years of familial hell to come. Heath Jr.


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

19. Let Me In

How fitting it is that the vampiric Ronald Reagan makes a cameo in Let Me In, the most unexpectedly tender, affecting film of its kind since Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark. The creatures of the night and the anguish of a generation raised by hypocrites and yuppies fit right into Matt Reeves’s heartfelt depiction of ’80s suburbia, a society that’s ravaged itself on a steady diet of fear. Distinctly warmer in tone than the Swedish original (and featuring a newly conceived carjacking sequence as nail-bitingly prodigious as anything in Hitchcock), this justified remake nonetheless finds equal levels of unrest and hurt among its cast of characters, eschewing traditional notions of villains and heroes with a dramatically ambiguous push-and-pull of overlapping, conflicting motivations. Kids, cops, bullies, killers, and even a vampire seem to share the same twisted soul. The bloodshed is tragic regardless, while a deceptively upbeat tone guards the true nature of the sinister conclusion—the end of this story, but more importantly, the beginning of another just like it. Rob Humanick

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The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

18. The Strangers

The Strangers is practically an abstraction, an old-school spooker spun from the blood splatter on a wall, a nearby record player scratching an oldie, a CB radio in the garage, a creaky swing set in the backyard. First-time helmer Bryan Bertino is beholden to genre quota, skidding the relationship of pretty young couple Kristen and James (played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) before subjecting them to an after-dark home invasion. But he offers no profound rationale for why she refuses his marriage proposal; like the shadowy stranger that comes knocking at their door (eerily asking, “Is Tamara home?”), it’s something that just happens. Plying an old-school artistry that begins with a creepy montage of bumblefuck houses and holds up almost without fail until the strangers offer a creepy non-justification for their transgressions, analog-man Bertino teases with the unknown until he’s left no pimple ungoosed. Sometimes avoiding the synapse-raping bad habits of splat packers Eli Roth and Alexandre Aja is its own reward; doing so without also submitting to Michael Haneke–style hand-slapping is nearly monumental. Ed Gonzalez


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

17. The Mist

Frank Darabont pulls off an impressive coup with The Mist, making the human monsters more unnerving, vile, and volatile than the genetically mutated creatures stalking their every move. After dense fog suddenly blankets a Northeastern coastal town, many of the citizens band together inside a local supermarket to wait out the crippling weather. As time passes, collective annoyance and unrest turns to fear, dissent, and ultimately divisive rage, creating a tenuous moral landscape driven by shifting mob mentalities. Extreme ideology becomes the characters’ sharp-edged weapons of choice, and the result is pure savagery, a Lord of the Flies-style community apocalypse that leads to a blunt-force ending both resolutely depressing and bravely fitting. In the face of collective doubt and panic, even the best of us are beasts of burden. Heath Jr.


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

16. Them

Hoody-clad sadists attack a couple, alone in their country home. That’s all the setup that co-writers/directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud need to dredge up some uniquely discomfiting chills. You won’t be able to shake Them after seeing it because it’s scary without being grisly or full of cheap jump scares. Instead, it’s a marvel of precise timing and action choreography. The silence that deadens the air between each new assault becomes more and more disquieting as the film goes on. Likewise, the house where Them is primarily set in seems to grow bigger with each new hole the film’s villains tear out of. To get the maximum effect, be sure to watch this one at night; just don’t watch it alone. Abrams


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

15. 28 Weeks Later

The nature of seeing is at the bedrock of our human experience, and is key to unlocking the emotions simmering just beneath the surface of 28 Weeks Later. The decade’s heir to the throne of Romero, Juan Carlos Frenadillo’s brilliantly staged savagery comes equipped with disarming fairy-tale overtones, his generous, intelligent storytelling drunk on equal parts love and hope, destruction and chaos. Deliberately shouting out to America’s War on Terror was a timely choice with genuine political insight, but the real theme here is the timelessness of our human frailties; the sins of our fathers determine our struggles of today, and sometimes, a loving mother’s instincts are the worst thing in the world. The breakneck opening sequence sets a tone of apocalyptic doom, and though the dispatching of the undead en masse has rarely been topped (see the film’s bodacious helicopter sequence, the original Dawn of the Dead’s infamous decapitation scene writ large), it’s the introspective moments—like a James Wolfe statue, seemingly weeping for senseless loss of life—that lend resonance to this raging sequel. Humanick

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The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

14. Let the Right One In

Not unlike Matt Reeves’s American remake, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In is, in color and emotion, something almost unbearably blue. When Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a 12-year-old outcast perpetually bullied at school, meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), the mysterious new girl at his apartment complex, one child’s painful coming of age is conflated with another’s insatiable bloodlust. The film treats adolescence, even a vampire’s arrested own, as a prolonged horror—life’s most vicious and unforgiving set piece. This study of human loneliness and the prickly crawlspace between adolescence and adulthood is also an unexpectedly poignant queering of the horror genre. Do not avert your eyes from Alfredson’s gorgeously, meaningfully aestheticized vision, though you may want to cover your neck. Gonzalez


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

13. The House of the Devil

Though The House of the Devil is so steeped in nostalgia for the genre films of yore that it seems to belong far more to the ’80s than to the present day, it nevertheless carved a perfect niche for itself in late-aughts cinema. Relative newcomer Ti West deals in nail-biting suspense and dread, making him a welcome outlier among his more gore-obsessed contemporaries: Each time West punctuates one of the film’s long periods of placidity and unease via an abrupt act of violence, the moment feels earned, even necessary, rather than tacked on. It’s a film that both relies on and rewards the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks of its slow-going narrative, a refreshing change of pace from the mindless horror fodder it surpasses with such ease and gravitas. Nordine


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

12. Bug

Bug, an intense little chamber play of blossoming madness, allowed William Friedkin to put his characteristic screws to both his characters and his audience while nearly achieving a poignancy that only heightens the horror. Your enjoyment of the film may depend on whether or not you buy how quickly Ashley Judd succumbs to paranoia and insanity. I didn’t buy it, but the film’s relentlessness overcomes the occasionally stagy absurdity. In one of his first key roles, Michael Shannon looks a little like Anthony Michael Hall at his most hungover, but his presence and surprisingly soft voice throws you off balance, and Friedkin masterfully exploits that emotional uncertainty, paving the way for an ending that’s abrupt, unforgiving, and the perfect capper for a very over the top last third. Bug has been referred to as a thriller or a horror story, but it’s really a perverse romance—a heightened, demented parable of losing yourself to someone. Bowen


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

11. War of the Worlds

The apex of what critic Matthew Wilder astutely pinned as the summery popcorn movies finally wrestled with the aftermath of 9/11 (along with Land of the Dead and Red Eye), Steven Spielberg’s relentless update of H.G. Wells’s creaky, pre-Cold War property often feels like a regression into the cheap safety of a zero-relativity “Us vs. Them” mentality. Which is exactly why it still seems like the most upsetting mass entertainment in Spielberg’s entire career. Stuffed with all the brutally efficient mayhem of Jaws, Poltergeist, Gremlins, and Jurassic Park put together, War of the Worlds is a mirror held up against the nation’s sense of festering shock. But for all the sympathetic shots of people running for their lives with grimaces of terror on their faces, you can’t help but wonder if Spielberg’s ultimate disaster movie isn’t also smuggling in criticism about the nature of our worst collective fears. Henderson

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The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

10. Wolf Creek

A beautiful expression of existential terror that doesn’t come with the noxious sexual baggage that typically dooms its horror ilk, Wolf Creek immediately stands apart from the pack, beginning with the stunning image of sunset-tinted waves crashing onto the sands of an Australian beachfront. For a split second, this expressionistic shot resembles a volcano blowing its top, and the realization that it’s something entirely more mundane exemplifies the unsettling tenor of the film’s casual shocks. Like two of the best horror films of the ’80s, Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, Wolf Creek is propelled by a lyrical sense of doom, and the ease with which first-time director Greg McLean creates a compelling sense of place and characters worth rooting for is truly something to behold. Gonzalez


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

9. The Devil’s Rejects

If House of 1000 Corpses successfully transposed the grotesqueries evoked by Rob Zombie’s music onto film, then The Devil’s Rejects cemented his status as a filmmaker worth noticing. Zombie’s sophomore effort, ungodly violent and gruesome as it is, would be nearly unbearable to watch were it not so wonderfully aestheticized. His most noticeable trait as a stylist is, unsurprisingly, a knack for selecting the perfect songs to both match and offset the morbid goings-on of his film, but there’s more at work here than mere artifice: Zombie infuses an unexpected somberness where his debut tended toward camp. His sideshow-esque cast of characters, while far from sympathetic, have evolved into genuinely fleshed-out beings whose unexpected pathos only intensifies the terror they evoke. The rejects’ long string of satanic ritual murders make for a carnivalesque experience far more viscerally stimulating—and strangely watchable—than it seems to have any right to be. Nordine


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

8. Antichrist

Lars von Trier’s two-hander psychodrama Antichrist draws heavily from a rich tradition of “Nordic horror,” stretching back to silent-era groundbreakers like Häxan and Vampyr (and Dreyer’s later Day of Wrath), in particular their interrogation of moral strictures and assumptions of normalcy. In the wake of their son’s death, He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) follow a course of radical psychotherapy, retreating to their wilderness redoubt, Eden, where they act out (and on) their mutual resentment and recrimination, culminating in switchback brutal attacks and His and Her genital mutilations. Conventional wisdom has it that von Trier’s a faux provocateur, but that misses his theme and variation engagement with genre and symbolism throughout, rendering Antichrist one of the most bracingly personal, as well as national cinema-indebted, films to come along in a while. It’s heartening to see that real provocation still has a place in the forum (let’s not say “marketplace”) of international cinema. Weber


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

7. The Descent

Soullessness and emptiness manifest physically in the form of screaming night crawlers in Neil Marshall’s The Descent, the ultimate prison movie devoid of any trap door for escape. What starts out as a weekend spelunking trip between female friends quickly degenerates into a claustrophobic master class in visceral directionality and piercing sound design, a setup that builds repression and cripples inertia in equal measure. Since every shadow holds the potential for sudden attack, Marshall instills a feeling of being emotionally, physically, and psychologically stuck, layers of simultaneous dread that are terrifying for both the characters and audience alike. Considering the dank corners of the mind Marshall explores in the film’s batshit-crazy ending, a denouement crawling with ambiguity, The Descent ultimately shows there’s nothing like extreme panic and betrayal to make even the sunniest parts of the physical world a very dark, confined place. Heath Jr.

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The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

6. Halloween II

Jason Vorhees and a thousand other disposable serial killers have long tried to diminish the essence of Michael Myers, a shell of a man devoid of morality, nothing less than evil manifest. Less a sequel than a continuation of Rob Zombie’s own remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece, Halloween II restores Myers to his deserving, iconic status, holding a candle to the original film in the process. As artful as it is ferocious, Halloween II quickly numbs the viewer to the effects of physical destruction and random violence (“Cow! COW!”) as a primer for the inward, downward spiral experienced by the victims, who must now attempt to reassemble their lives after such horrible events. Compared to the existentially tinged levels of bloodshed, the film’s media satire is practically an afterthought, but one is thankful for the spurts of levity amid Michael Myer’s expressions of primal rage. The incomparable Brad Dourif provides the emotional anchor, his familial tragedy another confirmation of Zombie’s deeply felt empathy. Like a gnarly David Lynch joint, the film isn’t necessarily pretty to look at, but it most definitely is beautiful. Humanick


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

5. Martyrs

If any one film could be used as a poster child for the punishing and unrelentingly gory new wave of recent French movies, Martyrs would be that film. Writer-director Pascal Laugier’s film leaves you with the scopophilic equivalent of shell shock. The gauntlet that his film’s heroine, a “final girl” who’s abducted and tortured by a religious cult straight out of a Clive Barker novel, is forced to endure is considerable. Which is like saying that King Kong is big, Vincent Price’s performances are campy, and blood is red. Laugier’s film is grueling because there’s no real way to easily get off on images of simulated violence. The film’s soul-crushing finale makes it impossible to feel good about anything Laugier has depicted. In it, Laugier suggests that there’s no way to escape from the pain of the exclusively physical reality of his film. You don’t watch Laugier’s harrowing feel-bad masterpiece, you’re held in its thrall. Abandon hope all ye who watch here. Abrams


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

4. Audition

Gonzo director Takashi Miike delivers one of his most controlled, if not exactly straightforward, films with Audition. Middle-aged widower Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), tired of his sad-sack existence, lets himself be persuaded by a film-industry colleague to hold a cattle call for love. Aoyama’s finicky laundry list of love-demands require a degree of polish in his woman, though he’s encouraged to settle for second-best, as too much of a good thing makes a woman prideful and unruly. At first, demure Asami (Eihi Shiina) seems to fit the bill, though there’s soon something clearly amiss. Maybe it’s repeated shots of the girl, slumped over, waiting by the phone, a conspicuously bulging sack glimpsed in the background. The leftfield second half, a surreally shifting hall of mirrors, mixes memory, desire, and nightmare, and Asami becomes an exterminating angel in white, liable to do terrible things with acupuncture needles and piano wire. Weber


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

3. Inside

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside is a beautiful junk painting of your worst nightmares. Like Takashi Miike at his most unhinged, Bustillo and Maury announce their disregard for all notions of good taste and restraint with their opening image of a severe car accident as seen and experienced by an unborn child. One moment the child is soothed by his mother’s loving, if alarming, words, the next he’s jolted and throttled, blood rising and floating from the inside. The film, in more ways than you can imagine, is driven by the fallout from that accident, and what follows is the most potent exploitation of unyielding, inexplicable violation outside of Takashi Miike’s Audition. The violence, before it goes haywire, is ghastly and remarkably apt thematically. The tides of blood flow and spurt and explode, and hauntingly confirm and underline a terrified young woman’s mental implosions. A mother’s most forbidden nightmares have finally arrived. The ending reveals the filmmakers to possibly be more in touch with their inner woman than we initially assumed, though the horror lies in which woman they appear to be in touch with. Bowen

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The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

2. Inland Empire

That Inland Empire—which is difficult to classify under any umbrella, let alone horror—ranks as highly on this list as it does says as much about the current state of the genre as it does about David Lynch’s mental state. But if horror may be thought of as a state of mind, a particularly intense form of suspension of disbelief owing as much to what we don’t know as to what we do, then Inland Empire’s status as one of the most terrifying films released in the last decade is immediately understood. At three hours long, the film is above all else a durational experience: There’s something about the singularly bizarre mix of digital video, Balkan intrigue, and talking rabbits which, after a relatively normal opening, takes you further into a claustrophobic, even nightmarish experience that you want to end as desperately as you want it to keep going. Lynch’s refusal to give us concrete clues as to what’s behind his impenetrable narrative makes it linger in your headspace—for days, weeks, months—after it’s ended. Nordine


The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

1. Pulse

When The Social Network came out, it was tagged with suspicious unanimity as the movie of “our moment.” But nearly a decade earlier, Kiyoshi Kurosawa pretty much wrote the ultimate obituary for the concept that there would ever again be an “our” anything, moment or otherwise. A neo-Invasion of the Body Snatchers in ghostly J-horror trappings, Pulse is a mournful techno-eschatology in which the world ends with not a bang, but the quiet murmur of billions of modems snatching away the souls of all who use them, and leaving all who opt out feeling even more alone than the throngs doing purgatory on the other side of the monitor. Coming, as it did, almost concurrently with the onset of “death of cinema” alarm bells, Pulse’s desperate plea for real, messy, analog emotions is all but unbearable, and should send a chill through anyone who’s found themselves absently caught up in YouTube roulette. Henderson

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