T here is a difference between a great horror movie and a great scary movie. Many, among them The Blair Witch Project and The Wicker Man , intersect. Others, like Get Out or Scream , are more suspenseful than particularly terrifying.
As Russell Crowe’s latest frightful flick, The Exorcism , pulls in reviews that range from tepid to terrible, we’ve ranked the horror movies that are actually worth your time – films that grip you, leave you shaken, and refuse to let go of your subconscious long after the credits have rolled. 15. Don’t Look Now (1973) The first of two Nicolas Roeg films on this list, Don’t Look Now is not only a haunting meditation on grief, immaculately performed by two of cinema’s greatest actors (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), but it's also a film with a terrifying little person dressed in a tiny red coat and giggling their way around Venice.
Roeg takes a potentially ruinous combination (a domestic marital drama and spooky, Lovecraftian horror) and renders it logical, powerful and deeply weird. 14. Mother! (2017) Maligned on its release by audiences, Mother! was never going to be a breakout pop-culture smash – not when it’s so deliberately unappealing.
Mother! is also the closest cinema has ever got to an actual anxiety attack, with Jennifer Lawrence the shiny waif married to a cruel genius, their home slowly eroded and invaded by all kinds of unwelcome visitors. Director Darren Aronofsky ratchets up the almost unbearable tension, befor.