The Best Horror Movies

Two colleagues become stranded on a deserted island, the only survivors of a plane crash. On the island, they must overcome past grievances and work together to survive, but ultimately, it's a battle of wills and wits to make it out alive.

Six friends hire a medium to hold a séance via Zoom during lockdown — but they get far more than they bargained for as things quickly go wrong. When an evil spirit starts invading their homes, they begin to realise they might not survive the night.

Nearly a year after a botched job, a hitman takes a new assignment with the promise of a big payoff for three killings. What starts off as an easy task soon unravels, sending the killer into the heart of darkness.

After breaking the mysterious "One Wish Willow" to win his crush's heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark, sinister price.

César, an unhappy concierge, maintains a peculiar relationship with the very diverse inhabitants of the upper-class apartment building where he works in Barcelona.

Moments after surviving an all-out attack from the Le Domas family, Grace discovers she’s reached the next level of the nightmarish game — and this time with her estranged sister Faith at her side. Grace has one chance to survive, keep her sister alive, and claim the High Seat of the Council that controls the world. Four rival families are hunting her for the throne, and whoever wins rules it all.

The young daughter of a journalist disappears into the desert without a trace—eight years later, the broken family is shocked when she is returned to them, as what should be a joyful reunion turns into a living nightmare.

When novelist Ohm Bauman retreats to a remote inn to scatter his parents' ashes, he is consumed by tales of a witch haunting the honeymoon suite. Disturbing visions and a shocking disappearance forces him to confront dark corners of his past.

A woman answers a help wanted ad to be a housekeeper in a mysterious New York City high-rise, unaware that she is entering a community that has seen a number of disappearances over the years and may be under the grip of a Satanic cult.

George Lutz, his wife Kathy, and their three children have just moved into a beautiful, and improbably cheap, Victorian mansion nestled in the sleepy coastal town of Amityville, Long Island. However, their dream home is concealing a horrific past and soon each member of the Lutz family is plagued with increasingly strange and violent visions and impulses.

A real estate agent leaves behind his beautiful wife to go to Transylvania to visit the mysterious Count Dracula and formalize the purchase of a property in Wismar.

In a fairy-tale kingdom where beauty is a brutal business, Elvira battles to compete with her incredibly beautiful stepsister, Agnes, and she will go to any length to catch the Prince’s eye.

After her husband's abrupt death, Alice seeks solace with his remaining family — descendants of a leading researcher on demonic possession. As her in-laws transform one by one into creatures that feed on fear, she comes to discover that the vows she took in life survive even in death.

What starts as a poignant medical documentary about Deborah Logan's descent into Alzheimer's disease and her daughter's struggles as caregiver degenerates into a maddening portrayal of dementia at its most frightening, as hair-raising events begin to plague the family and crew and an unspeakable malevolence threatens to tear the very fabric of sanity from them all.

While vacationing at a remote cabin, a young girl and her two fathers are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand that the family make an unthinkable choice to avert the apocalypse. With limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe before all is lost.

The expansive project has hype and money behind it – but how do you avoid it falling into the disappointment trap so many films end up stumbling into? If the history of failed Hollywood fantasy projects over the past 20 years has taught us anything, it is that transporting audiences to another world is only half the battle: you also have to give them a reason to spend several hours there. The Golden Compass diluted Philip Pullman’s theological bite, Warcraft thought that just explaining its world would make us care about it, and The Dark Tower compressed Stephen King’s sprawling mythology so ruthlessly that it scarcely left room for a story. All these films at one point had fans of the original source material quivering with anticipation at the prospect of seeing their beloved worlds on the big screen; all ended up disappointing. Which brings us to the forthcoming Alex Garland adaptation of the hugely popular high fantasy video game, Elden Ring. If there was ever a cinematic test of the phrase “too big to fail”, it is surely this. Elden Ring has sold more than 30m copies and is widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made. George RR Martin himself wrote the foundational mythology of warring demigods that underpins its gorgeous fantasy hellscape. And Garland as writer-director seems almost impossibly perfect: as the creative behind Dredd, Ex Machina and Annihilation, he has both the taste for beautiful nightmares and the geek credentials to deliver something extraordinary. Continue reading...

A witty creature feature set in a multi-occupancy building in Los Angeles that takes aim at unscrupulous landlords and finance bros This arachnid-themed horror is fairly traditional in terms of its structure, core monster threat and scares-to-laughs ratio, but there are a few winningly modern touches. For starters, there is a very contemporary anticapitalist undertow: it all takes place in a single multi-occupancy building (supposedly in Los Angeles, though the whole film was filmed in Portugal) owned by a slimy landlord (William Miller), who rails against the city’s “socialist” local council making it harder for him to rip off his tenants. And the tenants range across the spectrum of income levels and careers, in a way which is directly correlated to how sympathetic they are and therefore how likely to get spider-bit. So you shouldn’t get too attached any of the characters who work in finance, are “influencers”, or in any way act high and mighty towards the building’s long suffering supervisor Serena (Matilda Lutz), a tomboy-femme girl in shorts and biker boots who is also an aspiring musician. Serena is the one who finds the first victim, a UCLA professor in arachnology who is killed by an exotic spider which grows to extra-large proportions, from a colony ruled by a super-sized queen that appears semi-sentient. Continue reading...