Scariest Movies Ranked

In 1973, theater managers reportedly kept smelling salts at screenings of The Exorcist, and some audiences still struggle to sit through it. Fifty years of horror later, we ranked the 25 films that genuinely frighten people, using craft, staying power, rewatch value and the heart-rate data scientists have collected. Every entry includes the year, the director and where you can watch it now.

Key Takeaways

• Our pick for the scariest movie ever made: The Exorcist (1973), with Hereditary (2018) a close second and The Shining (1980) third.
• The scientific pick: In the Science of Scare Project run by Broadband Choices, Sinister (2012) produced the highest average heart rate, 86 beats per minute, and a peak of 131 bpm during one infamous Super 8 reel.
• Low budgets win: Paranormal Activity reportedly cost about $15,000, The Blair Witch Project about $60,000, and both rank among the most profitable films ever made.
• The modern era holds up: Eight of our 25 picks were released after 2010.
• Streaming homes rotate. The platforms listed were accurate at the time of writing, but horror catalogs move between services often, so check before you press play.

What the Science Says About the Scariest Movie

Most “scariest movie” lists are opinion polls. The most cited exception is the Science of Scare Project from UK comparison site Broadband Choices, which fitted viewers with heart-rate monitors and measured how their pulses moved across dozens of horror films. Scott Derrickson’s Sinister came out on top. Its average heart rate of 86 bpm compares with a resting rate in the mid-60s, and the lawnmower sequence in its found footage spiked viewers to 131 bpm. James Wan’s Insidious, The Conjuring and Ari Aster’s Hereditary also landed near the top.

That data is useful, but it measures one kind of fear: the spike. A jump scare will reliably move a heart rate. The films that keep you awake for three nights, the ones you can’t walk past in a dark hallway afterward, work on a slower and deeper level that a wrist sensor can’t read. Treat the analytics as one input, the way a good critic treats box office: something worth noting that settles nothing.

How We Ranked These Films

Each film was judged on four things, weighted roughly equally:

We left out pure thrillers and comedies with a horror edge, so Scream and Shaun of the Dead aren’t here. We also capped franchises at one or two entries, which explains why you won’t find four Conjuring films clogging the middle of the list.

The 25 Scariest Movies, Ranked

1. The Exorcist (1973)

William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel remains the scariest movie ever made because it refuses to treat its subject as a game. Friedkin shoots the possession of 12-year-old Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) with the clinical patience of a documentary: hospital tests, needle sticks and arteriograms come first, so by the time the demon shows its face, you have already been convinced that nothing in medicine can help this child. Ellen Burstyn’s performance as a mother running out of options grounds every scene, and Max von Sydow’s Father Merrin arrives like a soldier walking back into a war he barely survived. The film became the first horror title nominated for Best Picture, won Oscars for Blatty’s screenplay and its sound, and earned more than $400 million worldwide across releases. The 2000 cut, marketed as “The Version You’ve Never Seen,” restores the spider-walk and adds subliminal flashes of the demon’s face that most people only notice on a second viewing. Where to watch: Max; rent or buy on major digital storefronts.

2. Hereditary (2018)

Ari Aster’s debut is the closest any modern film has come to The Exorcist’s sense of a family being dismantled by forces it cannot name. Toni Collette’s Annie Graham, a miniaturist who builds dioramas of her own life, gives what many critics, including those at the New York Times and Vanity Fair, called one of the great snubbed performances in Oscar history. The first 40 minutes play like a grief drama until a moment on a dark country road detonates the film, and from there Aster stacks images you can’t unsee: a figure grinning in the corner of a dark room, a clicking sound, a head striking a wall. It cost about $10 million and made roughly $80 million, numbers that helped define A24 as the home of prestige horror. Watch it with the lights off and your phone in another room. Where to watch: Rent or buy digitally; it rotates through subscription services, most often Max.

3. The Shining (1980)

Stephen King famously disliked Stanley Kubrick’s version of his novel, which tells you something about how far Kubrick pushed it toward something colder and stranger. Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance unravels inside the Overlook Hotel while Shelley Duvall’s Wendy and Danny Lloyd’s Danny try to survive a building that seems to be rearranging itself. Garrett Brown’s Steadicam glides behind Danny’s Big Wheel through corridors that make no architectural sense, and the score, built around Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s dirge plus pieces by Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti, sounds like the hotel breathing. The scares are almost all compositional: twin girls at the end of a hallway, an elevator releasing a flood of blood, an old woman rising from a bathtub. It gets scarier with each viewing because you keep noticing new impossibilities. Where to watch: Max; rent or buy digitally.

4. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Tobe Hooper made this on a budget reported at around $140,000 during a brutal Texas summer, and you can feel the heat, the exhaustion and the stink in every frame. What surprises first-time viewers is how little blood is actually on screen; the horror comes from Daniel Pearl’s grimy 16mm cinematography, a soundtrack of animal noises and metal, and the sheer relentlessness of Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) once he appears. The dinner scene, with Marilyn Burns screaming as the family taunts her, runs long enough to become genuinely unbearable, which is exactly the point. It earned more than $30 million on its initial run and was banned or cut in several countries. Few films feel this much like found evidence of something that should not have been filmed. Where to watch: Frequently on Shudder; rent or buy digitally.

5. Halloween (1978)

John Carpenter shot Halloween for roughly $300,000 in Southern California, dressing palm-lined streets as Haddonfield, Illinois, and turned it into one of the most profitable independent films of its era. Its fear comes from empty space. Michael Myers, credited as The Shape and mostly played by Nick Castle in a modified William Shatner mask, keeps appearing at the edges of the frame: behind a hedge, across a street, standing still in a backyard while laundry blows. Carpenter’s own piano theme, written in 5/4 time, never resolves, so your ear stays unsettled. Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode is a believable, slightly awkward teenager rather than a slasher-movie archetype, which makes her terror land harder. Every slasher that followed borrowed its playbook, and almost none matched its patience. Where to watch: Has rotated between Shudder and AMC+; rent or buy digitally.

6. Ringu (1998)

Hideo Nakata’s adaptation of Koji Suzuki’s novel turned a cursed videotape into a global nightmare and kicked off the J-horror wave that reshaped Hollywood in the 2000s. The premise is simple: watch the tape, get a phone call, die in seven days. The tape itself, a collage of disconnected, grainy images including a woman brushing her hair in a mirror and a well in a clearing, is more disturbing than any monster because your brain keeps trying and failing to assemble it into a story. And then there is the final sequence, where Sadako crawls out of the well and out of a television, a scene that still makes people check their screens. Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake The Ring, starring Naomi Watts, is a strong American version, but Nakata’s original is quieter, sadder and scarier. Where to watch: Has streamed on Shudder; Arrow Video’s restored Blu-ray is the best way to see it.

7. The Thing (1982)

Released two weeks after E.T. in the summer of 1982, John Carpenter’s remake flopped and was savaged by many reviewers before being reclaimed as one of the great horror films. Kurt Russell leads a crew at an Antarctic research station infiltrated by an alien that can perfectly imitate any living thing, which means nobody can trust anyone. Rob Bottin’s practical effects, including a chest that opens into a mouth and a severed head that sprouts spider legs, remain more shocking than most CGI made four decades later. The blood-test scene, scored by Ennio Morricone’s throbbing synth line, is a masterclass in tension built from pure paranoia. Its ending leaves you sitting in the cold with the question unresolved. Where to watch: Peacock; rent or buy digitally.

8. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Roman Polanski’s film, adapted from Ira Levin’s novel, has a special pull for New York viewers because its haunted apartment building, the Bramford, is the Dakota on Central Park West, and its horror feels rooted in very real Manhattan anxieties: nosy neighbors, an ambitious husband, a doctor who won’t listen. Mia Farrow’s Rosemary grows thinner and paler as her pregnancy progresses, while Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar for the role, plays the overbearing neighbor Minnie Castevet with terrifying cheer. The fear here is gaslighting: everyone tells Rosemary she is imagining things, and you know she isn’t. Polanski’s later criminal case and flight from the United States complicates any celebration of his work, and many viewers now watch the film with that history in mind. Where to watch: Paramount+; rent or buy digitally.

9. Alien (1979)

Ridley Scott’s film is often filed under science fiction, but its structure is pure haunted house: seven blue-collar crew members, a dark ship, and something hunting them one by one. H.R. Giger’s creature design is biomechanical, sexual and wrong in ways that are hard to articulate, and Scott keeps it mostly in shadow. The chestburster scene, during which the cast reportedly hadn’t been told exactly how much blood was coming, produced genuine reactions that the camera captured. Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley emerges as the survivor almost by accident, which made her more believable than any planned action hero. The tagline, “In space no one can hear you scream,” is still one of the best ever written. Where to watch: Hulu in the US, Disney+ in many other territories; rent or buy digitally.

10. Sinister (2012)

The heart-rate data put Sinister at number one, and once you’ve seen it, the result makes sense. Ethan Hawke plays Ellison Oswalt, a fading true-crime writer who moves his family into a house where a murder occurred and finds a box of Super 8 reels in the attic. Each reel documents a different family being killed, and Scott Derrickson films them with sickening specificity: crackling film, wrong camera angles and Christopher Young’s grinding score. The lawnmower reel is the one that made the Science of Scare panel spike to 131 bpm, and you’ll understand why within seconds of it starting. The film loses some steam when it explains its demon, Bughuul, but those home movies are among the scariest things put on a screen this century. If it gets to you, Insidious, which ranked second in the same study, makes a natural follow-up. Where to watch: Rent or buy digitally; it rotates through subscription services.

11. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Shot for roughly $60,000 and grossing about $248 million worldwide, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s film made the internet part of horror marketing; its website presented the three missing filmmakers as real, and plenty of people believed it. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams improvised much of their dialogue while the directors left them with dwindling food in the Maryland woods, and their fatigue is real. You never see the witch. You hear children laughing in the dark, find stick figures hanging from trees, and watch the group slowly turn on each other. The final shot, a man standing in the corner of a ruined house, is a single image that does more than most monsters ever manage. Where to watch: Rent or buy digitally.

12. Psycho (1960)

Alfred Hitchcock shot Psycho in black and white with his television crew for around $800,000, and made audiences afraid to shower for a generation. Killing off Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, the apparent lead, before the film’s halfway point was a betrayal that nobody in 1960 saw coming, and Hitchcock insisted theaters bar latecomers so nobody would miss it. The shower scene, built from dozens of camera setups and cuts (the 2017 documentary 78/52 is named for them), never shows the knife entering skin, yet your brain fills in everything. Bernard Herrmann’s all-strings score, especially those shrieking violins, became the sound of on-screen terror. Anthony Perkins makes Norman Bates so shy and likable that the final reveals still sting. Where to watch: Peacock; rent or buy digitally.

13. The Descent (2005)

Neil Marshall’s British film follows six women on a caving expedition that goes wrong long before anything inhuman shows up. The first half is a claustrophobia film, with tight crawlspaces, collapsing tunnels and a broken leg rendered in uncomfortable detail, and it would be frightening even with no monsters. Then the crawlers arrive, pale and blind and fast, and Marshall lights the caves with only flares, glow sticks and the green wash of a camcorder’s night mode. Shauna Macdonald’s Sarah, still grieving a family tragedy, carries a psychological weight that makes the bleak ending feel earned. Note that US audiences originally saw a shortened ending; the UK version is the one to seek out. Where to watch: Rent or buy digitally.

14. Audition (1999)

Takashi Miike’s film spends roughly an hour as a gentle drama about a widower (Ryo Ishibashi) who holds a fake casting call to find a new wife and becomes infatuated with a quiet young woman named Asami (Eihi Shiina). There are hints, including a burlap sack in Asami’s apartment that moves, that something is off, but nothing prepares you for the final act, which plays out with piano wire, acupuncture needles and Asami’s whispered “kiri kiri kiri.” The cruelty is shocking, but the real horror is how cleanly Miike uses your expectations of romance against you. Audiences reportedly walked out of festival screenings. It is a film many people watch once and never again. Where to watch: Rent or buy digitally; Arrow has released it on disc.

15. Paranormal Activity (2007)

Oren Peli shot this in his own San Diego house for about $15,000; Paramount acquired it, launched a “Demand It” campaign asking audiences to request local screenings, and turned it into a worldwide hit of roughly $193 million. Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat play a couple who set up a camera in their bedroom to record what happens while they sleep. The genius is the static, time-stamped wide shot: you spend every night sequence scanning the frame, waiting for a door to move, and the film trains you to dread silence. Small events, footprints in powder or a body being dragged from bed, register as huge. It’s at its best in a packed theater, where a hundred people go quiet at once. Where to watch: Paramount+; rent or buy digitally.

16. Pulse (2001)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo imagined the internet as a portal for the dead years before social media made loneliness a cultural obsession, and it now plays as eerily prophetic. Young people in Tokyo begin vanishing after encountering strange websites, leaving behind black smudges on walls where their bodies used to be. Kurosawa’s ghosts don’t leap at the camera; one walks toward a character with an uncanny, stuttering gait, as if she has forgotten how bodies move, and that scene is among the most unsettling in the genre. The film’s terror is existential rather than visceral: the fear that death is simply eternal isolation. It’s gray, slow and deeply sad. Where to watch: Criterion’s disc edition; it periodically appears on the Criterion Channel.

17. It Follows (2014)

David Robert Mitchell’s premise is an STD as a curse: after a sexual encounter, Jay (Maika Monroe) is stalked by a shape-shifting figure that walks toward her, always slowly and always directly, and will kill her if it reaches her. The film turns every wide shot into a game of spot-the-threat, and you will find yourself checking the backgrounds of later movies for figures walking toward the camera. Disasterpeace’s synth score is retro and loud, and the decaying Detroit locations give the film a dreamlike placelessness. The rules are never fully explained, which makes the slow pursuit even worse. Few modern horror films have used a camera this cleverly. Where to watch: Rent or buy digitally; it rotates through subscription services.

18. The Babadook (2014)

William Friedkin, the director of our number one pick, publicly said he had never seen a more terrifying film than Jennifer Kent’s debut, and that endorsement still gets quoted for good reason. Essie Davis plays Amelia, a widow raising a difficult young son (Noah Wiseman) when a pop-up storybook appears on their shelf. The book’s illustrations, stark black lines on white paper, are scarier than most creatures in big-budget horror, and Kent ties the monster so tightly to grief and maternal exhaustion that it becomes hard to tell where the supernatural ends. Davis’s performance is raw enough to make some parents uncomfortable. The ending is strange and divisive, and it’s the right one. Where to watch: Has streamed on Shudder and AMC+; rent or buy digitally.

19. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

George A. Romero made this in and around Pittsburgh for about $114,000 and invented the modern zombie in the process. The grainy black-and-white footage looks like newsreel, which makes the farmhouse siege feel uncomfortably real, and the film’s casualness about death, including a child turning on her parent, shocked 1968 audiences. Duane Jones’s Ben, a Black man leading a group of terrified white survivors, gave the film political weight that has only grown, especially given its ending. Because of a copyright notice error on its original release, the film fell into the public domain, so you can watch it legally for free almost anywhere. Where to watch: Free on several ad-supported services; the Criterion restoration is the best version.

20. The Conjuring (2013)

The film the ratings board reportedly gave an R for scariness alone, with no gore, sex or harsh language to justify it, is still James Wan’s best. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga play paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren helping the Perron family in their Rhode Island farmhouse in 1971. Wan builds his scares like set pieces in a musical, most famously the hide-and-clap game, where hands emerge from the dark of a wardrobe. The craft is old-fashioned and precise, owing more to The Exorcist and The Haunting than to modern jump-scare cinema. It launched the most profitable horror franchise in history, but none of the sequels or spinoffs match its control. Where to watch: Max; rent or buy digitally.

21. Lake Mungo (2008)

Joel Anderson’s Australian mockumentary is the deep cut on this list and has built a devoted following largely through word of mouth. It tells the story of the Palmer family after their teenage daughter Alice drowns, using fake interviews, home video and photographs, as they begin seeing her in images around the house. For long stretches it plays as a gentle, devastating study of grief, which is precisely why its scares hit so hard. One piece of phone footage shot at a lake, revealed late in the film, is the kind of image that freezes you. Stay through the credits, and pay attention to the photographs. Where to watch: Has streamed on Shudder; rent digitally where available.

22. Misery (1990)

Rob Reiner directed Stand by Me, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally, so Misery’s ruthlessness still surprises people exploring the Rob Reiner director filmography for the first time. James Caan plays novelist Paul Sheldon, who crashes his car in a Colorado snowstorm and is rescued by Annie Wilkes, his self-described number one fan. Kathy Bates won the Best Actress Oscar for making Annie terrifyingly unpredictable, flipping from cheerful to murderous mid-sentence. William Goldman’s script swaps the novel’s axe for a sledgehammer in the hobbling scene, and somehow it’s worse. There are no ghosts here, only a locked room, a bad leg and a woman who has decided she knows what’s best for you. Where to watch: Prime Video, since Amazon owns the MGM library; rent or buy digitally.

23. Get Out (2017)

Jordan Peele’s debut cost about $4.5 million, grossed around $255 million worldwide and won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, a rare honor for a horror film. Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris visits his white girlfriend’s family for a weekend, and the dread comes from microaggressions that escalate into something much darker. Catherine Keener’s hypnotist mother, stirring a teaspoon in a china cup, sends Chris into the Sunken Place, an image that entered the culture almost immediately. Peele balances satire and horror without letting either undercut the other. It isn’t the most frightening film here moment to moment, but its ideas stay with you longer than most jump scares. Where to watch: Peacock; rent or buy digitally.

24. Host (2020)

Rob Savage made Host during the 2020 lockdown, shooting a group of friends holding a séance over Zoom, and released it as a Shudder original with a runtime of just 56 minutes. The constraint turns out to be its strength: every scare plays out inside the familiar grid of a video call, with virtual backgrounds glitching, cameras dropping and something visible in the dark behind someone’s shoulder. Savage’s cast performed and set up their own scares in their homes. It is the purest jump-scare machine on this list and remarkably efficient, with almost no wasted shots. Watching it on a laptop is, unusually, the scariest way to see it. Where to watch: Shudder; also available to rent in some regions.

25. Talk to Me (2023)

Australian YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou, known for their RackaRacka channel, made one of the best horror debuts of the decade, and A24 bought it out of Sundance. Teenagers at parties take turns grabbing an embalmed hand, saying “talk to me,” then “I let you in,” and getting possessed for 90 seconds while friends film it on their phones. Sophie Wilde’s Mia, still grieving her mother, gets hooked on the experience, and the film treats possession like addiction with real teeth. A sequence involving a younger boy and a table is genuinely hard to watch. It became A24’s highest-grossing horror release in the US, overtaking Hereditary, and the brothers followed it with Bring Her Back in 2025. Where to watch: Rent or buy digitally; A24 titles rotate between subscription services.

Honorable Mentions

These came close, and on another night any of them could break into the list:

• Jaws (1975): Steven Spielberg made people afraid of the ocean, and the malfunctioning mechanical shark forced him toward suggestion over spectacle.
• The Witch (2015): Robert Eggers’s Puritan nightmare is a slow burn with one of the genre’s great final images.
• Martyrs (2008): Pascal Laugier’s French extremity film is too punishing for many viewers, which is why it sits here and not in the top 25.
• The Wailing (2016): Na Hong-jin’s Korean epic runs over two and a half hours and earns every minute.
• Event Horizon (1997): Paul W.S. Anderson’s haunted spaceship is messy, but its brief glimpses of hell are memorable.
• Barbarian (2022) and Longlegs (2024): Two recent films that prove studio horror still has surprises left.

If you’re easing a younger viewer into the genre, Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy (2021) works well, with Sadie Sink playing one of the leads in the 1978 chapter. For an older gateway, the 1990 It miniseries remains a rite of passage, largely because Tim Curry made Pennywise so gleefully creepy that a generation of kids grew up afraid of storm drains.

What These Films Have in Common

Look at the full list and a few patterns jump out. Almost all of them were made cheaply, often by first- or second-time filmmakers: Hooper, Carpenter, Romero, Peli, Aster, Peele, Kent and the Philippous among them. A limited budget forces suggestion, and suggestion is scarier than spectacle because your imagination will always invent something worse than an effects team can.

Sound matters more than images in most of these films. Carpenter’s 5/4 piano theme, Herrmann’s violins, the clicking in Hereditary and the hum of a dead television in Ringu are often the first things people remember. Mute any of these films and the scares fall apart; turn the picture off and many still work.

The other constant is grief. The Exorcist, Hereditary, The Babadook, Lake Mungo, Talk to Me and The Descent all frame their horror around loss. The scariest movie is rarely about a monster. It’s about the thing the monster stands in for, usually a death that hasn’t been processed or a family that can’t protect itself.

Where to See Horror Classics on a Big Screen in NYC

Streaming is convenient, but many of these films were designed for a dark room full of strangers. New York has more repertory horror than almost anywhere, especially from late September through Halloween. Nitehawk Cinema, with locations in Williamsburg and Prospect Park, runs regular midnight and genre programming. In Manhattan, Film Forum and Metrograph book restored classics, and IFC Center’s midnight screenings have been a downtown tradition for years. Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria and BAM in Fort Greene also program horror retrospectives. Seeing The Thing or Halloween on 35mm with a crowd that jumps at the same moment is a different experience from watching on a laptop, and it’s worth seeking out.

What Happens Next: Upcoming Horror to Watch

Studio horror is in an unusually strong period, and 2026 has several releases worth tracking. Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple continues Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s revived infected saga. Scream 7, directed by original Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, brings Neve Campbell back to the franchise. The most unexpected entry comes from DC Studios: Clayface, directed by James Watkins (Speak No Evil) from a script originally written by Mike Flanagan, is being positioned as a body-horror film about the shape-shifting Batman villain and is slated for September 2026. A superhero-adjacent body-horror film from a major studio would have been unthinkable a decade ago, which says a lot about how far the genre has moved into the mainstream. Release dates shift often, so treat any calendar as provisional.

FAQ

What is the scariest movie of all time?

Our pick is The Exorcist (1973), because its documentary-style realism and refusal to soften its subject still unsettle audiences 50 years later. If you go by measured physical response, the Science of Scare Project named Sinister (2012) the scariest, with viewers averaging 86 bpm.

What is the scariest movie on Netflix right now?

Netflix’s horror catalog changes month to month, so any specific answer goes stale quickly. Its original Fear Street trilogy and Mike Flanagan’s series, such as The Haunting of Hill House, have stayed on the service, and you can filter its horror category for current film titles.

Is Hereditary scarier than The Exorcist?

For many modern viewers, yes, because Hereditary’s shocks are less familiar and its grief feels contemporary. The Exorcist is the more influential film and, in our view, the more complete one, which is why it edges out Hereditary for the top spot.

What is the scariest movie based on a true story?

The Conjuring (2013) is the best-known example, drawn from the Warrens’ accounts of the Perron family case, though its supernatural events are dramatized and unverified. The Exorcist was loosely inspired by a reported 1949 exorcism, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre borrowed elements from the crimes of Ed Gein while presenting itself as more factual than it is.

Which scary movies are in black and white?

Psycho (1960) and Night of the Living Dead (1968) are the two black-and-white films in our top 25. Other strong options include The Haunting (1963), Carnival of Souls (1962) and Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse (2019).

What’s a good scary movie for someone new to horror?

Get Out, The Conjuring and Halloween all work as entry points because they frighten without relying on extreme gore. Save Audition, Martyrs and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre until you know how much you can handle.