"Horror" covers a Disney comedy about three witches and a film that made audiences faint in the aisles. This guide splits the genre into seven kinds of scary, gives you the one film to start each, and points you to the full list when you want more.
The order runs from gentlest to hardest, so you can work down it over October or jump straight to the kind of scary you already know you like. Every pick has its own page with the trailer and where it is streaming right now, and every section links to the longer list it comes from.
For the night the whole house is watching.
Kenny Ortega directs three witch sisters brought back to Salem on Halloween night. It is a comedy first, which is exactly why it works as a first horror film: the scares are real enough to count and silly enough that nobody needs the lights on afterwards.
It tops our list of the best Halloween movies for kids, which also has the stop-motion picks for children who are ready for something a little darker.
One monster, a small crew, and nowhere to run.
The creature feature is horror's simplest shape: something that should not exist is loose, and the walls are closing in. Ridley Scott's film is the purest version of it, a haunted house that happens to be a spaceship.
It is number one on our list of the best horror movies on Netflix, so if you have Netflix in the US, you can start it tonight.
The toy that looks back.
Dolls are horror's favourite trick: take the most harmless object in the house and give it a reason to move. Tom Holland's film put a serial killer inside a talking toy, and Chucky has been running a franchise ever since.
It is number one in our doll horror ranking, ahead of M3GAN and Annabelle.
Every twenty-seven years, Derry pays.
Andy Muschietti's adaptation of the Stephen King novel is the clown film everything else gets measured against, and the rare horror film that is also a good coming-of-age story.
It leads our list of the best clown horror movies, sits at number one on the highest-grossing horror movies, and Pennywise is number three among the scariest horror movie villains.
A mask, a kitchen knife, and a quiet street in Haddonfield.
John Carpenter's film set the rules the slasher still follows: the masked killer who never runs, the babysitters, the final girl. Watch it once for the scares and again to see how little it actually shows you.
Michael Myers' face is number one in our ranking of horror movie masks and number two among the scariest horror movie villains, behind Freddy Krueger.
The one people still argue about.
William Friedkin directs the film that turned possession into a subgenre of its own. William Peter Blatty's novel drew on a real 1949 exorcism case, and that half-true foundation is a large part of why it still gets under people's skin.
It is number one on our list of horror movies based on true stories, which also sorts out how much of The Conjuring and The Amityville Horror actually happened.
When one film is not enough.
Mike Flanagan's ten-episode series is a family drama and a ghost story at once, and it does something a film cannot: it gives the dread time to build across a whole season.
It is number one in our list of the best horror TV shows, alongside Midnight Mass, FROM and The Terror.
The Conjuring, The Exorcist, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Amityville Horror and The Strangers: the real cases behind each film, and how much is true.
The 5 most iconic horror movie masks: Michael Myers, Ghostface, Jason, Pennywise and Art the Clown. Where each came from, and where to buy one.
The 5 best doll horror movies, ranked: Child's Play, M3GAN, Annabelle: Creation, Magic and Dead Silence. Trailers for all five.
