The 16 Best Scary Movies to Watch This Halloween

​Night of the Living Dead (1968)

From out of nowhere — well, Pittsburgh — George A. Romero scraped together a few bucks and a handful of friends to make what has since become the alpha and omega of zombie movies. Released during the height of Vietnam and the civil rights struggle, the movie has more on its mind than just the walking dead terrorizing the living. The presence of a Black hero (Duane Jones) was downright revolutionary. But even if you glaze over all of the political subtext, this is a suffocatingly claustrophobic nail-biter whose black-and-white cinematography only seems to heighten its unrelenting mood of dread.

Watch it: Night of the Living Dead

​Get Out (2017)

Jordan Peele’s Get Out is obviously more than just a horror movie. It’s a meditation on white privilege and race in America. But yes, it’s also deeply unsettling and scary as all get out. Daniel Kaluuya’s performance as Chris, a Black photographer who’s brought to the swanky suburbs to meet his white girlfriend’s liberal parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener, both perfection) is harrowing and layered. The rare horror show that doubles as stinging satire, Get Out never lets you off the hook for a second.

Watch it: Get Out

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Scary movies rarely get a date with Oscar, but Jonathan Demme’s serial-killer thriller virtually swept the Academy Awards in 1992. It’s not just a great horror film, it’s a great film, period. Jodie Foster absolutely soars as the determined FBI novice Clarice Starling, and Anthony Hopkins is an unshakable waking nightmare of seductive depravity as Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter. It’s also a corker of a police procedural, too, peppered with macabre details and twists that all snap together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Plus, if you’re so inclined, we hear it pairs well with a nice Chianti.

Watch it: The Silence of the Lambs

The Shining (1980)

Jack Nicholson gives the most haunting — and haunted — performance of his career as a snowed-in writer who neither works nor plays but becomes anything but a dull boy as he descends into madness and terrorizes his family in an abandoned hotel. The Shining is wall-to-wall with hallucinogenic visual images that continue to plague our nightmares: ghostly butlers, creepy twins, blood elevators, whatever happens in Room 237, “Redrum.” It may be the closest thing we have to an encyclopedia of terror.

Watch it: The Shining

The Exorcist (1973)

How on earth did this movie ever get an R rating? William Friedkin’s The Exorcist goes beyond scary, messing with the sacred and profane in ways that popular entertainment normally isn’t allowed to. This is a transgressive masterpiece that messes with your head by putting Satan inside the body of a sweet and innocent 12-year-old girl (Linda Blair). There is no taboo line that The Exorcist doesn’t walk up to and defiantly step across. It should be objectionable and offensive and awful. Yet it remains one of the most powerful and viscerally bloodcurdling movies ever made.

Watch it: The Exorcist​

Psycho (1960)

This is the movie that reinvented all of the rules of horror by breaking them. When that knife came swooping at the showering and vulnerable Janet Leigh, Alfred Hitchcock was announcing that absolutely no one was safe. Even the main star of a movie could be butchered before the film was half over. Add Anthony Perkins as the essence of creepiness as mama’s boy Norman Bates, and what you’re left with is the movie that officially launched the modern age of horror.

Watch it: Psycho

​Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

“What have you done to its eyes?!” Roman Polanski’s deal-with-the-devil thriller has aged impeccably well thanks to its eerie score, vise-tightening pacing and the performances of Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes and 70-year-old Ruth Gordon as the quintessential nosy neighbor from hell. Pregnant and increasingly paranoid (or is she?), Farrow’s Rosemary is haunted by the suspicion that she’s the victim of a conspiracy of devil worshippers coming for her unborn child. A master class in hysteria that, in the end, proves to be all too real.

Watch it: Rosemary’s Baby

​The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Overshadowed by Dracula, The Wolf Man and the original Frankenstein in the pantheon of classic Universal monster movies, director James Whale’s dark, tongue-in-cheek horror comedy may actually be the best film in the bunch. The bolt-necked Boris Karloff returns as Colin Clive’s lumbering reanimated giant, but it’s Elsa Lanchester (and her shocking-locks hairdo) who steals this wildly entertaining monster mash. This is the rare horror sequel that not only lives up to its predecessor but actually surpasses it.

Watch it: The Bride of Frankenstein

​The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter scared a generation to death with his 1978 cult classic, Halloween. Here, the killer isn’t some lunatic in a mask. Scarier, still: It could be any one of us. A gripping sci-fi meditation on paranoia and subzero dread, The Thing (a loose remake of 1951’s The Thing from Another World) is the story of a group of scientists shut off from the rest of the world in an Antarctic research station where something alien is assuming the bodies of its victims in very messy ways. Kurt Russell heads up a stellar ensemble that will make you break out in cold sweats and shiver with fear.

Watch it: The Thing

Carrie (1976)

If you didn’t fit in in high school, you’ll identify with Carrie White. Played by Sissy Spacek, Carrie is an outcast who’s hazed by the popular crowd at school and tormented by her religious fanatic mother (Piper Laurie) at home. Something’s gotta give. And when it does, at the prom, no less, hoo boy, the pig’s blood goes flying! Brian De Palma’s masterful adaptation of Stephen King’s horrific novel is a metaphor for puberty, teenage rebellion and what happens when you’re pushed too far. But it’s Spacek’s quiet vulnerability that grabs you like a hand reaching out from the grave.

Watch it: Carrie

Hereditary (2018)

Between this and 2019’s Midsommar, writer-director Ari Aster may be the most innovative (and deeply disturbing) new voice in American horror. Hereditary is the more traditionally effective of the two when it comes to pure joy-buzzer scares. Gabriel Byrne and Toni Collette star as a couple whose family starts to experience a bizarre string of terrifying cautions and curses. Hereditary works its way through a checklist of tried-and-true scary-movie ingredients — séances, shock scares, supernatural weirdness — but it’s the performances that get under your skin and raise goose bumps, especially Collette’s.

Watch it: Hereditary