Looking back at old horror movies allows one to see the ways that fears have changed and stayed the same. Here is a list of the 10 best classic horror movies you’ve never seen.
Horror movies have been unnerving and delighting audiences from the very beginning of cinema. Scholars at the New York Film Academy name Georges Mellies’ Le Manoir du Diable, or The House of the Devil, released in 1896, as the very first horror movie. Over the centuries it has proven itself to be one of the most consistently popular and profitable genres.
Trends may come and go but humans are always going to get scared. Horror movies allow the viewer to work through their fears and anxieties from the safety of the movie theater or living room. Hopefully you will not be attacked in your home by a Michael Meyers-type serial killer (knock on wood), but through watching Halloween (1978) and the character of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) you can safely make your way through that experience.
Horror movies are more than just supernatural creatures, jump scares, and characters going upstairs when they should be running out the door. The genre, at its very best, unlocks the dark and troublesome parts of humanity, the parts we would all rather ignore, but turn lurk in the shadows at 3am. And then, through the hero with whom we as a viewer have identified, the genre tells us that, though life will be frightening and difficult, we will eventually be able to make it through.
Looking at horror movies from different time periods allows the viewer to see the ways that fears change, and, more often than not, the ways that they say the same. Here below is a list of the 10 best classic horror movies you’ve never seen, all made before 1997 and ranked by release date, that will show that things have always been pretty scary. Keep the lights on while watching and enjoy!
1. The Seventh Victim (1943)
Director: Mark Robson
Producer Val Lewton once said that the message behind The Seventh Victim is that “death is good.” Doom hangs over the movie from the very first frame as a John Donne poem is quoted, “I run to death, and death meets me fast.” Sheltered schoolgirl Mary (Kim Hunter) descends into the Nightmarish Hell of Greenwich Village in search of her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) who has gone missing after running afoul of a satanic cult. This is a movie that is felt and experienced rather than intellectualized.
The ordinary is tilted ever so slightly askew into a dreamlike uncanniness. The point of the movie is the atmosphere, which eerie, bizarre, disorienting and otherworldly. Despite the clunkiness of pieces of dialogue, despite the plot holes and coincidences, there are sequences that would send chills up the spine of a football quarterback even in 2025, such as one that takes place on the subway, and another, a Pre-Psycho Shower scene.
2. Hangover Square (1945)
Director: John Brahm
An ancestor of slasher films and the Italian giallo, Hangover Square combines elements of film noir and German Expressionism in order to turn Edwardian Era London into an eerie, fog-covered Nightmare land. Laird Cregar gives an intense and emotionally involving performance as George Harvey Bone, a neurotic classical composer who begins to suffer from stress-induced amnesia, during which he comes to worry he is murdering people.The gaslit shadows of Hangover Square’s London are both dread-inducing and poetically beautiful, visually externalizing the paranoid, uneasy mind of a psychopath. The movie features a thundering score by Bernard Herrmann (Psycho), who demonstrates that, even then, he knew how to scare people through music.
3. Murder, He Says (1945)
Director: George Marshall
The rather poorly named Murder, He Says is a wacky comic take on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre type plotline. Fred MacMurray stars as Pete Marshall, a pollster for the Trotter Poll, “same as the Gallup Poll, only we’re not in quite as much of a hurry,” who is sent into the Rural South when a co-worker goes missing. While there he comes across a murderous hillbilly family that is searching for a missing fortune. The horror is played for laughs, but it’s still there in the grotesque implications of the Fleagle family’s activities. Moving at a breakneck pace and boasting truly remarkable special effects for the 1940s, Murder, He Says is loose, wild and tremendously funny, illustrating the fact that the difference between an itch on your funny bone and a chill up your spine is often smaller than you would imagine.
4. Hour of the Wolf (1968)
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Director Ingmar Bergman brings his trademark dour melancholy and psychological perception to the horror genre with Hour of the Wolf. Shot on Bergman’s beloved Faroes Island, the movie follows Johan (Max von Sydow), a painter who has recently moved to the Island with his pregnant young wife Alma (Liv Ullmann) because “he doesn’t like people.” His mental health rapidly deteriorates as he suffers from insomnia, terrified of “the hour of the wolf,” the period of time between 3 and 5 am, and begins to have unsettling interactions with real or imaginary inhabitants of a gothic castle on the island. The film meticulously thins the line between reality and illusion, dream and nightmare, until the very end, a finale which I would not be surprised to learn inspired David Lynch’s direction for the Red Room sequences on Twin Peaks. Never has someone simply removing a hat been so terrifying.
5. The House That Screamed (1969)
Director: Chicho Ibáñez Serrador
The critic Robin Wood theorized that all horror movies are about the “Return of the Repressed,” the things that society is hoping to forget rising up violently against us. In The House That Screamed, a gothic slasher from 1969, the psychosexual maladjustment is barely repressed, but heaving and sweating underneath petticoats and nightgowns as schoolgirls at a 19th Century boarding school are menaced by an unseen killer. Candlesticks are held as girls are chased down long hallways during stormy nights, and director Chicho Ibáñez Serrador creates a palpable sense of romantic gothic unease that would go on to influence Dario Argento.
6. Ganja and Hess (1973)
Director: Bill Gunn
With so many pieces of media featuring vampires, it’s difficult to find an original take on the monstrous creature. Ganja and Hess still feels as fresh and singular as the day it was released in 1973. Hess Green (Duane Jones, of Night of the Living Dead) is a respected professor of anthropology, who, one night, is stabbed three times with an ancient dagger by an unstable assistant (played by the film’s director Bill Gunn). The violent act does not kill Hess, and soon he discovers an unquenchable thirst for human blood. Gunn’s approach to vampire mythology eschews eurocentric gothicism for something angry, woozy and poetic, using the creature to comment on black assimilation into white culture. Gunn’s filmmaking is lyrical, often overlapping images and sounds to create a disorienting cacophony that matches the desperation of the blood-addicted vampire.
7. Black Christmas (1974)
Director: Bob Clark
Juxtaposing the wholesomeness of Christmas with the abject terror of the unknown, 1974’s Black Christmas is an early slasher film about a sorority being menaced by disturbing phone calls and an unseen killer during the winter holiday. The film is led by Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder, and all of the girls are richly and charmingly characterized, serving a function in the story beyond just playing a murder victim, making for a pointed comment on womanhood and patriarchal control. The sorority house is a world closed off from men, and the unknown killer seeks to punish the women for that. Certain sequences in Black Christmas may play as predictable in 2025 after decades of other movies ripping them off, but the chilly and macabre atmosphere is overwhelming enough to send a shiver down the spine, even when there’s no knife in sight.
8. Alison’s Birthday (1981)
Director: Ian Coughlan
The influence of Rosemary’s Baby worked its way to Australia with 1981’s Alison’s Birthday, written and directed by Ian Coughlan. The satanic panic chiller begins with a gripping sequence in which 16-year-old Alison (Joanne Samuel, of Mad Max) plays on a ouija board during a slumber party. One of her friends is seemingly possessed by the spirit of Alison’s deceased father and warns her not to go to her Aunt and Uncle’s home for her 19th Birthday or something horrible will happen. Flash forward to Alison’s birthday, and along with her boyfriend Pete (Lou Reed), she visits the Aunt and Uncle that raised her, the smiling, bourgeois Jenny (Bunney Brooke) and Dean (John Bluthal).
Everything is suburban banality, that is if you ignore the Stonehedge-like rocks in the background and the decrepit old woman in the attic. It’s a patiently paced slow burn, with well-sketched characters that you grow to care about, and an unnerving atmosphere, as though terrible things are being whispered about just out of earshot. The final punchline is existentially terrifying in its implications.
9. Thesis (1996)
Director: Alejandro Amenábar
The ethics and morality of portraying violence on screen rose to a terrifying height with Alejandro Amenábar’s debut film, the gothic noir Tesis, or Thesis. Graduate film student Angela (the remarkable, wide-eyed Anna Torrent) is working on her thesis project on violence in cinema when she discovers in the college archive what appears to be a snuff film of a fellow student being brutally tortured and murdered. Bodies begin to pile up around Angela and she finds herself drawn into a horror movie of her very own. Using the shadowy, empty corners that seem to exist in all University buildings for maximum atmosphere, Thesis is an engrossing exercise in Hitchcockian tension, a loving send-up of Hollywood horror tropes, and a probing look at what we look at when we look at horror movies.
10. Cure (1997)
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
We all like to think of ourselves as a good person that readily helps our loved ones and treats others decently, but what if, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s dread-inducing and chillingly atmospheric Cure, there was some mental thread in the back of your mind that could be tugged hard enough for you to commit an atrocity? Kōji Yakusho stars as the dejected Tokyo police detective Kenichi Takabe, who is sent through a metaphorical labyrinth in search of the meaning behind a rash of gruesome murders around the Greater Tokyo Area.
All of the culprits are solid citizens (school teacher, doctor, policeman) that readily admit to the crime, and have no apparent motive. All of the murders are connected by the presence of a painted X at the scene. The atmosphere of Cure is quotidian banality, weaved ever so gently with a supernatural uncanniness. Cure doesn’t seek to shock, but creeps up on the viewer with Hitchcockian patience. Any character that you meet could be a potential murderer or victim, no matter how pleasant they seem. No one is safe.
