The best and scariest horror films to watch now on HBO Max

Billed as a spin-off of The Conjuring, Annabelle operates more like a shoddy brand extension; it cost five times less than its predecessor, and the slashed budget shows—both in the economy casting and in the over-lit, sometimes hideous digital imagery. But as a blunt object, a machine built to put nerves on edge and fingers over eyes, Annabelle is still crudely (and cruelly) effective. Fear comes cheap. [A.A. Dowd]

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What’s scarier, a wolf in the house or a wolf at the door? Is it more frightening to be eaten by a monster or to live in fear of such a fate? Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick’s debut film The Blair Witch Project leaves its horror to the audience’s imagination, and in doing so creates a truly scary horror film, something akin to a lost art these days. An opening screen announces that the movie consists of footage recovered from three lost student filmmakers who disappeared in the Maryland woods while searching for the legendary Blair Witch, and never allows anything to shatter that illusion. Shot with handheld cameras, Blair Witch has the look of a student film and its accompanying outtakes, but more importantly, it feels real. [Keith Phipps]

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Barbarian is the kind of film that leaves you speechless—which is why everyone will tell you to go into it knowing as little as possible. Zach Cregger (Whitest Kids U Know) directs from his own screenplay, revealing a talent for storytelling that horrifically marries the absurd and the relatable. A plain description of the events of this film—which won’t be spoiled here—might sound like a prank from a masterful comedian. But Cregger steadily ratchets an escalating sense of tension that pulls viewers into the absurdity, making them believe an outlandish heart-pounding scenario. In other words, his debut as a horror filmmaker is impressive.

Described sparingly, Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at an Airbnb in Detroit to discover that it’s been double-booked. Her surprise roommate Keith (Bill Skarsgård) seems nice, but his presence immediately unsettles Tess. Keith eventually charms her into lowering her guard, but an eerie wake-up call raises those defenses when she discovers a secret passageway burrowed into her rental’s basement. [Leigh Monson]

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Whatever its flaws as a film, a none-too-scary monster chief among them, The Blob is a uniquely compelling monster movie. The decision to shoot in Technicolor, largely on real locations in Pennsylvania, invests it with a high-’50s feel money couldn’t buy. The remarkable seriousness the actors, particularly method disciple Steve McQueen, bring to the material makes the film difficult to dismiss as mere camp. So does a finale that unites the entire town, teens and grown-ups alike, in an all-metaphors-aside fight against an alien threat, a moment that seems to confirm historian Bruce Eder’s description of The Blob as “like watching some kind of collective home movie of who we were and who we thought we were.” Or maybe it’s simply the best film ever to pit hot-rodding teens against a mass of silicone. It delivers the goods any way you look at it. [Keith Phipps]

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Herk Harvey is said to have directed more than 400 movies in his three decades of filmmaking. Almost all of them, however, were educational and industrial training films, which he shot, on time and under budget, for the Centron Corporation in Lawrence, Kansas. The chief exception—and Harvey’s only feature—was 1962’s Carnival Of Souls, an eerie, low-budget horror yarn that’s become a bona fide cult favorite in the half-century since it was first released. The film, about a church organist (Candace Hilligoss) haunted by leering specters after a car accident, approximates the feeling of a nightmare that won’t end. Both David Lynch and George Romero have cited it as an influence on their own early, shoestring shockers, while the twist ending anticipated several decades of climactic rug pulls. But like a lot of cult classics, Carnival Of Souls—a recent inductee of the Criterion Collection—was unappreciated in its own time. Audiences ignored the movie, the distributor went bankrupt, and Harvey returned to his day job, never to make a full-length film again. Centron’s gain was our loss; surely, there were better uses of the director’s talents than warning kids about the dangers of cheating. [A.A. Dowd]

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As an exercise in classical scare tactics, delivered through an escalating series of primo setpieces, The Conjuring is often supremely effective. Set in the early ’70s, an era [James] Wan evokes through careful period detail and a heavy coat of “look, it’s the past” sepia, the film dives into the real-life case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, married paranormal investigators whose biggest claim to fame was the Amityville incident. The two are played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson and are introduced via an on-the-job prologue. (Wan gets bonus points for opening on the dead, fixed eyes of the world’s creepiest doll.) Following a thunderously portentous title card, which strains to position The Conjuring as this era’s answer to The Exorcist, the focus shifts to parents Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor, who move their family of seven into a roomy Rhode Island farmhouse. The subsequent supernatural happenings—slammed doors, rearranged belongings, yanked limbs—are nothing audiences haven’t seen before, but Wan stages them for maximum heart-in-throat suspense. By tracking his camera through the entire home early on, he can play on viewers’ familiarity with the space. And he refuses to show a fearsome bedroom specter, opting instead to train his lens on the terrified preteen who can see it, pledging his allegiance to the power of suggestion. [A.A. Dowd]

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When it was released on American screens, Georges Franju’s elegant 1960 horror film Eyes Without A Face was re-titled The Horror Chamber Of Dr. Faustus and paired with something called The Manster, the macabre tale of a half-man/half-beast with two heads. Beyond the fact that Franju’s film includes neither a horror chamber nor a villain named Dr. Faustus, the double feature must have seemed curious to the drive-in crowd, who had to wonder what these two films could possibly have in common. Yet Eyes Without A Face owes more to the American horror tradition than to French art cinema, which was slow to acknowledge the genre’s legitimacy, much less its potential. Caught between cultures, the film was greeted with scandal in its home country and mistreatment in the U.S., but it endures as a gorgeous fusion of opposing sensibilities, a lyrical monster movie with visceral thrills and moments of unforgettable visual poetry. [Scott Tobias]

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There’s a scene about halfway through The Exorcist, the highest-grossing film of 1973, where Father Damien Karras pauses mid-prayer. Karras is a Jesuit priest, but he’s also a psychiatrist, employed by Georgetown University to counsel the other priests. An actress named Chris MacNeil has come to him, desperate. Something is wrong with MacNeil’s daughter. MacNeil thinks that maybe she’s possessed, even though she knows that seems impossible. Karras says that, if he were to give anyone an exorcism, he’d “have to get them in a time machine and get them back to the 16th century.” But Karras meets this girl, Regan, and something is definitely wrong.

In church, thinking about all this, Karras gives the liturgy of the Eucharist, and he pauses for just a second. Something crosses his face. In that heartbeat, while talking about the body and blood of Christ, Karras seems to recognize something about Catholicism—about its connection to some ancient druidic barbarism. He seems to decide that only ancient mysterious good can combat ancient mysterious evil. Right away, he goes to his Church superiors and recommends an exorcism… [Tom Breihan]

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Like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to malevolent life, Häxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages remains a silent-era stunner of profane imagery and feverish socio-historical commentary. Danish director Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film (co-financed by a Swedish production company) combines animation, non-fiction, and fictional elements to investigate the history of witchcraft, and the persecution of women over the course of centuries. That topic is given gloriously demented visual life by Christensen, who drenches his black-and-white vignettes in dark shadows, brimstone fire and smoke, and all manner of unholy sights, from grave robbing and cannibalism to the Devil’s worshippers pledging allegiance to their horned master by kissing his naked ass. [Nick Shager]

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Of all the blood-curdling images conjured up by Hereditary, the most traumatically terrifying new horror movie in ages, one sticks out as particularly definitive: Toni Collette, face twisted into a grotesque grimace of fear, staring off screen at a ghastly something we’ll soon have the bad luck of laying eyes on too. Her recurring expression of fright and pain is more than just a perfect mirror, reflecting back the audience’s own mounting distress. It also captures, in shuddery microcosm, the tactics of this relentless, ingenious shocker, the way it builds its haunted house on a foundation of raw and ugly emotion. The real horror—a tempest of unspoken, unspeakable feeling—lurks behind the safer, faker kind, enhancing every macabre funhouse moment. [A.A. Dowd]

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1977’s House is a classic of what writer Chuck Stevens calls “le cinéma du WTF?!,” and it’s one of our favorites of the genre here at The A.V. Club. (We even inducted it into the New Cult Canon a few years back.) Written by director Nobuhiko Obayashi based on one of his young daughter’s nightmares, House is like an episode of Scooby-Doo directed by Richard Lester while he was utterly zonked out on psychedelics. Or maybe it’s like a ghost story told around the campfire by a precocious preteen who’s also out of her mind on psychedelics. You know what, maybe just watch the trailer. [Katie Rife]

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Cinematic vampires did the glam thing long before Twilight’s Edward Cullen came along with his diamond-sparkly skin and tousled hair. In The Hunger, Catherine Deneuve is a vampire and David Bowie is her blood-sucking, century-old consort, and they live a happy predatory life together in a glitzy ’80s paradise of Bauhaus concerts, blown-out hairspray helmets, and hard-edged Robert Palmer aesthetics. Then Bowie starts to age rapidly, and Deneuve admits that his connection to her could only keep him young and beautiful so long. As he panics and looks for a solution, she discards him and replaces him with new lover Susan Sarandon. As Sarandon says in The Hunger’s commentary track, this was back when lesbian relationships were barely ever seen onscreen—especially among mainstream American stars like her, and especially not with this level of soft-edged, dreamy sensuality. “It certainly changed my fan base,” she says.

The Hunger was the feature-film debut of director Tony Scott, who later made his name on bro-riffic action blockbusters (Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, The Last Boy Scout, Crimson Tide, Man On Fire, Unstoppable, etc.), but here, for once, he was more interested in female eroticism and emotional power dynamics than in explosions and male bonding. He was also expressing his own love of glam and punk, in the visual terms of the commercials he made at the start of his career. [Tasha Robinson]

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Watching the big-screen version of It only emphasizes how strange Stephen King’s novel really is. Adapting a more than 1,000 page book into a feature film—or half of it, as director Andrés Muschietti has done here—is a daunting task in and of itself, let alone a novel that features a cosmic turtle and an immortal shape-shifting clown who feeds off of the fear of children. In adapting It for the screen, writers Chase Palmer, Gary Dauberman, and Cary Fukunaga (the latter of whom was also attached to direct at one point) have made some significant changes from King’s book. Some are for the better and some are for the worse, but they’re all in the service of conventional three-act storytelling… [Katie Rife]

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Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 anthology film Kwaidan (the title translates simply as Ghost Stories) isn’t the kind of movie you watch when you want to be scared out of your wits. None of its four tales of the supernatural goes for the jugular, and several of them deliberately telegraph their chilling conclusion, undermining any suspense. Kobayashi, who adapted all four from collections of Japanese folk tales assembled by Lafcadio Hearn, expected local audiences to be familiar with the basic narratives, the same way that an American audience would know what’s coming in a filmed version of, say, “The Hook.” What makes Kwaidan singular is the combination of Kobayashi’s almost maddeningly patient, methodical approach to drama (as exemplified by 1962’s Harakiri, also available via Criterion) and his expressionistic experiments with color, sound, and theatrical artifice. [Mike D’Angelo]

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James Wan is a conductor of fear, and in more ways than one. Watch Insidious or The Conjuring, and it’s easy to picture the director standing in front of the screen as though it were an orchestra, baton in hand… Wan’s new movie, Malignant, is more ride than symphony. But it’s a ride to remember. The film returns its director to his original genre wheelhouse after a stint in the CGI waters of comic-book cinema. The opening frames make that lurch back onto land literal, as we skim the surface of a choppy sea to find a surely haunted hospital looming on the cliffside above like a Transylvanian manor. Over the two hours that follow, Wan will riffle through his bag of tricks with a renewed sense of diabolical purpose: zooming through peepholes, leering from the inside of washing machines, ripping down hallways, pushing invasively into the pale faces of his actors. When a gust of wind blows back the curtain of an open window, revealing the towering specter it was previously concealing, you can almost see the superimposed skeleton grin of the director, cackling through his rudimentary but expertly timed gag. [A.A. Dowd]

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Misery runs 107 minutes, and [James] Caan spends most of it confined to a bed, as his character, bestselling author Paul Sheldon, contends with unhinged fan Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates). Bates won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance, and deservedly so, while Caan, who completes and complements her performance, didn’t even receive a Best Actor nomination. We get it, though. Bates has the flashier role, while Caan is called upon to simmer and stew and scheme, with occasional bursts of mostly verbal fury, and flashes of fake warmth. He pulls you in, even though Sheldon is a bit of a jerk. And just try not to scream in terror along with Sheldon when Annie takes a sledgehammer to his ankles. [Ian Spelling]

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The original 1981 My Bloody Valentine, one of the first titles in the early-’80s slasher glut inspired by the success of Halloween and Friday The 13th, generally follows form: There’s a masked killer, an abundance of ready victims, and a series of elaborate, implausible deaths. But for those willing to look past the surface similarities, Valentine has its own distinctive charm. [Zack Handlen]

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As has been noted, dramatic King films have a better track record than horror ones. Still, the best King adaptation isn’t merely horror, but one of the scariest and most acclaimed horror films of all time: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Its mark on pop culture has been indelible, from “all work and no play” to the visuals of cascading elevator blood and creepy-as-hell twin girls. Its iconic scenes have been the subject of endless parody and homage, and it has been analyzed with enough rigor to provide the backbone for an acclaimed documentary that explores far-fetched fan theories. It is a masterpiece of dread and atmosphere, and one of the best examples of Kubrick’s mastery of mood. [Ryan Vlastelica]

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An ideally cast Ethan Hawke brings dimension to the role of a true-crime writer whose egomaniacal quest for another bestseller lands his family in terrible trouble in Sinister. His latest project involves the investigation of the hanging deaths of a couple and their two children and the disappearance of a third child. Without his wife (Juliet Rylance) and children knowing, Hawke moves them into the murder house to work on his book, and before long, disturbing events start happening. The trouble begins when Hawke discovers a box of 8mm home movies sitting in the attic, each depicting the gruesome ritual murder of a different family across the span of a few decades. With the help of a local deputy—a hilarious James Ransone (Ziggy from The Wire)—Hawke starts to put the pieces together, but the connections lead him into a supernatural realm. [Scott Tobias]

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A dark cityscape opens Sweeney Todd, Tim Burton’s adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical, but a baby-faced sailor (Jamie Campbell Bower) seems not to notice the gloom. Dismissing all the glories he’s seen in his travels, he cheerily decides that there’s “no place like London,” in a voice chipper enough to force the sun to shine. But Sweeney Todd isn’t that kind of musical. It needs a different kind of hero, and Bower is soon forced out of frame by the more troubled face of Johnny Depp, who sings, “You are young. Life has been kind to you… You will learn.” Life was once kind to Depp’s Sweeney Todd. As a younger man, he was a successful barber with a beautiful wife and child. But the evil Judge Turpin (a perfectly cast Alan Rickman) decided to take Depp’s family as his own, and had Depp arrested and deported. After more than a decade in exile, the newly bloodthirsty Depp returns to reclaim what’s his, or failing that, punish those who took it away. [Keith Phipps]

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A soapy, surreal, serial drama co-created by Hill Street Blues veteran Mark Frost and film director David Lynch, Twin Peaks arrived on network television like an atom bomb, debuting April 8, 1990, and putting the question “Who killed Laura Palmer?” on the lips of tens of millions of people. Almost inconceivably, 14 months later the show went out with a whimper, euthanized by ABC with a bundled two-episode send-off following a shuffling of time-slots and a hiatus of nearly two months. The series was a supernova, and it left the medium of television changed forever.

Why, then, did Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, arriving in theaters less than two and a half years (a mere blink of the eye in the pre-internet era) after its progenitor’s unlikely takeover of mainstream culture, land with such a thud—commercially, and especially critically?

The brilliant, ahead-of-its-time film, celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2022, has taken a long and winding road to redemption, both within Lynch’s larger canon and among fans of Twin Peaks, which of course was continued with 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return. [Brent Simon]

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