10. 'Under the Skin' (2013)

It took director Jonathan Glazer almost a decade to adapt Michael Faber's alien invasion novel, about an extraterrestrial that manifests in female human form (specifically, Scarlett Johansson) and seduces male hitchhikers in order to trap, dissolve and eat them. Then the creature makes a curious discovery about its sexual identity while inhabiting this big blue marble; by the end, we're all crying along with the monster. In the hands of a lesser director, Under the Skin would never succeed at such masterful manipulation. But this isn't a movie you watch so much as experience. It's like taking a warm bath in pure nightmare fuel. JV

9. 'The Descent' (2005)

Years before he redefined TV action with his work on Game of Thrones, British director Neil Marshall earned his place in the horror pantheon with this merciless survival-horror story. One year after a car accident shatters their bonds, a group of women go spelunking in a remote Appalachian cavern and unearth far more than they bargained for. The claustrophobic setting is intense and the creature effects genuinely disturbing, but the film's greatness lies in its use of its main character's raw, red grief as emotional kindling for the catastrophe that follows. Few of even the greatest genre movies dare to go places this deep. STC

8. 'Shaun of the Dead' (2004)

Fans consider it an expert goof on zombie movies, but don't tell that to director Edgar Wright: "Our funny characters were inhabiting a pretty bleak and scary situation," he's claimed. "I hope it works as a companion film to the Romero trilogy, rather than a spoof." Mission accomplished: Shaun brilliantly merges horror and comedy in a way that makes the scares exponentially more cutting. This story of a regular bloke (co-writer Simon Pegg) and his oafish best friend (Nick Frost) who discover that the undead are terrorizing their neighborhood has an extra jolt because its laughs are constantly undercut by seeing their friends and loved ones viciously devoured in front of their eyes. And few feature a disemboweling as gut-churning as the one in which a character is about to apologize for being an ass — just as the ravenous hordes break through the wall and tear him to shreds. TG

7. 'The Witch' (2009)

A masterpiece of atmospheric horror, Robert Eggers' brilliantly crafted period piece follows descent of a 17th-century New England farm family into despair and madness after their baby is snatched by a local hag. Though the film contains some genuinely terrifying sequences, much of its overwhelming sense of spookiness comes from what isn’t seen on the screen, along with the tension that inevitably results when the family pits their unbending Puritan outlook against the merciless power of Mother Nature. And Black Phillip, the family’s goat, will put you off petting zoos for the rest of your life. DE

6. 'Pulse' (2001)

An insidious, suicide-inducing miasma invades the world of the living via the Internet in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's quiet, apocalyptic ghost story. Of all the films in the J-horror wave of early aughts, Pulse is by far the creepiest and most prophetic – a depressing indictment of technology and the negative effect it continues to have on humanity. Even more impressively, the filmmaker never resorts to cheap scares, opting for a slower-than-slow-burn sense of dread to suggest a society suffering from spiritual rot, one mouse-click at a time. It's sad, beautiful and haunting – the rare horror movie that leaves a dark stain on your soul. JV

5. 'The Cabin in the Woods' (2012)

The most subversive meta-horror flick since Scream made the genre self-aware, Drew Goddard's tweaked take on the most tired cliché in horror – horny college kids retreating to cabin for drug-binging and sexcapades – becomes something so original that Hollywood hasn't figured out a way to mimic and/or ruin it the way they did with, say, The Blair Witch Project. It has so many twists that it's best enjoyed if you can go into it with a blank slate (or whiteboard, as the case may be ... we've said too much already). But its real feat is being a rare movie that manages to be scary and funny without becoming schlocky or corny in the process. And that's not mentioning the merman subplot. KG

4. 'The Conjuring' (2013)

Lots of directors pledge allegiance to old-school horror flicks like The Exorcist; James Wan is one of the few capable of making something worthy of his influences. This ghost story par excellence works from the same true-life sources that gave us The Amityville Horror: In the early 1970s, paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) visit a Rhode Island family who believe their home is haunted. The Conjuring isn’t merely a spot-on period re-creation — it's a fiendishly effective throwback to Seventies-style studio horror, back when methodical pacing and an icy tone trumped cheap gore. Stately, sophisticated dread permeates every frame, with Wan devilishly toying with his audience as they jump at every creaky floorboard and random trip to the super-creepy basement. TG

3. 'The Babadook' (2014)

Jennifer Kent's debut was not only one of the most assured in years but one of the most conceptually sound: She not only knows how to scare people, but why.The story of a widowed mother (Essie Davis) whose son is menaced by an angular demon that's literally straight out of a children's book begins as a nerve-scraping parable of grief; it becomes truly terrifying, however, when the subject shifts to how quickly parental love can turn to hate. It's a monster movie in which everyone takes turns being the monster. SA

2. 'Let the Right One In' (2008)

Beautiful, bleak and deeply affecting, Tomas Alfredson's stunning 2008 film gave the vampire genre a much-needed tweak with its somber depiction of one of the more unusual relationships in horror history – an alienated 12 year-old boy who inadvertently bonds with the "young" female bloodsucker next door. Filled with enough Swedish angst to make Ingmar Bergman proud and enough genuine scares to appeal to jaded horror fanatics, Let the Right One In moves quietly and deliberately, which makes its feeding scenes and set pieces such as swimming-pool massacre seem all the more jarring. Even more frightening, perhaps, is the film's assertion that adolescent males have the capacity to be far more monstrous than actual monsters. DE

1. '28 Days Later...' (2002)

As with many great horror movies, Danny Boyle's eviscerating zombie thriller grew out of real-world terrors. "Danny was particularly interested in issues that had to do with social rage – the increase of rage in our society, road rage and other things," screenwriter Alex Garland explained. Out of that came 28 Days Later..., in which a handful of survivors (including Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris) try to stay a step ahead of unstoppable hordes of rampaging undead, who don't just feast on the living but seem to be filled with an unquenchable anger, ferociously chasing after our heroes with the lunatic logic of a nightmare. Shot on MiniDV to emphasize the grubby, post-apocalyptic ugliness, the film is a marvel of handheld camerawork and jittery editing. But in the wake of 9/11's jolting tragedy, this prescient horror film also spoke to unconscious anxieties about a world in which simmering tensions and seething paranoia felt like a terrible new normal. TG