The 25 Best Foreign Language Horror Movies Of All Time

10. “Suspiria” (1977)
Along with fellow Italians Bava and Fulci (see above), Dario Argento pioneered the giallo genre, but his most famous and best movie does not actually fit the confines of that movement entirely. Instead, Argento borrows elements of giallo to tell a more overtly supernatural story, and the trademark hyperstylized visuals, gore, and lurid female eroticism, lend themselves to one of the most atmospheric and influential horror movies ever made as a result. The story of an American ballerina (Jessica Harper) who transfers to a sinister German ballet academy covertly run by a coven of witches, part of the weirdness is prosaic, like the unconvincing dubbing because everyone spoke different languages, but even that lends its own uncanny effect. And once you become attuned to its garish unsubtlety, “Suspiria” feels like a new drug, like the first hit that will get you hooked — on Argento, on giallo, and on all the many films that it would go on to inspire.

9. “The Devil’s Backbone” (2001)
If “Pan’s Labyrinth” is Guillermo Del Toro’s best film, and it is, “The Devil’s Backbone” might be his best pure horror movie, although as ever with the director, his encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre doesn’t stop other genres from creeping into the mix. A definite companion piece to the later picture (both are set during the Spanish Civil War), it’s an eerie ghost story set at an orphanage during the conflict, about a young boy, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), who starts seeing visions of a boy who appears to no longer be among the living. Complete with a literal ticking clock in the form of an unexploded bomb in the courtyard of the setting, it’s genuinely unsettling, and has more than one moment able to scare the bejeesus out of you. But as is often the case with Del Toro, the greatest evil comes from the living, not the dead, and few filmmakers find such sympathy and poetry from the ghosts and ghouls of the world.

8. “Time Of The Wolf” (2003)
With Michael Haneke, you could easily make the argument that almost any of his films is a horror film (even “Amour“), especially considering his international breakout came for pared-back home-invasion slasher movie “Funny Games.” But for us, his truest example of the genre is the 2003 dystopian terrorfest “Time Of The Wolf,” a thoroughly chilling and horribly plausible view of a human world devoid of humanity. After a catcalysm, Anne (Isabelle Huppert) and her family struggle to survive in the newly devastated land, eventually coming under the questionable protection of tinpot despot Olivier Gourmet. As you would expect from the severe Austrian formalist Haneke, this is about as far from genre jump scares as you can get, but the real-world parallels alone mean that it might just be the most bone-deep horrifying film on this list, a rigorously intellectual and precise view of a world so witheringly devoid of compassion or hope that it could curdle the blood in your veins.

7. “The Host” (2006)
We inevitably encounter opposition when we count Bong Joon-ho’s fearless, bonkers creature feature as a horror, but here’s the thing: it’s one of the best films of the new century (easy to see why it was the most successful South Korean film ever to that point) and where else are we going to get the chance to talk it up? Borne of the illegal dumping of hazardous toxins, a giant, amphibious creature causes havoc, eventually spiriting away a young girl (Go Ah-sung). The girl’s family, led by her schlubby father (wonderful Bong regular Song Kang-ho), vows to retrieve her, and what follows is equal parts horror film, comic family drama, satirical sci-fi and fairy tale, as well as culturally-specific grief movie. So multifacted it’s almost iridescent with the various themes, strands and genres it encompasses en route to its beautifully bizarre ending, it feels like a liberation, like an enormous blast of fresh air through the dusty halls of genre, and if that makes it less than “pure” horror, bring it on.

6. “Trouble Every Day” (2001)
An intense collision of carnality and cannibalism, French arthouse darling Claire Denis’s “Trouble Every Day” is anomalous in her output — only rarely does she make a film that sits easily within a genre. But it’s not surprising that when she did choose to embrace one, it was horror, in which all her darker instincts for the deeply disquieting, the surprisingly bloody and the emotionally, sexually and physically violent could come to the fore. A voracious woman Core (Béatrice Dalle), only kept in check by her scientist husband, is bonded to a recently married American, Shane (Vincent Gallo) by Shane’s history of erotic fixation on her, and in that neither can suppress their desire to literally devour their lovers. Gory and ddly Gothic though it is, it’s mostly a parable about destructive sexual obsession that continues Denis’ unflinching yet sensuous exploration of the body and the darker, more animalistic impulses it can harbor.

5. “Let The Right One In” (2008)
A gothic love story as well as a horror, Tomas Alfredson’s Swedish-language version of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel (which the author also scripted) is a rarity: genre geeks and art-house snobs can mutually appreciate the work. The film follows Eli (a brilliantly melancholic yet ruthless Line Leandersson) a centuries-old vampire trapped in the body of a (seemingly) prepubescent girl, who is provided for ineffectually by an older man who is part lover, part slave, but whose colossal loneliness finds some relief when she befriends her bullied, isolated 12-year-old neighbor Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant). There are elements in the book that Alfredson’s films plays down — such as the issue of paedophilia as well as the question of Eli’s gender (an theme that has entirely disappeared in Matt Reeves’ Chloe Moretz-starring US version “Let Me In“) but mostly this is a masterful adaptation of a great book, elevated by Alfredson’s icily meticulous visuals and a perfectly crooked little turn from Leandersson.

4. “Audition” (1999)
At last count, Takashi Miike has made roughly forty bajillion movies, but none are better known than his knuckle-bitingly brutal, deeply clever horror flick “Audition.” Based on a book by Ryu Murukami, the film initially appears to be a relationship drama (with echoes of a slightly darker “Sleepless In Seattle”), as widower Ryo Ishibashi agrees for his film producer friend to organize a fake audition for him to meet new women, at which point he falls for a beguiling, beautiful young woman Asami (Eihi Shiina). Unusually, Miike is incredibly restrained for the first half of the film, only gradually suggesting that Asami might not be entirely on the up-and-up. And then comes one of the great jump scares in cinema history, and the film turns into something truly and deeply disturbing. while still feeling of a piece with the first half (the director carefully sewing the seeds of casual sexism throughout, though the gender politics aren’t entirely unproblematic). If nothing else, it’ll put you off acupuncture for life.

3. “Pulse” (2001)
The beginning of the new millennium saw technological anxiety creep into the horror genre, mostly terrible horror movies about haunted cell-phones or Diane Lane trying to find a webcam killer. Easily the most twitchy and disturbing of this sub-genre, or indeed arguably the most twitchy and disturbing film of the past 16 years, was Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Pulse.” Long buried by the Weinsteins in favor of their terrible Kristen Bell-starring remake, the original tells two loosely connected stories that see souls of dead people begin to invade the physical world through the internet. Which sounds silly, but in fact Kurosawa turns out something deeply, soul-shakingly sad, carefully curating an eerie mood to unsettle you completely, while also exploring the disconnected nature of internet life in a way that doesn’t come across as shaking the fist at kids. By the apocalyptic finale, you’ll be ready to throw your router in the dumpster.

2. “The Orphanage” (2007)
As we said up top, we favor horror films that play with a much broader palette of emotions than just fear, and on that level the devastating “The Orphanage” from Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona only grows in our estimation year on year. Belen Rueda stars as the mother and wife returning to the house where she was raised as an orphan, where her son Simon starts to see a little boy in a (terrifying) sackcloth mask, whom he befriends before mysteriously disappearing. Like kindred spirit “Pan’s Labyrinth” (which is only not here because it already rode high on our 21st Century Fantasy Films list) the real and the supernatural co-exist brilliantly here, and though it’s tightly plotted, the plot is secondary to the massive emotional arc it encompasses. It’s creepy as hell, but also profoundly melancholy — a spellbinding ghost story in which the ghosts are as real as the grief they leave behind.

1. “Eyes Without A Face” (1960)
George Franju‘s delicious, heady and indelibly influential 1960 French-language “Eyes Without a Face” has spent the intervening decades being declared “ahead of its time” so at this stage, 56 years after it premiered, we think it’s safe to just call it “timeless.” And that in itself is remarkable for a horror film, a genre in which modish trends and topicality are often used as a shortcut to terror. But Franju’s film is altogether more ethereal, and while the effects, shocking enough back then to cause faintings (and still pretty queasy tbh), have obviously been overtaken in gore and graphicness, the film’s dreamlike, almost poetic mood has seldom been paralleled. It has however been much imitated, most overtly in Pedro Almodovar‘s “The Skin I Live In,” but even that does not quite capture the weird, fetishized sadness of Franju’s tragic horror. A mad doctor (Pierre Brasseur, who is all the more scary for appearing so clinically sane), abetted by his icily efficient housekeeper (Alida Valli) wants to graft a new face on to his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), who was badly injured in a car accident, but can only do it from a live subject. There’s an ambivalence at the heart of the film that is subtle and unusual, in which we sometimes almost sympathize with the villains and by which the literally faceless Christiane becomes a reflecting pool for themes of identity, deception and concealment right up until its deeply satisfying twist ending. Horrors that scare are good, horrors that haunt are great, and “Eyes Without a Face,” especially in that iconic, unheimlich image of Scob in her plastic mask, has been haunting us for five and a half decades.

Notes/Honorable mentions
There’s a marked lack of New French Extremity titles here, “Inside” aside, and no doubt the omission of “Martrys” will cause some kvetching among the more hardcore horror fans, but it wasn’t an oversight. While Pascal Laugier‘s film is undoubtedly skilfully done and inventively revolting it ultimately feels very hollow — a thin payoff for enduring such extreme unpleasantness. Ditto Alexandre Aja‘s “High Tension,” among several other examples, as well as sine qua non extreme gruesomeness endurance test “A Serbian Film.” We’re also light on giallo titles, with only the not-quite giallo “Suspiria” and the precursor “Black Sunday” standing in there, but those of you horrified by that paucity can check out our 12 Essential Giallos feature here, and know that of the other giallo masters Lucio Fulci’s “The Beyond” was probably closest to making the list. Also just missing our final list were films like “Thirst,” “Tesis,” “Dead Snow,” “The Silent House,” “Amer,””Taxidermia,” “Julia’s Eyes,” recent pregnancy horror “Shelley,” “Suicide Club” “Calvaire” “The Skin I Live In” and 1976’s “Who Can Kill A Child?“. Going back further, possibly because of their relatively unavailability, we did find it hard to get a hold of foreign horror titles from before the 1960s, and further back again, we took “foreign language” literally and excluded silent films “Nosferatu,” “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari,” and “Vampyr” (which isn’t actually silent but uses dialogue cards extensively) — but all three are of course foundational horror texts.

And as ever there are several very scary films that we just didn’t feel were quite on the money as horror films — “Les Diaboliques,” “Come and See!” “The Vanishing,” Japanese mindfuck “Tetsuo: The Iron Man,” gross-out classic “Salo” and “Oldboy” among them (indeed all the Korean revenge movie subgenre, like Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil” felt nearly-but-not-quite, especially when those directors have more straight-up horror films on their tickets too). And many of the directors listed above have a further title or two that could also have come under discussion. So yes, it’s a very selective scraping of a pretty enormous category, and though we hope you enjoyed it, we’re sure you have titles to add, so feel free to call them out in the comments below.