The 50 Best Horror Movies Of The 21st Century So Far

We’ve been having a bit of a horror-fest at The Playlist this month (terrifying Halloween party costumes of choice at Playlist Towers include: Mike Pence, the ghost of the never-made second season of “Vinyl” and Vin Diesel in the high-frame-rate sequences from “Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk”), with the last few weeks serving as something of a potted history of the last half-century or so.

We began with The Best Foreign Language Horror Films, continued with the best horrors of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, explored the best-looking horror films, and even examined some movies that aren’t horrors but are nevertheless terrifying. And now, we’re bringing it right up to date with the best of the 21st century so far.

READ MORE: The 15 Best Found Footage Horror Movies Ever

The sixteen years since the millennium switchover have been an amazingly vital time for the genre, with seemingly more variety and ingenuity in horror films than ever before, and with acclaimed directors and newcomers alike proving adept at scaring the living daylights out of you. So, with no further ado, here’s a full list of the 50 best horror movies of the 21st century (expanded from the 25 we did two years ago). Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

50. “Trick ‘R’ Treat” (2007)
Last year’s Christmas-themed “Krampus” finally gave writer-director Michael Dougherty the horror sleeper he should have had years ago, but it should have come with directorial debut “Trick ‘R’ Treat” another seasonal horror that was woefully mistreated by Warner Bros (who delayed it for two years before dumping it on DVD). A Halloween-themed anthology in the mold of “Creepshow,” it tells five brief stories, including a creepy, murderous principal (Dylan Baker), Anna Paquin in a Red Riding Hood riff, and Brian Cox as a Halloween-hating loner menaced by a jack-o-lantern-headed killer. Dougherty stitches the stories together pleasingly with a slightly “Pulp Fiction”-indebted structure, and the vibe is like a delightfully gory EC Comic come to life. It’s a real love letter to the genre, and its ever-growing cult following (hopefully aided by the enjoyable “Krampus”) is the justice it was denied first time around.

49. “Session 9” (2001)
Brad Anderson is one of the most prolific genre directors around, consistently knocking out films like “The Machinist” and “Transsiberian” while keeping busy on TV (he helmed a lot of the great “Fringe,” for instance), but his finest hour was this fuss-free, utterly chilling horror, which marked his transition from quirky indie fare into genre territory. The film sees a group of blue-collar workers, led by Gordon (Peter Mullan) head into an abandoned mental asylum to remove the asbestos, only to find increasingly eerie goings-on that may be linked to a former patient. Shot, strikingly, on digital video, it owes more than a little to “The Shining,” but finds quite a different tone, its macabre setting seeping into both the characters’ minds and your own, creating a film where, from very early on, things get almost unbearably creepy. It’s psychological horror in the truest sense (thanks in part to an excellent Mullan turn), and a true example of execution elevating a premise that might seem familiar.

48. “Dracula: Pages From A Virgin’s Diary” (2002)
The 21st century has brought multiple versions of the Dracula mythos, from Gerard Butler’s terrible  “Dracula 2000” to… Luke Evans’ terrible “Dracula Untold.” The best by some distance is this Guy Maddin film, in which the Canadian helmer brings his particular brand of silent-aping phantasmagoria to Bram Stoker’s classic tale in the form of a film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s production of Mahler’s dance version of the story. Stripping the tale of the vampire down to movement and music and shot in gorgeous black-and-white using both silent-era tricks and some digital effects, it brings out the beauty and eroticism of Stoker’s story in a way that few others have onscreen, and if it’s not actively terrifying, the film finds an eerie magic that still creeps into your bones. And its version of the Count as played by dancer Zhang Wei-Qiang deserves to stand with Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and Gary Oldman as one of the most indelible.

47. “Calvaire” (2004)
The movement of extreme horror that came out of (mostly) France across the 2000s was one of the most notable developments in the genre in recent years, and while it doesn’t get as much attention as a “Haute Tension” or an “Inside,” Belgian pic “Calvaire” is one of the best films to result from the movement. Directed by Fabrice Du Welz and with a title that translates appropriately as “The Ordeal,” it concerns traveling singer Marc (Laurent Lucas), whose van breaks down in a remote village. He’s taken in by an innkeeper (Jackie Berroyer), who initially seems friendly but who soon proves to be deeply mentally unbalanced, and options for escape don’t seem much better, with the villagers seemingly just as crazy. It’s genuinely disturbing (there’s a crucifixion, a teenager having sex with a calf and a man being swallowed by a marsh, among others), but Du Welz’s darkly comic voice stops it from being relentlessly grim, even while he consistently has an assured hand on the terror.

46. “Wolf Creek” (2005)
It’s spawned a sequel and most recently a TV series, but for pure outback terror, you can’t beat Greg McLean’s original “Wolf Creek.” The Australian director’s feature debut is based on a string of real-life incidents where backpackers were murdered in the country, though this is far from a true story, with British tourists Liz (Cassandra Magrath) and Kristy (Kestie Morassi), plus Aussie friend Ben (Nathan Phillips) being tormented by a Crocodile Dundee-style bushman named Mick Taylor (John Jarratt in an instantly iconic horror villain performance). It’s not quite reinventing the wheel, but the stripped-down, fuss-free approach only serves to heighten the terror, and the remote setting only increases the sense that there’s absolutely nowhere to hide and no one to save you. Not that it’s realistic: McLean gives it a greasy grindhouse feel that makes it feel like something you would have watched at a drive-in in the 1970s.

45. “Pontypool” (2008)
It’s hard to find a new and original take on the zombie movie these days, with almost every possible iteration of the genre already done to (un)death, but Canadian helmer Bruce McDonald found an intriguing one with “Pontypool.” The film’s set almost entirely in the radio studio in which DJ Grant Mazzy (character actor Stephen McHattie) is broadcasting his morning show. He’s already had a strange encounter with a woman on the way to work, but over time, he and colleagues Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly) and Sydney (Lisa Houle) discover that people are turning into vicious zombie-like creatures, thanks to a virus, albeit uniquely a linguistic one, which is infecting particular words in the English language. It’s a fascinating conceit, handled with an novel and tense sense of terror by McDonald, even if it feels a little stagey in places. McHattie delivers a mighty, characterful performance that suggests he deserves to be front-and-center more often. There are moments of contrivance, but for the most part it’s an atypically smart and intense take on the zombie genre that deserves a bigger audience.

READ MORE: The 50 Best Sci-Fi Films Of The 21st Century So Far

44. “Teeth” (2007)
Sexuality and horror have gone hand in hand since the beginning of the genre on screen, but you’ll find few movies that dealt with this intersection in quite so vivid or upfront a manner as Mitchell Lichtenstein’s “Teeth.” Jess Weixler stars as Dawn, an abstinent Christian teen who when a classmate (Hale Appleman) rapes her, discovers that she has ‘vagina dentata’ —teeth inside her vagina— which will remove the penis of anyone that penetrates her without her consent. She’s initially horrified, but soon takes advantage of her biological quirk to wreak revenge on the abusive, shitty men around her. It’s a tough tightrope for the film to walk thematically speaking, but its sense of humor, equal parts dark and campy, keeps things from becoming too bleak while still making male audience members to cup their junk and female viewers inwardly cheer, while Weixler’s phenomenal breakthrough turn, as a woman increasingly aware of her sexuality and using it to strike a blow against the patriarchy, makes the movie.

43. “Saw” (2004)
It sparked a seven-movie franchise (a reboot hits next year) of increasing grimness, unpleasantness and diminishing returns. But judging the original by its followups isn’t fair, because the first film is an ingenious and hugely effective horror-thriller that proved enormously influential on the genre. The breakthrough film for director James Wan sees a doctor (Cary Elwes) and a photographer (Leigh Whannell, who wrote the script) waking in a bathroom, chained to pipes by the feet, with only a gun, a tape recorder and two hacksaws with them, and swiftly learning that they’re victims of the Jigsaw Killer, who is holding the doctor’s family ransom outside. Much less nihilistic and reliant on the gruesome torture traps than the sequels would, it’s a lean, super-twisty thriller about human nature that’s undeniable in its ability to sear gruesome images and moral quandaries into your brain. The acting’s mostly poor and it owes everything to “Se7en,” but you’d be lying if you said you weren’t utterly gripped by it.

42. “Martyrs” (2008)
The most extreme of the so-called New French Extremity movement that pushed gore and violence to new heights, Pascal Laugier’s “Martyrs” is one of the most unrelentingly unpleasant, bleak horror pics in recent memory. Yet unlike some of its near-contemporaries, the film has something to say beyond ‘isn’t this horrible?’ The film sees a young woman (Morjana Alaoui) investigating her friend’s perpetration of a massacre, finding that it was linked to a mysterious cult led by Mademoiselle (Catherine Begin), who hope to find the secrets of life after death by torturing a series of ‘martyrs.’ It’s truly grim, stomach-churning stuff (not least when Lucie falls victim and is flayed alive by the group), but its meta elements —we are ‘witnesses,’ as the film’s closing text suggests, and a love of horror and violence is part of our way of contemplating our own mortality— go some way to justifying the excesses and make it oddly contemplative for a film so otherwise shocking.

41. “Slither” (2006)
One good thing about expanding this list is that we now have room for a couple of horror-comedies, which gives us the chance to talk about our love for James Gunn‘s hilarious and completely disgusting “Slither.” Starring a perfect tongue-in-cheek, B-movie horror-com couple in Nathan Fillion and Elizabeth Banks, this is a goofily gross-out pleasure, as a parasitic alien lifeform falls to earth and begins to infect the citizens of a small town via a swarm of horribly phallic blood-red sluglike minions. Taking gleeful pleasure in imagining grotesque deaths for its characters, and reveling in some terrifically revolting practical effects, “Slither” is hardly an original concept, and most of its details have popped up in one form or other somewhere else. But it’s put together with such affection for the films it pastiches/homages that it’s hard to get mad at Gunn, and even if you could, the winning, perfectly calibrated performances across the board will get you back on its side.