Directed by Harry Kümel • 1971 • Belgium
Starring Delphine Seyrig, Danielle Ouimet, John Karlen

The vampire myth gets a disturbingly seductive psychosexual spin in one of the most exquisitely mesmerizing adult horror films ever made. International screen icon Delphine Seyrig stars as Elizabeth B...

Directed by John Carpenter • 1983 • United States
Starring Keith Gordon, John Stockwell, Alexandra Paul

A high-school nerd’s (Keith Gordon) possessive and possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury unleashes its jealousy in a diabolical killing rampage in this sleek horror joyride from genre master John Carpe...

Directed by Georges Franju • 1960 • France
Starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, François Guérin

At his secluded chateau in the French countryside, a brilliant, obsessive doctor (Pierre Brasseur) attempts a radical plastic surgery to restore the beauty of his daughter’s disfigured countenance—a...

Directed by David Cronenberg • 1975 • Canada
Starring Paul Hampton, Joe Silver, Lynn Lowry

Canadian auteur David Cronenberg has spent much of his career mining our fears about sex, technology, and corporeal existence, but this breakout feature is perhaps the most shocking of all his body-horror ...

Directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza • 2007 • Spain
Starring Manuela Velasco, Ferrán Terraza, Jorge-Yamam Serrano

Perhaps the scariest found-footage horror film of all time, this unrelentingly intense Spanish shocker begins as TV reporter Ángela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman ar...

Directed by Neil Marshall • 2005 • United Kingdom
Starring Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid

Brilliantly exploiting our innate fears of the dark and the unknown to maximum nerve-shredding effect, this intense journey into the void is among the most frightening horror films of the twen...

Directed by John Carpenter • 1994 • United States
Starring Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow

Imagine a novel so overwhelmingly hypnotic, so tremendously horrifying that it paralyzes its audience with fear and turns its most sensible readers insane. When Sutter Cane, the author of this dis...

Directed by William Friedkin • 2006 • United States, Germany
Starring Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, Lynn Collins

Director William Friedkin received some of the best reviews of his later career for this searing psychological thriller, a relentless plunge into nightmare delusion adapted by playwri...

Directed by John Carpenter • 1987 • United States
Starring Donald Pleasence, Lisa Blount, Victor Wong

When a Catholic priest (Donald Pleasence) asks a physics professor (Victor Wong) and his research students to come to an old abandoned church, they don’t expect to find a large glass canister of...

Directed by Claire Denis • 2001 • France
Starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle

Claire Denis’s poetic take on the body-horror genre is an atmospheric reverie of blood and lust that lays bare the filmmaker’s core artistic concerns around power, desire, and delirium. Newlyweds Shane...

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar • 2001 • Spain, United States, France
Starring Nicole Kidman, Christopher Eccleston, Fionnula Flanagan

A remote manor; hushed, candlelit atmosphere; and shivery, supernatural menace. With his first English-language feature, Chilean Spanish writer-director-composer ...

Directed by David Fincher • 2002 • United States
Starring Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, Forest Whitaker

Relentlessly roving camera work heightens the sense of claustrophobic dread in this typically stylish tour de force of tension from director David Fincher. Newly divorced Meg Altman (Jodie Fo...

Directed by Andrzej Żuławski • 1981 • France, West Germany
Starring Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Heinz Bennent

Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of a marriage unraveling is an experience unlike any other. Professional spy Mark (Sam Neill) returns to his West Berlin home to fin...

Directed by Amy Holden Jones • 1982 • United States
Starring Michelle Michaels, Robin Stille, Michael Villella

Scripted by lesbian feminist author Rita Mae Brown, THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE puts a smart, subversive, and lightly satirical spin on the 1980s slasher formula. When Trish (Michelle Mi...

Directed by David Cronenberg • 1988 • United States, Canada
Starring Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold, Heidi von Palleske

In DEAD RINGERS, David Cronenberg tells the chilling story of identical twin gynecologists—suave Elliot and sensitive Beverly, bipolar sides of one personality—who share the sa...

Directed by Věra Chytilová • 1987 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Miroslav Machácek, Tomás Palatý, Stepánka Cervenková

Věra Chytilová’s subversive take on the 1980s teen-horror movie assembles a gaggle of bratty adolescents for a mysterious skiing retreat at a snowbound cabin where they find themselve...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa • 1997 • Japan

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s arresting international breakthrough established him as one of the leaders of an emerging new wave of Japanese horror while pushing the genre into uncharted realms of philosophical and existential exploration. A string of shocking, s...

Directed by Jayro Bustamante • 2019 • Guatemala
Starring María Mercedes Coroy, Margarita Kénefic, Sabrina de la Hoz

A country’s bloody history stains the present in the Guatemalan auteur Jayro Bustamante’s transfixing fusion of folk horror and searing political commentary, inspired by the real-l...

Directed by Ricky Lau • 1985 • Hong Kong
Starring Lam Ching-Ying, Ricky Hui, Chin Siu-Ho

The film that, along with producer Sammo Hung’s SPOOKY ENCOUNTERS, launched an entire hopping-vampire horror-comedy subgenre is Hong Kong cinema at its most gleefully inventive and gloriously unrestrained. T...

Directed by David Cronenberg • 1981 • Canada
Starring Stephen Lack, Jennifer O’Neill, Michael Ironside

With SCANNERS, David Cronenberg plunges us into one of his most terrifying and thrilling sci-fi worlds. After a man with extraordinary—and frighteningly destructive—telepathic abilities is nabb...

Directed by Guillermo del Toro • 1993 • Mexico
Starring Federico Luppi, Ron Perlman, Claudio Brook

Guillermo del Toro made an auspicious and audacious feature debut with CRONOS, a highly unorthodox tale about the seductiveness of the idea of immortality. Kindly antiques dealer Jesús Gris (Federi...

Criterion Collection Edition #539

How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie HOUSE (HAUSU)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of “Scooby-Doo” as directed by Mario Bava? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip abou...

Criterion Collection Edition #584

Directed by Kaneto Shindo • 1968 • Japan
Starring Kichiemon Nakamura, Nobuko Otowa, Kei Sato

In this poetic and atmospheric horror fable, set in a village in war-torn medieval Japan, a malevolent spirit has been ripping out the throats of itinerant samurai. Whe...