A list of the most critically acclaimed scary films of all time — and where to stream them right now.
There\’s no reason to scream: Our viewing guide to the most critically acclaimed horror movies of all time will help you determine which chillers to stream this Halloween. Bettmann/Getty Images Halloween means Halloween movies — and for some, Halloween movies most definitely means horror movies. To help you make the most of the fall season, we’ve put together a countdown of the 25 best horror movies of all time, from “Psycho” to “A Quiet Place.” The list is based on horror rankings from the movie-review aggregate site Metacritic. Movies are ordered from good to excellent — there are no bad horror movies on this list. Most ties were broken by looking at the total number of reviews that went into each film’s Metacritic score. Overall, only movies with at least 15 Metacritic-tracked reviews are included in this countdown. We further narrowed the list to horror movies that can be streamed on subscription services, such as Amazon Prime Video and Paramount+, or on free, ad-supported services, such as Pluto TV and Tubi. (CBS Essentials, Paramount+ and Pluto are all subsidiaries of ViacomCBS.) Read on to see which films made the final cut — and to find out where to stream all of them right now. Making good on its title, this 2018 film from writer-director-star John Krasinski (“The Office”) rarely registered above a whisper en route to becoming a box-office smash. Emily Blunt, Krasinski’s real-life wife, co-stars. Krasinski and Blunt play a married couple who must keep things hush-hush, lest their family becomes targeted by mysterious, sound-sensitive creatures. In the Seattle Times, critic Moira Macdonald praised “A Quiet Place” as “taut and often quite terrifying.” “Under the Shadow” is a 2016 Persian-language film set in wartorn Iran in the 1980s. The psychological chiller from writer-director Babak Anvari concerns a mother (played by Narges Rashidi), her daughter (played by Avin Manshadi) — and the doll the mother says will protect them from a malevolent force. “The movie is first fascinating, then terrifying,” Noel Murray wrote for the Los Angeles Times. Released in 2009, in the wake of the financial collapse, Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell” tells the story of a loan officer (played by Alison Lohman) who is cursed after she denies a mortgage extension. Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek found the film scary fun — the result of “an especially joyous kind of filmmaking.” Watch “Drag Me to Hell” on Showtime (subscription required) Released in 2021, “Saint Maud” is the newest film in this countdown. Morfydd Clark stars as a hospice nurse who’s out to save a soul. According to the Atlantic’s David Sims, writer-director Rose Clark “keep[s] the viewer guessing until the very last minute.” Johnny Depp earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination as the vengeful barber at the bloody heart of this 2007 adaptation of the same-titled Broadway musical. TV Guide Magazine’s Maitland McDonagh praised director Tim Burton for transforming the Stephen Sondheim source material into “a cheerfully gothic morality tale.” “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is the first — but not last — musical in this countdown. Watch “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” on Paramount+ (subscription required) Watch “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” on Pluto TV (free, with ads) Anya Taylor-Joy (“The Queen’s Gambit”) stars as a teen accused of being a witch in this 2016 film set in Puritan New England of the 1600s. In Time Out, critic David Ehrlich wrote that “The Witch” is “one of the most genuinely unnerving horror films in recent memory…“ This black-and-white,2019 entry is the second movie on this list from filmmaker Robert Eggers, who also wrote and directed “The Witch.” The psychological horror tale stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as 19th-century lightkeepers who struggle with the isolation of their post. “‘The Lighthouse‘ stands as a monument to two titanic performances,” Tara Brady praised in the Irish Times.
