In turn, that’s caused a reappraisal of the genre’s past as a whole – and as this list of the greatest horror movies of all-time proves, horror has never deserved its status as filmdom’s second-class citizen. Oscar statuettes have still been hard to come by, but the likes of A Quiet Place, Get Out and Hereditary have helped elevate the standing of horror among critics, while crowdpleasers like M3GAN and The Conjuring sequels are among the only non-MCU films consistently bringing audiences to the theatre post-pandemic. Even the likes of Psycho, The Shining and The Thing took years to become widely regarded as classics. It’s not entirely without reason: at the dawn of the VHS era, murdering horny teenagers proved to be the easiest way to a quick buck, leading to a wave of cheap schlock overtaking multiplexes and video store shelves.
Fans loved it, sure – for its most hardcore adherents, it’s not just a genre but a lifestyle – but critics generally regarded it with derision, and award shows have often ignored it all together. For a long time, horror was treated like cinema’s devil-horned stepchild.
