The 21st century's most chilling films

Let’s begin with ‘a bow’ to journalism, shall we? A visceral exercise in investigative journalism unfolds in filmmaker Kōji Shiraishi’s mind-breaking mockumentary found-footage horror, Noroi: The Curse. Stitching together fragments of information — footage from weird reality television shows, pigeons crashing into windows, knots tied on ropes, a baby’s cries, and so on — a journalist reverse-engineers how a curse born of religious sacrilege consumes one victim after another. Poetry-in-horror-movie writing, to say the least.

In this chilling feature from filmmaker André Øvredal, a post-mortem room turns into a hellish confine for a father-and-son coroner duo who perform an autopsy on an unidentified female body. Suspicion curdles into paranoia with every progressively freakish finding in the corpse — severe clouding of the eyes, fractures without external marks, a severed tongue, and so on. From a bell tied to the ankle of another corpse to the weather report on the radio, Øvredal floods this compact descent into hell with details designed with just one intention — paralysing you.

Anyone who claims to have cracked The Wailing on a first viewing is either lying through their teeth or plain demented, possibly both. Korean auteur Na Hong-jin seems to instinctively know that possession horror is far more terrifying when you can’t establish whether anyone is actually possessed. Between the village succumbing to collective hysteria, the stomach-churning impossibility of knowing whom to trust and one anxiety-inducing bastard of a dog; “Oh Hell Na” is about the only thing left to say that isn’t a profanity. That hair-raising final shot will likely haunt you forever.

I credit M. Night Shyamalan with being the only filmmaker to have made me actually piss myself (hey, I was 8), thanks to THAT Signs jump scare. But the film from his opus that temporarily crippled my ability to regard my own grandparents as benign is The Visit. The less said about the plot, the better, but two siblings spend a week with grandparents they’ve never met, armed with a camera and a frankly indefensible lack of background information. A cracking little horror film, and one I have absolutely no intention of revisiting.

This 1998 film is on this list as an exception. The long-haired female ghost has become an archetype herself. But beyond its unmistakable fear factor, Hideo Nakata’s Japanese classic Ringu is arguably the most influential horror movie after The Exorcist. Apart from giving rise to the hugely popular English-language franchise, Ringu created a wave of Asian horror that led to films like the Ju-On franchise (which became The Grudge in the West) and Shutter (which was remade thrice in India), among other hits in the 21st century. Watch this at your own risk!

A slow pan across the room is enough for Canadian filmmaker Ian Tuason to fill your chest with anxiety. In a story about a podcast-hosting duo who find mysterious audio files, Undertone suspends you in the moments just before the horror strikes. Tuason’s greatest tool is restraint — it is not about showing horror, but about making you dread what you cannot see. Every slow zoom, creak of wood, and unusually long stretch of silence feels sinister. We warn you: the dark corners of your room might soon invite your eyes.

I’ve always considered horror houses relatively harmless, but thanks to Hell House LLC, I’ve been speedrunning every subsequent one I’ve visited at Mach 3 speeds. Stephen Cognetti’s slow-burn found-footage takes its sweet time getting under your skin before delivering a payoff that makes the wait thoroughly worthwhile. The film ought to issue live actors at actual horror attractions a pre-emptive apology for the very real possibility of getting absolutely decked by someone whose fight-or-flight response has been irreparably compromised by this franchise.

What better time to have watched Host than holed up in your room, past midnight, during a pandemic lockdown, on an online watch party with a bunch of useless friends you couldn’t even count on to save you? Rob Savage’s postmodern found-footage masterstroke is a curse that keeps giving, with every subsequent viewing revealing some previously undiscovered little evil lurking in its multi-Zoom frames. I sometimes catch myself wishing this would happen during our Monday morning meetings.

You rarely meet a protagonist as tenacious as Officer Loren, the policewoman guarding an old police station about to shut down. Throughout the 90-odd-minutes of this Anthony DiBlasi psycho-trip, Loren keeps taking that one extra curious step to understand the confines that keep throwing one trap after another, luring her and spiralling her into lunacy — I would bolt from this job if there were a rumour that a mass murder was committed in my editor’s room. We challenge you to watch this film without fast-forwarding through the scary stretches.

By the late 2000s, Hollywood began to crack a pulpy, more visceral language for how dread accumulates, and James Wan was at the forefront of this particular supernatural-horror sensibility. Dread seeps into a quiet family life — whispers on baby monitors, a bloody handprint on a bedspread, a glitch-like split-second appearance, and eventually, a demon licking your face. When Insidious came out, most horror lovers lost it at the possibility that the supernatural might not respect the usual boundaries of a haunted-house story just because you move out. It can latch onto your soul and fester.

Argentine director Demián Rugna loves to kill children as gorily as possible. Yet, the filmmaker’s most discernible instinct is to treat evil as a contagion invading the domestic lives of ordinary citizens. Terrified, for instance, has him treat the undead with an almost procedural realism. A paranormal investigator and former coroner walks into a home to find a young boy, recently deceased and buried, sitting erect in the dining room. This controlled fever dream can shred anything resembling sunshine from your lives, though the third act hardly lives up to its excellent set-up.

A blood-drenched machine of malevolence, the 2013 reboot lodges something so twisted in its viewers that they can feel it in every successive instalment, even the weakest. A father ties up his daughter and pours gasoline on her, even as she begs him to let her live. But just as he strikes the match, it reveals itself, and it has lurked in the shadows of the horror zeitgeist ever since. The relentless bloodshed and the twisted rules of its unique world set Evil Dead apart. I can still hear “Your little sister is being raped in hell” in that demented voice.

Another sterling addition to the anti-old people catalogue of cinema, Deborah Logan is yet another found-footage gem that mines the very real horrors of Alzheimer’s for dread; not to mention the very rancid prospects of watching a loved one go from demented to demon-ted. Its clever mockumentary style is only further ammunition against film students who think they’re God’s gift to cinema, and that final sequence is a jaw-dropping all-timer.

Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s Spanish horror classic [REC] is one of the most influential found-footage films ever made and arguably the scariest zombie movie ever committed to celluloid. If you’ve ever needed another reason to distrust your neighbours in an apartment building, this gonzo-style infrared nightmare makes a rather compelling case. A relentless jumpscare bonanza that barely gives you time to unclench before the next atrocity, [REC] is pure, unadulterated adrenaline. Pablo the GOAT.

A foundational modern found-footage trailblazer, I don’t think I’ve ever scrutinised every corner of every frame on a screen with quite as much paranoia as I have with Paranormal Activity. Few films have made such a compelling case for horror’s less-is-more philosophy, and fewer still have left me with the near-reflexive inability to stick a foot outside my blanket at night, lest some uninvited entity take the opportunity to claim it. That it also turned $15,000 into $194 million only strengthens its case as one of the most devilishly effective horror films of the 21st century.

Of all the films on this list, The Descent is the one I would least like to experience firsthand. As someone with debilitating claustrophobia, being wedged into some subterranean crevice while God knows what skitters around in the dark is quite literally my personal hell. If you’ve ever seen those memes about cave divers with perfectly stable lives voluntarily exploring caves named “Satan’s Rectum” with a 0% survival rate, congratulations, you already know the premise. A horrifically gory, suffocating ordeal that keeps you drowning in dread until the very last second; curiously enough, this might also be the only film on this list to pass the Bechdel test.

Don’t let the diminishing returns of its subsequent instalments rewrite the street reputation of James Wan’s mausoleum to a new Hollywood horror sensibility. The Conjuring was a modern horror beast that understood that ‘based on a real story’ wasn’t just a good marketing mantra; it was an insidious promise that ensured audiences carried the horror back home. Demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren investigate the terrifying paranormal disturbances, but in truth, the one who will soon need an exorcism is you. If you survive, may you meet Valak next.

I cannot overstate how badly horror films that veer into snuff-film territory mess with me. There’s a vicious, unvarnished realism to the cruelty that makes you forget you’re watching fiction and leaves you feeling almost complicit for having watched at all. Scott Derrickson shamelessly exploits that discomfort, luring us in with unsuspecting family footage before subjecting us to some of the most depraved, stomach-turning shockumentary sequences ever committed to film. Some of those images are likely going to squat in my brain rent-free forever. I also appreciate a good Slipknot reference.

The most recent disruption to my sleep routine. The undisputed zenith of found-footage horror, this Taiwanese folk horror does the unthinkable: it makes you, the viewer, an unconsenting participant in its own grotesque mythology of desecration and damnation. The less I say, the better. The camera drags you through the series of nightmarish forbidden rituals, ghastly deaths, and the gut-wrenching pain of seeing your offspring suffer otherworldly traumas. You might be tempted to look up whether you are cursed for real. Regardless of where that journey takes you, nightmares for a few weeks are guaranteed.

The soul-sucking nihilism (complimentary) of Ari Aster’s cinema may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but his feature debut is an ungodly paean to suffering that everyone ought to subject themselves to at least once. Between Toni Collette’s petrifying uncanny-valley performance and Aster’s sadistically unobtrusive background scares, I’ve never found the cinema’s walls, ceiling, floor or the palms of my own hands quite so fascinating. I don’t think Hereditary is merely scary so much as fundamentally, almost spitefully evil, and anyone who disagrees deserves to be institutionalised along with Aster. Oh, and Hail Paimon.