It's almost Halloween and you know what that means: Tis the season for every film site on the internet to rank their favorite horror movies of all time. If you're of the few who isn't so hot on subjective opinion, however, we've found just the thing for you.
Last week, Reddit user u/ryno731 went through an extensive research process, compiling a list of over 700(!) horror films and dropping them into one massive, sortable spreadsheet. The spreadsheet takes horror films scores from various ranking sites including, IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and MetaCritic, while also letting you sort by their average and total scores. You will truly never need another horror list to help you find the scariest movies of all time again.
In his Reddit post, u/ryno731 explained his process, "Top movie lists are subjective but this originally sorts by their average score in those. Anything that didn’t appear on a list was given the highest position +1 so any movies not on a top 100 were ranked 101. A movie that has never shown up on a top list is currently sitting at a 70 and in that case, is sorted by its average review site score."
In a testament to the true greatness of Reddit, another user, u/negative__d, took up the mantle and made a letterboxd list with all the films in order.
"Psycho"
Credit: Universal Pictures
The Scariest Movies of All Time Ranked
If you sort by total score, the top ten films are:
- The Shining
- The Exorcist
- Alien
- The Thing
- Halloween
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
- Psycho
- Night of the Living Dead
- Rosemary's Baby
- Jaws
"Rosemary's Baby"
Credit: Paramount Pictures
In case you were wondering, here are my personal favorites:
- The Shining
- Psycho
- The Thing
- Evil Dead 2
- Halloween
- Alien
- Rosemary's Baby
- Carrie
- Suspiria
- An American Werewolf in London
And if you want even more, here are John Carpenter's, Stephen King's, and Guillermo Del Toro's favorites. What are your top ten? List em in the comments below and maybe we'll make a No Film School reader's list of our own!
