Ten modern horror masterpieces for Halloween

Attack the Block

Dir. Joe Cornish

Given Joe Cornish's form with tomfoolery (stuffed toy movie parodies, Song Wars), when we heard he was moving into filmmaking with Attack the Block we expected a knockabout invasion spoof. What we got instead was a high-octane John Carpenter film starring N-Dubz.

Cornish delivers a mean, lean siege movie where the modernist architecture of inner city London looks as alien as the invading creatures and the patois of the film’s hooded anti-heroes, led by brooding teen Moses (charismatic newcomer John Boyega), is as incomprehensible as Klingon. It’s a blistering debut.

The Babadook

Dir. Jennifer Kent

With her debut film, Australian director Jennifer Kent delves deep into the tensions bubbling under between a widowed mother and her difficult-to-manage son. Is the film's titular 7ft monster a manifestation of the mother's anger, or her son's imagination, or both? Or is it just one tall, creepy dude? We won't spoil the surprise, but all horror filmmakers should take note of the psychological credibility Kent brings to every nail-biting scene.

The Conjuring

Dir. James Wan

No modern director constructs a scare – especially a cheap one – with more aplomb than James Wan. How ironic that the filmmaker who helped begin the millennium's most tiresome sub-genre (torture porn) with Saw, has also done more than most to rehabilitate mainstream horror by reminding us of the pleasure of old-school tension and release.

We could have chosen any of Wan’s jack-in-the box frighteners, from haunted kid shocker Insidious to sinister ventriloquist’s doll hokum Dead Silence, but we’ll go with his biggest hit: The Conjuring. The setup is pure cliche but the silky execution makes you forget that instantly. Wan's camera zooms, glides and pivots around the film’s haunted house, ratcheting the tension through film grammar long before we see anything creepy on screen.

Don’t Breathe

Dir. Fede Alvarez

This fat-free thriller from Fede Alvarez is the movie surprise of 2016. Who’d have thought the director who brought us the anonymous Evil Dead remake from 2013 would turn out the horror film of the year? Three unlikable kids break into the home of a blind Iraq war veteran and the heist goes wrong – and then the film goes to places where you’d never have expected.

Alvarez’s control of his camera is immense as it explores every inch of the vet’s threadbare house in the centre of an abandoned Detroit neighbourhood. More tables are turned than at a redneck wedding, and Alvarez isn’t afraid to get nasty as the suspense builds to an outrageous conclusion involving a turkey baster filled with defrosted semen.

Ginger Snaps

Dir. John Fawcett

The link between lycanthropy and puberty is a well established one, from hothead Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf to Michael J. Fox’s teen basketball star in Teen Wolf. Beyond the obvious joke about hair growing in new places, none of these pubescent teen-as-werewolf sagas explore this metaphor more effectively than cult Canadian horror Ginger Snaps. Like Carrie, Ginger Snaps begins with a girl’s first menstruation that initiates a terrifying transformation. And, like Carrie, it’s a sophisticated study of what it’s like to be an outsider within the scariest wolf den of all: high school. And, like Carrie, Ginger Snaps is wickedly funny.

The House of the Devil

Dir. Ti West

This beautiful ode to the 80s scream queen cycle is actually far more sophisticated than many of the films to which it pays homage. The secret to Ti West’s success is that he defies Hitchcock’s old adage: “Movies are life with all the boring bits taken out.” West does the opposite. “All of the stuff in the film that's not horror is what makes all of the horror stuff work,” he told Interview magazine. “I make regular movies that turn into horror movies.”

We follow a cash-strapped college grad who’s taken a babysitting gig with a family who turn out to be satanists, but for the bulk of its runtime West simply follows our heroine as she potters around the house listening to her Walkman and eating pizza, only interrupting her hangout time to investigate the creaking doors or weird thuds that are slowly getting her heart – as well as ours – racing.

It Follows

Dir. David Robert Mitchell

The most gorgeously composed horror film since John Carpenter's The Fog, and the best sounding one since John Carpenter's Halloween, and maybe the best horror premise since John Carpenter’s The Thing (if you haven’t already guessed, cut open It Follows and it bleeds John Carpenter). Simply put: David Robert Mitchell's dreamy slasher is about a sexually transmitted curse.

Like a game of tag, the terrifying “It” of the title, a shuffling, shape-shifting ghoul, is transferred from character to character whenever they have sex. What makes this thin but delicious story hum is its sophisticated visuals. It’s full of unsettling long takes and voyeuristic tracking shots. Its slow zooms and 360 degree pans will make your hairs stand on end; film grammar has never been so terrifying.

The Mist

Dir. Frank Darabont 

Frank Darabont's third crack at adapting Stephen King (after classy takes on The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile) is by far his best (whatever IMDB users might think). We’re in a quiet Northeastern coastal town when a bank of swirling white mist rolls in, trapping a group of strangers in a supermarket with thin plate glass windows.

It’s a right pea-souper, but there’s more to worry about than bumping tail lights on the ride home. We soon realise that swirling in the murk are tentacled creatures, giant killer lobsters and blood-thirsty flies the size of Jack Russells. They begin to look much more appealing, however, than the ugly quasi-religious fever that’s spreading through the store lead by a terrifyingly batshit Marcia Gay Harden. The ironic ending has all the subtlety of a Twilight Zone twist in the tale, but such is King and Darabont’s blunt vision of humanity, it seems cruelly fitting.

Orphan

Dir. Jaume Collet-Serra

We’ll allow one piece of pure schlock on the list, and no horror film in recent memory has been as sickly pleasurable as Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan. In Nick Pinkerton’s wonderful profile of the Spanish director for Sight & Sound, Orphan is described, quite astutely, as “a work of relentless mental terrorism” and “one of the more artfully depraved properties to hit the multiplex in ages.” It concerns a well-off Connecticut couple with two children who adopt a third: a nine-year old Russian girl called Esther who dresses like a haunted Victorian doll.

We know there’s something not quite right with her. So does Vera Farmiga’s barely on the wagon matriarch of the family. But what is it? We won’t ruin the macabre surprise, but even if you’ve guessed it there are still plenty of pleasures here, from Esther’s sadistic war of attrition with her new mother to the deliciously salty dialogue: “I’ll cut your hairless little prick off before you even figure out what it’s for,” is how Esther puts her bratty new brother in line.

Pulse

Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

The chilling high-point of the early aughts J-Horror wave that included Ringu and Audition, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse is the most emo horror movie ever made. It concerns a group of melancholic teens in existential crisis.

It seems to be the internet that’s causing their blues: tech-savvy kids who spend their nights in front of computer screens are disappearing out of existence and a webiste transmitting images of other sad kids (or are they ghosts?) sitting by themselves in rooms seems to be the cause. As as study of the isolation and loneliness of the internet age, it’s stunning. Kurosawa never resorts to easy scare tactics, preferring a molasses slow pace and atmosphere of dread that manifests as a dreamlike terror of our modern world.