Horror movies are, first and foremost, supposed to be scary, but they can often be thrilling too. Some might not consider there to be a huge difference between being scared and being thrilled/excited, but maybe it’s easiest to compare the two based on theme park attractions. Being scared is tied up with haunted houses, and being thrilled is more in line with roller-coasters, but that doesn’t mean the former attraction can’t be exciting, nor the latter exempt from being scary.
So, worlds collide with the movies below, since just about all of them can be considered both horror films and thrillers. They strike a good balance between feeling frightening and exciting, so if you want to feel something, or a lot of things, while watching a movie, then they’re all pretty easy to recommend (though many are quite famous, so there’s a good chance you’ve seen a bunch of them already… sorry).
10
‘Green Room’ (2016)
Pat (Anton Yelchin) and Sam (Alia Shawkat) standing in the bar in ‘Green Room’Image via A24
Green Room is all about a punk band having a bad time, since they put on a tense show at a skinhead bar with patrons who don’t take too kindly to their non-skinhead sentiments. It’s a bit like that scene in The Blues Brothers where the band has to play at a bar where they only have both kinds of music (country and Western), but stretched to feature-length while also being a great deal more horrifying.
It sounds intense on paper, sure, but Green Room is much more relentless in execution, since it pulls no punches and gets pretty damn grim and violent when it needs to. Also, it has Patrick Stewart giving a performance unlike most of the ones he’s best known for giving, since he’s terrifying here and shockingly good at playing an entirely ruthless (and cold-blooded) central antagonist.
9
‘The Hitcher’ (1986)
Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in a car with Jim (C. Thomas Howell) in ‘The Hitcher’Image via Tri-Star Pictures
While Rutger Hauer is understandably best known for his role in Blade Runner, he’s almost just as good in The Hitcher. He’s technically the antagonist in the former, though a tragic and sympathetic one, but in The Hitcher, he’s pretty much just a relentless monster of a human being, as he’s the hitchhiker the title refers to, and he makes life a living hell for the young man who decides to give him a ride one fateful night.
It’s like a game of cat and mouse, for much of the film, with The Hitcher building things up slowly but surely before exploding into all-out craziness at a certain point. It’s bold and expressive, but it never goes too over-the-top to run the risk of being silly, rather than intense and unnerving. It’s a well-controlled and incredibly well-paced film, and it still hits a nerve almost 40 years on from its release.
8
‘Train to Busan’ (2016)
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A man in white is turning his head while separating alive humans with dead walking onesImage via Next Entertainment World
Weirdly enough, Train to Busan is a series, rather than just one film from 2016, but it didn’t really need to be the former. Those follow-ups aren’t the worst things in the world, but they were never going to live up to how clean and effortlessly thrilling 2016’s Train to Busan was as a horror/thriller/action movie, and a pretty unique take on the ever-popular zombie sub-genre.
Most of Train to Busan is set on a train, and if you want a movie to always feel like it’s barreling forward, there’s really no better setting to pick.
Basically, it’s a movie about a big zombie outbreak, but it stands out because most of it’s set on a train, and if you want a movie to always feel like it’s barreling forward, or at least going somewhere, there’s really no better setting to pick. Train to Busan is always exciting, but it’s got a strong emotional core as well, and it makes the blend of genres at hand go down smoothly, like a finely crafted cinematic cocktail.
7
‘Suspiria’ (1977)
A scared Suzy Bannion, played by Jessica Harper, holding a knife in ‘Suspiria’.Image via Produzioni Atlas Consorziate
Since it’s pretty heavy on surreal horror, a good deal of Suspiria feels like a dream and/or nightmare. Maybe more of a fever dream early on, and then predominantly a nightmare as things ramp up in intensity, but also kind of a fun nightmare. Well, at least it’s a colorful one. You could do worse, like an awful dream that’s shrouded in darkness and thereby despair.
Suspiria is dark narratively, with a plot about a group of young women having terrible things happen to them while they try to train as ballerinas at a well-renowned but very unsettling academy, but it’s also an exciting and stylish film, so in that sense, it’s quite entertaining. It’s a bit of a strange one, and lots of it makes less sense the more you try and think about it, though Suspiria is a film to experience and feel more than anything else. When viewed that way, it’s great.
6
‘Godzilla Minus One’ (2023)
Godzilla chasing after a small fishing boat in ‘Godzilla Minus One’Image via Toho
If you ever find someone who doesn’t believe giant monster movies can be scary, it’d be worth showing them either Shin Godzilla or Godzilla Minus One. The former is more bizarre and kind of nightmarish as a result, but the latter retains some horror elements while also being a bit snappier with its pacing and thereby more exciting, so it’s getting the full-on shout-out here.
Really, this is pretty much as good as the series has gotten to date, or, at the very least, Godzilla Minus One can be viewed on the same level as the 1954 original, Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, and Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. It has a strong human storyline, which makes you care about the characters who aren’t Godzilla, and as for the titular monster himself, he’s absolutely unstoppable and vicious here, which adds all the more to Godzilla Minus One feeling especially nerve-wracking and involving.
5
‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)
Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter smiling sinisterly in The Silence of the Lambs (1991)Image via Orion Pictures
The Silence of the Lambs is just about a textbook example of how to best combine the crime, thriller, and horror genres into one hard-to-fault movie. Its story is simple but also instantly able to hook you, as it’s about a young female detective who strikes up an unusual partnership of sorts with an imprisoned serial killer, trying to get insight from him that’ll help in the capture of another serial killer at large.
So, there are lots of moving pieces here, and different characters wanting different things from others, and sometimes keeping their cards close to their chests in ways that are often disquieting. That more quiet tension explodes into horror at the ideal times, and all of that adds up to make The Silence of the Lambs feel ideally paced, and always able to keep the thrill level high without ever overdoing it. It’s bold and controlled, and few comparable films, either before or since, have ever juggled all these genres at once quite so well.
4
‘Misery’ (1990)
Kathy Bates and James Caan in ‘Misery’.Image via Columbia Pictures
Stephen King has never been afraid to make his readers uncomfortable, and he’s also often willing to write books that are relentless in tension. Misery exemplifies this particularly well, and so it’s not too surprising that the well-handled film adaptation that came out in 1990 also hits – and unnerves – in comparable ways to the source material, changing a few things but ultimately keeping the book’s nerve-wracking stuff intact.
It’s a horror movie with a very confined setting, being about an author who’s kidnapped by an obsessed fan and forced to resurrect a character he’d killed off to continue a series he’d wanted to leave in the past. Misery keeps the scope small, but it’s never boring, succeeding as an adaptation, featuring great direction, and being exceptionally well-acted, with all these things making it easily one of the best movies based on a Stephen King story.
3
‘Psycho’ (1960)
Marion Crane driving and looking pensive in Psycho.Image via Paramount Pictures
Though Psycho might be Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous movie, it’s worth pointing out that he was a fairly eclectic filmmaker, having done some great romantic movies and also making his fair share of full-on comedies (not just thrillers with a sometimes dark sense of humor, like Rope). But Psycho is the one most people know, and it does have an all-time great plot twist surprisingly early on, so it’s a bit of a tough one to forget.
Still, if you’ve had it spoiled and are yet to watch Psycho, then you can rest easy (or easier), because there are other surprises to be found in the film. It’s too great as a mystery/horror/thriller film to just rely on one big shocking moment, as it really sprinkles them throughout and gives you more bang for your buck than most horror movies were willing to provide back in the early 1960s. So, much of Psycho still holds up and feels shocking when watched today, even if parts of it are almost too iconic and well-known for their own good.
2
‘Aliens’ (1986)
It’s unwise to bet against James Cameron, especially when he makes a sequel. Terminator 2: Judgment Day is an especially exciting one, though it can’t really be called a horror movie, so it’s not getting included here. Aliens, on the other hand, just squeezes into the horror category, though less so than the movie it’s a sequel to (Alien), with there being a great deal more action and in-your-face thrills found here.
Ridley Scott’s original is remarkable, but Aliens did help show that the Alien series could grow into, well, a series, instead of remaining just one great sci-fi/horror movie. Aliens is easy to take for granted nowadays, since it feels like it influenced a great many sci-fi/horror/action movies (and some entertainment not of the silver screen variety) in the years and decades that followed, but it still holds up and kicks ass, perhaps even being the high point of the Alien film series to date.
1
‘Jaws’ (1975)
Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw in ‘Jaws’ as the shark launches out of the waterImage via Universal Pictures
The biggest shark movie about a big shark doing big damage to a small town, Jaws is as classic as movies get, really, and so, since it fits within the thriller and horror genres (while also being an adventure movie of sorts), it’s an easy pick for the #1 spot here. It wasn’t Steven Spielberg’s first movie, but it was his first masterpiece, and he helped usher in the blockbuster as it’s now understood, owing to just how popular and inevitably ubiquitous Jaws was.
So much of it’s still phenomenal, with its combination of restraint, unexpected spectacle, great characters, and an overall variety of emotions found throughout a perfectly-paced two-hour-long runtime. Jaws is just how it’s done, in pretty much every way, being so simple on one hand, but also so wonderful and weirdly mind-blowing in just how fresh and exciting it feels on the other hand. There might be more exciting movies out there? Emphasis on the “might be.” Like, the history of cinema is huge, so it’s not impossible. But also, good luck with such a search. You’ll probably need it.