Horror evolves, but it never dies. Every decade picks a new way to crawl under your skin, and the best films tell you exactly what kept people up at night back then. So, in the Halloween spirit, here are the six movies that defined their eras from the 1970s to now — not just classics, but the ones that shifted the whole genre while audiences tried not to pass out in the aisles.
The 1970s — The Exorcist (1973)
The 70s gave us a wave of gut-punch horror — The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, Halloween — but nothing hit like The Exorcist. When it opened, people literally fainted, screamed, and bailed mid-screening. Beyond the shock factor, it ignited noisy arguments about science, psychology, and the supernatural — because the movie makes the unthinkable feel alarmingly plausible.
The setup is simple: Regan, a kid who starts acting very not-okay, becomes the focus of a desperate mother and two priests who try to save her soul. What still stuns is the realism — that scratchy, inhuman voice, the makeup, the infamous head spin — all anchored by William Friedkin’s brutally grounded style. He leans on practical effects, gritty lighting, and a cold blue palette so everything looks frozen and lifeless. The camera hangs back, steady and unblinking, letting dread accumulate instead of going for cheap startles. This wasn’t just another possession movie; it reset the bar for supernatural fear.
The 1980s — The Shining (1980)
Wild thing about The Shining: critics weren’t sold at first, and Stephen King famously disliked how his book was handled. Time did what time does — now it’s one of the most unsettling movies ever made.
Jack Torrance becomes winter caretaker of an isolated hotel, brings his wife and psychic kid, and slowly comes apart at the seams. Stanley Kubrick builds that collapse with obsessive detail: the geometry of the Overlook, the reds and golds, the long tracking shots that make you feel trapped in the hallways. The score hums with menace even when nothing obvious is happening. Jack Nicholson goes feral; Shelley Duvall’s fear feels painfully real. The scares come from precision and pressure, not fake-outs, and the imagery has lived rent-free in our heads ever since.
"Here's Johnny!"
The 1990s — The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The 90s had layers: supernatural horror roared back with Japan’s Ringu and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, while America got very fluent in serial killers. Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs sits right at that crossroads and gives us a modern monster who talks back.
FBI trainee Clarice Starling seeks help from Dr. Hannibal Lecter — Thomas Harris’s cannibal psychiatrist (first seen on screen in Michael Mann’s Manhunter) — to catch Buffalo Bill. Demme plays it like a psychological puzzle box, splicing horror into a detective thriller. Those invasive close-ups trap you inside the characters’ heads, especially during Lecter/Clarice face-offs. Anthony Hopkins is chilling without raising his voice; Jodie Foster’s steel makes her every bit his match. The palette is muted, the shadows do a lot of the work, and the movie doesn’t need gore to feel dangerous. It swept major Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay — because it understood that the scariest predators often look like everyone else.
The 2000s — REC (2007)
The Blair Witch Project (1999) kicked off the found-footage wave that dominated the 2000s. You got smart chillers like Lake Mungo and the runaway smash Paranormal Activity. But when it comes to squeezing maximum terror out of that format, REC is the one that feels like a live wire.
A TV reporter and her cameraman ride along on a late-night emergency call, get locked inside a Barcelona apartment building, and discover the tenants aren’t just sick — they’re turning into feral, fast, and hungry. Shot entirely handheld, the film weaponizes shaky chaos, grain, and flicker. The hallways are tight, the light is stingy, and the sound design — those panicked screams, that staticky audio — shreds your nerves. The makeup is viciously convincing, and the movie leans on shadow and strobe over CGI. No musical safety net, no exit signs, no relief — just escalating panic that turns found footage into something truly artful.
The 2010s — Hereditary (2018)
The 2010s were the decade of so-called elevated horror — genre movies grappling with grief, identity, faith, and trauma. The Babadook digs into depression, The Witch wrestles with fanaticism and adolescence, and Get Out slices into race and complacency. Then Ari Aster comes in with Hereditary, which combines all that heavy thematic weight with suffocating fear and turns it into a modern landmark.
It starts as a family tragedy — a mother and her kids processing the death of their secretive matriarch — and slowly reveals a darker inheritance tying them to something occult, awful, and inevitable. Toni Collette delivers a performance that’s all raw nerve and rage; you can see the grief metastasize in her face. The cinematography feels like you’re peering into a dollhouse where the walls keep closing in. Long, silent shots and dim, amber light let small details — a tongue click, a floor creak — hit like gunshots. The heartbreak doesn’t soften the horror; it sharpens it. It’s not just demons out there — it’s the ones embedded in your bloodline.
The 2020s — Talk to Me (2023)
This decade is already stacked — Ti West’s X trilogy, Jordan Peele’s Nope, even Ryan Coogler’s Sinners — but Talk to Me came out of nowhere and knocked the wind out of people. It’s the feature debut of Australian brothers Danny and Michael Philippou (yes, the YouTubers), who also made the ritual-heavy gore film Bring Her Back. On paper it sounds familiar — teens messing with spirits — but the execution is sharp and mean in all the right ways.
A mummified, embalmed hand lets kids invite spirits in for exactly 90 seconds. Keep it brief and it’s a rush; push it, and the line between host and hitchhiker dissolves. The directing has jittery, youthful energy — the camera moves like a heartbeat you can’t slow down. Neon blues and sickly yellows paint the party highs and the crash afterward. Possessions look unnervingly real, thanks to nasty-good makeup and restrained VFX. Sophie Wilde grounds the chaos with a genuinely heartbreaking lead performance. It’s modern possession horror with teeth, folding in grief and guilt without skimping on the bruises.
- The Exorcist (1973) — Director: William Friedkin; Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Lee J. Cobb, Kitty Winn; Rotten Tomatoes: 78%; Runtime: 2h 2m; Where to Watch: HBO Max
- The Shining (1980) — Director: Stanley Kubrick; Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers; Rotten Tomatoes: 84%; Runtime: 2h 24m; Where to Watch: Prime Video, Apple TV
- The Silence of the Lambs (1991) — Director: Jonathan Demme; Cast: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine; Rotten Tomatoes: 95%; Runtime: 1h 58m; Where to Watch: HBO Max, Prime Video
- REC (2007) — Directors: Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza; Cast: Manuela Velasco, Ferran Terraza, Jorge-Yamam Serrano, Pablo Rosso; Rotten Tomatoes: 90%; Runtime: 1h 18m; Where to Watch: AMC+, Shudder, Netflix
- Hereditary (2018) — Director: Ari Aster; Cast: Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Gabriel Byrne; Rotten Tomatoes: 90%; Runtime: 2h 7m; Where to Watch: HBO Max, Hulu, Prime Video
- Talk to Me (2023) — Directors: Danny and Michael Philippou; Cast: Sophie Wilde, Miranda Otto, Joe Bird, Otis Dhanji; Rotten Tomatoes: 94%; Runtime: 1h 35m; Where to Watch: HBO Max, Paramount+, Prime Video
If you’ve got another pick for each decade, drop them. Horror’s a conversation — and these movies started some very loud ones.