Horror is something of a success story in the world of genre fiction; what was once considered as nothing more than low-brow piles of shock value and torture porn, is now recognized today as a tool of poignant social commentary, story-telling, and masterful exploitation of our collective fears.
For a genre that’s so vast and versatile, all while continuing to reach new heights, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where the building blocks all land in the history of horror. But Reddit has never been one to back away from a challenge, and one user on r/horror took the liberty of crafting the 35 most important horror movies to ever exist.
Opting to order the selections based on the year the films were released, the user kicked off the list with 1920s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, one of the two silent films on the list alongside Nosferatu. Considered a cornerstone of German Expressionist cinema, the film follows a crazed hypnotist who commits murders by placing someone under his spell to do the killings in his stead.
Rounding out a list that included the likes of Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween was 2018’s Hereditary, considered to be a cornerstone of 21st-century horror.
As is the case on the internet, of course, there were some responders who questioned the absence of such films as Friday the 13th, It Follows, Pet Sematary, and Insidious.
Another responder pointed out the apparently glaring absence of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, a 1986 film that played a significant role in bringing the body horror subgenre into the spotlight.
It’s fair to say that no one could have predicted the trajectory of the horror genre even a decade ago, much like how we probably can’t predict where it will be a decade from now. Although, we’re all too happy to go out on a (severed) limb and say the future is blindingly bright for the world of horror.