The 25 Greatest Horror Films of the Past Quarter Century – The Top Five

Here’s the fifth and final installment of my list of the twenty-five greatest horror films from the past quarter century, starting from the bottom and gradually heading to the top. We’ve reached the Top Five, just in time to welcome the new year. 

Here’s a link if you missed the fourth installment: The 25 Greatest Horror Films Of The Past Quarter Century, Part Four

I’ll try to stay as spoiler-free as possible for recent films.

#5 – The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015)

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a masterpiece of wintry atmosphere and the tragic effects of desperate loneliness. 

Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton) are both teenaged students at Bramford Academy, a Catholic boarding school in upstate New York. In February, the school has closed for winter break, leaving behind only the two girls and two nuns who reside on the campus. Kat’s parents have neither called nor shown up to get her, which worries her, but she’s assured by her headmaster that icy road conditions may simply have delayed them. Rose, who fears she may be pregnant, has lied to her parents to delay their arrival and buy herself some time to figure out what to do. Elsewhere, Bill (James Remar) has discovered Joan (Emma Roberts) sitting on a bus bench in freezing weather and has offered to give her a ride at least partway to her destination. Meanwhile, somewhere in the bitter cold and darkness is something darker still that will bind them all together.

Shipka, who was 16 at the time of filming Daughter, had just finished eight years of being on Mad Men, which makes her impressively composed performance a bit less surprising. She initially portrays Kat as lonely and scared, a child inexplicably abandoned by her parents, a freshman left in the care of a senior who wants nothing to do with her. As the story goes on, however, Kat gains in confidence, and Shipka plays the role with a precisely unsettling ease, as if she has just figured out the secrets of the world and is quietly marveling at her transition.

If Kat’s character arc is that of an unnoticed person gaining agency, Rose’s arc is the exact opposite. When we are first introduced to her, it’s at a photo shoot in which she smiles like a glamorous starlet, shot in dreamy slow motion with jangly guitars on the soundtrack, evoking the off-the-charts charisma of Audrey in Twin Peaks. But the moment the shot is over, her face falls – Rose is in trouble. Boynton convincingly plays the role as a young woman used to getting her way who is gradually realizing she may be seriously out of her depth.

Roberts gives the most interesting and unusual performance in the film, which is more remarkable for being almost entirely internalized. Joan has very little dialogue; her response to almost every question is silence. Roberts is largely known these days from years playing very broad, usually bitchy, characters on many seasons of American Horror Story, but her work here is admirably subtle, composed of veiled glances and hidden thoughts. She also gets the movie’s single most powerful and memorable scene, in which she makes an affecting and indelible impression, but more about that later. Remar does a great job as the kindly if troubled Bill, and Lauren Holly is very good as Bill’s distrusting wife, Linda.

As a director, Perkins benefits enormously from Julie Kirkwood’s superb cinematography, which creates a muted milieu of wan winter sun and encroaching darkness (according to Perkins, for many scenes, no artificial illumination was used at all). This film is at least half about atmosphere, the characters isolated in a landscape of washed-out white and gray and black in a cold place (some of the outdoor sequences were shot in 40-below Fahrenheit conditions!) where there is never enough light. Perkins’ sound design emphasizes creaky door openings, footsteps and groaning building pipes to create a sense that the overwhelming quiet of the school is being intruded upon. His choice to focus the camera often on the character’s back or the back of their head increases the sense of people concealing their motivations. The score by Elvis Perkins (the director’s brother) is appropriately spooky, a wash of eerie strings mixing with what best could be described as haunted carnival keyboards and underlaid with occasional bursts of percussion to create an effectively menacing supernatural ambience.

If half of Daughter is its incredible atmosphere, the other half is the brilliance of Perkins’ script. The dialogue, themes, structure and concept combine seamlessly to create a cold, cold valentine; a love story in which the lover is left with nothing but despair. The dialogue (or lack of dialogue, in Joan’s case) is expertly specific to the character in question. Kat, who has been possessed (at least partly willingly) by a demonic entity, answers everything with an undercurrent of threat. When Rose innocently asks her if there’s anything else she could do for her before she goes to bed, Kat (thinking of Rose’s earlier rudeness to her) replies, “No. You had your chance.” Bill, who thinks he “saw God” in Joan (who is the grown-up, no-longer-possessed and nine years older but still murderous version of Kat), asks her if she has a “friend or somebody” in her life. When she says “Somebody,” he replies, “Well, that’s better than having no one, isn’t it?” That one line encapsulates the entire film, in which a lonely person decides it’s better to be possessed by a demon than to have no one at all.

It turns out that the reason Kat’s parents haven’t arrived to pick her up is that they’ve died in a car accident. Taking advantage of her vulnerability, the demon possesses her at first by calling her on the public phone (“Hi, baby girl,”) and telling her she should kill everyone left at the school. From that point on, Kat is being used by a negative outside influence. Rose is deliberately not involving any adults in her pregnancy decision, which costs her life. Perkins says on the Blu-ray commentary track that he wanted to make a horror film about children without parents, and Rose loses her parents too (Bill and Linda) when Joan kills them nine years later.

The most controversial aspect of Daughter is its structure, which makes it seem like the sequences with Joan are happening at the same time as the scenes with Kat and Rose, although Joan’s scenes happen nine years later. The other controversy is that the grown-up Kat, now “Joan,” is played by a different actress, which some have complained makes figuring out the film’s twist unfair on the audience. I can see that point of view, but it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the film at all. There’s an artistic argument to be made that Joan is literally a different person from Kat at this point (the demon forcibly exorcised from her years ago), and having this twist sets up the extraordinary ending, which arguably wouldn’t have worked without the surprise.

And that ending. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything else quite like it. Back in the Kat storyline, Kat murdered Rose and the two nuns, decapitating them and placing their severed heads in front of the hellish red boiler in the school as tribute to her demon. She’s shot by a cop and placed in a mental hospital, where the head priest at her school visits and removes her unholy visitor. Years later, she murders a nurse (her ID says “Joan”) and adopts her identity. She kills her hapless benefactors Bill and Linda and brings their heads back to the abandoned old school boiler room, hoping this sacrifice will bring her demon back. But it doesn’t. The boiler is cold, no bright red flame to worship anymore. She walks outside in the snow, her hands covered in blood. She’s all alone. She howls with loss and despair, abandoned even by Hell.

Some miscellaneous things I noticed on this rewatch follow. The poster gives away the game (Kat and Joan are represented as two connected heads), but nobody (including me) figured it out. Bramford is the name of the apartment complex Rosemary lives in in Rosemary’s Baby. The school crest of Bramford, shown on a sweatshirt, is the bust of a female head, symbolic of the five severed heads to come. Perkins is the son of Anthony Perkins of Psycho fame, and Rose’s death sequence is very similar to Martin Balsam’s staircase demise in the classic Hitchcock slasher thriller. Also, the voice of the demon here is one of the actors who voiced “Mother” in Psycho. One of the producers was Bryan Bertino, director of The Strangers. The title of the film comes from a song Elvis Perkins created for the movie, and “blackcoat” is a pejorative word for a clergyman. Although it’s never specified that Kat is the daughter of a religious man, it fits with the idea of an innocent being taken by evil.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a masterful piece of craft and heralded the debut of an intelligent and artful filmmaker, the potential of which was shown again in his second film, I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House. All of this impressed and entertained me. But I was also unexpectedly moved by Daughter, by the plight of these isolated, trapped people. Unexpectedly, I was most affected by the final scene, by that naked howl of loneliness and loss. The things people will do to stave off loneliness, to have any connection, are sometimes the real horror. The title song has a line in it which describes the fate of the blackcoat’s daughter, saying simply, “The angels, they forgot her.”

Here’s a film for the forgotten.

Thanks to ArtsBeatLA for permission to repost this piece.

#4 – The Descent (2005)

A lot of these entries are the best films of their particular subgenres, and so it is here – The Descent is absolutely the greatest movie about a group of people trapped underground in a cave system getting picked off by hungry blind humanoid creatures. It’s masterfully directed, visually stunning and impressively acted, and it really benefits from being seen on a movie theater screen if possible.

Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) has recently lost her daughter and husband in a car accident. Her friends, trying to cheer her up a year later, have set up a spelunking trip in the Appalachian Mountains. One of them, Juno (Natalie Mendoza), is a cave expert, and she chooses the Boreham Caves as an easy adventure. Except, as the group of six women quickly discover, Juno lied, choosing an uncharted cave system instead, hoping to garner glory. The group is quickly trapped after their escape tunnel collapses, and they must find another way out. However, they’re not the only creatures in the cave system, and to the crawlers, these women are prey.

Macdonald is good and memorable as Sarah, the protagonist of the story, but it’s really an ensemble piece and so she’s really more the final girl than a usual heroine. Mendoza, however, is definitely the human antagonist. Her performance highlights Juno’s arrogance and selfishness so effectively that when the character finally gets her comeuppance it’s a very satisfying moment. MyAnna Buring (from Kill List) makes an early career appearance here.

Writer/director Neil Marshall made a jump in quality from the good Dog Soldiers to the great The Descent. Whether changing from a primarily male cast in the former to a primarily female cast in the latter had anything to do with this improvement is uncertain, but it certainly makes the movie distinctive. The film looks amazing, largely due to Sam McCurdy’s cinematography, but Marshall’s choice to keep the color schemes of above (green, grey) and below (black, red) ground consistently pays aesthetic dividends. Marshall shows off his talent for creating tension in this picture – the creatures don’t appear until about an hour into the story and the suspense is already strong – and he has one of film’s greatest jump scares in a sequence involving a night-vision camera revealing a crawler standing right behind an oblivious character.

The filmmakers did a spectacular job at making it look like the movie was actually shot inside a cave system, but it’s all just incredibly detailed sets in a studio. The sense of claustrophobia is palpable, and shots of tiny lights dwarfed by the immensity of darkness are extremely effective. Marshall’s script does a superb job of creating a believable group of friends and a real sense of betrayal as one of them blithely leads them into an almost literal hell. His dialogue is smart and funny, as in one line from one of the frustrated women: “I’m an English teacher, not fucking Tomb Raider.” The script also allows for alternate readings of the plot: some have contended that the creatures are only in Sarah’s grief-stricken mind, and that the descent of the title is a trip into madness. 

A lamentable sequel followed; avoid if possible. 

#3 – REC (2007)

REC, a Spanish film co-directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, follows in 28 Days Later’s footsteps by replacing zombies with violent infected people but distinguishes itself by ramping up the intensity. It’s often referred to as a found footage movie, but I’d say it falls somewhere between that and a regular story as the footage in question is never presented as found by anyone. It certainly shares the style of that genre and makes the most of the “shaky cam” vibe.

Ángela (Manuela Velasco) is a reporter for the late-night program “While You’re Asleep,” and tonight she and her cameraman Pablo (who is heard but never seen) have been assigned to follow a group of firemen to show what their lives are like. They get a call to go to a local building to check on an old lady stuck in her apartment. When they open the apartment, the lady attacks them, biting a police officer. More attacks and deaths rapidly follow, and Ángela is startled when the entire building is tented and quarantined. A health inspector in a biohazard suit informs them that there’s a virus in the building, and soon everyone in the building except Ángela and Pablo are infected and trying to kill them.

Velasco gives a great performance as Ángela, running the emotional gamut from bored reporter wishing for a better assignment to an angry journalist yelling at authority figures to an utterly terrified person just trying not to die. She also gets an iconic final scene, crawling around in the pitch-black attic, shown through the camera’s green night vision, suddenly grabbed by her feet and dragged screaming into the darkness.

Plaza and Balagueró’s direction is very skilled in making use of found footage tropes, creating a sense of raw immediacy by supposedly having everything filmed live (and even after he’s dead) by the fictional Pablo. Although the first couple of scenes of setup are calm, once things get moving, the pace of the film is furious. It’s the shortest movie on this list, burning through its runtime of one hour and eighteen minutes. 

Besides its famous ending scene, REC boasts incredible atmosphere, from the various creepy settings (the supposedly empty penthouse, filled with scientific gear and religious paraphernalia, is especially ominous) to the screams and unearthly growls coming from the upper floors. Many of the set pieces are strong, but the sudden descent of a fireman down the airshaft to crash onto the floor, shocking the gathered apartment residents, is an early sign that anything goes in this movie. 

An American remake, Quarantine, followed a year later, and was surprisingly good.

#2 – The Witch (2015)

When The Witch was released a decade ago, it seemed to me to be the most historically detailed horror film ever made, and I don’t think it’s been bettered. It heralded the debuts of Anya Taylor-Joy and writer/director Robert Eggers, both of whom have gone on to impressive careers. It’s also a point of contention between audiences who find it too measured and arty and those of us who love its slow-burn character-based descent into goat-influenced familial destruction.

Teenager Thomasin (Taylor-Joy) and her family have been kicked out of a Puritan plantation in 1630s New England and have to build a remote home next to a dark forest. Her father, William (Ralph Ineson), is attempting to grow corn, but his harvest is rotting. Her mother, Katherine (Kate Dickie), has recently given birth to a baby that she dotes on. Her conscientious younger brother, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), tries to help his father, and the younger twins run around playing games and singing about how their goat Black Philip talks to them and wears a crown. One day the baby mysteriously goes missing while in Thomasin’s care, and they begin to wonder if a witch in the woods has cursed them all.

Taylor-Joy gives a striking and memorable performance as Thomasin, who chafes under her parents’ claustrophobic religious zealotry but is also constantly blamed for things she hasn’t done. Ineson is fantastic as the wannabe patriarch (his deep resonant voice like a trained preacher) who keeps failing, and Dickie is painfully believable as a woman whose world is shattering bit by bit. Scrimshaw is amazing as Caleb in a serious performance – his character’s death scene is one of the most impressive pieces of acting I’ve ever seen a young person deliver.

Eggers’ directorial debut is masterful, from the incredible performances by his cast to the painterly cinematography and composition (Jarin Blaschke’s work as DP is superb). Some especially memorable sequences include the naked feverish Caleb returning home in the pouring rain after being held captive by a witch to the iconic shot of the witches levitating into the sky at the film’s conclusion. Mark Korven’s music is appropriately unsettling, a cacophony of wailing voices that evokes the approach of something sinister. 

Eggers’ screenplay is even better, and if you’re watching at home have the subtitles on to catch all of the references and decipher some of the thick British accents. Eggers has said that much of the dialogue was taken directly from period sources, and one feels the sense of authenticity. One of the nice things about the writing is that, although this is definitely a horror film (a witch makes the baby into paste to be smeared over her body, among other awful occurrences), his character work makes a lot of the story a powerful drama about a family just trying to survive already difficult circumstances.

There are at least a couple ways to interpret the film, depending on one’s religious outlook. Some people might see the story as the triumph of evil over a devout family (after all, all but one of the family dies), but others might see the story as that of a woman from a repressive family finally finding the freedom long denied her, albeit in an unfortunate way. For Thomasin, signing away her soul and joining the witches is a happy ending. The look she has on her face as she ascends naked into the sky is one of delighted joy. It turns out that the title of the picture isn’t referring to the preexisting witch in the woods, but to Thomasin herself becoming the titular entity.

At one point in the film, the voice of the devil asks her, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” Turns out, she would.

#1 – Hereditary (2018)

From the moment I thought about putting together this list, there was never any doubt that Hereditary would be number one. It’s a masterpiece of construction and style, dense with clever detail that rewards repeat viewings. The acting is magnificent (Toni Collette should have won an Academy Award for this), the familial drama so potent you could remove the supernatural elements and it would still largely work. It was an audacious debut for writer/director Ari Aster, who continues to display his unique artistic talent in such disparate works as Midsommar and Beau Is Afraid. 

Miniatures artist Annie (Collette) has recently lost her secretive mother and is surprised by the large number of “strange, new faces” at the funeral. Unfortunately, her losses are just beginning, as her teenage son, Peter (Alex Wolff), inadvertently causes a car accident that decapitates his odd sister, Charlie (Milly Shapiro). Peter is stunned with guilt while Annie flies between grief and rage at Peter, as her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) tries and fails to be a peacemaker. Looking to ease her pain, Annie meets Joan (Ann Dowd), who shows her how to conduct a séance to contact Charlie. She also finds a disturbing letter from her late mother, assuring her that “our sacrifice will pale next to the rewards.” Peter, however, notices something unearthly trying to influence him as Annie continues to become ever more out of control.

Collette was already a respected actress at this point, but the raw emotional power she displayed in this performance was stunning. The sheer ferocity with which Annie angrily tears into Peter in the dinner sequence is jaw-dropping, but her late-night confession to him that she never wanted to be his mother and tried to induce a miscarriage (which seems to shock even Annie in its candidness) is somehow even worse. She fully commits to all of the horror aspects of the role, and one moment in which she changes from terrified into calm and (literally) possessed is an expert display of her skill. Wolff is also amazing in his intense classroom scene, in which he genuinely seems hysterically frightened.

Aster’s mastery of film techniques is apparent even in his first feature. He reminds me here of a less formally rigid Kubrick. His initial zoom shot into one of Annie’s miniature rooms becomes the setting for the characters’ inexorable descent into doom – as one schoolgirl says, “they’re all like pawns in this horrible, hopeless machine.” Visual highlights include the dimly lit Annie crouching in the corner of the ceiling like a malevolent spider, and the shock cut from Annie discovering Charlie’s headless body in the car to Charlie’s head on the road, covered in ants (which is traumatizing). Pawel Pogorzelski’s exquisite cinematography progresses from warm autumnal tones to cold blues and blacks, and Colin Stetson’s music is suitably ominous.

Aster’s script is beautifully constructed, its plot and themes in complete harmony from the first shot to the last. The story concerns a plan set into motion by Annie’s deceased mother and her satanic cult to find a human host for one of the eight kings of Hell and sacrificing her own family, who never know why they are suffering. This scheme has been going on for a long time, as Annie unknowingly relates when saying her dead brother was schizophrenic, complaining that their mother kept “putting people inside him.” It’s a story about ritual, as is Aster’s follow-up, Midsommar. It’s also full of shockingly gruesome violence, from Charlie’s decapitation to the utterly insane sequence of Annie levitating and sawing her own head off with piano wire.

Hereditary is a serious horror film. It’s not leavened with humor to make it easier to take. It means to disturb on a deep level, and it does that brilliantly. That and its all-around excellence easily make it the greatest horror movie of the past quarter century.  

Here’s the entire list of films from top to bottom. Thanks for reading! 

1. Hereditary; 2. The Witch; 3. REC; 4. The Descent; 5. The Blackcoat’s Daughter; 6. 28 Days Later; 7. Longlegs; 8. Shaun of the Dead; 9. Get Out; 10. Funny Games; 11. Session 9; 12. The Strangers; 13. Weapons; 14. The Cabin in the Woods; 15. It Follows; 16. The Mist; 17. 30 Days of Night; 18. The Ring; 19. Train to Busan; 20. Paranormal Activity; 21. House of 1000 Corpses; 22. Mandy; 23. Ginger Snaps; 24. Terrifier; 25. Splinter.