Directed by Dario Argento • 1982 • Italy
Starring Anthony Franciosa, John Saxon, Daria Nicolodi

Dario Argento raises the giallo genre to new heights with this darkly humorous and notoriously grisly murder mystery, widely considered one of his finest works. American mystery author Peter Neal (Ant...

Directed by Claire Denis • 2001 • France
Starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle

Claire Denis’s poetic take on the body-horror genre is an atmospheric reverie of blood and lust that lays bare the filmmaker’s core artistic concerns around power, desire, and delirium. Newlyweds Shane...

Directed by Věra Chytilová • 1987 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Miroslav Machácek, Tomás Palatý, Stepánka Cervenková

Věra Chytilová’s subversive take on the 1980s teen-horror movie assembles a gaggle of bratty adolescents for a mysterious skiing retreat at a snowbound cabin where they find themselve...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa • 1997 • Japan

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s arresting international breakthrough established him as one of the leaders of an emerging new wave of Japanese horror while pushing the genre into uncharted realms of philosophical and existential exploration. A string of shocking, s...

Directed by Jayro Bustamante • 2019 • Guatemala
Starring María Mercedes Coroy, Margarita Kénefic, Sabrina de la Hoz

A country’s bloody history stains the present in the Guatemalan auteur Jayro Bustamante’s transfixing fusion of folk horror and searing political commentary, inspired by the real-l...

Directed by Ricky Lau • 1985 • Hong Kong
Starring Lam Ching-Ying, Ricky Hui, Chin Siu-Ho

The film that, along with producer Sammo Hung’s SPOOKY ENCOUNTERS, launched an entire hopping-vampire horror-comedy subgenre is Hong Kong cinema at its most gleefully inventive and gloriously unrestrained. T...

Directed by David Cronenberg • 1981 • Canada
Starring Stephen Lack, Jennifer O’Neill, Michael Ironside

With SCANNERS, David Cronenberg plunges us into one of his most terrifying and thrilling sci-fi worlds. After a man with extraordinary—and frighteningly destructive—telepathic abilities is nabb...

Directed by Guillermo del Toro • 1993 • Mexico
Starring Federico Luppi, Ron Perlman, Claudio Brook

Guillermo del Toro made an auspicious and audacious feature debut with CRONOS, a highly unorthodox tale about the seductiveness of the idea of immortality. Kindly antiques dealer Jesús Gris (Federi...

Criterion Collection Edition #539

How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie HOUSE (HAUSU)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of “Scooby-Doo” as directed by Mario Bava? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip abou...

Criterion Collection Edition #584

In this poetic and atmospheric horror fable, set in a village in war-torn medieval Japan, a malevolent spirit has been ripping out the throats of itinerant samurai. When a military hero is sent to dispatch the unseen force, he finds that he must struggle with hi...

Directed by Brian De Palma • 1973 • United States
Starring Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Charles Durning

Margot Kidder is Danielle, a beautiful model separated from her Siamese twin, Dominique. When a hotshot reporter (Jennifer Salt) suspects Dominique of a brutal murder, she becomes dangerously...

Directed by Carl Th. Dreyer • 1932 • France, West Germany
Starring Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel

With VAMPYR, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer channeled his genius for creating mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, unsettling imagery into the horror genre. The result—a chilling film...

Directed by Georges Franju • 1960 • France
Starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, François Guérin

At his secluded chateau in the French countryside, a brilliant, obsessive doctor (Pierre Brasseur) attempts a radical plastic surgery to restore the beauty of his daughter’s disfigured countenance—a...

Directed by David Cronenberg • 1979 • Canada
Starring Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle

A disturbed woman is receiving a radical form of psychotherapy at a remote, mysterious institute. Meanwhile, her five-year-old daughter, under the care of her estranged husband, is being terrorized by a...

Directed by George A. Romero • 1968 • United States
Starring Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman

Shot outside Pittsburgh on a shoestring budget, by a band of filmmakers determined to make their mark, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, directed by horror master George A. Romero, is a great story of...

Directed by Robert Day • 1958 • United Kingdom
Starring Boris Karloff, Jean Kent, Elizabeth Allan

Nineteenth-century English author James Rankin (Boris Karloff) believes that the wrong man was hanged twenty years earlier for a series of murders, but his investigations lead him to a horrible and,...

Criterion Collection Edition #896

This genre-defying horror-musical mash-up—the bold debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska—follows a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore to explore life on land in an alternate 1980s Poland. Their tantalizing siren songs and otherworldly auras...

Directed by Nobuo Nakagawa • 1960 • Japan
Starring Shigeru Amachi, Utako Mitsuya, Yoichi Numata

Shocking, outrageous, and poetic, JIGOKU (HELL, a.k.a. THE SINNERS OF HELL) is the most innovative creation from Nobuo Nakagawa, the father of the Japanese horror film. After a young theology student ...

Directed by Arthur Crabtree • 1958 • United Kingdom
Starring Marshall Thompson, Kynaston Reeves, Kim Parker

A scientist’s thoughts materialize as an army of invisible brain-shaped monsters (complete with spinal-cord tails!) who terrorize an American military base in this nightmarish chiller, dir...

Criterion Collection Edition #63

A young woman (Candace Hilligoss) in a small Kansas town survives a drag race accident, then agrees to take a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. En route, she is haunted by a bizarre apparition that compels her toward an abandoned lakeside pavilion. Made...

Directed by Benjamin Christensen • 1922 • Denmark
Starring Benjamin Christensen, Astrid Holm, Karen Winther

Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen’s legendary silent film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that th...

Directed by Paul Schrader • 1982 • United States
Starring Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard

Paul Schrader’s kinky-stylish reworking of the 1942 Val Lewton classic transfers the action to a voodoo-spooky New Orleans, adds an incestuous undercurrent, and ups the sex and gore. Nastassj...

Directed by John Frankenheimer • 1966 • United States
Starring Rock Hudson, Salome Jens, John Randolph

Rock Hudson is a revelation in this sinister, science-fiction-inflected dispatch from the fractured 1960s. SECONDS, directed by John Frankenheimer, concerns a middle-aged banker who, dissatisfi...