This second selection of post-2000 horror movies includes original works and cleverly-made sequels, and originate in different countries around the world.

40. A Quiet Place Part II
2020, USA, d. John Krasinski.
Making a great film is incredibly difficult. Making a genuinely great sequel is even harder, particularly for a horror film. All of the surprises have been blown, and things that are scary once are rarely scary the second time. John Krasinski’s follow-up to his own masterful A Quiet Place ups the ante in inventive and enormously tense ways. Hiding in a house from carnivorous, sound-seeking aliens seemed an impossible task. Moving cross-country with a baby and a badly injured child? It’s a wonder audiences remembered to breathe.

39. The Invisible Man
2020, USA, d. Leigh Whannell.
Universal have spent years in an ungainly effort to launch remakes and re-imaginings of their classic monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Dracula Untold (2014) and The Mummy (2017) were both misfires intended to launch shared universes – who would have guessed that the solution was to give the basic concept to a smart filmmaker and let them simply make a great horror film. Whannell’s The Invisible Man is timely, socially relevant, enormously suspenseful, and creative. No surprise that Universal have tapped him to re-imagine The Wolf Man.

38. The Innocents
2021, Norway, d. Eskil Vogt.
There have been plenty of stories about children spontaneously developing super powers, but Eskil Vogt’s The Innocents makes a point to explore what that would actually be like. What if the child with powerful psychic abilities was a bully? What if they were too immature to understand the moral responsibility of their gifts? Children in peril is a common trope of horror movies, but if protecting a child from evil generates rich levels of tension in audience, what about being threatened by your child?

37. Pearl
2022, USA, d. Ti West.
Ti West’s X (2022) was an enjoyable sort of slasher pastiche that benefitted from a few fresh ideas and a winning performance by star Mia Goth. This prequel – usually a terrible idea for a horror film – stands head and shoulders above its predecessor by taking the elements that worked in X and accentuating them still further. It is disturbing, funny, and tragic all in turn, while Goth’s late-stage monologue is one of the best written and acted scenes of its kind. There is a third film to West’s trilogy, MaXXXine, but sadly I have yet to see it.

36. Candyman
2021, USA, d. Nia DaCosta.
What seemed from the outside to be a cynical remake turns out to be one of the strongest legacy sequels there is. Supernatural scares are blended with visceral body horror, urban myth, and social commentary. Nia DaCosta directs a film that tackles the ‘black lives matter’ crisis of 21st century America with intelligence and grace, and the steps she takes to re-develop and revise the Candyman mythos (invented by author Clive Barker) are clever and provocative ones.

35. The Night Eats the World
2018, France, d. Dominique Rocher.
Imagine waking up the morning after a wild party and discovering that the zombie apocalypse happened without you. That’s the fate of protagonist Sam (Anders Danielsen Lee) in Dominique Rocher’s The Night Eats the World. It is not a film about running for one’s life, but rather about barricading oneself up and waiting for the whole crisis to blow over. It is tense and scary, but also weirdly amusing as well. The real horror in this case is not the undead, but the loneliness of isolation.

34. Exhuma
2024, South Korea, d. Jang Jae-hyun.
A stunning blend of supernatural and folk horror, playing smartly on Korean history and culture. It’s rich in metaphor, and provides the sort of specific story that could only be told within a Korean context. The film is led by a strong cast and an entertaining range of characters: part ghost hunters, part con artists. While it may lack a little in proper scares, it compensates by providing something truly weird and unsettling.

33. The Lodge
2019, UK, d. Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala.
A father leaves his two grieving children alone in a winter cabin with his new girlfriend while they mourn their mother’s death. Riley Keough is sensational as that girlfriend, Grace, who is a cult survivor with a lot of secrets. As she tries to establish a rapport with the two resentful youths, mysterious phenomena begin to affect them. This is ambivalent, hugely paranoid stuff, keeping the audience guessing throughout about what is occurring and with what characters they should side.

32. The Ring
2002, USA, d. Gore Verbinski.
American remakes of successful non-English language films are pretty much a foregone conclusion. Gore Verbinski’s adaptation of Hideo Nakata’s Ring is essentially a textbook on how to undertake the task properly. A deeply Japanese story is revised and adjusted to maximise its relevance to American culture instead. It takes good advantage of a Hollywood budget, and some of its key set pieces – notably a fly in a video, and a runaway horse – make for some of the best horror visuals in decades.

31. Saw
2004, USA, d. James Wan.
A superbly pulpy exercise in grand guignol and gory pastiche. Saw was unfairly lumped in with a Hollywood run on ultra-violent, voyeuristic horror films that got collectively dubbed ‘torture porn’. It’s significantly more baroque, complicated, and intricate than that. It is a film about a serial killer who constructs elaborate traps, with a narrative similarly constructed as an elaborate trap. So effective is this first, modestly budgeted original that it spawned nine sequels and counting.

50 Great Works of 21st Century Horror
#50-41 (link) Dark Water, Old, Suicide Forest Village, Daguerreotype, 1922, Fresh, The Dark and the Wicked, Kill List, Barbarian, The Black Phone.