30. 28 Days Later
2002, UK, d. Danny Boyle.
There is so much talent put to bear on this, tense, dramatic, and hugely entertaining post-apocalyptic zombie thriller. Director Danny Boyle works the hell out of it, and the film boasts superb performances by Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson, Naomie Harris, and Christopher Eccleston. The only thing that lets it down? Alex Garland’s screenplay which, while effective, liberally steals from John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. That aside, 28 Days Later is truly superb.

29. Saw IV
2007, USA, d. Darren Lynn Bousman.
James Wan’s Saw was a great, nasty little thriller, and it led to two sequels: one enjoyable, one perhaps less so. The thing about Saw III, however, was that is concluded the story: both villains are dead, and the story threads are completely tied up and resolved. Saw IV had all of the potential to be an entirely unnecessary and weakly plotted cash-in. Instead it is a work of genius, and powers up enough story potential to keep the franchise running for years. Its climax is the best of the whole series, and its technical achievements – notably its in-camera scene changes – are truly remarkable.

28. Saloum
2021, Senegal, d. Jean Luc Herbelot.
Three Senegalese terrorists are forced to make an emergency landing in the middle of nowhere, where the nearest village is home to a strange holiday resort. A violent crime spree shifts into a paranoid revenge thriller before shifting into something altogether more supernatural. Jean Luc Herbelot’s Saloum is a hugely inventive, blending a range of influences together in superb style. It is infused with West African history, politics, and folklore – quite simply, it could not exist coming from anywhere else in the world.

27. Come True
2020, USA, d. Anthony Scott Burns.
A teenage runaway (Julia Sarah Stone) signs up for a university sleep study, in the hopes it might help cure her of her nightmares. It is not the study she thought it was, and to make matters worse one of the leaders of the study appears to be stalking her. It is insanely difficult to render dreams and nightmares in an authentic fashion in cinema, but director (to mention writer, editor, and cinematographer) Anthony Scott Burns has produced one of the best attempts I have ever seen.

26. Doctor Sleep
2019, USA, d. Mike Flanagan.
A sequel to The Shining should have been unimaginable. Instead, in the hands of director Mike Flanagan, it somehow managed to tell a story worthy of both Stephen King’s novel as well as Kubrick’s film adaptation. Ewan McGregor is fantastic as the adult Danny Torrance, haunted by his past as his alcoholism. As Rose the Hat, Rebecca Ferguson delivers one of the most ominous screen villains of all time. Once the climax has them meet in the legendary Overlook Hotel, the film heads into incredible territory. This is a deeply underrated film.

25. Last Night in Soho
2021, UK, d. Edgar Wright.
After forging a career out of self-conscious pastiche comedies, director Edgar Wright shifts to a sleazy blend of horror movie and thriller. It is enormously culturally literate, and smartly written. It actually does a lot of what Wright’s films always do: bounce off pre-existing films and cultural artefacts and make something new and entertaining out of them. In this case he indulges in the “swinging 60s” aesthetic and then viciously flips the take to show off an unpleasant, deeply awful underbelly. I honestly think it might be his best film.

24. Speak No Evil
2022, Denmark, d. Christian Tafdrup.
One family meet another on holiday, and are invited to join them again – with horrifying results. Speak No Evil is a hard, mean horror film that just gets more relentlessly unpleasant as it goes. At first it is just an appalling comedy of manners, with the guests too polite to say anything about their hosts’ weird behaviour. By the end it reminds me of that phenomenon where people have literally died in their underwear in house fires because they were more afraid of embarrassment than death, Within two years of its original release, this already has a Hollywood remake – an odd choice, since it is mostly performed in English.

23. Train to Busan
2016, South Korea, d. Yeon Sang-ho.
This is such a crowd-pleasing film, combining that sort of 1970s disaster flick – a rag-tag group of civilians stuck on a passenger train – with the undead. Wilfully over-the-top and melodramatic, and packed with all manner of inventive set pieces and action sequences, Train to Busan is simply a joyful thrill ride from start to finish. I am not sure if I have had more fun with a zombie movie this century.

22. Us
2019, USA, d. Jordan Peele.
Comic actor and writer Jordan Peele rightfully blew audiences away with his debut feature Get Out. His 2019 follow-up Us was perhaps less well received, but I absolutely adore it. This is, unusually for a studio feature, genuine bug-eyed weirdness in a mainstream horror film. It is remarkably unsettling stuff because it is so unlike other movies. It also boasts some a-grade performances, particularly from star Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke.

21. The Exorcism of Emily Rose
2005, USA, d. Scott Derrickson.
It is a difficult business making a film about exorcism while under the shadow of Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose actually manages to step beyond that shadow through a combination of genre shift – it is a horror film and a courtroom drama – as well as narrative structure – by the time the film begins the key events have already happened. A knockout cast includes Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Jennifer Carpenter, Colm Feore, and Shohreh Aghdashloo. Derrickson’s The Black Phone made an earlier post on this list, while his film Sinister (2012) is absolutely worth a look, but Emily Rose is honestly his finest film.

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.
#40-31 (link) A Quiet Place Part II, The Invisible Man, The Innocents, Pearl, Candyman, The Night Eats the World, Exhuma, The Lodge, The Ring, Saw.