Ever since Resident Evil exploded onto the scene in 1996 and made inventory reshuffling in the face of a zombie outbreak popular, players have been regularly fighting down to their very last bullet. 30 years later, survival horror is the dominant format for those seeking video game scares, as popular now as it’s ever been. And with a fresh batch of nightmares to consider, there’s never been a better time to rank the best games of the genre.

But what qualifies a game to be considered as "survival horror"? Many games are often labelled survival horror, but lean much too heavily into action to be truly considered a genuine example of the genre. For our money, survival horror can be boiled down to four key factors, all of which are vital components of the classics that make up our list.

1. There has to be a power dynamic weighted in the enemy's favour.
2. You need to explore maze-like environments while solving puzzles.
3. There’s often jeopardous resource management.
4. Relentless pressure inflicted by either a pursuer or an oppressive space.

So with the rules established and out of the way, here are our picks for the 10 best survival horror games of all time.

10. Clock Tower

While 1989’s Sweet Home is often considered the progenitor of survival horror, it’s Clock Tower, the 1995, 16-bit survival horror classic that was only ever released in Japan, that perhaps left a bigger mark on the genre. Its fingerprints can be easily found throughout the entirety of this list.

You play as Jennifer, a teenage orphan stranded in a Resident Evil-like manor, point-and-clicking your way through a series of impressively detailed, oppressive rooms. But Clock Tower's defining mechanic, and why it rightfully deserves its place on this list, is its pioneering stalker gameplay. Four years before Resident Evil’s Nemesis spent an entire game shouting “STARS”, Clock Tower had us avoiding the dreaded “Scissorman”, who, much like Mr X, Pyramid Head, and Alien: Isolation’s Xenomorph, is a near-unstoppable force that’s always lurking nearby. Fast forward to today, and the stalker enemy type has become a staple of the survival horror genre. We have Scissorman to thank for all those enduring nightmares.

9. Silent Hill

While Capcom was storming the charts in the late ‘90s with Resident Evil’s campy, zombie-focused take on survival horror, Konami’s first stab at the genre saw the studio try something very different. What it created was dread. Pure, unrelenting dread.

Silent Hill stars Harry Mason, an everyman who enters a fog-filled nightmare while trying to find his missing adopted daughter in the town of Silent Hill. What follows is an oppressive tale riddled with unseemly horrors, the likes we’d never witnessed in a video game before.

Unlike its peers, Silent Hill provided a true 3D environment to explore, rather than the static, pre-rendered backdrops of Resident Evil. Due to the hardware restraints of the time, which struggled to render long draw distances, the fictional town was caked in a constant thick layer of fog that disguised the tech’s limitations. Serendipitously, this not only became the series’ signature look, but also demonstrated perhaps the greatest marriage of tech and tone we’ve ever witnessed in a video game.

Silent Hill pioneered its own psychological corner of the survival horror genre, spawning many sequels and remakes that would go on to be considered some of the most haunting video games ever made.

8. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

It seems like a distant memory now, but there was a painful period where the Resident Evil series lost touch with its survival horror roots. While Resident Evil 4 is rightly celebrated, it significantly ramped up the action, which laid the groundwork for both Resident Evil 5 and 6 to practically abandon the genre altogether.

2017 finally saw Capcom return to that classic survival horror feeling with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, but it did so from an entirely new first-person perspective and through the use of a grimier, Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like cast of characters. Our new protagonist, Ethan Winters, is forced to take on the Louisiana swamp-dwelling Baker family, who force him to endure a gauntlet of grisly challenges. Gone were roundhouse kicks, quicktime events, and off-the-charts bombast, and back was delicate resource management, a reestablished power balance in the antagonist's favour, and the long overdue return of a stalker enemy.

It’s impossible not to think of Resident Evil when talking about survival horror, but it’s only thanks to Resident Evil 7’s genre renaissance that they’re still considered synonymous with each other, rather than survival horror being just a footnote in the history of the series.

7. Outlast

Often the best survival horror tropes are reflections of the movies that inspired them, and there’s no better illustration of this than 2013’s Outlast, a first-person descent into a remote psychiatric hospital that took the found footage movie genre and expertly turned it into a five-hour interactive nightmare.

Outlast is relentless, and in traditional survival horror fashion, gives you very little to defend yourself with. It does, however, effectively turn vision into a resource; with the majority of the gloomy hospital only visible through the green, grainy lens of your camera's night vision, it's vital you build a stockpile of batteries to keep it powered up. AAs are as important in Outlast as bullets are in Resident Evil, and without them, you’re completely blind to horrors that lurk in the dark.

When you can see what’s chasing you, Outlast is as scary as any game on this list. When the lights go out, it stands nearly in a league of its own.

6. Alan Wake 2

Much like Outlast, Alan Wake 2 also commodifies light, although unlike its more action-led predecessor, it strikes a perfect balance of tense survival horror gameplay and a cinematic, surreal nightmare.

Developer Remedy’s unsettling story follows the intertwined journeys of titular writer Alan Wake and FBI agent Saga Anderson. As Alan, you’ll blast ghostly figures and solve Resident Evil-esque puzzles in a nightmare version of New York City. But the further you venture, the stranger things get; you’ll write new pathways through reality, witness a bizarre Finnish horror movie, endure an anxiety-inducing chat show, and take part in the best rock opera you’ve ever gunned your way through.

Saga’s chapters, meanwhile, see the story transform into a blend of Hannibal and Zodiac, with Silent Hill-like exploration and combat sitting neatly next to police procedural work. As you investigate a chilling chain of ritual murders, you’ll need to arrange clues on your evidence board and drill deeper into the minds of your many suspects.

Alan Wake 2 finds a unique way to combine familiar survival horror gameplay with Lynchian cinematic flair, resulting in a deeply ambitious, frequently disturbing experience that both feels true to the genre and something completely fresh.

5. Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Thanks to its gameplay innovations that helped course-correct and spur a rebirth of a genre that had drifted too far into action-game territory, almost all modern survival horror games are indebted to Amnesia: The Dark Descent, at least to some degree.

In Frictional Games’ landmark 2010 first-person horror, you play as Daniel, who wakes up alone in the dark castle of Brennenburg with no memory of how he got there. As you explore, you learn of a shadow that’s stalking you, and encounter other creatures that will give chase if they spot you. Armed with nothing but a lantern, your only form of defence is to run and hide, often in the dark. This cat-and-mouse experience is a common survival horror trait today, but back in 2010, it was a stark contrast against more action-oriented horror games like Resident Evil 5, which was released just one year earlier.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent isn’t just a game of hide and seek, though: it has an extra wrinkle, one that forces you to always be on the move. Stay in the dark too long and you’ll gradually lose your mind. This forces you into maintaining a delicate balancing act, avoiding the darkness that’s driving you insane but frequently using it to hide from your pursuer.

Amnesia’s multiple sequels all build upon The Dark Descent’s mechanics in smart ways, but perhaps more important to its legacy is how other developers took notice, with Resident Evil 7’s decision to switch to a first-person perspective owing a lot to Amnesia’s success.

The Dark Descent still holds up today, and its influence runs deep, paving the way for the first-person playstyle to receive equal attention next to the genre’s traditional third-person camera.

4. Resident Evil

It’s hard to imagine what horror in video games would look like without the arrival of Resident Evil. The first in the long-running (and extremely successful) series arrived in 1996, inviting players to explore the zombie-infested, puzzle-riddled Spencer Mansion, and it’s fair to say the survival horror genre hasn’t looked back since.

Although primitive by today’s standards, Resident Evil set the mold for everything that followed. The isolation, the limited resources, the relentless sense of dread, and the jump scares. Resident Evil pioneered the way for the genre, and without it, modern survival horror simply wouldn’t exist. Yes, Sweet Home outlined the blueprint, but Resident Evil masterfully executed the ideas and propelled survival horror to the masses.

Of course, the formula has since been regularly improved upon, and many of those games are featured in this list, but every entry in Capcom’s enduring series owes a debt to the first. Resident Evil is arguably weaker than most of its sequels, its own remake included, but none of them would have existed without the progenitor, and its importance to the genre (and this list) is unquestionable.

3. Alien: Isolation

1979’s Alien is a masterclass in fear, building uneasy tension and suspense with the threat of its single, deadly Xenomorph. On paper, the film’s concept is not easily translated into video game form, and there certainly were many failed attempts until Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation arrived in 2014.

Alien: Isolation abandons pulse rifles, gung-ho Colonial Marines, and gallons of acid blood in favour of survival horror trappings, asking you to outwit an indestructible stalker that hunts you around the sprawling Sevastopol space station.

Powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence, the Xenomorph in Alien: Isolation lives up to its silver screen relative, accurately creating a terrifying gameplay experience based on everything we saw in Ridley Scott’s classic. The beast quite literally has a mind of its own, capable of learning your tactics and finding new ways to hunt you. In a list full of games with stalker enemies, it’s still hard to look past the perfect organism as the greatest hunter of them all.

With only stealth, guts, and a few select tools to help you survive, Alien: Isolation is a terrifying horror simulator that not only instantly became the best Alien video game of all time, but also one of the very best examples of the survival horror genre.

2. Silent Hill 2

Silent Hill 2 is an increasingly disturbing, psychological journey into the repressed thoughts of its unassuming protagonist and the tortured souls he meets along the way. Emotional tragedy, guilt, anger, abuse, and the horrible ways the resulting trauma manifests are handled with grace and maturity rarely seen in the genre.

Silent Hill 2 is everything a good survival horror game should be, perfectly balancing a relentless sense of hopelessness with just enough to keep you in the fight. James is a tortured soul, but one driven by the desire to continue his path, despite how unlikely success seems, and although this isn’t the first Silent Hill on this list, it is unquestionably the best.

The original Silent Hill 2, developed by Konami’s Team Silent back at the dawn of the millennium, is perhaps the bleakest, most sombre game ever made. 23 years later, Bloober Team successfully recreated its miserable magic, crafting a remake that is a deeply effective descent into genuinely uncomfortable terror. With this 2024 remake, Team Silent’s nightmarish vision is preserved. It’s a modern reminder not just of an era when Konami was a master of survival horror, but also of the significant power of Silent Hill 2’s timeless misery.

1. Resident Evil 2

When you think of survival horror, you think of Resident Evil, and although there are many contenders for best entry in the series, our vote, emphatically, goes to the 2019 remake of Resident Evil 2.

The original Resident Evil 2 took everything successful about the survival horror formula established by the first game and refined it. The locations were creepier, the enemies more menacing – this was the introduction of the infamous Licker and Mr. X, the stalker enemy that set the bar for the genre – and the scares were bigger and badder. The adventures of Leon and Claire in Raccoon City not only became a benchmark for Resident Evil but for the genre as a whole.

Every way 1998’s Resident Evil 2 improved on its predecessor, the 2019 remake replicated in kind, becoming not only a prime example of how to take an older game and reanimate it for a new generation of players, but also how the original rules of survival horror still stand strong to this day.

Resident Evil 2 is everything you want survival horror to be: a game of carefully balancing your resources while always feeling like you don’t quite have enough, enduring relentless pursuits through maze-like environments, obtuse puzzles to solve, and a constant state of unease that makes it feel like you won’t quite survive through the whole ordeal.

Resident Evil 2 influenced not one, but two generations of survival horror, and despite being often imitated, it’s rarely equalled. In our eyes, Resident Evil 2 is not only the very best of survival horror’s most famous series, but it also sits atop the genre itself.

If you liked this list and are eager for more survival horror, why not check out the 25 best horror games of all time, or our Art of the Level episode on Resident Evil 2, discussing how Capcom perfected the RPD Police Station twice.

It’s a big, scary world out there, but that’s never stopped us from some additional big screen thrill-seeking. While some movies are scarier than the sum of their parts, we’re getting a little more granular with this list and breaking down individual moments...but right off the bat, there's a caveat. No moment exists in a vacuum; every scene is the product of the context laid down before it and the consequences that follow it. This might be doubly true for scary moments. A good scare needs the ingredients arranged correctly in front of it and the tension built, and a great scare will linger long after it’s left the screen.

And just so we’re on the same page from the jump, I’m not talking exclusively about horror movies here. Admittedly, most of this list will be made up of that spookiest of genres, but one of the great things about scary moments is that they can drop in when you least expect them. A truly scary movie moment can creep up in a dramatic chamber piece just as easily as it can in the middle of Slasherpalooza 7: The Blood Bath-ening...sometimes more so.

So for each of the categories in our taxonomic breakdown of individual scares on film, I want to focus on at least one that’s from a not-traditionally-considered-horror film. Now, with all that being said, let’s talk about scaring the shit out of an audience with the old reliable jump scare!

10. The Jump Scare

Built on an instantaneous release of tension, the jump scare is maybe the purest example of set-up and payoff that cinema has to offer. You can go back 100 years to find a good jump scare in The Phantom of the Opera, or maybe even the original horror movie – that train that people thought would run them over in the theater. There’s a beautiful simplicity to these that, when executed properly, give a dose of the unexpected just when you’re starting to think the coast is clear. Some more recent favorites are the boy in the attic in REC, panning around almost 360 before … FUCK that kid… the lawnmower scene in Sinister, making us quietly wait until … GOD DAMMIT what the… there’s the famous Texas Switch of shock, luring us in with a kid running to his … SHIT he turned into a different guy…

Where non-horror movies are concerned, the old reliable jump scare is standing by to cash in a bit of tension between a mayor and a good cop when a fake Batman slams into the window in The Dark Knight. Then there's the jewelry-crazed uncle and his reluctantly adventurous nephew crossing paths again in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

But my favorite types of jump scares don’t turn the screws with tension, but with safety. A quick personal aside: My daughter (who was 8 at the time) and I were watching The Lost World, and because I’m very likely a pretty lame dad, I prefaced the hell out of the movie so she wouldn’t be scared. But during the escape from the raptors sequence, when Julianne Moore checks under the shed to be sure the coast is clear only to find out shortly thereafter that no, the coast was very much NOT clear, I explained the nature of that particular jump scare in a way that I’m sure ruined movies for my poor kid.

First of all, we’re in the middle of a tense scene as it is. This particular moment is a little bit of a chance to catch our breath, with at least a wall between us and the carnivores. We’re presented with a means of another escape by digging under the wall. We watch as Moore checks underneath it, confirming that it’s a safe space. The camera pans away from it quickly...and that’s key. We take our eyes off the safe space for a split second, only to find when we pan back to it… JUMP SCARE! Safety and respite are briefly teased before being pulled out from under us like our faith in Man’s ability to respect the limits of Creation.

A few days later, I overheard my daughter explaining jump scares in her own words to her cousin, and I’ve honestly never been more proud, but the point here is that jump scares are a foundational, cleanly simple place to start our look at what makes a movie moment well and truly scary.

That same pattern of tension + momentary safety + rug pull can be found in another Spielberg gem, and our number 10 pick, the "Ben Gardner’s boat" scene from Jaws.

What’s great about this scene is the lengths taken to establish a sense of relative safety surrounding a nighttime swim to investigate the hull of the well-known fisherman’s boat. Some of it is even rooted in character. We’re still getting to know Richard Dreyfuss’s Matt Hooper, but his expertise has been completely established in the moments leading up to THE moment. We know he’s smart and respectful of the shark terrorizing Amity Island, but here we also see his capability. He’s got gadgets a-plenty on his boat, the backing of the film’s primary hero, and a confidence that we get to share as he dives in.

We also know that there is definitely a shark out there. The tension looms just under the surface, as it does for the rest of the film and the famously camera-shy antagonist. But Spielberg’s greatest misdirect with this scene is the tooth. Finding a massive great white tooth lodged in the hull is frightening enough, surely -- we think -- and that’s what this scene has in store for us. It's the first visual proof of the scale of the problem but … NOPE.

Just when we think the scene is done with us, poor Ben Gardner’s head pops up to say hi. First of all, anything jumping out at us in this moment makes for a good jump scare, but it’s not the shark we were afraid of when we first jumped into the water, which accomplishes a few things besides just the scare. Most importantly, it maintains Hooper’s credibility. Had he confidently dove into the water and come face to face with the shark, he’d look pretty stupid for the rest of the film, and we can’t have that. But structurally, in the narrative of the movie, it had been a solid 20 minutes since the last shark sighting, and it’ll be another 10 or 12 before the next attack. We needed this tension and this scare to keep us on the edge of our seats between the more traditionally scary moments.

On top of the way this jump scare is executed, it’s a jolt of adrenaline to the audience at a spot in the runtime that really needed it, and the movie on the whole is better for it.

9. The Slow Burn Scare

Moving on from the jump scare -- the monster that takes you by surprise -- the natural place to go next is to the scare that you see coming. These are the slow burn scares, the ones that sneak up on you even though they’ve been slowly walking your way this whole time, like It Following in the background, or each time A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. These are films filled with moments of creeping dread, moments like a column silhouette turning to face us in The Night House, or the cell phone footage discovered in Lake Mungo. For a non-horror movie, think also about the critical scene on the highway at night during Nocturnal Animals, and how the result of the encounter was so clear the entire time it was working its way towards the screen. They're slow moving terrorizers that you can’t look away from.

The best of these, by their very nature, take a while to organize. "Slow" is literally half of this category's name, and to distill them down to a moment is a mistake, as we must also include the long build-up. The best of these, to risk a cop-out at number 9, take the whole movie to build, and few have done it as well as 1973’s The Wicker Man.

The Wicker Man is such a fun folk horror film, but it’s a little hard to watch it now without having at least a notion of how it’s going to play out. It’s been homaged, imitated, and literally remade enough that even if you’ve never seen it, you know it. That’s why I really want to highlight this movie here, even more than the craft of the film.

The moment when Sergeant Howie realizes his doom is imminent is only just a few minutes from the end, but it’s the result of an entire film's worth of build-up. The paganism of the island is something he’s known about for his entire stay, something he’s seen coming with every quirky Summerisle inhabitant he encounters, something they’ve been honest with him about since Christopher Lee’s charming Lord Summerisle told him about it all upon their first meeting. And for us in the audience, this set-up and execution are as familiar a trope as you could ask for, but it’s important to remember that it’s familiar because The Wicker Man did it so well.

The movie is a cult favorite for a reason, and it’s all clear in these final moments before desperation sets in. The policeman thinks he’s done his job, but the rug is pulled out from under him just as quickly. Set on a cliff overlooking the ocean, the scene finds him trapped between crashing waves and the calm matter-of-factness of the cult that’s about to sacrifice him to their pagan gods. This is the only end that Howie was ever meant for; it was deliberately plotted and slowly revealed for the entire runtime of the film, leaving us in the helpless shoes of a doomed man.

8. The Terrifying Image

To elicit any emotion on screen, at the intersection of all the trades required to make a movie work, these scary movie moments need to have their nuts and bolts in order. And because we’re nothing if not big ol’ marks for film craft here, let’s start breaking down some moments based on individual parts, starting with the visuals.

These are the moments that just look scary. There are films that lean on production design, like the Pale Man’s dinner table in Pan’s Labyrinth, or venturing through the inner workings of a mad man in The Cell... or any of Tarsem Singh’s work for that matter. Also, a quick aside here: I'd like to advocate for stop motion as a preeminent vehicle for imagery that’s scary outside of all context, with films like The Wolf House made in the stop-motion equivalent of a single take and created entirely out of duct tape, or animation pioneer Phil Tippett’s magnum opus, Mad God.

But to be honest, terrifying visuals really sing loudest and most disturbingly in non-horror movies. More than any other category we’ll talk about here, a scary visual can REALLY pop in a film where you might not be expecting it. This is where the term Lynchian really comes in handy, as nearly all of the late auteur's work qualifies as not-really-horror-but-scary-as-hell-anyway, from a truly bizarre attempt at cutting a chicken, to Dean Stockwell karaoke, and beyond. For me though, when I think of scary on-the-look-alone, I always go back to The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film is, on paper at least, fairly straightforward. An obnoxious and powerful criminal strong-arms his way into a partnership with a gourmet chef while the crook’s wife falls for a bookish regular at the restaurant. It’s all right there in the title. However, the presentation of that story is anything but straightforward, and certainly not anything that would immediately fall into the scary movie bucket.

But the entire runtime of the film is otherworldly, and because I won’t be calling the whole movie a “moment,” I want to focus on the first tracking shot through the back of the house at the restaurant. It's not the first shot of the film, but it's still “the opening" -- a tracking shot that establishes something truly unsettling. There’s a formality to these proceedings, an artifice that is so front and center, it’s impossible not to notice or think, “what the hell is about to happen here?”

From the eerie falsetto of a young boy singing, lost in his own thoughts, through the bullying buffoonery of Michael Gambon’s Spica and the quiet resignation of the Cook, very aware of the trap he’s in with instinct enough to pick his rebellious spots. The smoke, the dark and damp back alley vibes, the duck feathers floating through the air like a gentle snow -- all of it is filmed in a slow and steady tracking shot.

It's a shot that thoroughly establishes the tone of the film as something almost paranormal. This is a staged morality play, a classical tragedy about to unfold in a dark and dangerous world in which nothing good can last, and for this shot to happen so early in the film makes the moment all the more unsettling.

7. The Scare Built on the Sound

Let’s stick with craft for another couple picks and look at audio. These are the moments of terror that succeed in their scares chiefly through their use of sound. There are whole movies, of course, built on the idea of being quiet in order to survive, A Quiet Place being the most recent and fully committed of those examples.

Sometimes there’s a familiar clicking of an alien predator to build tension, or tripping over a pet’s water bowl after a long stretch of silence to break tension. This sequence from Invisible Man is incredibly shrewd, pinning our hero's hopes for escape on her ability to stealthily get out of the house. Sometimes it’s just a loud noise that jump-starts our character back into reality, like the bus stopping suddenly in Cat People. This is the style of sound-based scares most often found in non-horror fare; think of the sequence from Ikiru that Darren Aronofsky later borrowed for The Fountain, with the sudden intrusion of sound from the world around the isolated characters waking ALL of us back up.

We Need to Talk About Kevin also deserves a non-horror mention for the truly awful sound of the titular Kevin biting his fingernails that adds a disturbing aura to that entire scene, and to invoke David Lynch again, the sound design attached to the old woman -- a moment that rightfully belongs in the jump scare category, but is absolutely sold on the strength of that haunting sound.

But scary sounds are best in scary movies, when a single spike in the waveform can send shivers down your spine in a sea of other scary moments. For this, we look to The Conjuring’s game of hide and clap, with one last solitary clap coming at us from the dark. This moment is built on the sound design of the previous few minutes, with creaks and whispers originating from the dark corners of the house. While it is undoubtedly effective, for a moment based entirely on the sound, our number 7 pick goes to the clucking from Hereditary.

By the time we get to the clucking, we know exactly what the sound is, what it means, and where it comes from. It’s an involuntary tic, something Milly Shapiro's Charlie does that's quite literally out of her control. It’s something that on a narrative level implies the presence of a demon, but on an emotional level, it’s a reminder for Toni Collette’s Annie of the pain and grief that comes with loss. This tongue click in an empty car is the perfect deployment of a single sound scare.

What makes Hereditary great -- what makes any movie truly great -- is a connection to the characters. Things sneaking up on you, either visually or auditorily, will always give you a jolt, but things sneaking up on our emotions can do you one better. Here’s a moment where a mother is grieving, where disturbing mysteries about her family are coming to light, and she is at her breaking point; it's something we can all empathize with. This sound, this piece of her daughter from the past, is a terrifying straw on a camel’s back that’s all but broken. It’s a trap that had been laid close to an hour earlier, creating a heartbreaking moment that’s also a terrifying jump scare.

6. The Edit

Combining picture and sound is sort of the literal definition of editing, so for our number 6 spot following our audio and visual cues, we may as well look at editing as well. Of course every scary moment on this list works based on the edit to some degree, but think about our last pick -- that quick cut to the backseat certainly helps, but it’s not WHY it’s such an impactful moment. Editing does a lot of different things, however, and looks a little different for each moment.

It’s important to remember that there are entire documentaries about the editing in Psycho’s shower scene, so right off the bat, I can tell you that I’m not going to waste your time by talking about it more here. But for other scares that are truly pulled off via the edit, we can first look at a wild montage like the ending of Don’t Look Now that rapid-fires through a panicked set of images. This is also where my non-horror example would live, in the final moments of the still very horrific Come and See, flashing back in our protagonist’s imagination to find Hitler as a child.

Flashy quick cuts are not the only way to show off an edit, though. Sometimes the magic lives in not cutting. The Exorcist III’s famous hallway scene is as great a jump scare as has ever been seen in film, but it’s achieved through an incredibly long "what is it I’m supposed to be looking at" shot that builds the tension.

When we look at editing, we also have to think about juxtaposition. Where on-screen scares are concerned, I always think about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for this, with hard and fast cuts away from the gruesome to something peaceful. There’s also the narrative function of images on screen to consider, like Jordan Peele’s cutting back to the sitcom tragedy in Nope before we know its significance. But for pure editing, the brilliant combination of images and sound to tell a story, I’d really like to talk about Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s neo-giallo slasher, Amer.

On first blush, this is a largely visual movie you might think doesn’t belong in this category. Sure, its primary language is French, but you really don’t need the subtitles. It’s a luscious, erotic, and violent collection of close-ups coupled with the creaking of leather and the slice of a blade as gravel crunches beneath heavy boots. The film is a collection of images and sounds assembled in such a tight, breathless way that still manage to convey space and time and character in spite of being assembled almost entirely of insert shots.

But one moment in particular, at the end of a midnight cat-and-mouse chase through an italian villa, involves a sudden burst of violence erupting as a stylized attack. A long stretch of quietly breathless sneaking in blue-hued day-for-night is suddenly over with a series of swooshing stabs and gasps. This moment leads to an even more drawn out, methodically tortuous death filmed with quick inserts and a raw, animalistic sound design that makes you squirm.

Amer takes everything giallo was known for and squeezes it with a black leather glove, making it all sing through the edit. If the film weren’t cut so expertly, moments like this would be a nonsensical collection of inserts and sound effects; instead, it’s a sequence worth studying for its ability to convey so much fear and anxiety and discomfort with such minimal imagery.

5. The Scare Based on Real Phobias

For the second half of our list, let’s move away from strictly craft-based categories and get into some psychological stuff. To start with, I want to look at real fears -- movies that very deliberately tap into well-known phobias. These can show up in the subject matter easily enough, with very little to do with the actual craft of filmmaking. Are you scared of big dogs? Maybe Cujo is going to give you nightmares. Scared of nightmares? Well, Freddy Krueger’s got a pun for that, I'm sure.

Some of our favorite scary stories to tell around the CineFix campfire though are moments of claustrophobia, like the tight underground tunnels of The Descent or the tight underwater tunnels of the perfectly titled Underwater. Both of those films feature killer monsters, but perhaps their most squirm-worthy moments trade on that all-too-common fear of enclosed spaces.

Then there’s the opposite fear, agoraphobia, that Hitchcock plays with famously in North by Northwest. There’s just straight up getting hopelessly lost in the woods, like in The Blair Witch Project, and then there’s the old reliable, 'scared of the dark.'

Every movie I’ve mentioned here also features sequences in which the darkness holds a significant danger. There’s always something lurking in the shadows just beyond the light, but the cleverest twist on this timeless fear shows up in the basement of a serial killer with night vision goggles in The Silence of the Lambs.

By the end of The Silence of the Lambs, we know how much danger Jodie Foster’s Clarice is in. She’s been a step ahead of her boss for most of the film, and by the time she tracks down Jame Gumb, discovers he’s actually Buffalo Bill, and has to chase him into his basement / dungeon / fashion studio, we’ve already visited the space on a few occasions. For the audience, there’s no mystery as to what’s down there, so how does director Jonathan Demme escalate a terrifying Act Three set piece in a familiar location?

He turns out the lights.

But instead of letting us fester in our collective fear of moments like this, we get to see the scenario from the perspective of the thing we’re afraid of. We’re looking on as Clarice, eyes wide, pupils dilated and begging for light, stumbles through the basement groping at the walls; we're seeing her through Buffalo Bill’s eyes. We see how easy it would be for him to reach out and kill our hero, and how he’s toying with the idea of doing just that.

The effect is not a jolt of adrenaline like something jumping out at you from the dark. Instead, the first-person perspective confirms what we’ve always been afraid of -- that there’s something in the dark waiting to do us harm -- and the scene is all the more terrifying for it.

4. Existential Dread / What Is This Terrifying Nonsense?

Ping-ponging away from the well-known phobias, we need to also look at the type of fear that’s not quite so easy to put your finger on. This is the realm of the existential, when a film presents you with an image that asks you to question your very nature. For me, I find myself simplifying that down to, “what is this terrifying nonsense?”

Jacob’s Ladder has a thousand great moments for this; Ken Russell’s work generally falls into this category for me as well, with Altered States and The Devils being a pair of fascinating films. Nicholas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising doesn’t quite qualify as a traditional horror film, but the simple-on-the-surface rock-stacking sequence is one of the more disturbing moments of that film, while I must, yet again, invoke David Lynch’s particularly unsettling tone in…oh, it’s everywhere in his work.

And does Mandy count as a horror movie? I think it does, but it also certainly counts as three or four other kinds of movies at minimum, including a drug-fueled cult trip into the heart of madness and revenge that peeks past the curtain of humanity and into the dark places beyond. But it’s hard not to pick an oldie but a goodie, a moment from a movie that likely could have or should have been used in all these categories: The bear suit guy from The Shining.

Two hours and change into the runtime of this much-dissected horror classic, Stanley Kubrick has us sprinting to the finish. Jack is axe-wielding his way toward Danny while Wendy is frantically trying to secure her son’s safety. It’s chaos, utter insanity-inducing chaos, particularly when compared to the rest of the movie’s relatively measured pace. And then Wendy tops another set of stairs to find a man in an assless bear suit performing a sex act on a man in a tux, who pops up to make eye contact with an inscrutable look on his face.

This moment, especially the first time you see it, fits so perfectly into my “what is this terrifying nonsense” definition that it’s almost like I reverse engineered this entire category. Ink has been spilled for literally decades about the scene's meaning and metaphorical significance, and every theory out there has merit, which is what makes this moment so great.

On the surface, it’s a truly bizarre image couched in a sequence of increasing terror. Wendy’s husband is trying to kill her and her son, she can’t find him anywhere, the hotel is understood to be haunted as shit at this point in the film, and then she stumbles on this remarkably upsetting scene. While that’s a specific set of circumstances not many of us have found ourselves in, the Rorschach-ness of it -- the ability to read your own flavor of horror into it -- speaks to how existentially terrifying this scene can be.

3. SHOCK!!!

Getting into the final third of our list, we have to pay a visit to the specific subgenre responsible for as many scary movie moments as anything else: Body horror. The shock and grotesquerie of seeing the human body pushed past its limits creates images that can, in a snap, terrify our most inner caveman brains.

There is a Mount Rushmore of body horror that is easy to rattle off, from the chest-chomper in John Carpenter's The Thing, to the spider-head from the Thing, to the…my God, most of The Thing could be our pick here! Ditto for Jeff Goldblum’s gradual evolution into BrundleFly, or the tapedeck tummy of Videodrome, which puts David Cronenberg in the all-timers club. An American Werewolf in London’s transformation scene is carved into the side of a mountain as well, so I’m not going to speak more about any of those here.

There are great, shocking, violent moments of disfigurement in films like Green Room, when an arm gets stuck on the wrong side of a door, or in Midsommar during the suicide jump, or the hooks dance sequence in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake. All of them are incredibly disturbing and sudden.

But there’s a quieter side of body horror. Think about Black Swan, which perfectly toes the line between “scary movie that’s not a horror film” and “just straight up a horror film” while following the slow descent of a ballerina into something else entirely. This, I would argue, is also Nightcrawler, digging at the depths to which ambitions will drive and warp somebody mentally. For our Number 3 spot though, there are two movies I love for the body horror’s subtler side: The Skin I Live In and Eyes Without A Face.

These films about renowned surgeons performing experimental surgeries at home, about an urge to right a wrong with yet more wrong, aren’t related. To clarify, The Skin I Live In is not technically a remake of Eyes Without A Face, but I’ve always found the films to be fascinating companions. One features a man seeking a new face for his daughter who’d been disfigured in a car accident, while the other focuses on a man seeking revenge on the young man who raped his daughter. Both Pedro Almodóvar’s 2011 film and Georges Franju’s 1960 film feature a clinical approach to body modification.

The doctors have so fully committed to the reason they’re doing these things -- the why of it all -- that there’s no questioning their actions. It’s most evident in the quieter moments, like the simple and straightforward way the doctor and his wife drug their victim. It’s the casual normalcy with which Dr. Ledgard examines the progress of his work. Above all, it’s the comfort with which they go about it, with no regard to being caught or exposed. These films don’t shock with gore or sudden snapping of bones; they look at incredibly intelligent and skilled people with real and relatable motivations doing horrible things to their victims without thinking twice.

If body horror is about blowing past the limits of what the human body should be able to do, making you squirm while watching it, The Skin I Live In and Eyes Without A Face ask you to consider what you would do given the tools at these doctors' disposal, making you squirm just the same.

2. The All-Consuming Terror

There are only two spots left, and so many scary moments still to consider...which is in itself another scary moment for anybody that’s ever written a movie list! But one more stop that we need to make is in the realm of the all-consuming scare; these are the moments that create terror or even just unease, and then make you stew in it.

This is different from the slow burn or the existential scares in that these moments are still more self-contained -- moments that confront the viewer with a very specific feeling and force you to keep watching. Most of Nosferatu lives in this world, especially when the vampyre kills the two children. This is Get Out’s Sunken Place sequence, and the girls walking away in slow motion from Picnic at Hanging Rock while their friend still watches at sound speed.

This is another category that non-horror movies see a lot of success in, because I find Barry Keoghan eating spaghetti in The Killing of a Sacred Deer to be terrifying, not to mention the later sequences of Mother! But the all-consuming scene I think of most often is the beach sequence in Under the Skin.

Jonathan Glazer’s version of E.T., Under the Skin finds an alien abducting men throughout Scotland for some type of study. She finds herself on a beach luring her next subject, a surfer, back to a van when a tragedy begins to unfold in the water further down the beach. A dog has ventured too far out into the waves; a woman tries to save it, then a man tries to save her, followed by the surfer trying to save them both, only for all of them to fail, leaving a baby alone on the beach.

It’s an upsetting scene just to describe, but the true brilliance is in how it’s shot. We can hear nothing over the powerful sounds of the waves. Glazer uses long lenses, leaving us detached from the proceedings, unable to connect or participate in the same way that Scarlett Johansson's alien female is incapable of empathy.

The scene also sets up her journey for the rest of the film. It’s an Act One break at which she begins to want something, to know what being human feels like. But to watch a family drown, to leave their infant stranded and alone, and to pull it off from such a detached perspective, is the whole reason this movie is incredible, featuring a truly terrifying movie moment.

1. Fear of the Nothingness / Void / Oh God Whatever's Next

As we arrive at our number one category, we’re fully on the other side of the spectrum from the jump scare with which we started. For our last spot, I want to talk about something everybody has in common. Regardless of who you are, where you come from, or what you find scary, we’re all going to die some day; it’s the one universal fear there is -- knowing that one day, for some reason, you’ll just stop. Movies that can pull off a scary moment built around the unknowable void that comes after death are fewer and farther between than those in our other categories.

There are of course some great rug pull-style twists that point in this direction, famously featured in movies like The Others and The Sixth Sense. But Lars von Trier’s super slo-mo overture at the beginning of Melancholia is more what we’re looking for; it's a moment that stares the end of existence in the face. 2001: A Space Odyssey cosmically does the same thing with Dave Bowman’s life cycle, presenting an uncomfortable and, dare I say, scary thread to pull on at the end of a mind-blowing bit of science fiction.

But the moment and movie I want to talk about is more recent, with a title that hints at the oldest scary moments in our storytelling history. It's the montage of time passing in 2017’s A Ghost Story.

What begins as a contained story about grief and a ghost watching his partner move on with her life shifts gears to the entire world moving on. About two thirds of the way through the movie, writer/director David Lowery presents us with a montage of time passing from the perspective of this ghost. It is eerie, unsettling, and magnificently edited to feel as though it’s happening in real time. In the spot on which his house used to stand, a skyscraper is constructed in two straight minutes, and it all ends with a ghost deciding to jump off a building.

Time itself is presented as incalculably huge in the montage, with a sense of loneliness, of desperation, damnation even, accompanying this long-waiting ghost; it’s a terrifying thought.

The technique Lowery (who edited the film as well) uses to jump us through time the same way in which the ghost perceives it is used throughout the film, but it never feels like much more than cleverly assembling the story…until this montage. As his spirit lingers, we see that this moment makes the story about more than one dead man’s experience. This is a movie about memory and legacy and their microscopic significance set against eternity itself. Nowhere is that driven home more than the montage of a fraction of that eternity passing, which -- for my money -- makes it one of the scariest movie moments of all time.