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Sign in to your Collider account Add Us On Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recapEvery decade has movies that stand the test of time and end up influencing countless films that come after them. The 90s gave us Scream, The Blair Witch Project, and The Silence of the Lambs. The 2000s followed with The Ring, Saw, and Final Destination. The 2010s are widely credited with shifting horror away from the torture porn and jump scare-heavy trends of the 2000s and introducing what became known as elevated horror.
This was the decade that saw the rise of studios like A24 and Neon, which successfully sold artsy horror to mainstream audiences. It was also the era where directors like Jordan Peele and Ari Aster became household names for bringing bold new ideas to the genre. The following movies are the greatest horror masterpieces that defined the 2010s and set a new standard for horror going forward.
10 ‘Midsommar’ (2019)
Florence Pugh as Dani, wearing a flower crown and holding a stick with another woman in 'Midsommar'Image via A24
Midsommar follows a group of Americans who travel to a remote village in Sweden to attend a midsummer festival. But their trip gradually turns into a horrifying nightmare, as they become unwilling participants in increasingly violent and bizarre pagan rituals. Everything about Midsommar feels wrong in a way that is hard to explain. It is bright, colorful, and constantly bathed in sunlight. The villagers smile, dance, and welcome their guests with open arms. Yet from the very first scene, you can feel that something is very, very off.
The horror happens right out in the open, surrounded by people and daylight, which completely messes with your instincts. In horror movies, we are trained to associate light and crowds with safety, but Midsommar makes them feel just as terrifying as being alone in the dark. The film also uses murals, tapestries, and background details to subtly show the audience exactly what will happen later. That shifts the fear from "what will happen?" to a dreary sense of inevitability.
9 ‘The Witch’ (2015)
Thomasin is covered in blood in The Witch.Image via A24
The Witch is a period piece that focuses on a devout Puritan family banished from their colony in 1630s New England. Their youngest son suddenly vanishes, and the family turns on itself almost immediately. Blame falls on Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the oldest daughter who was watching the boy at the time of his disappearance, and suspicion quickly grows that she may be involved in witchcraft.
Everything about this movie feels cursed, like you are watching something you were never meant to see. The Witch builds dread through eerie silences, a dissonant score, and long, suffocating shots filled with Shakespearean dialogue. And all of it works because the film takes 17th-century demonology completely at face value. This is a world where the Devil and supernatural evil are as real and threatening as the characters believed them to be.
8 ‘The Conjuring’ (2013)
Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as Ed and Lorraine Warren fight the forces of evil in 'The Conjuring'Image via Warner Bros.
The Conjuring is often credited with revitalizing mainstream horror when it was dominated by slashers and found footage movies. The film centers on real-life paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren, which gives it a sense of authenticity. The conversations, case files, and procedural approach grounded the supernatural elements in reality, and by framing the haunting as something the Warrens actually investigated, the movie invited the audience to ask the same question people asked years earlier with The Blair Witch Project. Did this really happen?
James Wan used long takes and wide-angle shots to build anticipation before delivering scares with perfect timing. The Hide and Clap scene still remains one of the most flawlessly executed scares in horror history. The impact of the film cannot be overstated. It launched an entire horror cinematic universe and created a formula that studios are still copying over a decade later. Even as the quality of later entries has dropped, the first Conjuring was so influential that the name alone still gets people into theaters.
7 ‘Us’ (2019)
Image via Universal Pictures
This movie elevated the home invasion genre that was often dismissed as slasher fodder by infusing it with deep social and psychological commentary. The plot follows a family that is suddenly attacked by mysterious figures dressed in red. Upon closer inspection, the family realizes that the intruders somehow look exactly like them.
Us delivers genuinely brutal and unsettling horror, but it also knows when to ease off and let humor cut through the tension. That breathing room keeps the movie from wearing you down and makes the scares hit harder when they return. And then there is the ending reveal that completely recontextualizes everything that came before it. It is an all-time great twist, right up there with Fight Club and The Sixth Sense.
6 ‘Train to Busan’ (2016)
Soo-an, played by actor Kim Su-an, stands fearfully clutching a backpack while people fight behind her in Train to Busan.Image via Next Entertainment World
Train to Busan was the South Korean hit that took the world by surprise and went on to become one of the greatest zombie movies ever made. It follows a group of strangers trapped on a high-speed train as a zombie outbreak spreads across the country. In a lot of ways, it feels like Snowpiercer with zombies. Their only real hope is to survive long enough to reach Busan, which is rumored to be a safe zone.
Once the zombie action gets going, the movie is relentless and never slows down. Zombies are genuinely terrifying, and the director even hired a dance team to coach the zombie actors in bone-breaking movements, inspired by video game creatures and dolls. These erratic, joint-snapping movements make the zombies feel more visceral and terrifying than typical sprinters. It is even scarier because, unlike other zombie movies, the humans here do not have guns, chainsaws, and flamethrowers. So, they can’t actually kill the zombies; they can only knock them down and hope they stay down.
5 ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ (2011)
Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, and Kristen Connolly in The Cabin in the WoodsImage Via Lionsgate
The Cabin in the Woods has become a cult classic in the horror community. It is the ultimate horror movie for someone who has seen every horror movie. The film takes the classic “teens in a cabin” premise and turns it into a clever deconstruction of horror tropes.
Director Joss Whedon called it “a very loving hate letter to horror,” and that is exactly what it feels like. The facility employees in the movie are meant to represent Hollywood producers and directors, while the Ancient Ones are a metaphor for audiences demanding the same scares over and over again. By pointing out so many tropes that had been done to death, The Cabin in the Woods essentially wiped the slate clean for the genre and made space for the new wave of elevated horror that followed.
4 ‘It’ (2017)
Pennywise the Clown, played by actor Bill Skarsgard, holds a red balloon in 'It' (2017).Image via Warner Bros.
It follows the Losers’ Club, a group of bullied kids who come together to fight an ancient, shape-shifting entity. This creature resurfaces every 27 years and preys on children by taking the form of their worst fears, most notably appearing as an evil clown named Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård). Unlike other films in the genre, It focused more on the coming-of-age story and brought a Spielberg-esque adventure vibe to modern horror. The horror was always secondary to the Losers’ Club group dynamic. That made the scary moments hit harder because you cared about the kids and what they were going through.
The movie led to a massive resurgence of the “rag-tag group of kids fighting supernatural forces” genre. This kind of story had been a staple of 80s cinema with films like The Goonies and E.T., and It proved that the format still worked with modern audiences. The film went on to gross $704 million worldwide and became the highest-grossing horror movie of all time, a record it still holds nearly a decade later.
3 ‘Get Out’ (2017)
Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams in Get OutImage via Universal Pictures
Get Out follows Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), an African-American man who decides to visit his Caucasian girlfriend's parents during a weekend getaway. Although her family seems normal at first, he is not prepared for the horrors that lie ahead. This was Peele’s directorial debut, and it earned him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay right out of the gate and put him on the map as one of Hollywood’s hottest up-and-coming filmmakers.
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Unlock deeper film analysis by subscribing to the newsletter. Receive scene-by-scene breakdowns, director and studio context, and thoughtful perspectives on 2010s horror, other landmark films, and broader film trends. Subscribe By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept Valnet’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime.Peele masterfully uses awkward conversations and subtle racial microaggressions to build horror, slowly ratcheting the tension higher and higher until it explodes in the final act. Jason Blum, the CEO of Blumhouse, has stated, "The cool kids make horror movies now," and he credits Peele’s Get Out for this. Instead of relying on monsters or demons, the movie made humans the real source of horror. It pushed the genre toward more thought-provoking stories at a time when horror was largely stuck in a cycle of cheap jump scare slop, and set a new standard for horror movies going forward.
2 ‘The Babadook’ (2014)
Amelia holding on to Samuel and screaming in fear and anger in The BabadookImage via Umbrella Entertainment
The Babadook tells the story of a single mother struggling with grief and her difficult six-year-old son after her husband’s passing. Their lives slowly unravel when a creepy pop-up book called Mister Babadook suddenly appears in their home, and the sinister entity inside the book seems to start haunting them in real life. The film uses horror to dig into much heavier ideas, like unresolved grief, depression, and the parts of parenting people rarely want to talk about. It looks directly at the resentment and exhaustion a parent can feel toward a child, especially when grief has gone unprocessed for years.
At its core, The Babadook is a masterful character study disguised as a mainstream horror film. It went on to become one of the most acclaimed horror movies ever, currently holding a near-perfect 98% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It is also the film that is most often credited with pioneering the elevated horror movement of the 2010s.
1 ‘Hereditary’ (2018)
Alex Wolff as Peter looking serious in Hereditary.Image via A24
Hereditary is widely hailed as this generation’s The Exorcist, and it is easy to see why. Just a few minutes into the movie, you can tell this is something special; a rare masterpiece that could define the horror genre for decades, and somehow it only gets more intense as it goes on. The film opens with the funeral of a family matriarch and follows a family shattered by grief. Soon after the funeral, strange and horrifying events begin to occur that reveal dark secrets tied to the family's ancestry.
The scares in Hereditary are unforgettable. The pole scene alone has given everyone who has seen the movie an irrational fear of sticking their head out of a car window. The classroom head-banging moment comes out of nowhere and happens in broad daylight, in a place that usually feels safe in horror movies. The mother hiding in the shadows, crawling on walls, and chasing her son through the house is pure nightmare fuel. And even when nothing supernatural is happening, the film is just as intense. The human drama is so raw and gnarly that, even if there were no scares here, it would still stand as one of the all-time greats.
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Release Date
June 8, 2018
Runtime
2h 7m
Director
Ari Aster
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