Horror movies keep us shrieking in the dark forever. Whether they involve Universal monsters or contemporary serial murderers, creature features, or slasher flicks. And during the past hundred years or more, the art form has developed. Nearly every conceivable technique has been created to unnerve us, frighten us and strike upon our most basic fears.

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The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The Blair Witch Project took a different approach by creating a new form of presentation and, in particular, promotion. In contrast, Screaming reinvented a genre by drawing back the shades to show the internal workings of horror. Yes, found footage movies had already been made. Just check out The Last Broadcast from a year earlier. However, this was the first to receive wide theatrical distribution. Its distributor Artisan Entertainment skillfully seized the opportunity to use the lack of accessible information about the movie to carry out an enigmatic internet advertising campaign during the early days of the Internet era.

Ganja and Hess (1973)

Before Black horror emerged as the go-to genre for people to explore the daily traumas connected to organized religion, identity, & integration, writer-director Bill Gunn ventured to incorporate these serious topics into one seductive, avant-garde work. Anthropologist Doctor Hess turns into a vampire after being stabbed by his aide George Meda with an old African dagger. In the end, Hess kills his helper and falls in love with Ganja (Marlene Clark), the widow of Meda.

The Conjuring (2013)

Where and when you anticipate being scared, The Conjuring surprises you. Although the haunted house/possession plot is nothing new, Wan gives an old, creaky farmstead in Rhode Island a stunning makeover that is unmatched in previous films in this genre. The movie subverts audience expectations by delivering powerful thrills without the usual Hollywood Jump Fear build-ups while invoking traditional golden period ghost stories like Robert Wise's The Haunting.

They Look Like People (2015)

They Look Like People is truly creepier than many other, more conventional horror movies on the list, which are more intended to amuse than to be genuinely frightening. This is a unique and frank depiction of emotional and mental illnesses spiraling out of control. They Look like People toys with the audience's expectations by offering the male characters (Evan Dumouchel and MacLeod Andrews) their psychological obstacles to overcome. It would have been quite simple for the plot to be more conventional-the friend guy visits and find out the friend is mad.

In Fabric (2019)

One of those movies, In Fabric, has a plot that would work equally well in a 5-minute horror short as it would in a full-length film. "Ghostly clothing ruins people's lives," is how you can sum it up in a handful of sentences. That sounds like easy-to-imagine source material for a corny psycho-thriller, like something from England's Amicus Films in the 1970s. Still, in Strickland's hands, it becomes the foundation for a phantasmagorical slide into a specific, lavishly furnished form of madness.

Sator (2021)

The woodland contains something. However, there is also hardly anything at all. A man, a cabin, and conceivably more. Sator, a schlocky horror that straddles the line between contemporary The Witch, is Jordan Graham's startling follow-up to The Blair Witch Project & Lovecraft. It's the kind of terror that substitutes negative space for jump scares and begins with details that your usual A24 beast reserves for the end.