There's a particular kind of film for a rainy night alone - absorbing enough to pull you fully in, good enough that you don't check your phone once.
Looking back, the 2000s were a golden era for this kind of filmmaking - studios still willing to fund serious work, directors still pushing at the edges of what was expected.
Great horror films are never really about the monster. They're about what the monster represents â fear, grief, guilt, the unknown.
When Ann, husband George, and son Georgie arrive at their holiday home they are visited by a pair of polite and seemingly pleasant young men. Armed with deceptively sweet smiles and some golf clubs, they proceed to terrorize and torture the tight-knit clan, giving them until the next day to survive.
Blade forms an uneasy alliance with the vampire council in order to combat the Reapers, who are feeding on vampires.
When hundreds of videotapes showing torture, murder and dismemberment are found in an abandoned house, they reveal a serial killer's decade-long reign of terror and become the most disturbing collection of evidence homicide detectives have ever seen.
A small town is taken over by an alien plague, turning residents into zombies and all forms of mutant monsters.
Haunted by memories of a patient's death, a nurse takes a job at an antiquated hospital for children. Soon she learns that the kids fear a ghost that prowls the floors and will not allow anyone to leave. Amy tries to protect them and convince the other staffers of the evil that lurks there.
These films work because they respect their audience. They don't rush to the scare. They build it, layer it, let it sit â and then they deploy it perfectly.
When athletic teen Mari Collingwood opts to hang out with her friend Paige in town rather than spend an evening in with her parents vacationing at the family's remote lake house, it marks the beginning of a night no one is going to forget.
The "true" story of what really became of Elvis Presley. We find Elvis as an elderly resident in an East Texas rest home, who switched identities with an Elvis impersonator years before his "death," then missed his chance to switch back. He must team up with JFK and fight an ancient Egyptian mummy for the souls of their fellow residents.
Annie Wilson, young widow and mother of three, makes her living foretelling others' futures-though her own has become cloudier than even she can see. Threatened by a client's violent husband and plagued by visions of a missing local woman, Annie finds herself pulled into a thicket of lies and deception in which her extraordinary gift may ultimately get her killed.
After denying a woman the extension she needs to keep her home, loan officer Christine Brown sees her once-promising life take a startling turn for the worse. Christine is convinced she's been cursed by a Gypsy, but her boyfriend is skeptical. Her only hope seems to lie in a psychic who claims he can help her lift the curse and keep her soul from being dragged straight to hell.
On a desolate country highway, two homeward-bound teens are nearly run off the road by a maniac in a beat-up truck, and later spot him shoving what appears to be a body down a sewer pipe.
The best measure of whether a film is worth watching is whether you'd recommend it to someone you respect. These all qualify.
These films work not in spite of their darkness but because of what they do with it. Fear, in the right hands, is one of cinema's most honest tools.