The best films for a group don't flatten the experience - they create one. You want something that generates opinions, debates, a reason to stay up later than planned.
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.
Horror works best when it earns the dread before deploying it. The best films in the genre build something you care about, then threaten it.
A man who specializes in debunking paranormal occurrences checks into the fabled room 1408 in the Dolphin Hotel. Soon after settling in, he confronts genuine terror.
Journalist Rachel Keller investigates a strange videotape that may be behind the untimely deaths of four teenagers. There is an urban legend about this tape: the viewer will die seven days after watching it. Rachel tracks down the video... and watches it. Now she has just seven days to unravel the mystery of the Ring in order to save herself and her son.
A family living on a farm finds mysterious crop circles in their fields which suggests something more frightening to come.
Frederick Abberline is an opium-huffing inspector from Scotland Yard who falls for one of Jack the Ripper's prostitute targets in this Hughes brothers adaption of a graphic novel that posits the Ripper's true identity.
In the immense city of Tokyo, the darkness of the afterlife lures some of its inhabitants desperately trying to escape the sadness and isolation of the modern world.
The horror films worth watching are the ones that stay with you not because of the scares but because of what the scares meant. These films mean something.
Two doctors find their graveyard shift inundated with townspeople ravaged by sores. Among the wounded is Cherry Darling, a dancer whose leg was ripped from her body. As the invalids quickly become enraged aggressors, Cherry and her ex-boyfriend El Wray lead a team of accidental warriors into the night.
Director F.W. Murnau makes a Faustian pact with a vampire to get him to star in his 1922 film "Nosferatu."
When a virus leaks from a top-secret facility, turning all resident researchers into ravenous zombies and their lab animals into mutated hounds from hell, the government sends in an elite military task force to contain the outbreak.
In a quiet suburban town in the summer of 1958, two recently orphaned sisters are placed in the care of their mentally unstable Aunt Ruth. But Ruth's depraved sense of discipline will soon lead to unspeakable acts of abuse and torture that involve her young sons, the neighborhood children, and one 12-year-old boy whose life will be changed forever.
After a teenager has a terrifying vision of him and his friends dying in a plane crash, he prevents the accident only to have Death hunt them down, one by one.
The best mind-bending films don't cheat. They follow their own logic rigorously - which is exactly why the rug-pull, when it comes, is so disorienting.
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.