Top Horror Films of the Past 20 Years

[Smokey]

As we approach Holloween, this top 20 compliation from Entertainment Weekly Magazine range from slasher films to J-horror to thrillers. But somehow the first SAW film is missing from this list.

Countdown from the top:

20. DEAD-ALIVE (1992)
Before he became a respectable filmmaker, Peter Jackson directed this slapstick carnival of gore. The movie is one outrageously gruesome set piece after another, with limbs, eyeballs, and — especially — intestinal tracts taking on an exuberant life of their own.


19. DARKMAN (1990)
In Sam Raimi's thrillingly demented horror-pop spectacular, Liam Neeson plays a mad scientist whose face gets dunked in acid; he then perfects a recipe for synthetic skin.


18. EVENT HORIZON (1997)
In 2046, a spaceship voyages beyond Neptune to find out what became of the Event Horizon, an exploratory vessel that vanished into the cosmic void. With Laurence Fishburne.


17. THE KINGDOM (1994)
Made for Danish television (but released here as a feature), Lars von Trier's sinister soap opera about the hidden goings on in the neurosurgical ward of a hospital in Copenhagen is a cheeky gothic medical bad trip: It's like a twisted ER crossed with The Shining.


16. THE DESCENT (2005)
This British shocker about a group of women who go spelunking — that is, exploring caves. What's memorably unsettling is the movie's icy claustrophobia: It's a nightmare of damp rocky crawl spaces you would never want to be wedged into.


15. SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004)
Alert! The dead have risen and are feasting on the living — but in the lumpish working-class Britian of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's zombie satire, everyone is so blitzed and jaded and drunk that it's hard to tell the difference.


14. HOSTEL 2 (2007)
In Eli Roth's splatter sequel, wealthy businessmen make bids to travel to Slovakia, where, in a network of dungeons hidden inside an abandoned factory, the top bidder will murder the victim he has bought.


13. MISERY (1990)
As a mousy, vengeful nurse who kidnaps a romance novelist (James Caan) and tortures him into keeping her favorite character going, Kathy Bates has a homicidal gleam under her hilariously sunny, apple-pie earnestness.


12. FROM HELL (2001)
Johnny Depp plays a Sherlockian police inspector on the trail of the world's legendary first serial killer. The movie gives us flickering vérité flashes of the human soul turned inside out.


11. PLANET TERROR (2007)
The Robert Rodriguez half of Grindhouse is a deliciously bottom-of-the-barrel living-dead thriller, set in a present day that feels just like 1974, with zombies that get shot and spurt raspberry Jell-O blood.