The Most Rewatchable Horror Movies Of All Time

Not all great horror movies are ones you necessarily feel like watching more than once. Some are too violent, some deal with intense emotional content, and some just aren't as good the second time around. There's nothing wrong with these movies, but with horror being a genre primarily intended to entertain viewers, a horror movie that isn't just a good time but demands to be revisited is something special. There are countless horror films released every year, and the genre has been popular long enough to have an established canon of must-see films. Yet a select few possess a very particular longevity, one that keeps fans coming back to them year after year. And if you've yet to see any of these films, don't worry. It's never too late to join in. 

Oftentimes great horror films are made by genre specialists. Directors like John Carpenter, Wes Craven, or Ti West tend to be well-studied in the genre and know the right ways to work with it. But every now and then someone from mainstream Hollywood will give horror a shot. And never has the result of this been more iconic or masterful as the time Stanley Kubrick adapted a Stephen King novel, the result of which is the cinematic titan The Shining. 

There's very little to say about this film that hasn't already been said. It features signature Kubrick visuals, a career-best performance by Jack Nicholson, and a multitude of thematic ideas and elements. It's a layered film that benefits from multiple viewings largely due to how much there is to interpret. Much is left ambiguous in the film, from whether or not the phantoms plaguing the Torrance family are real or figments of their collective cabin fever to the haunting final shot of the film, implying anything from reincarnation to the Overlook Hotel having absorbed Jack Torrance into the fabrics of its existence. 

Combine this thematic density with it being perhaps the most outright entertaining entry in the filmography of one of the greatest directors of all time and you've got yourself a film worth watching over and over again for years to come.

It's tough for a film to strike a good balance between being fun and being genuinely frightening, and it takes a director with a deft hand to pull it off. Ti West is a director with a deft hand. He's proven it time and time again with movies like The Innkeepers and The Sacrament but none are as fun to revisit as The House of the Devil. 

A modern throwback to horror cinema of the '70s and '80s, the film takes a premise you've likely seen before—a babysitter accepts a last-minute job and soon realizes everything is not as it seems—and tells the story better than it's been told in ages. West shot the movie on 16mm film, creating a grainy aesthetic that, when paired with the period-appropriate soundtrack, feels like an authentic film from the era. But the film diverts from the norm in its lack of reliance on jump scares or plot contrivances. Rather, it plays out in a slow-burn fashion, taking its time in creating an escalating sense of discomfort until it hits a crescendo, paying it all off in a horrifying finale. 

Yes, it's partially worth revisiting just to see how much of the ending is telegraphed early on, but it's also just an old-fashioned good time. It's the kind of movie you want to show to friends who have never heard of it just to see their reactions as the movie ends.

Don Coscarelli's Phantasm was shot in disjointed bits and pieces over the course of a year and, by some miracle, still came together to make one of the most memorable horror movies of all time. But the film's difficult shoot may have actually aided in what makes it so memorable. Phantasm, more than any other horror movie, captures the feeling of a nightmare perfectly. There's an off-tilt flow to it. Not everything makes perfect sense, but in the moment you don't question the film's logic. And there's a strong undercurrent of trauma and grief present in the plot. 

The film's surreal narrative focuses on a teenager named Michael, his older brother Jody, and their best friend Reggie being pitted against a sinister mortician known only as The Tall Man. Featuring everything from a killer fly to inter dimensional zombie dwarves, it's a bizarre movie that should not work on any level. But it does. And the result is one of the coolest, most singular horror films ever made. It might not hold the widespread popularity of horror staples like Friday the 13th but after watching it for the first time it's likely to become the kind of movie you come back to every October. Phantasm feels like the cinematic adaptation of those nightmares you had as a kid.

One of the more unique horror movies of its generation, Southbound is an anthology film taking place along a lone stretch of road somewhere in the desert. Each story flows into the next, forming a strange cohesive narrative about isolation and morality.

It's a film that is concrete in its smaller stories but abstract in its overarching one, and so much of Southbound's beauty comes from interpreting the latter. Different elements from each short carry over into the next, with some ever-present throughout the film. There's a tremendously effective feeling of a world outside of the story, even if that world is limited to the stretch of highway that the film takes place on. As a whole, it's about people who have done bad things finding themselves in bad places, with the task of deciding whether or not their deeds define them left to the audience.

Southbound is fun and frightening, sure. But what makes it stand out as a truly rewatchable film is how compelling it is. The questions it asks will have you coming back for answers it won't give you. But it won't stop you from looking.

Most directors are probably satisfied with only having revolutionized the genre they work in once. Wes Craven clearly wasn't, because after creating that Freddy Krueger fella you may have heard of, he made Scream, which went on to define an entire generation of horror cinema.

Boasting what might be the best script in the history of the genre courtesy of writer Kevin Williamson, Scream revitalized the slasher genre by making it self-aware for the first time. The characters aren't just intelligent, they're the very audience that flocked to cinemas to see horror movies for a generation. They understand the tropes of the story they're in, and as such the story has to defy expectations at every turn. 

From its infamous (and genuinely terrifying) opening scene to its legendary third-act twist, it's a movie you'll never get tired of watching as a horror fan. It might not offer a wealth of mysteries or dense themes to parse, but it's such a well-oiled machine of a movie with such engaging characters that horror fans aren't ever likely to tire of this one.

Sometimes you just need the original, and while it wasn't the first horror film (or even the first great one), John Carpenter's Halloween is very much the film that defined the modern horror movie. Everything present in the genre today, from story structure to individual horror movies spawning multi-film franchises can be traced back to Halloween. And decades after its original run, it still hasn't aged a day.

Carpenter made Halloween on a shoestring budget and couldn't rely on special effects or flashy trickery to make his movie work. Instead, everything that makes the movie great stems from his unrivaled technique, be it the writing, the score, or the way Carpenter shot the film. Beginning to end, it's a perfect horror movie. 

But in addition to being flawless on a technical level, it offers everything we love about the genre. Sure, you can break horror down into subgenres (haunted house movies, body horror, slashers, etc.) but at the end of the day, everything filmgoers love about horror movies is present in Halloween. It has every necessity, from the occasional laugh to relieve the tension to the compelling villain. Plus its scares will still make you jump. For these reasons, every generation of genre enthusiasts comes back to Halloween. And that likely won't ever change. New horror movies and franchises come and go. But Halloween is eternal.