The aesthetics of fear: 10 horror films that are true works of art

The idea was simple: to make a film about a monster that kills everyone until a final survivor defeats it — but set in space, aboard a spaceship with no way out. It was essentially the concept of Jaws fused with Halloween and other films about relentless killers. Ridley Scott turned it into a pure work of design: the spaceship’s interiors, the play of light and darkness, the astronauts dressed like truck drivers, and of course the monster’s design, all give the film a personality never seen before. Sure, there’s suspense and fear, but they always emerge from these design elements — from the functional perfection of the facehugger attaching to a face and implanting an embryo in the human stomach, or from the terrifying geometry of the xenomorph’s head.

Anyone else would have taken this story and turned it into a satanic film — full of ominous signs, sadistic characters, and disturbing neighbors. But Roman Polanski, who arrived in America after shocking Europe with Repulsion, made a film set in a Gothic building in New York (the Dakota Building), focusing on what remains unseen and unknown — on the rooms of the house and, in a grand finale, on the décor of the neighboring apartment and the design of a cradle. One of the first American films to truly speak about apartment living, about proximity to one’s neighbors, and about the condominium as a place of unease — because it forces you to live side by side with strangers.

The building of a grand hotel in the mountains can, as the film progresses, become more and more an allegory of a man’s drifting mind. Jack Torrance, who must spend a few months at the Overlook Hotel with his family as caretaker, is slowly possessed by the ghosts haunting the place. We watch him go insane and develop a desire to kill his family. But this madness is tied to the hotel’s rooms — to a certain bedroom, the bar, the great hall where he writes his novel, the basement that contains his subconscious, and the hedge maze outside. From here comes the true horror: that of venturing into a diseased mind.

There had been many films in which someone is possessed by the devil, but none had the impact of The Exorcist. That’s because all the others clung to the conventions of the genre. William Friedkin, instead, goes deeper — he listens to recordings of real exorcisms, invents countless new conventions, and twists and distorts his protagonist to suggest the demon’s presence, altering the very atmosphere of the bedroom where the exorcism takes place. He claims to be pursuing realism, yet in fact he creates a new, diseased fantasy. There is such evident desperation in the priests, such a titanic struggle for the girl’s soul, that it can only truly be the devil.

None of the films on this list began with lower ambitions than The Thing — a true B movie. It was a kind of variation on the success of Alien: a monstrous alien picking off victims in a place from which there is no escape. Only here, instead of a spaceship, there’s a base in the Arctic. In theory, it was also a remake of Christian Nyby’s The Thing from Another World (1951), but in practice John Carpenter — with his political mind — added the idea that this “thing” could transform into whatever it killed, hiding among the men at the base without their being able to tell who it was. It’s an adaptation of that story for the age of body horror and films where flesh mutates and is torn apart in countless ways, but it’s also a true work of art — not only for the spareness of the direction and the ability to tell in seconds what would take others minutes, but also for how it reflects the fear of the Cold War and of “the other among us,” using the framework of a film born from the golden age of that very paranoia.

The film that created the modern obsession with the serial killer. For the first time in cinema, the classic predator–prey dynamic between a woman and a murderer is reversed: FBI agent Clarice is the hunter, and the killer is the hunted. And then there’s Hannibal Lecter — the unsettling accomplice — who plays with Clarice a game similar to that of serial killers with their victims, only without killing: all made of words and suggested fear. It’s Anthony Hopkins who brings him to life, inventing the modern cinematic serial killer — refined, calm, and inhuman without overplaying it. With his affable yet disturbing demeanor, he gets inside Clarice’s head, and as he does, he gets inside the audience’s as well.

After Deep Red and his turn toward horror, Dario Argento was at the height of his creative power. That film had been a worldwide success; the director was celebrated everywhere, at the peak of his own delirium of omnipotence, and decided to make a horror work of art. His closeness to Fellini’s dreamlike and grotesque style of mise-en-scène became even more pronounced: he called upon Luciano Tovoli, one of the greatest cinematographers, and created Suspiria. The opening sequence alone — from the airport arrival to the drive toward the dance academy — is masterful, but the entire film intertwines a disturbing story with an orgy of color and chromatic choices that suggest Argento’s true intent was, essentially, to film vivid colors and their unsettling potential.

Jordan Peele has redefined what horror can do today and revived Afrosurrealism, creating a version suited to modern cinema. It’s the telling of stories that, through the fantastic, describe the condition of African Americans by imagining them as the protagonists of the cinematic world. In this case, an African American man dating a white woman visits her parents — liberal and progressive — only to discover that they so deeply idolize the Black body that they wish to possess it, to claim its power for themselves. Through mind control, they implant the consciousness of elderly white people into the bodies of young Black individuals — like the protagonist’s — effectively becoming them. A film of extraordinary tension and total originality, where the villains are not where you expect them to be, and where it’s never possible to predict what will happen next.

Starting from a blatant copyright violation, the story of Dracula was reworked into that of Nosferatu, a film that was the first to attempt to make the vampire poetic. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s 1922 version is a jewel of invention blended with pictorial expressionism, creating stretching shadows, figures warped by loneliness, and — in one of its most striking moments — the shadow of a hand on a woman’s chest transforming into a fist at heart level, as if seizing it. Werner Herzog made a remake in the 1970s with stunning realism, showing what it would be like if a vampire truly existed and how it would relate to its surroundings. Incredible.

Mario Bava hated calling himself a great director, let alone an artist. He made B movies, mostly horror, because he was extremely skilled (and had a lot of fun) with practical effects. He invented far more solutions for special effects than can be counted, but above all, he created an entire aesthetic — and that is the work of true artists. It’s the aesthetic of Italian Gothic and later the Italian giallo, from which Argento emerged, characterized by an expressive, almost operatic take on the most well-known features of classical Gothic. The Mask of Satan is one of his most perfect films, where rhythm, set design, and work with black-and-white cinematography reach levels of craftsmanship so high they verge on naïve art.