20 Most Highly Rated Horror Movies On Rotten Tomatoes
Who cares what the critics say? We do.
Aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes has gotten a lot of flak recently over its supposedly unrepresentatively positive reviews of Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot and favouring of Marvel movies over DC movies. But love it or hate it, the site is a pretty useful indicator of how good a movie is going to be.
For a genre as crammed with crappy offerings as horror is, it’s maybe even more useful in helping horror fans sift through the swamp of subpar films to find those films that stand on their own as not only excellent horror movies but also brilliant films overall.
And so, we bring to you Rotten Tomatoes’ ultimate ranking of the top twenty horror films. Perhaps surprisingly, considering it’s based on the opinions of film buff critics, there’s a good mix of movies represented from early classics to contemporary contenders and a varied mix of subgenres from zombies and vampires to psychological and sci-fi horrors.
Many horror fans may disagree with this ranking, but the aggregator gods of Rotten Tomatoes have spoken and this is the definitive list of the best horrors of all time. Kind of.
20. Night Of The Living Dead (1968)
Rating: 96%
Just squeezing in at number twenty, George A. Romero’s debut Night of the Living Dead basically set the standard for all zombie films to come. Made on a micro-budget of just $114,000 it grossed $30 million internationally and has been a cult favourite since its 1968 release, eventually making its way onto the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry – an honour bestowed to films deemed culturally and historically significant.
Not everyone was quite so taken with Romero’s film when it was first released. Back in the halcyon days of the 1960s, they didn’t have genres like torture porn so weren’t quite prepared for the now relatively tame amount of gore the movie featured.
But despite the initial controversy, Night of the Living Dead has since found a place in the heart of film critics and horror fans alike and is a film whose legacy is still felt today from the five other Romero directed Living Dead films and its many remakes to nods in movies like Shaun of the Dead.