50 Greatest Horror Movies Of The 21st Century
20. Dark Water
Plot: After moving into a new apartment, a single mother (Hitomi Kuroki) and her young daughter (Rio Kanno) start experiencing sinister hauntings.
This masterful Japanese ghost story from director Hideo Nakata - who'd directed the horror masterpiece Ring a few years earlier - is one of the most under-appreciated horror films... well, ever.
It's hard to understand why this one seems to have gone under the radar so much over the years. Dark Water is slightly formulaic and sometimes feels too similar to Ring (although it has the more emotionally powerful story of the two films, so that's something) but unoriginality aside, it more than stands out in the drab landscape of 2000s horror.
A terrifyingly atmospheric horror film with a potent and soulful story to boot, this one has that exact mix of pathos and screams that define many of the best cinematic ghost stories, and it truly does shame Hollywood's output from around that time. Speaking of Hollywood, they remade it in 2005 but inevitably failed to understand what made the original work.