It’s a truth universally acknowledged — okay, maybe a theory that is arguably true — that you can always tell what’s going on in society and pop culture during a certain time period by taking a look at what kinds of horror movies they were making. In the 1950s, we were worried about nuclear bombs (Godzilla, Them!). In the ’70s, we were afraid of foreign invaders (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dawn of the Dead) and violence from within (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Martin). In the ’90s, it was the disturbing behavior of the youth (The Craft, Scream, IT). Currently, we’re all worried about ... a whole bunch of things.

We’ve already gone over the worst horror movies of the last ten years, so now it’s time to take a look at the best. The best horror often reflects back to us our worst fears about ourselves and others, commenting on social anxieties by giving us a heightened, almost absurd version of the things we fear — or even just the things we’re intellectually or philosophically preoccupied with. Racial tensions, gender and sexual identity, ideological extremism, and nostalgia have defined the latter half of the 2010s and the first half of the 2020s, so it stands to reason that our horror movies, especially, would reflect that.

So we took it upon ourselves to pick not only the ten best scary movies of the past decade, but also the movies that best reflect what horror movies today are really about. There’s a mix of just about everything in here, proving that the horror genre is constantly expanding and evolving new ways to express what freaks us out the most. And let’s be clear: there are plenty of horror movies out there that are just as good as these. But these are the movies that define the current era.

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