‘Hereditary’ tops scariest horror movies ranking this Halloween
With Halloween falling on a Saturday this year, playcasino.com examined 98 highly rated horror feature films and ranked them according to the percentage of IMDb users who rated their frightening and intense scenes as severe.
Hereditary topped the list. Of the 994 people who rated the 2018 Ari Aster film, 893 or 89.8 percent called the frightening scenes severe. The movie is set in Utah.
Spanish found-footage title REC from 2007 placed second at 89.7 percent, followed by French horror film Martyrs from 2008 at 89.4 percent.
The full top 10 comprises Hereditary at 89.8 percent, REC at 89.7 percent, Martyrs at 89.4 percent, Bring Her Back at 87.7 percent, The Descent at 87.3 percent, Bone Tomahawk at 87.2 percent, The Mist at 87.2 percent, The Conjuring 2 at 87.0 percent, Funny Games at 86.7 percent and Audition at 86.6 percent. Four entries are American: Hereditary, Kurt Russell western Bone Tomahawk, Stephen King adaptation The Mist set in small-town Maine, and The Conjuring 2.
Bring Her Back, the newest top-10 entry at fourth place, arrived just a year after release from Talk to Me directors Danny and Michael Philippou. Major classics ranked lower, with The Exorcist 18th at 84.3 percent, The Shining 26th at 81.5 percent, John Carpenter's Halloween 74th at 54.6 percent and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho 82nd at 45.5 percent.
Army of Darkness registered the lowest severe rating in the study at 2.8 percent. The Rocky Horror Picture Show followed at 8.6 percent, The Lost Boys at 12.0 percent and Gremlins at 16.8 percent.
The entertainment experts at playcasino.com said: "Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, so plenty of people will be planning a proper horror movie night. Hereditary is the one that really gets under people's skin, with nearly nine in ten viewers who rated it saying the frightening scenes were severe. It's interesting that the big classics like The Exorcist and The Shining don't make the top 10. Newer movies like Hereditary and Bring Her Back go all out to shock, while a lot of the older ones build their scares more slowly. If you'd rather not be up all night, horror comedies like Zombieland or Gremlins are a much safer bet."
playcasino.com calculated the figures from IMDb Parents Guide ratings for horror feature films that had at least 50,000 IMDb user ratings. Each film required at least 100 votes on frightening and intense scenes plus an IMDb score of 7.0 or higher, resulting in 98 qualifying titles. The votes were collected on September 30, 2026.
