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DILLON ON FILM

My Twelve Favourite Horror Films

An agonisingly selected smorgasbord of scariness

13 min readOct 31, 2022

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Angel Heart (1987). Credit: Sony

This is not an article I undertake lightly. My preoccupation with the horror genre is well documented, and in honesty, I struggled to narrow this list down to fifty favourites, let alone twelve. I should also emphasise the word “favourite”, as this is not a list of what I consider the greatest horror films of all time. Such a list would certainly be different, though perhaps not substantially, from the list below.

When compiling lists of horror gems, I prefer limiting parameters or writing about subgenres. For instance, I’ve recently written about horror comedies and my favourite vampire films. Last year, I explored notable non-English language horror films and highlighted how I believed the best recent horror films are directed by women. Nonetheless, I foolishly decided to torture myself by attempting to narrow down a list of favourites across the entire horror genre. No easy task.

Here then are my twelve favourite horror films. I am sticking to my ten-year rule, otherwise, The Babadook (2014), Under the Shadow (2016), and Get Out (2017) would feature in this list. In purely objective terms, it is hard to say any film on this list is better than another. Therefore, I’ve ranked them according to how personal…

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Simon Dillon
Simon Dillon

Written by Simon Dillon⁠

Novelist and Short Story-ist. Film and Book Lover. If you cut me, I bleed celluloid and paper pulp. Blog: www.simondillonbooks.uk