7 Terrifying Scripts You Must Read

A young African-American visits his white girlfriend’s parents for the weekend, where his simmering uneasiness about their reception of him eventually reaches a boiling point.

Critic Consensus: Funny, scary, and thought-provoking, Get Out seamlessly weaves its trenchant social critiques into a brilliantly effective and entertaining horror/comedy thrill ride.

Tomato Meter 98%

Audience 86%

A Phoenix secretary embezzles $40,000 from her employer’s client, goes on the run, and checks into a remote motel run by a young man under the domination of his mother.

Critic Consensus: Infamous for its shower scene, but immortal for its contribution to the horror genre. Because Psycho was filmed with tact, grace, and art, Hitchcock didn’t just create modern horror, he validated it..

Tomato Meter 96%

Audience 95

Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween night 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again.

Critic Consensus: Scary, suspenseful, and viscerally thrilling, Halloween set the standard for modern horror films.

Tomato Meter 96%

Audience 89%

A young woman is followed by an unknown supernatural force after a sexual encounter.

Critic Consensus: Smart, original, and above all terrifying, It Follows is the rare modern horror film that works on multiple levels — and leaves a lingering sting.

Tomato Meter 95%

Audience 66%

A family’s serene beach vacation turns to chaos when their doppelgängers appear and begin to terrorize them.

Critic Consensus: With Jordan Peele’s second inventive, ambitious horror film, we have seen how to beat the sophomore jinx, and it is Us.

Tomato Meter 93%

Audience 59%

A family in 1630s New England is torn apart by the forces of witchcraft, black magic, and possession.

Critic Consensus: As thought-provoking as it is visually compelling, The Witch delivers a deeply unsettling exercise in slow-building horror that suggests great things for debuting writer-director Robert Eggers.

Tomato Meter 90%

Audience 59%

A research team in Antarctica is hunted by a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of its victims.

Critic Consensus: Grimmer and more terrifying than the 1950s take, John Carpenter’s The Thing is a tense sci-fi thriller rife with compelling tension and some remarkable make-up effects.

Tomato Meter 85%

Audience 92%