Jaws

No other horror movie has ever matched the elemental perfection of Jaws. There are the other summits of the genre, for sure, but even such cornerstones of horror as Psycho, The Shining, Carrie, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre don’t quite attain the primal ingeniousness of Steven Spielberg’s shark tale.

Paperhouse

Paperhouse has many frightening scenes, but one stands out as particularly scary for its brevity and almost inexplicable terror.

The Empty Man

There is a lot of misdirection in David Prior’s ambitious, scary, and exhilaratingly convoluted The Empty Man. For its first 20 minutes it plays like lost-in-the-wilderness adventure horror, following a group of American friends backpacking through the mountains of Bhutan who come across something strange and terrifying, which proceeds to tear them apart, emotionally and physically.