The best gothic horror movies

Craving chills and thrills under moonlit skies? Dive into our curated list of the top 10 best gothic horror movies, where crumbling castles, chilling mysteries, and spine-tingling scares await.

1. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

In a castle on a stormy night, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron praise Mary Shelley for her story of Frankenstein and his Monster. She reminds them that her intention for writing the novel was to impart a moral lesson, the consequences of a mortal man who tries to play God. Mary says she has more of the story to tell...

2. The Innocents (1961)

A young governess for two children becomes convinced that the house and grounds are haunted.

This genuinely frightening, exquisitely made supernatural gothic stars Deborah Kerr as an emotionally fragile governess who comes to suspect that there is something very, very wrong with her precocious new charges. A psychosexually intensified adaptation of Henry James’s classic The Turn of the Screw, cowritten by Truman Capote and directed by Jack Clayton, The Innocents is a triumph of narrative economy and technical expressiveness, from its chilling sound design to the stygian depths of its widescreen cinematography by Freddie Francis.

3. Rebecca (1940)

A self-conscious woman juggles adjusting to her new role as an aristocrat's wife and avoiding being intimidated by his first wife's spectral presence.

Rebecca is a 1940 American romantic psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It was Hitchcock's first American project, and his first film under contract with producer David O. Selznick. 

4. The Haunting (1963)

Hill House has stood for about 90 years and appears haunted: its inhabitants have always met strange, tragic ends. Now Dr. John Markway has assembled a team of people who he thinks will prove whether or not the house is haunted.

5. The Others (2001)

In 1945, immediately following the end of Second World War, a woman who lives with her two photosensitive children on her darkened old family estate in the Channel Islands becomes convinced that the home is haunted.

6. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

This is a 1920 German silent horror film, directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, it tells the story of an insane hypnotist (Werner Krauss) who uses a brainwashed somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. The film features a dark and twisted visual style, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique and curving lines, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles, and shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the sets.

7. The Black Cat (1934)

One of Universal’s last horror movies released before the Hays Code became strictly enforced in Hollywood, “The Black Cat” is an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation in name only. Director Edgar G. Ulmer famously fooled censors by adding more racy and violent content than intended so that some of his more boundary-pushing scenes would look tame by comparison. The theatrical cut was still a challenging watch for contemporary audiences. It drew big crowds despite, or maybe because of, its morbidly sexual themes, torture, and human sacrifice. The scene in which Bela Lugosi’s character gets his revenge on Boris Karloff’s is still frequently cited as one of the scariest scenes in classic horror.

8. House of Usher (1960)

Upon entering his fiancée's family mansion, a man discovers a savage family curse and fears that his future brother-in-law has entombed his bride-to-be prematurely.

House of Usher (also known as The Fall of the House of Usher) is a 1960 American gothic horror film directed by Roger Corman and written by Richard Matheson from the 1839 short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe. The film was the first of eight Corman/Poe feature films and stars Vincent Price, Myrna Fahey, Mark Damon and Harry Ellerbe.

9. Crimson Peak (2015)

In the aftermath of a family tragedy, an aspiring author is torn between love for her childhood friend and the temptation of a mysterious outsider. Trying to escape the ghosts of her past, she is swept away to a house that breathes, bleeds - and remembers.

10. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

The centuries old vampire Count Dracula comes to England to seduce his barrister Jonathan Harker's fiancée Mina Murray and inflict havoc in the foreign land.

Overblown in the best sense of the word, Francis Ford Coppola's vision of Bram Stoker's Dracula rescues the character from decades of campy interpretations -- and features some terrific performances to boot.