The 15 Best 2000s Horror Movies, Ranked

The 2000s gave horror fast zombies, cursed videotapes, a bathroom with two chained men and a camcorder that never stopped recording. Some of the best 2000s horror movies cost less than a used car. One cost $48 million and made five times that back.

This list counts down the 15 best 2000s horror movies. They’re ranked on three things: how well the scares hold up today, what critics made of them, and how much they changed the horror that came after. Every entry has the budget, the box office and its Rotten Tomatoes score, so you can see which films earned their reputation.

The Best 2000s Horror Movies at a Glance

#	Film	Year	Scare style	Rotten Tomatoes	$ back per $1
15	House of 1000 Corpses	2003	Grindhouse slasher	22%	$2.40
14	The Hills Have Eyes	2006	Survival remake	51%	$4.70
13	Hostel	2005	Torture horror	60%	$17
12	The Exorcism of Emily Rose	2005	Possession courtroom drama	46%	$7.60
11	30 Days of Night	2007	Vampire siege	50%	$2.50
10	Dawn of the Dead	2004	Zombie remake	77%	$3.90
9	The Mist	2007	Creature siege	73%	$3.20
8	Paranormal Activity	2007	Found footage haunting	82%	about $12,900
7	Saw	2004	Trap horror	50%	$87
6	[REC]	2007	Found footage infection	90%	$15
5	The Others	2001	Gothic ghost story	85%	$12
4	The Ring	2002	Cursed tape, J-horror remake	72%	$5.20
3	Let the Right One In	2008	Vampire coming of age	98%	$2.50
2	The Descent	2005	Cave creature feature	87%	$8.20
1	28 Days Later	2002	Infected apocalypse	87%	$10

Rotten Tomatoes critic scores as of October 2026. Dollars back = worldwide gross divided by production budget, not profit.

Pick by your stomach. The top left corner is for viewers who want to sleep badly without seeing much blood. The top right is the full assault.

15) House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

Rob Zombie’s debut is the messiest film on this list, and the only one set on the night before Halloween.

Four friends driving through Texas on October 30, 1977, stop at Captain Spaulding’s roadside Museum of Monsters and Madmen. They leave with directions to the Dr. Satan tree. They end up at the Firefly family’s farmhouse, and almost none of them leave.

It’s loud, ugly and soaked in 1970s grindhouse grain. Critics gave it 22%. Audiences liked it three times as much, and Sid Haig’s clown-faced Spaulding became a horror icon on very little screen time.

Getting it into cinemas was a horror story of its own. Universal shelved it over fears of an NC-17 rating. MGM picked it up and dropped it within days. Lionsgate finally released it, reportedly earned its costs back almost immediately, and asked Zombie for a sequel. That became The Devil’s Rejects.

14) The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

Alexandre Aja’s remake took Wes Craven’s 1977 desert nightmare and made it bigger, hotter and harder to sit through.

The Carter family takes a shortcut through the New Mexico desert and breaks down near an old nuclear test site. The people living in the hills are mutated descendants of miners who refused to leave. They know the family is there long before the family knows anything.

Aja shot it in Ouarzazate, Morocco, after scouting Namibia, South Africa and Mexico. Temperatures on set reportedly passed 120 degrees, and you can feel it in every frame.

KNB EFX spent more than six months designing the mutants, and Lizard’s makeup took about three hours a day. The first cut came back NC-17. The version in cinemas was trimmed to get an R.

13) Hostel (2005)

Hostel became the poster child for the “torture porn” label, and it still opened at number one in America.

Two American backpackers and an Icelandic friend follow a tip to a hostel in Slovakia. For its first act it plays like a party comedy. Then the friends start disappearing, and the film moves into a factory where rich clients pay to torture tourists.

Quentin Tarantino told Roth to keep it low budget and shoot it in Europe. The $4.8 million budget turned into about $82 million worldwide, roughly $17 back for every dollar spent.

The gore earned the headlines, but the first half is where Roth’s craft shows. He makes you like these idiots just enough to dread what’s coming. Look for Takashi Miike in a cameo, a nod to his film Audition. Shock horror wasn’t new, either. Freaks (1932) upset audiences so badly that Britain banned it for about 30 years. It came out in the pre-Code Hollywood years, before the censors arrived.

12) The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)

Half courtroom drama and half possession film, Emily Rose won the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film over far bloodier competition.

A priest goes on trial for negligent homicide after a college student dies during an exorcism. Laura Linney plays his agnostic lawyer. The story unfolds in flashbacks from the witness stand, so the film keeps asking whether you’re watching a possession or an illness.

It’s loosely inspired by the death of Anneliese Michel in Germany in 1976. Derrickson moved the story to America and shot it in Vancouver, with scenes at the University of British Columbia.

Carpenter’s performance is the reason to watch. She did the bent-backwards dorm room scene in 15 to 20 minutes with almost no digital help. One of her face contortions was so disturbing it earned the film an R. Derrickson lost the appeal and cut the shot to get a PG-13.

11) 30 Days of Night (2007)

David Slade’s vampires don’t sparkle, brood or talk much. They hunt an Alaskan town that won’t see the sun for a month.

Barrow, Alaska, enters its yearly polar night. The last plane leaves, the power goes out, and a pack of vampires walks into town. Sheriff Eben Oleson and his estranged wife have to keep a handful of survivors hidden for 30 days.

Steve Niles first pitched the story as a comic and got no takers. A film pitch fell through too. IDW published it as a comic series in 2002, and Sam Raimi’s team picked up the film rights that same year.

Alaska is played by New Zealand. The crew spent about two months shooting at night, first in the Queenstown area, then at Henderson Valley Studios in Auckland. The snow and the dark do half the work.

10) Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Zack Snyder’s first feature remade George Romero’s mall classic and made its zombies sprint.

Nurse Ana wakes up to find her neighbour’s daughter in the bedroom doorway. Within minutes her husband is dead, then back, then chasing her. That opening, written by James Gunn, is one of the best 10 minutes in 2000s horror.

The survivors hole up in a shopping mall. The crew shot in a mall near Toronto that was due for demolition, and had eight weeks to dress it as a working shopping centre.

The crew made about 3,000 zombie applications over the shoot, with up to 50 makeup artists and 200 to 400 zombie extras on the biggest days.

9) The Mist (2007)

Frank Darabont’s third Stephen King film traps a town in a supermarket and then delivers an ending King loved.

A storm knocks out power in a Maine town. The next morning, a thick mist rolls in, and something inside it starts taking people. David Drayton and his young son end up trapped in the supermarket with neighbours who turn on each other faster than the monsters can get in.

Marcia Gay Harden’s Mrs. Carmody, the shopper who becomes a doomsday preacher, is scarier than anything with tentacles.

Darabont wrote a far bleaker ending than King’s novella. King loved it, calling it “so anti-Hollywood, anti-everything” in a 2017 interview. Darabont hired the camera crew from TV’s The Shield to shoot it handheld, which is why it feels like news footage.

8) Paranormal Activity (2007)

Oren Peli shot a horror film in his own house for about $15,000, and it made more than $193 million.

Katie thinks something has followed her since childhood. Her boyfriend Micah buys a camera and sets it up in the bedroom at night. Each night, the timestamp in the corner runs a little longer, and something in the house gets a little bolder.

Peli shot it in about seven days in the San Diego house he’d just moved into. He cut about 70 hours of footage down to a feature. Three endings were filmed, and the one in cinemas was reportedly suggested by Steven Spielberg.

It waited almost two years for a release. Paramount finally tested it in 12 college towns in September 2009 and let audiences demand it in their city. Three weeks later it was everywhere.

7) Saw (2004)

Two men wake up chained in a filthy bathroom with a dead body between them, and the horror decade changed direction.

Adam and Dr. Gordon have a hacksaw, a tape recorder and until six o’clock. Jigsaw doesn’t kill anyone. He builds traps that make his victims choose, and the film keeps flashing back to the people who failed.

It was shot in 18 days in a converted warehouse studio in downtown Los Angeles. The crew had so little time they were “basically shooting rehearsals,” and filled the gaps with grainy surveillance-style shots and stills.

Shawnee Smith held the reverse bear trap in place by biting down on a thick tongue depressor. Critics split 50-50. Audiences gave it 84%, and the franchise reached ten films by 2023.

6) [REC] (2007)

A TV reporter follows firefighters into a Barcelona apartment building, the building gets sealed, and the camera keeps rolling for 78 minutes.

Ángela is hosting a late-night show about firefighters. A call takes them to an old woman screaming in her flat. Then the police seal the building from outside, and nobody explains why.

The actors never had the whole script. They were even given a false ending, so their panic in the last scenes is close to real. The film was shot in sequence so the cast could grow with the story.

America remade it as Quarantine in 2008, and the original reached US DVD in 2009. Watch the Spanish one. The final night vision scene in the penthouse is one of the most frightening sequences of the decade.

5) The Others (2001)

Nicole Kidman keeps her children in the dark, literally, in the most elegant ghost story of the decade.

In 1945, on the island of Jersey, Grace waits for her husband to come home from the war. Her two children are so sensitive to light that no door can open until the one before it is locked. Then the new servants arrive, and the house starts making noises.

Amenábar wrote the first draft in Spanish and set it in Chile. When Tom Cruise came on as a producer, it moved into English. Amenábar also composed the score himself.

There’s almost no blood in it. The fear comes from oil lamps, heavy curtains and the dark corners of the frame, a masterclass in low key lighting. It made about $210 million, more than any other film on this list except The Ring.

4) The Ring (2002)

Watch the tape, the phone rings, and you have seven days. The Ring started Hollywood’s J-horror remake wave.

Journalist Rachel Keller investigates her niece’s death and finds a videotape of strange, disconnected images. Everyone who watched it died a week later. Rachel watches it. So does her son.

Verbinski remade Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) and kept its slow, wet dread. The green-grey look was made in camera with filters and photochemical timing, with no digital grade. If you want to see what that choice does, our guide to what color grading is breaks it down.

The Ring made about $249 million, the most of any film on this list, and the girl crawling out of the TV made a generation nervous about their own screens. The Grudge, Dark Water and Pulse all followed it.

3) Let the Right One In (2008)

A bullied 12-year-old makes friends with the girl next door, who only comes out at night.

Oskar lives with his mother in a 1980s Stockholm suburb and gets beaten up at school. Eli moves in next door. She doesn’t feel the cold, she smells strange, and a man has started draining people in the woods for her.

It has the highest critic score on this list, 98% from about 190 reviews. It’s also the quietest film here. Alfredson shot most of it in Luleå, in northern Sweden, to make sure of real snow.

Hoyte van Hoytema, who later shot Interstellar and Oppenheimer, lit it with a cold, still camera. The swimming pool finale is filmed from underwater and barely shows the violence above. It’s the scariest thing in the film because of what you don’t see.

2) The Descent (2005)

Six friends go caving in the Appalachians, take a wrong turn, and find out they aren’t alone down there.

A year after losing her husband and daughter, Sarah joins her friends on a caving trip. A tunnel collapses behind them, and Juno admits she brought them to an uncharted cave. That’s before the crawlers.

Marshall makes the first half work with no monsters at all. Tight squeezes, falling rock and dying torches are enough. When the crawlers arrive, blind and hunting by sound, every breath is a risk.

The caves were built mostly from self-expanding foam that could be cut away for cameras. The only light in the film comes from things the characters carry: headlamps, glow sticks, flares and a camcorder’s night vision. American audiences got a shorter ending than British ones. Watch the original if you can.

1) 28 Days Later (2002)

Danny Boyle shot an empty London on cheap digital cameras and made the best horror film of the 2000s.

Jim wakes up from a coma in an empty hospital and walks out into a deserted London. A virus called Rage has turned most of the country into screaming, sprinting killers. They’re not dead, they’re infected, and that makes them faster than any zombie before them.

The empty city wasn’t empty. Boyle shot Westminster Bridge and Piccadilly Circus around 4 a.m., and closed a motorway on a Sunday morning behind a police rolling roadblock. Then a post house made 155 effects shots to remove the cars and people that remained.

The MiniDV image is rough and smeary, and that’s the point. It looks like footage someone found. American Cinematographer covered the camera setup in 2003, and it’s worth a read if you shoot on a budget. Boyle and writer Alex Garland came back to it with 28 Years Later in 2025.

Three Waves That Shaped 2000s Horror

The best 2000s horror movies came in three waves: Japanese remakes, torture and remakes of 1970s classics, then found footage.

The J-Horror Remakes

The Ring’s $249 million opened the door. The Grudge (2004), Dark Water (2005) and Pulse (2006) followed, all remade from Japanese originals. They traded gore for slow dread, long hair and technology that turned on you.

Torture and 1970s Remakes

Saw arrived in October 2004 and Hostel in January 2006. Both were cheap, both opened big, and both made the cruelty the event. The same years remade the 1970s: Dawn of the Dead in 2004, The Hills Have Eyes in 2006, both meaner than the originals. For the decade before this one, see our list of psychological thrillers from the 90s.

Found Footage Goes Mainstream

[REC] in 2007, Cloverfield in 2008 and Paranormal Activity’s wide release in 2009 turned the handheld camera into a genre. Cheap cameras made it possible. Paranormal Activity’s $193 million made every studio want one.

The Money Behind the Scares

The best 2000s horror movies were some of the most profitable films of the decade, and the cheapest ones did best.

Saw made about $87 for every dollar it cost. Hostel made about $17 and [REC] about $15. At the other end, 30 Days of Night had the biggest budget on the list, $30 million, and made back only about $2.50 for each dollar, before marketing and the cinemas’ share.

The pattern holds today. A small budget, one location and a strong hook can still pay off better than a studio tentpole. If you’re planning your own, start with how much it costs to make a movie.

Five More 2000s Horror Movies Worth Watching

These didn’t make the 15, but they belong on any Halloween list.

• Shaun of the Dead (2004): The zombie comedy beat Saw and Dawn of the Dead to the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film.
• Drag Me to Hell (2009): Sam Raimi’s return to horror, with a curse, a goat and a lot of slapstick.
• The Orphanage (2007): A Spanish ghost story produced by Guillermo del Toro. It beat [REC] to the Goya Award for special effects.
• Ginger Snaps (2000): A Canadian werewolf film that treats the change as puberty.
• The Devil’s Backbone (2001): Del Toro’s own ghost story, set in an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War.

For more fear after dark, try our list of movies to watch alone at night, or go back further with the best 90s horror movies that came before these.

FAQs About the Best 2000s Horror Movies

The Final Cut on the Best 2000s Horror Movies

The best 2000s horror movies were made by people with small budgets and big ideas: a camcorder in London, a bathroom in a warehouse, a bedroom in San Diego. 28 Days Later tops the list because it changed the most, and The Descent is right behind it because it scares the most.

Pick one from the chart, turn the lights off and see how long you last. Which one would you put at number one?