Famous Directors Share Their Favorite Scary Movies
“What’s your favorite scary movie?” It’s an iconic line from the Scream franchise. And if we were Ghostface, we’d want to ask this question to Hollywood’s best directors; what better way to get top-tier Halloween movie recommendations? So if, like us, you’ve ever wondered which film gives Martin Scorsese the heebie-jeebies, which one makes Steven Spielberg cower behind the sofa in terror, or which one sends a shiver down Quentin Tarantino’s spine, then wonder no more. Here, we’ve rounded up 40 famous filmmakers and the scary movies they love the most.
1. Martin Scorsese — The Innocents
Martin Scorsese has occasionally ventured into the horror genre: see the inspired 1991 remake of Cape Fear. But it’s a film from three decades earlier that makes him break out in a cold sweat. Talking to The Daily Beast about the scariest movies he’s ever seen, the legendary filmmaker cited The Innocents, the psychological horror released in 1961.
And Scorsese gave his reasons, too. He said, “This Jack Clayton adaptation of The Turn of the Screw is one of the rare pictures that does justice to Henry James. It’s beautifully crafted and acted, immaculately shot by Freddie Francis, and very scary.”
2. Wes Anderson — Rosemary’s Baby
Renowned for his heavily stylized tales of twee, Wes Anderson is as far removed from a horror filmmaker as you could possibly get. And yet the auteur claims that his career has been heavily inspired by one particular frightening film experience.
In a piece for Rotten Tomatoes, Anderson revealed that Roman Polanski’s chiller Rosemary’s Baby has regularly given him “a source of ideas.” He also praised Mia Farrow for her turn as the leading lady who discovers that the little one she’s carrying is [spoiler alert] the spawn of Satan.
3. Alexandre Aja — The Shining
Alexandre Aja positioned himself as a master of 21st-century horror with his 2003 original High Tension and 2006 remake of Wes Craven classic The Hills Have Eyes. But the director says it was a Stephen King adaptation that first set him on his spooky career path.
Aja told Rotten Tomatoes, “I accidentally watched The Shining at age seven and it was the most traumatic experience, and maybe one of the reasons why I’m doing what I’m doing today. Then, year after year, it’s that movie that I can watch again and again.”
4. Quentin Tarantino — Audition
“A true masterpiece.” That’s how Quentin Tarantino described 1999 scare-fest Audition during an interview in 2009. And as a master of all things pop culture, the filmmaker sure knows what he’s talking about. The Takashi Miike film gave everyone the heebie-jeebies with the story of a widower, played by Ryo Ishibashi, who auditions for a new wife.
Unfortunately for him, the candidate he deems to be perfect, Eihi Shiina’s Asami, gives him far more than he bargained for. The scene involving the bag, in particular, is widely regarded as one of the most unsettling in contemporary horror.
5. Greta Gerwig — The 39 Steps
Greta Gerwig went old-school when she was asked about her favorite films by IndieWire in 2016. As well as naming Red River, Rio Bravo, and Singin’ in the Rain, the Barbie director also listed The 39 Steps.
This is the Alfred Hitchcock chiller about a man who finds himself embroiled in a global espionage conspiracy when he’s put in the frame for homicide. In fact, Gerwig described the classic as “maybe one of the most perfect movies ever made.”
6. Darren Lynn Bousman — The Last House on the Left
Darren Lynn Bousman has helmed no fewer than four chapters of Saw, the franchise which practically invented the term ‘torture porn.’ So it’s little surprise to discover that his favorite horror is also at the grisly end of the spectrum. Speaking to El Rey Network, Bousman sang the praises of The Last House on the Left, the 1972 exploitation flick made by genre master Craven.
He explained, “There’s a singular moment after Krug and his band of misfits get done torturing a girl. They stand up and they have regret on their face. It humanizes these killers. It’s a bold choice and it was the first time I remember as an audience-member wanting to look up the director.”
7. Steven Spielberg — Psycho
Steven Spielberg, who’s occasionally explored the horror genre with Jaws and The Twilight Zone, believes that Psycho is the ultimate scare-fest. But while he was in awe of the man who made it, the feeling definitely wasn’t mutual. In fact, as claimed in Stephen Schochet’s Tales of Hollywood audiobook, Spielberg ended up irritating Hitchcock for his persistent nature.
The Master of Suspense was apparently “upset by an uninvited young man hovering around” the set of 1976’s Family Plot. And despite providing the voice of the Jaws ride at Orlando’s Universal Pictures, Hitchcock had no interest in meeting the keen Spielberg then, either.
8. Mike Flanagan — The Blackcoat's Daughter
Mike Flanagan is fast becoming one of the new horror maestros thanks to the likes of The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and Doctor Sleep. And he kept things contemporary when asked by Rotten Tomatoes about his own favorite scary movie. The director opted for 2015’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter, Oz Perkins’ chiller about two boarding school students forced to defeat a malevolent entity when they’re left behind over the winter holidays.
Flanagan said, “Great performances across the board and what appears at first to be a story about girls encountering a supernatural force is revealed to be something even deeper by the end. I love this movie for a lot of reasons, but particularly because of how it touches on an unexplored facet of possession stories.”
9. William Friedkin — Funny Games
The late William Friedkin is the man behind what many consider to be the scariest movie of all time, The Exorcist. So could anything possibly have scared the iconic director in the same way? Well, while talking to Entertainment Weekly, Friedkin revealed that another auteur, Michael Haneke, gave him the fright of his life with the original Funny Games.
He said, “It’s probably the scariest film on my list because it involves two young punks in a rural village terrorizing a family in their home. It’s the kind of thing you see on the news very often today, and there’s a possibility of this actually happening.”
10. Tim Burton — The Wicker Man
Tim Burton is obviously a major fan of Christopher Lee. The director chose two films starring the horror icon when asked about his five all-time favorite movies by Rotten Tomatoes. While Dracula A.D. 1972 was something of a left-field choice, The Wicker Man was a common one.
And we’re talking the Edward Woodward original one here, not the terrible Nicolas-Cage-in-a-bear-suit remake, obviously. Burton said, “It was not a very successful movie when it came out but it’s really quite a hypnotic and amazing film I think. It’s like a weird dream... Things are quite normal on the surface but underneath they’re not quite what they seem.”
11. Mary Harron — Relic
Best-known for adapting what many considered to be an unfilmable novel, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, Mary Harron bigged up a fledgling filmmaker when asked about her favorite horror by Entertainment Weekly.
“That was fantastic,” she said of Natalie Erika James’ first film, Relic, before adding, “I was really impressed. That again is female-centered. It’s a woman, her daughter, her mother. So, grandmother-mother-daughter. And crazy things happen inside a house, lot of amazing visual effects.”
12. John Carpenter — The Exorcist
So what could possibly have scared the man who practically invented the modern slasher movie with Halloween? Well, it turns out, another ‘70s bona fide classic, The Exorcist. And it still packs a punch nearly half a century on, as he explained to The Fader.
Carpenter said, “I watched it again recently and was surprised by how intense it is. The things that they did back then, with this little girl, they broke a bunch of taboos, my god. It’s pretty damn good.”
13. Christopher Nolan — Alien
As the man behind Interstellar, Inception, and the impenetrable Tenet, it’s perhaps little surprise that Christopher Nolan opted for something in the realm of sci-fi when it came to his personal best horror.
In an interview with Media Company, the fanboy favorite revealed that alongside Blade Runner, Alien completely knocked him for six when he first watched it. Nolan said, “The director I have always been a huge fan of… Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid.” He added that the two genre classics “created these extraordinary worlds that were just completely immersive.”
14. David Cronenberg — Don't Look Now
You might have expected David Cronenberg to choose something with plenty of blood and gore. After all, he’s built a career on making audiences squeamish with body horrors such as Scanners and Eraserhead. But the auteur appears to prefer his scares a little more cerebral when it comes to being a viewer, choosing Nicolas Roeg’s meditative 1973 classic Don’t Look Now.
He told YouTube channel Konbini, “Very strange. Very much about death, but at first you’re not aware that that’s really the subject-matter. It’s really a love story, but it’s really a love story about love and death.”
15. Guillermo del Toro — Eyes Without a Face
Guillermo del Toro is undoubtedly the man you turn to when you want a little goth with your horror. The Mexican has made his name with visually-stunning macabre films such as Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, and Crimson Peak, not to mention recent Netflix anthology Cabinet of Curiosities.
So it’s no surprise to learn that del Toro believes the French expressionist classic Eyes Without a Face is his all-time favorite scary movie. The Oscar-winner told Fandor, “It influenced me a lot with the contrast between beauty and brutality… The clash of haunting and enchanting imagery has seldom been more powerful.”
16. Bong Joon Ho — Midsommar
Bong Joon Ho caused an Oscars sensation when his 2019 parable Parasite won four gongs, including the coveted Best Picture. But the South Korean believes that another film released that same year, Midsommar, was worthy of such praise, too.
Bong named the Ari Aster picture, one of those rare horrors which takes place almost entirely in sunlight, as one of his favorite movies of the year in a list compiled for IndieWire. And he’s also a massive fan of its predecessor, Hereditary.
17. Karyn Kusama — Habit
Karyn Kusama became one-to-watch in the horror world with her dinner-party-gone-very-wrong chiller The Invitation. But her own personal favorite is something a little more supernatural. In a chat with Nylon, the filmmaker hailed Habit as an “incredible thematic companion piece to Abel Ferrara's The Addiction.”
She also hailed it as “a grimy, vivid portrayal of a life getting very out of control.” The ‘90s cult classic focuses on two men, one who’s descending into an alcohol addiction and another who’s falling in love with a vampire.
18. Luca Guadagnino — The Fly
Luca Guadagnino believes that David Cronenberg’s 1986 masterpiece The Fly is the most chilling film of all time. But not for the reasons you may expect, as the Suspiria director told Vulture.
He said, “The horror of it for me is at the end when you realize that the character of Jeff Goldblum and the character of Geena Davis desperately love each other, but they’re not going to be together. The ultimate horror of that movie was the impossibility of the love between the two of them.”
19. Alex Garland — The Lighthouse
Alex Garland appears to believe that 2019 was a golden age for cinema. As well as picking Parasite as one of his all-time favorite films, the director also opted for that same year’s black-and-white tale The Lighthouse. And it was Robert Eggers’ sense of invention that impressed him the most.
Garland told Rotten Tomatoes, “I thought the performances were fantastic. It was incredibly beautifully shot and put together. It was just so original that I thought, ‘Well, something right is happening if films like this can get made and get made so beautifully.’”
20. Leigh Janiak — Scream
Viewers of Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy may have spotted that it had a fair few things in common with another meta trilogy, Scream. And with good reason, too. Its director Leigh Janiak is a major fan of Ghostface’s exploits, particularly the 1996 original.
In an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, the filmmaker enthused, “I can’t even count the amount of times that I’ve seen that movie, let alone the opening sequence of it... So, when we were shooting [Fear Street], I wanted to very much be sending that love letter, and immediately orienting the audience into, ‘Okay, this is it. This is creepy, this is scary.’”
21. Jennifer Kent — Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Jennifer Kent, who scared the bejezus out of everyone in 2014 with her directorial debut The Babadook, might not be a particularly big fan of Friday the 13th. In fact, she compared the slasher to a shampoo ad during a chat with Shutterstock.
But she’s much more appreciative of a teen-based horror from the previous decade, describing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a “masterpiece.” Kent added, “There’s something so rough and coarse in a really great way running through that film. It’s a genius film. It’s still shocking.”
22. David Lowery — Hereditary
Boon Jong-Ho isn’t the only contemporary filmmaker who bows down to the talents of Ari Aster. David Lowery, who made his name with the supernatural indie A Ghost Story, is also a massive fan of the director’s first feature film Hereditary.
In a chat with IndieWire, he revealed he had to go to bed with the lights on after watching it, adding, “I was traumatized. I wondered if the movie might be too brutal. The only way to find out, of course, was to drag as many friends as I could to see it when it opened a few weeks later.” Lowery then stated he’d watch Hereditary every October for as long as he lives.
23. Sofia Coppola — Let the Right One In
You might not expect Sofia Coppola’s work to be significantly influenced by the world of horror. But that doesn't mean she's completely averse to the odd scary movie. In 2008, she cited Let the Right One In as one of her all-time favorite films in a list for IndieWire.
Coppola was, of course, referring to the Scandinavian original rather than the American remake which only came out two years later. The movie takes a different approach to the vampire movie by centering its story on the relationship between a young bloodsucker and her all-human boy friend.
24. Andy Muschietti — Near Dark
Andy Muschietti defied all the naysayers by adapting one of Stephen King’s best-loved stories, It, across two chapters to big-screen success. But it’s a vampire, not a murderous clown, that’s at the center of his own personal horror favorite. Speaking to Shortlist, Muschietti gave props to Kathryn Bigelow’s cult classic Near Dark, particularly for the way it portrayed its bloodthirsty characters.
He said, “These are like trash vampires, going around in an RV, and that blend of Americana, and Western underbelly, trashy vampires was just mind-blowing for me. I had never seen anything like that.”
25. Natalie Erika James — Ringu
Think of the scariest scenes in modern horror and no doubt that Sadako emerging from her well and out from the TV screen in the original Ringu is up there. Relic director Natalie Erika James was certainly spooked enough to name the J-horror as an all-time favorite in an interview with IndieWire.
She said, “[The film] always had that empathetic view of the menace, which I think a lot of Asian horror does as well.” James also revealed that Ringu had a major influence on her own acclaimed work.
26. Jordan Peele — Misery
Jordan Peele has delivered three of the biggest horrors of recent years in Get Out, Us, and Nope. And he’s often looked to one of the masters of the genre for inspiration, as he explained to USA Today.
“Misery is a movie where the unlikely villain turns out to be the scariest,” Peele remarked, referring to Kathy Bates’ crazed fan in the adaptation of the Stephen King classic. He added, “It’s also a movie where the acting and the performance and the script and the dialog is where the fear in the movie lies. I love that kind of technique.”
27. Sam Raimi — Night of the Living Dead
You might think that nothing would scare Sam Raimi, the man behind the gruesome horror of The Evil Dead. But it turns out that a ‘60s black-and-white classic gave him the fright of his life.
“I was screaming and shrieking, begging my sister to take me home, and she was trying to shut me up,” Raimi told Den of Geek about George A. Romero’s seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead. He added, “There was nothing Hollywood about it: it was just unrelenting and complete madness and very upsetting for me.”
28. James Wan — The Others
Thanks to The Conjuring and Insidious franchises, James Wan has established himself as the modern king of the ghost story. But according to the director, he still has a way to go to beat his own personal favorite.
“Alejandro Amenabar’s movie with Nicole Kidman is exquisitely photographed, crafted, and old-school,” Wan raved about The Others to The Hollywood Reporter. He added, “It’s truly one of the finest ‘bump-in-the-night’ Victorian ghost stories ever committed to film.”
29. Jim Jarmusch — American Psycho
Who can forget the sight of a near-naked Christian Bale running after his latest victim with a chainsaw in the turn-of-the-century cult classic American Psycho? Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel certainly left an impression on auteur Jim Jarmusch. The indie favorite argued that the post-modern horror is “masterful” while talking to Rotten Tomatoes.
He explained, “I think that the film resonates even more now than when it was made almost 20 years ago. Though at the time it was called sexist filth by some. Christian Bale’s performance is brutally riveting, and the entire cast — Willem Dafoe, Chloe Sevigny, Reese Witherspoon, and Jared Leto — are all just really good.”
30. Robert Eggers — Nosferatu
Robert Eggers delved deep into the annals of the genre when he recommended five films for horror aficionados to stream. As well as The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari, the filmmaker also gave a shout-out to one of the most famous early scare-fests, Nosferatu. Eggers told IndieWire, “It was an indie horror in its day, a bit rough around the edges, yet it¹s one of the greatest and most haunting films ever made.”
The Witch director also advised fans to seek out the monochrome version rather than the color restorations, adding, “Those grimy versions have an uncanny mystery to them and helped build the myth of Max Shreck being a real vampire.”
31. Pedro Almodovar — Arrebato
It’s little surprise that Spanish arthouse darling Pedro Almodovar opted for something a little obscure when it came to his favorite scary flick. In a piece for BFI, the acclaimed filmmaker sang the praises of Arrebato, a movie which he admitted no one saw even on its 1979 release.
Almovodar, who’d cast many of the lost classic’s actors over the following decade, said, “It’s a fantastic tale of self-immolation; of dedication to both heroin and cinema as beginning and end of everything, and to the dark side as the only possibility for self-fulfilment and self-knowledge.”
32. Nia DaCosta — Under the Skin
Nia DaCosta impressed audiences and critics alike with her 2021 remake of ‘90s classic Candyman. And it was informed by a slightly less popcorn-friendly film that had been released eight years previously.
“It’s unlike anything I’d seen before and could remain opaque without being rudderless,” DaCosta said of Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi horror Under the Skin during a chat with IonCinema. She added, “Incredibly moving and disturbing. Inspiring because it makes me feel as though, in film, one could do anything.”
33. Julia Ducournau — Dead Ringers
Julia Ducournau announced herself as a successor to body horror maestro David Cronenberg with her cannibal-themed Raw. So it makes sense that she’d choose a film from the auteur as her all-time favorite creepy flick, although it’s not one that you might have expected.
Ignoring Cronenberg’s grislier efforts, the Frenchwoman plumped for Dead Ringers, telling Fandom, “The way he filmed bodies and the themes he tackles — with mortality and the human condition, and identity as well — are themes that I have always been interested in and that I treat in my own work.”
34. Coralie Fargeat — I Saw the Devil
Anyone who watched 2017’s Revenge won’t be surprised to learn that its director Coralie Fargeat took major inspiration from the bloodthirstiest of South Korean cinema. As well as Park Chan-wook's classic Oldboy, the filmmaker was also influenced by Kim Jee-woon's equally grisly I Saw the Devil.
In a chat with The Financial Times, Fargeat explained, “The bloody scenes [in these films] are so excessive that they become absurd and poetic. I’m interested in when blood and flesh create something that becomes baroque and operatic. [Quentin] Tarantino does that in Kill Bill.”
35. Rob Zombie — 28 Days Later
Considering his stage name, it’s little wonder that Rob Zombie chose a tale of the undead as his all-time horror great. But instead of the usual Romero suspects, the metalhead opted for the more contemporary 28 Days Later, particularly for the way he injected the crowded genre with something new.
Zombie told Vice, “I don’t know how much credit [Danny Boyle] gets for it, but the zombiemania that’s going on with everyone, no one could really figure out what to do with zombie movies... And he was the first person to come along with a fresh take on it, which came along in kind of a stagnant genre, and I never really thought of it of being stagnant until I saw that film.”
36. Edgar Wright — Dead of Night
Edgar Wright, director of Shaun of the Dead, is one of the few filmmakers who’s managed to nail both the horror and comedy genres in a single film. “I’ve always been fascinated by horror films and genre films,” he once wrote. “And horror films harboured a fascination for me and always have been something I’ve wanted to watch and wanted to make. Equally, I’m very fascinated by comedy.” Wright revealed his 100 all-time favorite scary movies in 2017, but which came out on top?
Wright chose Dead of Night, an unsettling anthology of four British shorts, all narrated by strangers who meet for reasons unknown at a house in the countryside. And Wright is in good company, too. Scorsese also hailed the same film as a classic while speaking to The Daily Beast.
37. Ben Wheatley — Eraserhead
You’d expect the man behind one of the most twisted cult horrors of recent years, Kill List, to choose something outside the box. And Ben Wheatley didn’t disappoint while talking to Criterion. The director named Eraserhead and another David Lynch masterpiece, Blue Velvet, as formative films, describing his idol as “the Dark Lord of midnight movies.”
Wheatley explained, “Lynch films are scary in a way that modern horror films seldom are. He talks directly to my inner child, to the nightmares of my seven-year-old self. It’s a singular cinematic experience.”
38. Eli Roth — Creepshow
Eli Roth became renowned as the new enfant terrible of the early ‘00s horror scene thanks to splatterfests like Cabin Fever. But it turns out that he was simply emulating one of his heroes. Well, three to be exact. Yes, Roth was particularly taken with Creepshow, the anthology which brought author Stephen King, filmmaker George A. Romero, and make-up maestro Tom Savini together for 90 minutes of gory mayhem.
He told Today, “If you’re not that into the story, a new one will be on in ten minutes… An amazing cast, incredible script, brilliant makeup effects, and nonstop fun. A very underrated horror movie that’s a guaranteed good time.”
39. Gaspar Noé — Un Chien Andalou
Surreal short Un Chien Andalou probably wouldn’t make your average horror fan’s all-time list. But as one of France’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers, Gaspar Noé found it impossible to resist. The auteur told Rotten Tomatoes that the squeamish opening scene in which co-director Luis Buñuel cuts out a woman’s eye was particularly memorable.
He said, “I wish I could have been in the audience, if I could not be behind Bunuel. If I could see the reaction, I’m sure there’s never people turning more crazy in the history of cinema than the first audience that that movie had.”
40. Patrick Brice — Jacob's Ladder
Patrick Brice has made two of the most unnerving found-footage horrors in recent years with the Mark Duplass-starring Creep films. And his own personal favorite, Jacob’s Ladder, also drew on distinctive techniques to scare audiences like never before.
Brice told Mental Floss, “There are moments in the film that use practical and in-camera effects to pull off scares that are beyond comprehension. I remember having to rewind certain moments asking myself how Adrian Lyne was able to pull them off, and it’s his only horror movie!”