According to science, the reason we like to be scared silly by films has something to do with the dopamine that gets released when we’re frightened.

It’s also safe. We get to experience horror from the safety of the couch and then follow it up with a Pixar movie that will take the edge off before we go to sleep.

Halloween has brought with it endless lists of terrifying films to binge until your dopamine levels are so high that you’ll never close your eyes again.

Now that Halloween is over, there’s no need to abandon all of that. Instead, Rolling Stone has compiled a list of the 60 greatest horror films of the 21st century for you to work through.

Let’s take a look at the top 10:

1. Get Out

Hands down the best horror film of the century.

It was an instant classic and the inescapable horror movie of 2017 — both a pitch-perfect throwback to writer-director Jordan Peele’s beloved Seventies “social thrillers” and a right-now racial state-of-the-nation address that touched a raw nerve. A lesser filmmaker might have reduced the story of an African-American photographer (Daniel Kaluuya, giving great cry-face) going to meet his white girlfriend’s liberal parents — and having the strange feeling that something is very wrong — to little more than a collection of socially conscious jump scares.

Everyone has to watch this film. Everyone.

2. 28 Days Later

This one is a classic.

As with many great horror movies, Danny Boyle’s eviscerating zombie thriller grew out of real-world terrors. “Danny was particularly interested in issues that had to do with social rage – the increase of rage in our society, road rage and other things,” screenwriter Alex Garland explained. Out of that came 28 Days Later…, in which a handful of survivors (including Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris) try to stay a step ahead of unstoppable hordes of rampaging undead, who don’t just feast on the living but seem to be filled with an unquenchable anger, ferociously chasing after our heroes with the lunatic logic of a nightmare.

Are you ready for the zombie apocalypse?

3. Hereditary

This film is almost too good. I expected it to be higher in the rankings.

Whether you think it’s “the scariest film since The Exorcist” or simply one of the best horror films in the last decade, Ari Aster’s debut feature is one remarkably self-assured, genuinely disturbing take on family dynamics. It knows exactly when and how to jump headfirst into insanity. Its mix of grief, grotesquerie and ghost-story dread feels nigh unbeatable. Toni Collette’s performance as an artist dealing with loss(es) is a masterclass in how to play someone slowly losing their mind; Alex Wolff’s portrayal as her son, equally heading off the rails, matches her step for step. Everything from the cinematography to the score suggests a bad dream you can’t wake up from.

You’ll struggle to sleep when it’s over.

4. Let The Right One In

Step aside, Twilight.

Tomas Alfredson’s stunning 2008 film gave the vampire genre a much-needed tweak with its somber depiction of one of the more unusual relationships in horror history – an alienated 12 year-old boy who inadvertently bonds with the “young” female bloodsucker next door. Filled with enough Swedish angst to make Ingmar Bergman proud and enough genuine scares to appeal to jaded horror fanatics, Let the Right One In moves quietly and deliberately, which makes its feeding scenes and set pieces such as swimming-pool massacre seem all the more jarring. Even more frightening, perhaps, is the film’s assertion that adolescent males have the capacity to be far more monstrous than actual monsters.

Add this to your list immediately.

5. The Babadook

Fun fact: the Babadook became a gay icon after Netflix accidentally filed the film under ‘Gay Movies’.

The story of a widowed mother (Essie Davis) whose son is menaced by an angular demon that’s literally straight out of a children’s book begins as a nerve-scraping parable of grief; it becomes truly terrifying, however, when the subject shifts to how quickly parental love can turn to hate. It’s a monster movie in which everyone takes turns being the monster.

Don’t trust the mom in this one.

6. The Conjuring

This film claims to be based on a true story.

This ghost story par excellence works from the same true-life sources that gave us The Amityville Horror: In the early 1970s, paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) visit a Rhode Island family who believe their home is haunted.

It’s a throwback to 70s horror that’s fun as well as scary.

7. The Cabin In The Woods

The trailer quickly goes from fun in the woods to all-out gore.

The most subversive meta-horror flick since Scream made the genre self-aware, Drew Goddard’s tweaked take on the most tired cliché in horror – horny college kids retreating to cabin for drug-binging and sexcapades – becomes something so original that Hollywood hasn’t figured out a way to mimic and/or ruin it the way they did with, say, The Blair Witch Project.

It has so many twists that you’ll want to keep a pen and paper ready.

8. Pulse

The internet makes everyone crazy in this tech-infused horror.

An insidious, suicide-inducing miasma invades the world of the living via the Internet in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s quiet, apocalyptic ghost story. Of all the films in the J-horror wave of early aughts, Pulse is by far the creepiest and most prophetic – a depressing indictment of technology and the negative effect it continues to have on humanity.

No cheap scares in this one. It’s a psychological thriller all the way.

9. The Witch

Atmospheric horror at its best.

Robert Eggers’ brilliantly crafted period piece follows descent of a 17th-century New England farm family into despair and madness after their baby is snatched by a local hag. Though the film contains some genuinely terrifying sequences, much of its overwhelming sense of spookiness comes from what isn’t seen on the screen, along with the tension that inevitably results when the family pits their unbending Puritan outlook against the merciless power of Mother Nature.

Nature probably wins.

10. Raw

Rumour has it that some people seeing this film for the first time puked in the cinema and fainted.

Many folks walked in to French director Julia Ducournau’s extraordinary, extreme debut expecting to test their mettle. (The movie that caused fainting at festival screenings! Mon dieu!) A little under two hours later, they exited the building having seen a genuine Grand Guignol masterpiece.

I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s definitely on the list.

You can’t call yourself a fan of horror until you’ve worked through the films on this list.

Good luck getting to sleep afterwards, though.

[source:rollingstone]