10 Horror Movies EVERYONE Needs To Watch On The Big Screen

There is no other genre that does as well at the box office as horror and that's because they just

keep them coming all year round and people flock to see them. It doesn't matter whether these films

have a big budget or major stars attached, people just love a good scare. Netflix and other streamers

have capitalised on this in recent years, keeping a steady flow of horror content coming directly to

their platforms to entice viewers to stay home and tune in. And yet there are plenty of horror

films out there that beg to be seen at the cinema, deserving of something better than the cheapest

thrills of the TV, the laptop or, shudder to mention it, the mobile phone screen. So with that in mind

I'm Ellie for WhatCulture and these are all horror movies you must watch on the big screen

Starting with As Above, So Below. The Paris Catacombs are so much more than the health and

safety compliance section designed for tour groups and holiday makers. In fact, there is a far larger

network of tunnels under the city, many of which are dangerous, inaccessible, and home to who only

knows what. And these catacombs are where we find archaeologist Scarlett Marlow in As Above, So Below

on her hunt for the, well, the Philosopher's Stone. Far more than just a Harry Potter title

the stone is a legendary substance that has entranced a certain subsection of explorers

in a similar way to the Holy Grail. But rather than a National Treasure-esque romp

Scarlett and her companions find themselves descending through something akin to Dante's nine circles of hell

While found footage in general seems a TV-native format, this one is a little different

The documentarian style adds to the scope of what the film can do on the big screen

generating a claustrophobic feeling that captures what it's like to really be in the catacombs

not to mention hell. Add to this sound that largely eschews music, focusing not on soundtrack but the minutiae of the sound design, and you've got a picture made for a great big auditorium with total audiovisual clarity

My Bloody Valentine 3D 3D has long drawn the ire of the cinephile and it's not difficult to see why

It rarely adds anything meaningful to the viewing experience or to the film itself

and sometimes, particularly when it is retrofitted to movies, can actually harm the viewing experience

However, if the stakes are low to begin with, say with a bloody slasher romp

and the approach to the 3D is intentionally silly, the results can surprise

Such is the case with My Bloody Valentine 3D, the Jensen Ackles-led flick about a Valentine's Day killer in mining gear

Is it gimmicky? Of course. But given that this isn't exactly Shakespeare

it's half of the fun to see a pickaxe come swinging out of the screen at you

And it was the first horror film to utilise the Real D technology

banishing the red and blue glasses to the recycling bin The only hitch The 3D doesn translate well to home viewing To get the full force of this camp gory splatterfest in all its glory you have to see it on a big screen

The Lighthouse. Robert Eggers went all out on his follow-up to 2015's The Witch, digging

deeper into the unspeakable horrors and darkness that have come to define his filmmaking. In

The Lighthouse, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson star as lighthouse keepers who unite on a

remote New England island for weeks on end, succumbing to cabin fever, alcoholism and the

lure of the lighthouse's lens. The lighthouse is purposefully designed, more than any other of

Egger's films, to batter the audience into submission. The intention is very much to drop

us into the wiki life, with accents, dialogue and method acting from both leads designed to provide

optimal verisimilitude with the subject matter. The movie harks back to classic black and white

horrors using similar framing and technology but rather than take these elements and make

something traditional Eggers uses the limitations to the advantage of his horrors. The aspect ratio

and tight framing provide a visual claustrophobia that the sound design then uses to trap and fixate

us and the sound itself is frequently deafening and brutal with foghorn drones screaming wickies

and catawalling seagulls all contending for the limited space in a mono mix. In all the lighthouse

is an atmospheric journey that begs for the bombast of the cinema

Mad God. Any horror fan worth their salt would give an arm, two legs

and their firstborn child to catch Phil Tippett's stop-motion masterpiece Mad God on the big screen, sinking into the gore

while being able to appreciate every minute detail of the tireless labour of love

The film's journey south takes an unnamed and mute assassin through hellscape after hellscape

finding his way to the bloody heart of a ghastly war-torn world

where he seeks to deposit a bomb and bring it all crumbling down

And it took Tippett and a large team of volunteers some 30 years to make

Mad God is obscene in the scale and grim details of its multitudinous horrors

never settling for sanitary when there is the opportunity to wring some blood and misery out of a minor feature

Everything that can have texture does, every surface awash with bolts and grates, every creature, a mass of flesh, hair and bloodshot, everything

No details spared to the Tippett treatment. But unless you're packing a 90-inch OLED at home

much of this meticulous craft will be sadly lost to the murky corners and crevices of your screen

Mother. Darren Aronofsky's court stealing surprised everyone this year when it threw us into a Soderbergh-esque romp

no mania, no hysteria, no drugs and prostitution, no floor vagina and snapped baby. He has, after

all, spent the bulk of his career making deeply uncomfortable films, and no film is as uncomfortable

as Mother. Jennifer Lawrence is the film's matriarch, trying to survive in a beautiful home beset by

hordes of unwelcome guests whom her poet husband adores but cannot control Yes it is a fairly overt metaphor for Mother Nature humanity and God and no that doesn diminish his craft Like many of his

pictures Aronofsky designed Mother as a rising panic. Unlike many of his other films it uses

silence and deafening noise as two of its primary storytelling and genre elements and seeing it at

home surrounded by minor distractions just isn't the same. This movie demands from you the ability

to experience the absolute sound of silence and the explosions of violence, chaos and, well, literal bombs

Nothing less than full immersion in this troubling world can provide the intended stress

nor a full appreciation of the work. Psycho. A dastardly experiment by Gus Van Sant

the Vince Vaughn-starring remake of Psycho, had a rocky reception on release

Vaughn is an unlikely leading monster as Norman Bates, and yet there really is something unsettling to his performance

when his leering close-ups are projected 30 feet high. But so few have had the chance to see Psycho 98 on the big screen

especially compared against the swathes of audiences who have seen and continue to see

Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 original regularly. This is precisely where it comes into its own

No matter how good Hitchcock's Psycho is, it is somewhat limited by the technology of the time

It is presented in black and white in 1.37 to 1 aspect ratio

all reworked into 1 to 84 in some cases. And it features a mono soundtrack

that again has been digitally altered for multi-channel presentation. Black and white is by no means worse than colour

but it is the possibilities of Van Sant's colour palette here that really come to life in the cinema

Suspiria. Either of the Suspirias would fit perfectly into this slot, but we look here to the remake

as Dario Argento's 1977 original is widely screened, whereas Luca Guadagnino's effort only received a limited run

Guadagnino's Suspiria follows Susie Banyan, a young ex-Mennonite dancer, to a dance academy in Berlin that harbours some dark secrets

namely that it's run by a coven of witches. From the outset, the film is pure spectacle

wrangling stunning interpretive dance into the same picture as grotesque acts of violence

Made for the cinema, every other scene is dripping with blood and other fluids

and the movie neatly juxtaposes in its palette a pulsing, vibrant red

which goes gloriously OTT in the third act against the drab interiors and exteriors of 1970s West Berlin

And the dance practices and sequences themselves, which make up the core of the film

are the intensely choreographed sequences of the kind we would pay good money to see live on stage

Suspiria is a night at the theatre, the cinema and the slaughterhouse all rolled into one

So why would anyone settle for living room viewing? Barbarian left most of us looking for more from director Zach Kregger and Weapons has given us precisely what we wanted while upping the ante considerably From the get the film about a town suffering from the sudden and mysterious disappearance

of an entire classroom of their children is nail-bitingly tense and often super quiet to boot

Kregger makes great use of distance, staging his scenes so that horrors often come from afar

and end up uncomfortably close, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the cinema

This is something backed up to the hilt by the sound design, with eerie space created and then closed

and small seemingly innocuous details proving to be gasp-inducing at this scale

something more easily missed when watching at home. The smattering of shocks, jump scares and horrifying visuals

especially where witchy sleeper antagonist Gladys is concerned, truly are all the more effective when you can't escape them

and this is one horror sure to become a stalwart of horror movie nights at theatres in the years to come. Climax

Gaspar Noé's Climax takes us back to the 90s joining a dance troupe as they hole up out of the snow in a disused school

rehearsing for an upcoming performance but when someone spikes the punch with acid

things take a turn for the miserable Much like Suspiria, Climax is a fusion of disturbing horror elements

with rich colour motifs and painstaking choreography The difference here, which elevates Noé's film above Guadagnino's

is that most of Climax is shot with long takes including the dance numbers

The tension built by the revolving long takes is almost unbearable no matter where you watch it

as Noé has his dancers tear each other apart under vomit-inducing red and low lighting

But being trapped in a large dark hall with climax is the way to get the full effect of it

not just watching but really experiencing the claustrophobia and stress up close

feeling trapped in there with the dancers. And finally, the neon demon

Nicholas Winding Refn builds his pictures around the visuals, creating fluid and malleable scenes

that satisfy what he wants to see first and foremost, and allowing story to present itself through these

While not for everyone, arthouse extravaganza The Neon Demon is a true representation of this filmmaking ethos

perfectly married with its subject matter, LA's fashion world. The film whisks Elle Fanning's Jessie off to the City of Angels

where she meets catty models, sinister agency figures and every kind of seedy and lecherous pedestrian the city can hawk her way

Despite the torrent of questionable characters in her way, she gets her foot on the ladder and starts climbing

rapidly becoming subsumed by the lack of culture. As with most Refn films, we are treated to lush, rich visuals

with every frame a dead ringer for a fashion shoot, a mega-budget advert or an installation

The aesthetics and cinematography are bold, bright and, you guessed it, drenched in neon

and whether the plot satisfies the average viewer or the kills and cannibalism make us blow chunks

this is a movie for the cinema screen. It is no less than an arresting piece of visual art

and ought to be consumed as such, out in the world in its most authentic form