Lights Off: The Best Horror Films for a Late Night

A London electronics salesman tries to win back his girlfriend, patch things up with his mother and survive a zombie outbreak, mostly by heading to the pub. Edgar Wright’s comedy is the perfect gateway horror: real zombies, real stakes, and far more laughs than screams.

Watch it if: someone in the room says they don’t do horror.

A family survives in near-total silence, because the creatures that hunt them track by sound. The idea is simple and the tension is almost physical. You’ll catch yourself holding your breath, and nobody will dare open a bag of chips.

Watch it if: you want tension rather than gore.

Chris goes to meet his girlfriend’s parents for the weekend, and the welcome is just a little too warm. Jordan Peele’s first film as director builds unease out of small talk, then pays it off in full. Smart, funny in places and hard to shake.

Watch it if: you like horror with something to say.

In the summer of 1989, a group of kids in Derry, Maine, realize that the thing taking local children looks like a clown and feeds on fear. Half coming-of-age adventure, half funhouse ride, with a villain who owns every scene he is in.

Watch it if: you want jump scares and characters you root for.

A woman on the run with stolen money checks into a quiet roadside motel run by a shy young man and his mother. Alfred Hitchcock’s black-and-white classic is more than sixty years old and still knows exactly how to unsettle an audience.

Watch it if: you want to see the film that so many later thrillers borrow from.

The crew of a commercial towing ship answers a distress signal and brings something back on board. Ridley Scott keeps the creature in the shadows for as long as possible, which is exactly why it works. Slow, cold and relentless.

Watch it if: you like your horror in space and your pacing patient.

Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren are called to a Rhode Island farmhouse where a family is being tormented by something in the house. James Wan relies on old-fashioned craft, like a creaking door or a game of hide-and-clap, and it is brutally effective.

Watch it if: you want a proper haunted-house night.

A writer takes a job as winter caretaker of an isolated mountain hotel and brings his wife and young son along. Stanley Kubrick’s film gets under your skin through long corridors, strange symmetry and Jack Nicholson slowly coming apart. The one to finish the night on.

Watch it if: you want dread that follows you to bed.