If cinema is like dreaming with our eyes open, then horror movies could rightly be viewed as waking nightmares: an opportunity to confront our unconscious fears directly — most often as entertainment, but sometimes with the express purpose of terrifying ourselves. On-screen frights take every form imaginable, from iconic boogeymen like Frankenstein and Freddy Krueger to real-world threats, be it psychosis, contagion or off-putting in-laws (“Get Out,” anyone?).In compiling a list of the genre’s highest achievements, we considered it all, from highbrow to lo-fi, pure schlock to Hitchcock (whose “Psycho” topped our “Greatest Films” list, but not this one), reaching back to the advent of cinema. Well, maybe not quite the beginning. According to legend, 1895 audiences recoiled in fear when they saw the train pull into La Ciotat station in the Lumière brothers’ early actuality film. We don’t count that as horror, though it certainly demonstrated the medium’s capacity to startle people. The q...
