The Best Jump-Scare Horror Movies

These are the movies that first mastered the art—and not the most obvious ones, either.

Five friends head on an adventure in the woods only to discover a Necronomicon and accidentally unleash a demonic force upon their camping trip in Sam Raimi’s low-budget cult classic. 

While some of the practical effects in The Evil Dead are a little hokey when looking back, it’s amazing to see how much was accomplished in this film with so few resources.

It’s a must-watch for any self-proclaimed fan of the horror genre, and it’s fun to appreciate one of the places where the art of the jump scare originated.

Riding on the coattails of more obvious jump-scare horror like Scream (1996) and Scream 2 (1997), Urban Legend tells the story of a group of college kids who begin to suspect a string of strange deaths around their campus are connected to an Urban Legend. 

Sure, it hits many of the same beats that Scream does, but it’s worth the watch if you’re looking for a similar brand of thrill.

What Lies Beneath (2000)

Lord of Illusions (1995)

The early 2010s saw a revival of jump-scare horror, most notably including Insidious (2010), The Conjuring (2013), and Fede Alvarez’s 2013 Evil Dead remake.

However, here are a couple of unsung heroes that will have your heart beating out of your chest. 

Scarlett Marlowe is the daughter of a historian who went insane in pursuit of Nicholas Flamel’s infamous immortality stone, and when she finds new information pointing to its true location, she decides to take up the family mantle.

Scarlett, two friends, and a group of hired guides head into the catacombs beneath Paris, which happens to be a popular hangout for some of French society’s outcasts and also might just be the gates to hell.

The claustrophobia in this film makes it impossible to relax, and despite having the audience on alert the entire time, the scares still catch you from every angle.

What’s best about this film is that it doesn’t solely rely on the supernatural to terrify. You can suspect some stomach-churning gear malfunctions and some strange outsiders lurking around the many corners of the catacombs.

The deeper down Scarlett and company go, the worse it gets.

The brainchild of Mike Flanagan and Kate Siegel, the husband-wife pair behind some of your favorite spooky Netflix series (The Fall of the House of Usher, Midnight Mass & The Haunting of Hill House), Hush follows Maddie, a writer who lost her ability to hear and speak from meningitis, as she moves to the woods in search of the isolation necessary to complete her next novel.

All hell breaks loose one night when Maddie gets a visit from her friend Sarah, who is later murdered by a masked man, though Maddie is unable to hear the attack when it occurs. 

Because of her disability, Maddie is completely unaware that she is the next victim once the killer sets his sights on her. The audience sees him lurking in windows and through glass doors, but Maddie is wrapped up in her work.

What makes the movie even scarier is how the killer uses Maddie to his advantage once he realizes she is deaf. 

It’s a total game of cat and mouse that will surely make you scream more than once. 

Grave Encounters (2011)

Creep (2015)

Lights Out (2016)

Here are some more recent releases that do an excellent job of keeping viewers on the edge of their seats.

Smack in the middle of the pandemic, an hour-long British indie film about a group of friends in quarantine hosting a séance over Zoom made its way to Shudder.

The entire movie takes place in a virtual meeting and was directed remotely with the actors coordinating their own effects and doing their own makeup because of the pandemic. 

It sounds ridiculous, and you might be wondering how on Earth a Zoom screen could be scary, but Host is so well done and absolutely merciless in its pacing.

Host plays on so many fears we were experiencing societally at that time, and watching it evokes a similar feeling to watching Paranormal Activity (2007) for the first time. 

Host will most definitely have you looking over your shoulder the next time you work from home, and if you love it, make sure you check out Dashcam from 2022, too.

In 2022, the most ridiculous trailer ever dropped for the movie Smile, it looked laughably bad, but in a shocking turn of events, the movie turned out to be great.

Smile follows therapist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) after an encounter with a patient named Laura who takes her life in front of Rose. From that point on, Rose believes that she inherited a curse from her patient, the very reason for the girl’s suicide, that both distorts her reality and will be the eventual cause of her death. 

Smile is dreadful from the second it starts, and for the entire film, there’s a metaphorical timer ticking over Rose’s head. The journey to break her curse takes her everywhere and in between, and it’s this desperate speed that preoccupies us and leaves us vulnerable to the scares, which the film is full of, by the way.

Rose also has dissociative tendencies caused by the trauma of her early childhood that draw the viewer in, another means to predispose the audience to surprises. 

If you liked It Follows, you’ll probably like this one. Bonus points because the film takes a total turn at the end. 

The Night House (2020)

IT Chapter One (2017)

You can’t go wrong with anything on this list. Just make sure someone else holds the popcorn. 

Featured photo: Still from The Evil Dead (1981) via Renaissance Pictures