Only 3 Horror Movies Are Scarier Than 'The Exorcist'

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Published Mar 25, 2026, 4:54 PM EDT

Jeremy has more than 2300 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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Even if The Exorcist doesn’t entirely need an introduction, it’s going to get one here regardless. It’s one of those genre-defining horror movies that people might tell you is overpraised at this point, which is perhaps inevitable when something has a reputation of being “the scariest movie ever.” It’s a big thing to hear, and if you're coming to The Exorcist after who knows how much time spent hearing such praise heaped upon it, you could well be disappointed once you actually get to it and it doesn’t scare you more than any other movie has ever scared you before. Maybe that’s okay, because what’s scary is subjective in a way not dissimilar to humor; the idea of something being funny to some, but not all. And all that makes it hard to say “The Exorcist is not the scariest movie ever made, because these other movies exist,” but… well, you saw the title. You know what you're in for.

The Exorcist starts as a drama and becomes more of a horror movie as it goes along, being about a mother who has to deal with increasingly strange behavior exhibited by her daughter, which eventually makes her fear her daughter’s possessed, and that leads to – you guessed it – an exorcism. But it’s a slow burn toward that exorcism-related stuff, and before it dives fully into the supernatural/religious horror, there’s a lot of psychological drama/horror. It’s scary on multiple fronts, and it’s also genuinely intense because you're really made to care about the characters and the situation they're in, which sets it apart from lots of horror movies of a more carefree or popcorn-munching persuasion. Some horror movies don’t want you to care about the characters too much, because then it ceases to be enjoyable to see bad things happen to them. That whole notion of horror being at its scariest when bad things happen to decent and/or normal people was one thing kept in mind while trying to pick out horror movies genuinely scarier than The Exorcist. The ones below possibly are, but again, this is all a bit subjective, more so than most rankings. If you agree that all three picks here are genuinely scarier than The Exorcist, honestly, that would be kind of surprising. A pleasant/welcome surprise, sure, but a surprise nonetheless.

3 'Lake Mungo' (2008)

There are other found footage horror movies that deserve an honorable mention, before talking about Lake Mungo, with The Blair Witch Project probably being the most noteworthy (also Cannibal Holocaust and Noroi: The Curse, the former for being so surprisingly influential, and the latter for being so creatively creepy). Still, there’s just something special about Lake Mungo and how uniquely unsettling it is. It helps that it’s about grief in a way that feels remarkably visceral and raw, before you even get to the horror stuff, because at the center of Lake Mungo is a family that has to deal with the death of one of its members: a 16-year-old girl. She drowns under mysterious circumstances, and then various things happen to – and around – her surviving family members, which gets them slowly thinking something supernatural might be happening, with a progression toward that being more and more likely in a way that somewhat recalls the structure and overall narrative of The Exorcist. It’s psychological and supernatural horror all at once. Psychonatural horror? Superlogical? Hmm. Former’s not great, but is better.

Lake Mungo... achieves what’s going to be dubbed here as the “I don’t want to turn off all the lights in the house, even though it’s time for bed” effect.

That’s before properly diving into what’s perhaps the thing that makes Lake Mungo much scarier than your average horror movie: its use of found footage/mockumentary horror conventions. It’s one of those films where it’s easier than usual to forget you're watching a work of fiction. Not entirely; nothing can ever really fool you completely, once you're not a kid anymore, at least. It would take something unbelievably realistic to genuinely fool most people 100%, but Lake Mungo comes close enough to fooling you entirely that it achieves what’s going to be dubbed here as the “I don’t want to turn off all the lights in the house, even though it’s time for bed” effect. There’s probably a catchier name for that, but if you can watch Lake Mungo (preferably at night) and then feel completely normal going about your before-bed routine (including switching off all the lights and possibly making the last part of that “journey” in pitch darkness), then you're made of tougher stuff than this writer. Lake Mungo is the sort of thing that might go through your mind whenever you're in an open space late at night, because its most effectively traumatic scene plays on a primal fear of darkness, with that scene being really unshakable. There are also so many simple yet eerie moments here, with most of the film being low-key in a manner that really makes it linger in your mind once it’s all over. You'll probably get startled once (there’s only one really big traditional jump scare, but it’s a brutal one), but then everything stands a good chance at sticking with you and remaining fixed in your mind, regardless of whether you want memories of Lake Mungo there or not.

2 'The Shining' (1980)

It feels easy to introduce The Shining as a movie based on a Stephen King novel, but some people would push back against that notion, or at least would rather hear you call it something “loosely based” on a Stephen King novel. It takes the same premise as the book – a struggling writer takes his wife and young son with him on a job that involves looking after a hotel during its offseason, and some strange things happen, to put it mildly – but doesn’t follow everything that happens in the source material. It’s possible to enjoy both, and they're sometimes scary for similar reasons, but there’s an added sense of coldness to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and perhaps slightly more emphasis on the psychological horror side of things than the ghost stuff. There’s still a marriage of both, though, and that’s what counts the most. Also, for as great as King’s novel is, you'd be hard-pressed to find too many people who feel the more faithful miniseries adaptation of The Shining is genuinely better (and scarier) than the 1980 movie.

The characters are a little different in appearance and the way they act in the film for sure, if you want to go beyond some of the narrative changes (the bolder ones come near the movie’s end), but for this movie, the acting is great. The Shining also looks incredible throughout, as you'd expect for a Stanley Kubrick movie, and it’s all so good that it makes it feel like a shame that the filmmaker only dived fully into the horror genre once (that being said, other movies of his are indeed horrific and disturbing at times). There’s also something uniquely troubling about how infamously off so much of The Shining feels, with the hotel setting being uncanny and sometimes outright impossible, in terms of how it’s designed. That setting – and the movie as a whole – feel designed to make you feel just a bit out of sorts the whole time, doing so right from the movie's start, and so while the big moments are successfully scary and deservedly iconic, the overall feel of the film is just as praiseworthy. In that sense, it’s a bit like The Exorcist. That’s a movie with big/wild/in-your-face moments, too, but a pervasively unnerving atmosphere and feel throughout that also proves vital in making everything scary.

1 'Hereditary' (2018)

Yes, Hereditary is a fairly recent release in the overall scheme of things, and also yes, it’s proven to be one of those horror movies some see as overhyped, owing to how blown away people were initially, which raised the expectations of those not able to see Hereditary ASAP. This seems to happen with modern horror movies more than most other genres, so some might take issue with Hereditary being there; those who haven’t already had an issue with The Shining being here, maybe. Again: subjective! And saying something is scarier than The Exorcist is not the same as suggesting The Exorcist isn't scary.

Whatever. As for Hereditary, it is, like all the other movies already mentioned, about a family dealing with horrible – and eventually horrific – things. There’s a lot of grief early on in Hereditary, and more later, though some of it comes about in an intentionally jarring and surprising manner, so much so that it still feels wrong to explain what Hereditary is genuinely about after its first act, even if the movie’s been out for about eight years, at the time of writing. It was the first feature film Ari Aster directed, and he might never top it, but that’s okay (his later films have all been interesting and, post-Midsommar, he has been steering away from the horror genre a little more). Hereditary can also be compared to Lake Mungo in the sense that jump scares are kept to a minimum, so that when something does want to startle you, it is genuinely startling. And all the horror that wants to be a little more subtle and under-the-skin works uncomfortably well, too, with certain sequences, shots, and even just ideas from Hereditary proving hard to shake after you’ve finished watching it.