Only 4 Horror Movies Made Before 1960 Are Actually Scary

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Robert-Mitchum looking at the camera in The-Night-of-the-Hunter

Published Aug 23, 2026, 2:40 PM EDT

Jeremy has more than 2700 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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Talking about the best horror movies ever made and the scariest horror movies ever made will turn up some of the same titles, but there’s unlikely to be 100% overlap. To put it simply, plenty of great horror movies are more entertaining or even comedic than outright scary, and then various classics that have defined the genre (especially early on) might not be especially frightening all these decades later. Calling versions of Frankenstein and Dracula from the early 1930s not particularly scary, for example, isn't the same as disparaging them or saying they're bad horror movies. If they were scary about 100 years ago, then that can be celebrated. The influence they’ve had can be praised. The parts of the movie that aren’t necessarily scary can still be admired. But you're very unlikely to have anyone watch either of those movies in the 2020s and go to bed feeling like sleep is going to be less comfortable than usual specifically because of what’s just been watched.

Then you get to 1960. The 1960s, as a decade, was a turning point for a ton of things, and the horror genre was one of them. There are movies attached to the New Hollywood movement (which began in the late 1960s) that are still frightening today. And earlier in the decade, you had some all-timers come out, like Psycho and Eyes Without a Face. Actually, both of them were specifically released in 1960, and it’s not hard to see why Psycho could still be shocking to someone who watches it today (somehow) unspoiled. And then Eyes Without a Face isn't as famous, but it still stands out for how alarming some of it is for something so old, with it being one of the first horror movies to have genuinely graphic imagery that’s stood the test of time uncomfortably well. If you want to go back further, you won’t find a lot by way of horror movies that still have the capacity to scare, though you might stumble across a few. The following four, for instance, stand out for being horror movies made before 1960 that are actually still scary.

4 'Diabolique' (1955)

Nicole and Christina hide behind a curtain, as if spying on someone

There are a fair few genuinely good psychological thrillers from this century that don’t fall a little short of Diabolique in terms of quality, with it being fairly well-known considering it’s a French-language horror/mystery/thriller film that’s more than 70 years old. Still, not so well-known that anyone should feel comfortable spoiling it, because there is quite a bit to spoil, which means, in the interest of keeping things vague, things will be… vague. Uh, yeah. Like, there are two women, and they're both connected to the same cruel man, since one’s his wife, and the other is his mistress. He’s good to neither of them, and so a plan is made to get rid of him.

The general atmosphere of Diabolique – and some key visual moments, specifically – do still feel unsettling.

Things get complicated after that point, with the psychological distress of the whole situation making it increasingly uncertain just what’s going on. If you watch Diabolique, you'll eventually know what’s going on, but the film takes its time playing all its cards. As it does all that, it keeps building dread and staying genuinely creepy in a way that feels very ahead of its time. You might not find it perfectly terrifying if you find a few camera movements and performances over-the-top, yet the general atmosphere of Diabolique – and some key visual moments, specifically – do still feel unsettling. Further, if you're let down by the horror, for whatever reason, then what you’ve got left will likely still impress as more of a mystery/thriller sort of thing.

3 'Faust' (1926)

Mephistopheles guiding Faust through the mist in Faust

Going way back to the silent era, here’s Faust, which is a century old, at the time of writing. It’s the movie here that’s most likely to get scoffed at, since it’s like, “How can something be 100 years old and still be genuinely scary?” It just is. There’s something to this one, with the way it’s shot and how it feels overall that’s more than a bit unsettling. It’s unlikely to be the story that terrifies anyone, since the narrative here is based on the legend of Faust, which goes back centuries. It’s a silent movie adaptation of that tale, being about one man being at the center of a wager between Mephisto and an Archangel, the former claiming he can corrupt the soul of that man: Faust.

Because of what Faust goes through and gets tempted by, Faust (1926) retains a certain power when it comes to being a psychological drama, and getting you to feel the frame of mind of its titular character. That stuff’s intense, and then plenty of imagery here (with some amazing special effects for their time, and maybe even of all time, too) adds to the genuine horror here. It was directed by F.W. Murnau, and it’s worth acknowledging two things: he directed the original Nosferatu (in 1922), and his Nosferatu is also among the scariest movies out there made during the silent era. But there’s something about Faust that feels even more surprising and successfully nightmarish. It’s old, but has an unusually good chance of getting under one’s skin, even if one was born decades upon decades after it first came out.

2 'The Night of the Hunter' (1955)

The Night of the Hunter is one of the quintessential oddities from cinema history. Like, it’s hard to even know where to begin. It’s a movie that doesn’t try to do literally everything tonally and genre-wise, but it probably tries to do most of those things, and it’s hard to tell how much of all that’s deliberate or accidental. It’s almost a very dark coming-of-age movie, it certainly feels like a horror film in parts, it’s a film noir kind of thing with a twist, it’s a thriller that gets very slow at certain points, parts are possibly darkly comedic, and then it’s also very heavily moralistic, or even a bit like a very dark fairy tale? It’s not a movie that feels well, or right in the head, if a movie can be right or wrong in the head. Yet that’s part of the reason it works. Or doesn’t work. Or just endures.

As for the plot, it’s simple, since it’s everything around the plot that gets complicated (it was like Charles Laughton knew he’d only ever direct a single movie, so he tried to put all his directorial ideas into the one thing). There are a pair of kids who get targeted by a preacher who’s really a serial killer, as he believes they're the only ones who know where their dead father stashed a large sum of money after a robbery. That man, Harry Powell, very much feels like the precursor to No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, and though he’s not shown doing as many violent things as Chigurh is shown to do, Powell is almost just as terrifying… when he’s not also being kind of cartoonish, or even silly, with how over-the-top he gets. Look, you won’t be scared by all of The Night of the Hunter, but you will probably be alarmed at a couple of points, and then exit the whole thing feeling slightly out of sorts, uneasy, a bit nauseous, or perhaps even all of the above.

1 'Godzilla' (1954)

Basically, the idea of nuclear weapons remains scary, now as they were 70 to 80 years ago, because otherwise, no one would've been rattled by the ending of 2023’s Oppenheimer. So, that’s the main reason why the very first Godzilla movie is going here. It’s all about a world dealing with the fact that nuclear weapons still exist, and more specifically, it’s focused on the fear in Japan as the only country that had such weapons used on it. You could make a horror or a psychological drama out of that without any monsters, and they did just that. Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear, for instance, is, well, about living in fear in Japan during those post-war years. But there is that monster to consider, when talking about Godzilla, and he is, in fact, known now as the king of the monsters (and rightfully so).

Godzilla has arguably been more threatening in a few subsequent Godzilla movies (like Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack), but there’s something particularly creepy about the way he’s designed and shot here, with the black-and-white visuals probably playing a part, too. Also, Godzilla (1954) lacks much by way of action or adventure elements, and even if you wanted to call it a thriller, it’s a fairly patiently paced one. The emphasis is on the sci-fi/horror stuff, and it’s probably more horror than anything else, because nuclear weapons are not from the science fiction genre, by any means. It’s more sci-fi because that technology gives birth to Godzilla, who is like a walking nuclear bomb, in many ways. This is all scratching the surface, and also kind of rushing over that surface, but there is so much here that still feels unnerving and relevant, so it’s fair to call Godzilla (1954) one of the most timelessly scary horror films ever made.