Top 10 European Horror Movies

European horror definitely operates on a different wavelength than better-known American films, which offer more easily comprehensible plots and focus somewhat more on developing characters and presenting a version of reality, albeit one with supernatural occurrences. Filmmakers across the Atlantic don’t care as much about all that, content to swarm audiences with imagery and sound that affect the senses but don’t necessarily coalesce in the mind. And the continuum of violence and sex is much more skewed toward blood in the United States and skin in Europe. European horror offers a different but equally rewarding experience, and there are plenty of masterfully made genre films across the spectrum of subject matter. This lists includes only one entry per filmmaker, lest the top five entirely comprise Lucio Fulci films.

10. Let the Right One In (2008; dir: Tomas Alfredson)
Country: Sweden

This Swedish product, based on a successful novel, is easily one of the most artful and satisfying vampire movies to come out in the 2000s. The focus is on a lonely child vampire and her desperate search for companionship in a world filled with creepy men trying to prey on the underage predator. It’s beautifully atmospheric and achingly melancholic, yet disturbing and filled with plenty of viciousness. It’s one of the best at portraying a vampire as protagonist without losing the bloodthirsty edge.

9. Vampyres (1974; dir: José Ramón Larraz)
Country: England/Spain

Speaking of vicious vamps, this British film from Spanish director Larraz features a couple of beautiful women with absolutely voracious thirsts for blood. It satisfies European vampire film requirements for moodiness and nudity while significantly amplifying the carnage. Vampyres is gorgeous and sensual and all that, but never forgets, as its contemporaries sometimes do, that it’s a damn horror movie.

8. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974; dir: Jorge Grau)
Country: Spain/Italy

Grau’s zombie masterpiece was originally intended as just a full-color cash-in on George A. Romero’s original masterpiece, but it ended up being very much its own thing and a progenitor to the gorier Italian zombie cinema of Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, Bruno Mattei, and others. While filled with plentiful gut-gnawing, Grau’s wonderful film has the distinction of being one of the most atmospheric odes to the living dead, feeling very much like a hazy perpetual nightmare.

7. Martyrs (2008; dir: Pascal Laugier)
Country: France

Martyrs is the pinnacle of the New French Extremity movement that rolled out in the early 21st century with films that wrapped commentary on France’s political and cultural polemics into extremely visceral packages that punished the senses. Martyrs is perhaps the most thoughtful and nastiest of the pack. It’s hard to get through since it’s essentially 50 minutes of two young women suffering terrible tragedy then 50 minutes of one of them being beaten as close to the death as possible, but it’s completely unforgettable.

6. Lips of Blood (1975; dir: Jean Rollin)
Country: France

Lips of Blood functions as a remarkable reflection of Jean Rollin’s legacy to this point in his career, and it’s perhaps his most accomplished work. It encompasses all the grander themes you expect from his stuff: mysterious, cloud-cloaked landscapes; oft-nude vampiresses; a man trying to fix broken bonds of love; a castle engulfed by mist. The film has the body of gothic horror with the soul of the fantastique, and it’s a fascinating mashup that none of Rollin’s other movies balances as skillfully.

5. Cannibal Holocaust (1980; dir: Ruggero Deodato)
Country: Italy

This Italian horror shocker is the prototype for the found footage subgenre. Deodato’s film is notorious for its depiction of realistic (but fake) human deaths that incurred actual murder charges against Deodato and real animal deaths, and it’s all made even more queasy by Riz Ortolani’s beautiful and practically happy score, which, juxtaposed with the carnage on screen, is absolutely haunting. This is not a movie for everyone, but it’s undeniably effective and will scar your soul.

4. Xtro (1983; dir: Harry Bromley Davenport)
Country: England

Harry Bromley Davenport’s best-known work is a real oddity, going for an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach that includes a creepy backwards-crawling spider alien, a woman giving violent birth to a fully grown man, human-sized toy soldiers, toy tanks with flesh-tearing firepower, an evil clown, a panther, and morphing eggs. This film has the distinction of being one of the most eccentric horror movies ever made and everything about it stands alone. Bromley Davenport’s bizarre synth score is also notable. Xtro isn’t for everyone, but for the people who dig it, it’s something special.

3. Possession (1981; dir: Andrzej Zulawski)
Country: Poland/Germany

Zulawski’s insane mashup of Lovecraftian creatures, bizarre sexual fetishes, serial killing, white polyester-clad Caucasian martial artists, espionage, and commentary on divorce and the Berlin wall is one of the most singular movie viewing experiences one can endure. Actors Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill have seemingly been replaced by doppelgangers from a different universe unfamiliar with how human beings are generally represented on screen. Possession is frightening, unsettling, funny, weird, and probably brilliant.

2. Cemetery Man (1994; dir: Michele Soavi)
Country: Italy

Cemetery Man (aka Dellamorte Dellamore) is one of the most unique products from Italian cinema. Based on the comic book, Dylan Dog, and starring pre-Hollywood Rupert Everett, the film is a very funny, very thoughtful, and very ethereal work of art under the guise of a zombie flick. Yeah, there are zombies and there’s gore, but there’s also a disembodied head that leaps through the air, a resurrected motorcyclist that was buried with his bike for some reason, surrealism, a heavy dose of existentialism, and Anna Falchi, for God’s sake.

1. City of the Living Dead (1980; dir: Lucio Fulci)

Country: Italy

This spot could have easily gone to The Beyond, but I personally love Fulci’s first film in the Gates of Hell trilogy just a bit more. It’s filled to the gory brim with eerie dread, guts, and the best music in the annals of the horror genre, courtesy of the maestro Fabio Frizzi. The best zombie movies are engulfed by atmospherics, and City of the Living Dead is defined by its palpably nightmarish ambience. You don’t go Fulci expecting masterful storytelling, but few top this for macabre artistry.