As chosen by critics AND fans
With Halloween coming up it seems like a good time to survey horror films. I followed the same methodology as my recent story combining critics’ and fans’ rankings to determine the best films of all-time.
For the critics’ list, I started with Rotten Tomatoes’ top 100 horror films. I don’t like the RT weighting formula, as it weights the aggregate critics’ scores by the number of reviews. This means a film with a score of, say, 97% can be ranked higher than one that critics unanimously agree is perfect (score 100%) if it gets sufficiently more reviews. That skews the playing field in favor of recent films which tend to have many more online reviews. In my reweighting, I prioritized the aggregate critics’ score then used RT’s ranking to separate films with the same score. That gave me the following top 20 horror films as rated by critics. The full reweighted RT top 100 is at the end of this story.
Certainly lots of creepy (in a good way) films there.
For the fan list, I started with IMDB’s top 100 horror films. When two films have the same score, IMDB ranks the more recent film higher. As horror is a genre that…
