The Best 1960s Horror Movies Ranked

A spaceship is sent to Mars after an alien distress signal is picked up. They find one survivor, but when a crew member is found drained of blood it's evident they have rescued a bloodsucking monster. Uses footage from Encounter in Space (1963).

A mentally unbalanced man is obsessed with the idea that a black cat is possessed. He tortures and kills it. Later, he comes to believe that the cat has returned from the dead to kill him.

An undertaker befriends a pair of motorcycle-riding, knife-wielding, psycho restaurant owners who kill people for body parts to use in their blue-plate daily specials.

A corpse has 24 hours to mastermind a good deed without leaving his crypt, to go "up there" and have his youth restored.

The relatives of a recently deceased man gather at his eerie mansion but before his will can be read, they start being murdered one by one.

A man who loves to travel, travels to an island where a mad doctor is creating zombies.

In this dark comedy, a Yankee goes to visit a family of British eccentrics to ask for the hand of one of their daughters in marriage. He soon finds himself in the midst of a really odd family. One of them talks like Bela Lugosi, another believes herself to be a vampire, while a third is locked away in a padded cell. Another family member is thrilled when he finally invents a horseless carriage (50 years after Ford), and the family grandfather is found reading Playboy just before he dies. Trouble begins when members of the family begin to be mysteriously murdered. The American suitor must then discover which member of the strange family is in line to inherit the family fortune.

Experimental gothic short, adapted from Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Pit and the Pendulum'.

In 1880, Sir Robert Cargrave, a London physician known for his experimental work in paralysis treatment, is summoned to Gorslava by the mysterious Baron Sardonicus—who is now married to Cargrave's former wife, Maude—to treat his disfigurement. When Cargrave arrives, he finds the masked baron is a cruel sadist who has threatened to harm Maude if he is not successfully cured.

Women are being tortured to death with various devices in the dungeon of an old castle by a mysterious, hooded figure who may be a notorious executioner from medieval times.

In the shadow of Castle Dracula, the Prince of Darkness is revived by blood trickling from the head-wound of an unconscious priest attempting exorcism. And once more fear and terror strikes Transylvania as the undead Prince of Darkness stalks the village of Keineneburg to ensnare victims and satisfy his evil thirst.

A young sailor falls in love with a mysterious woman performing as a mermaid on the local pier. As they become entwined, he comes to suspect the woman might be a real mermaid who lures men to a watery death during the full moon. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2007.

A special sideshow torture exhibit has the power, according to showman Dr Diabolo, to warn people of foreseeable evil. One by one, skeptics stand before the Fate Atropos to preview the greed and violence hiding behind their respectable façades.

A woman trapped in a home elevator is terrorized by a group of vicious hoodlums.

An undertaker who hasn't had any 'customers' in a long time is forced to pay one year's back-rent. To get money he starts to kill people, which brings absurd results.

In late 19th century London, a woman weds a necrophiliac doctor whose first wife died under mysterious circumstances - and who might be returning from the grave to torment her successor.

In the eerie village of Holfen, a series of gruesome murders sparks rumors of a centuries-old curse, with a noble heir caught between suspicion and his own dark urges.

Three tales of supernatural horror include a woman plagued by threatening phone calls, a family targeted by vampiric monsters, and a deceased medium who wreaks havoc upon the living.

An overweight lab technician with low self esteem, brought on by his dominant mother, becomes a serial killer of female nurses.

A woman seeks to avenge her father's death using a local dancer, with long poisonous fingernails, to do her bidding.

A teenager and his girlfriend must save the world from "eye" aliens after their attempts to convince authorities of an invasion fall on deaf ears.

A warlock burned at the stake comes back and takes over the body of his great grandson to take his revenge on the descendents of the villages that burned him.

An alcoholic actress, her personal assistant, and their pilot are downed on a secluded isle by bad weather, where a renegade Nazi scientist is using ocean life to develop a solvent for human flesh. The tiny flesh-eating sea critters that result certainly give our heroes a run for their money - and lives.

A boy goes missing in a bigoted town and a mysterious local family becomes a target of suspicion. With their lives threatened, it's revealed that they are actually an ancient supernatural commune, stationed there to guard humanity from evil.

Six people are lured into a small Deep South town for a Centennial celebration where the residents kill them one by one as revenge for the town's destruction during the Civil War.

The reclusive Dr. Zorba has died and left his sprawling mansion to his nephew Cyrus and his family. They will need to search the house to find the doctor's fortune, but along with the property itself, they have also inherited the occultist's collection of thirteen ghosts.

Sexy nightclub dancers get trapped in a dark, creepy castle for the night.

A former vaudeville child star viciously torments her paraplegic sister in their decaying Hollywood mansion.

England, 1645. The cruel civil war between Royalists and Parliamentarians that is ravaging the country causes an era of chaos and legal arbitrariness that allows unscrupulous men to profit by exploiting the absurd superstitions of the peasants; like Matthew Hopkins, a monster disguised as a man who wanders from town to town offering his services as a witch hunter.

After a warehouse fire, museum director Grove and assistant Pimm find everything destroyed, only one statue withstood the fire mysteriously undamaged. Suddenly Grove is lying dead on the ground, killed by the statue? Pimm finds out that the cursed statue has been created by Rabbi Loew in 16th century and will withstand every human attempt to destroy it. Pimm decides to use it to his own advantage.

An attorney arrives at a castle to settle the estate of its recently deceased owner. The owner's wife and daughter reveal that he was someone who was able to summon the souls of ancient plague victims and, in fact, his spirit was roaming the castle at that very moment. Soon occupants of the castle begin to die off in gruesome, violent ways.

A young woman is driving alongside a lake. She has an accident and the car plunges into the water. Her body is then possessed by the spirit of an 18th-century witch who was killed by local villagers, and is bent on avenging herself on them.

A crazed scientist keeps the heads of Nazi war criminals alive until he can find appropriate bodies on which to attach them so he can revive the Third Reich.

A one-handed madman (he lost the hand while escaping a hanging) uses various detachable devices as murder weapons to gain revenge on those he believes have wronged him.

A demented elderly woman has her mentally incompetent son kill and scalp various young women to use their hair for her wig shop while a persistent co-ed tries to link various killings on a local Florida college campus to them.

A painter of morbid art, who becomes a murderous vampire by night and kills young women, attempts a daytime relationship with a woman who resembles a former love and is also the sister of one of his victims.

An aging hypnotist creates a device that allows the user to control the mind of another person, but his wife abuses its power by manipulating a younger man to commit evil acts.

Five train passengers are joined by a mysterious fortuneteller who offers to read Tarot. A quintet of stories unfold: an architect returns to his ancestral home to find a vengeful werewolf; a doctor suspects his new wife is a vampire; an intelligent vine takes over a house; a jazz musician plagiarises music from a voodoo ceremony; and a pompous art critic is pursued by a disembodied hand.

A plastic surgeon and his nurse join a bizarre circus to escape from the police. Here he befriends deformed women and transforms them for his "Temple of Beauty". However, when they threaten to leave, they meet with mysterious accidents.

Esoterica collector Dr Maitland buys an unusual skull from his ordinary source; the artifact is what remains of the Marquis De Sade. Much too soon, Maitland discovers that the skull is turning him into a frenzied killer.

In a dilapidated rural mansion, the last generation of the degenerate, inbred Merrye family lives with the inherited curse of a disease that causes them to mentally regress from the age of 10 or so on as they physically develop. The family chauffeur looks out for them and covers up their indiscretions. Trouble comes when greedy distant relatives and their lawyer arrive to dispossess the family of its home.

A group of sinners involved in interconnected tales of murder, revenge, deceit and adultery all meet at the Gates of Hell.

Dr. Bill Cortner and his fiancée, Jan Compton, are driving to his lab when they get into a horrible car accident. Compton is decapitated. But Cortner is not fazed by this seemingly insurmountable hurdle. His expertise is in transplants, and he is excited to perform the first head transplant. Keeping Compton's head alive in his lab, Cortner plans the groundbreaking yet unorthodox surgery. First, however, he needs a body.

In 1930s Prague, a Czech cremator who firmly believes cremation relieves one from earthly suffering is drawn inexorably to Nazism.

During WWII, Germans obtain the immortal heart of Frankenstein's monster and transport it to Japan to prevent it being seized by the Allies. Kept in a Hiroshima laboratory, it is seeming lost when the United States destroys the city with the atomic bomb. Years later a wild boy is discovered wandering the streets of the city alone, born of the immortal heart.

A young man visits his fiancé's estate to discover that her wheelchair-bound scientist father has discovered a meteorite that emits mutating radiation rays that have turned the plants in his greenhouse to giants. When his own wife falls victim to this mysterious power, the old man takes it upon himself to destroy the glowing object with disastrous results.

In a 15th century village, a woman is accused of witchcraft and put to death. Her beautiful older daughter knows the real reason for the execution lies in the lord's sexual desire for her mother.

After landing on a mysterious planet, a team of astronauts begin to turn on each other, swayed by the uncertain influence of the planet and its strange inhabitants.

In the sleepy suburbs of Miami, seemingly normal Egyptian immigrant Fuad Ramses runs a successful catering business. He also murders young women and plans to use their body parts to revive the goddess Ishtar. The insane Ramses hypnotizes a socialite in order to land a job catering a party for her debutante daughter, Suzette Fremont, and turns the event into an evening of gruesome deaths, bloody dismemberment and ritual sacrifice.

When a cynical journalist accepts a wager that he won't survive the night in a haunted castle, it unlocks an odyssey of sexual torment, undead vengeance, and a dark seductress who surrenders the gravest of pleasures.

Once hounded from his castle by outraged villagers for creating a monstrous living being, Baron Frankenstein returns to Karlstaad. High in the mountains they stumble on the body of the creature, perfectly preserved in the ice. He is brought back to life with the help of the hypnotist Zoltan who now controls the creature. Can Frankenstein break Zoltan's hypnotic spell that incites the monster to commit these horrific murders or will Zoltan induce the creature to destroy its creator?

An architect and his wife are staying in an empty castle in California. They are joined by an unhappily married lawyer and his wife. Things start getting strange when they spot a half man/half beast prowling around the house and keep seeing a headless woman wandering the grounds.

Radioactive waste dumped off the coastline creates mutant monsters. The beasts attack slumber parties, beaches, tourists, and terrorize a waterfront community as a scientist, his daughter, her boyfriend and the local police try to find a way to stop them.

An aging, reclusive Southern belle plagued by a horrifying family secret descends into madness after the arrival of a lost relative.

An artist grows distant from his new wife as an irrational fear of premature burial consumes him.

Eleven years ago, the wealthy Ashby family was shattered when Mr and Mrs Ashby died in an airplane crash and their grieving son Tony committed suicide. All who remains is cruel Simon, an alcoholic in desperate need of funds; his mentally fragile sister Eleanor; and his protective aunt Harriet. Simon is just weeks away from receiving his inheritance, but there's a hitch in his plans when the long-believed dead Tony suddenly arrives.

Sir James Forbes arrives in a remote Cornish village to identify a mysterious plague afflicting the population. He discovers that one of the squires is a disciple of Haitian witchcraft and using dark magic to resurrect the dead. As the plan to create undead servants unravels, the squire unleashes his zombie army on the unsuspecting village.

Whilst vacationing in the Carpathian Mountain, two couples stumble across the remains of Count Dracula's castle. The Count's trusted servant kills one of the men, suspending the body over the Count's ashes so that the blood drips from the corpse and saturates the blackened remains. The ritual is completed, the Count revived and his attentions focus on the dead man's wife who is to become his partner; devoted to an existence of depravity and evil.

Disowned in the past by his father, Kurt Menliff, a cruel and sadistic nobleman, returns to the family castle to reclaim his inheritance.

In Whitewood, Massachusetts, a presumed witch places a curse on the town before she is burned at the stake. 300 years later, a college student arrives and checks into the mysterious Raven's Inn to research the town's history with witchcraft.

A noted professor and his dim-witted apprentice fall prey to their inquiring vampires, while on the trail of the ominous damsel in distress.

Isabella, a young model, is murdered by a mysterious masked figure at a fashion house in Rome. When her diary, which details the house employees' many vices, disappears, the masked killer begins killing off all the models in and around the house to find it.

Convinced that his family is tainted by generations of evil, Roderick Usher is hellbent on stopping his sister Madeline’s wedding to prevent the cursed Usher bloodline from expanding. When her fiancé Philip Winthrop arrives at the crumbling estate to claim his bride, Roderick goes to ruthless—even deadly—lengths to keep them apart.

A young teacher on her way to a position in Transylvania helps a young man escape the shackles his mother has put on him. In so doing she innocently unleashes the horrors of the undead once again on the populace, including those at her school for ladies. Luckily for some, Dr. Van Helsing is already on his way.

The powers of good are pitted against the forces of evil as the Duc de Richelieu wrestles with the charming but deadly Satanist, Mocata, for the soul of his friend. Mocata has the knowledge and the power to summon the forces of darkness and, as the Duc de Richelieu and his friends remain within the protected pentacle, they are subjected to ever-increasing horror until thundering hooves herald the arrival of the Angel of Death.

When a disease turns all of humanity into the living dead, the last man on earth becomes a reluctant vampire hunter.

A child conceived by a mute servant girl transforms from an innocent youth to a killer beast at night with uncontrollable urges.

Taking its title from an archaic Japanese word meaning "ghost story," this anthology adapts four folk tales. A penniless samurai marries for money with tragic results. A man stranded in a blizzard is saved by Yuki the Snow Maiden, but his rescue comes at a cost. Blind musician Hoichi is forced to perform for an audience of ghosts. An author relates the story of a samurai who sees another warrior's reflection in his teacup.

In a small English village everyone suddenly falls unconscious. When they awake every woman of child bearing age is pregnant. The resulting children have the same strange blond hair, eyes and a strong connection to each other.

In the sixteenth century, Francis Barnard travels to Spain to clarify the strange circumstances of his sister's death after she had married the son of a cruel Spanish Inquisitor.

Verden Fell is shattered after the death of his lovely wife. But, after an unexpected encounter with Lady Rowena Trevanion, Fell soon finds himself married again. Nevertheless, his late wife's spirit seems to hang over the dilapidated abbey that Fell shares with his new bride. Lady Rowena senses that something is amiss and, when she investigates, makes a horrifying discovery -- learning that Fell's dead wife is closer than she ever imagined possible.

Dr. Génessier is riddled with guilt after an accident that he caused disfigures the face of his daughter, the once beautiful Christiane, who outsiders believe is dead. Dr. Génessier, along with accomplice and laboratory assistant Louise, kidnaps young women and brings them to the Génessier mansion. After rendering his victims unconscious, Dr. Génessier removes their faces and attempts to graft them on to Christiane's.

A European prince terrorizes the local peasantry while using his castle as a refuge against the "Red Death" plague that stalks the land.

Mary Henry ends up the sole survivor of a fatal car accident through mysterious circumstances. Trying to put the incident behind her, she moves to Utah and takes a job as a church organist. But her fresh start is interrupted by visions of a fiendish man. As the visions begin to occur more frequently, Mary finds herself drawn to the deserted carnival on the outskirts of town. The strangely alluring carnival may hold the secret to her tragic past.

While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins an affair with a neighbor who survived the war, Hachi. The mother disapproves and, when she can't steal Hachi for herself, tries to scare her daughter-in-law with a mysterious mask from a dead samurai.

Thousands of birds flock into a seaside town and terrorize the residents in a series of deadly attacks.

A vengeful witch, Asa Vajda, and her fiendish servant, Igor Jauvitch, return from the grave and begin a bloody campaign to possess the body of the witch's beautiful look-alike descendant: Katia. Only a handsome doctor with the help of family members stand in her way.

Beautiful young manicurist Carole suffers from androphobia (the pathological fear of interaction with men). When her sister and roommate, Helen, leaves their London flat to go on an Italian holiday with her married boyfriend, Carole withdraws into her apartment. She begins to experience frightful hallucinations, her fear gradually mutating into madness.

A young governess for two children becomes convinced that the house and grounds are haunted by ghosts and that the children are being possessed.

Dr. John Markway recruits three strangers for a sleep-disorder study at the eerie and isolated Hill House. It soon becomes clear his real interest lies in the mansion itself and its sinister history, as they are forced to confront the nature of its horror…

Loner Mark Lewis works at a film studio during the day and, at night, takes racy photographs of women. Also he's making a documentary on fear, which involves recording the reactions of victims as he murders them. He befriends Helen, the daughter of the family living in the apartment below his, and he tells her vaguely about the movie he is making.

A ragtag group barricade themselves in an old Pennsylvania farmhouse to remain safe from a horde of flesh-eating ghouls ravaging the Northeast.

A young couple, Rosemary and Guy, moves into an infamous New York apartment building, known by frightening legends and mysterious events, with the purpose of starting a family.

When larcenous real estate clerk Marion Crane goes on the lam with a wad of cash and hopes of starting a new life, she ends up at the notorious Bates Motel, where manager Norman Bates cares for his housebound mother.