THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS Is A Horror Movie, And So Are These 12 Films

Can you believe there are people out there in the year 2025 still claiming that Jaws isn’t a horror movie?! Well, scarily enough, there are. The 1975 creature feature not only changed the world of cinema, it also triggered a fear of sharks in generations to follow. Jaws follows all the beats of a classic monster movie, with the added fright factor coming from the fact that, unlike cryptids or kaiju, great white sharks are very, very real.

If you think Jaws isn’t a horror movie, swim out to the middle of the ocean until you can no longer touch the floor and start humming that ominous two note score to yourself. See what happens.

There’s an argument to be made that almost all of the late, great David Lynch’s vast cinematic ouvre could be classed as horror, or at least adjacent to it, even outside of his more objectively terrifying efforts like Eraserhead and Inland Empire. On paper, his 1986 magnum opus Blue Velvet is a neo-noir crime thriller that unearths the seedy sickness dwelling just beneath the manicured facade of suburban America. In practice, it’s a suffocating, psychosexual nightmare, with Dennis Hopper's performance as the seething psychopath Frank Booth scarier than any movie monster.

Blue Velvet’s influence can be seen in everything from the Silent Hill games to the music of Lana Del Rey, and almost 40 years after its release it remains more shocking and scary than a great deal many horror movies that followed it.

If you haven’t seen Park Chan-wook’s vengeance epic Oldboy, stop reading here, because you owe it to yourself to go in completely blind. The revenged-fuelled saga, the second in Park's Vengeance Trilogy,  is packed with violence and unsettling moments sure, but the true, abject horror of Oldboy comes from its nauseating reveal. Although billed as a thriller, Oldboy is pure psychological horror, keeping you guessing throughout its twists and turns until a grisly climax that'll leave you shocked and speechless.

The supernatural threats of werewolves, vampires, ghosts and demons all pale in comparison to the very real threat of nuclear war. In the BBC's 1984 television movie Threads, England is levelled by a strike that plunges the city of Sheffield into a devastating nuclear winter, complete with widespread radiation sickness, martial law and mass death and chaos. As bleak and brutal as any classic horror, Threads serves as a chilling warning that all that stands in the way of humanity and total destruction is the press of a button. 

Here at FANGORIA, we’ve been fighting the ‘Jurassic Park is a horror movie’ fight for years (we don’t put those dinos on the cover for nothing, after all), and don't intend on stopping any time soon. Don't let Spielberg's unrelenting positivity and John Williams' sweeping score fool you – Jurassic Park is scary. The terrifying introduction to the T-rex and the nail-biting anxiety of the stalking raptors scene could easily have been plucked straight from the greatest slasher movies – just switch out the stalker with a knife for a giant, hungry reptile.

Following their mainstream breakout Uncut Gems, the Safdie Brothers are quickly becoming synonymous with “anxiety cinema”, the type that makes your heart pound, palms sweat and feel like you're on the brink of a full blown panic attack. If that's not horror, we don't know what is. 2017's Good Time, starring Robert Pattinson as a small-time criminal on the run after escaping arrest for a botched bank robbery, is a thundering thrill-ride of palpitating unease that'll manage to scare the bejesus out of you without any the use of any ghosts, ghouls or jumpscares – especially the scene where Pattinson's Connie pours an entire bottle of LSD into an unsuspecting security guard's mouth. Talk about a bad trip.

Something must have been in the air in England in the 1970s. While our transatlantic cousins were enjoying the squeaky-clean, family-friendly fare of Disney, us Brits were watching feral bunnies tear each other to shreds in the shockingly graphic “children's movie” Watership Down. Somehow landing a U rating at release (the British equivalent to a G), in 2012 the BBFC confirmed complaints from angry parents about the suitability of Watership Down “almost every year since its classification.” It's not just the animated violence that makes Watership Down so frightening – the film (based on a 1972 novel of the same name) deals with themes surrounding power and control, fascism, and confronting mortality. All scary stuff.

Teenagers are terrifying at the best of times, but especially when they're masking a murderous side. Starring Ezra Miller as sociopathic teen Kevin Khatchadourian and Tilda Swinton as his long-suffering (yet arguably culpable) mother Eva, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a parents' nightmare come true, and one that unfortunately only further cements its status as a horror movie with every passing year.

Just like war, the dark realities of addiction are scarier than anything conjured up by fiction. Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream follows four addicts as they descend deeper and deeper into dependence on their drug of choice, eventually leading to total physical, mental, emotional and physical collapse portrayed in excruciating, sobering detail. Need we remind you that Merriam-Webster defines “horror” as “painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay” – all qualities that Requiem for a Dream has in bucketloads.

Have you ever been stuck at a social gathering you really don't want to be at, trying desperately to avoid a person you really don't want to see? If so, then you'll understand exactly why Shiva Baby is a horror movie. The “comedy drama” (yeah, sure) is every socially anxious person's worst nightmare, bolstered by a hilarious lead performance from Rachel Sennott, who understands that the line between laughter and crying is a very thin one.

Upon watching Tár, eagle-eared viewers might have noticed a familiar scream punctuating the workout of Cate Blanchett's shamed conductor and composer Lydia Tár. Todd Field's orchestral drama makes use of a soundbite (allegedly used without permission, sadly) from The Blair Witch Project, notably, the bloodcurdling scream of Heather Donahue as she's lost in the woods stalked by the titular witch. The use of the scream only adds to the notion that Tár is an eerie ghost story, made even more apparent by the lingering specter that can be spotted lurking around the corners of some scenes…

Much like David Lynch, there's an argument to be made that every Stanley Kubrick movie has an undercurrent of horror to it, from the warmongering violence of Full Metal Jacket to the erotic mysteries of Eyes Wide Shut. 2001: A Space Odyssey is existential horror at its finest, asking us to consider what it means to be human, and warning us, with increasingly unsettling relevance, of the dangers of giving too much of ourselves over to artificial intelligence. These enduring themes and anxiety-inducing production design make 2001: A Space Odyssey a viewing experience that's all at once beautiful and horrifying – much like being a human.

Rather than asking what makes The Silence of the Lambs a horror movie, the question should probably be what doesn't make The Silence of the Lambs a horror movie? The story of FBI Agent Clarice Starling on the hunt for serial killer Buffalo Bill is terrifying enough even without the presence of the serpentine Dr. Lecter pulling the strings behind the scenes. Sir Anthony Hopkins didn't give the performance of a lifetime just for you to deny his place in the canon of iconic horror villains.