The Scariest Movies of 21st Century

It’s difficult to really make a great horror film while setting it in modern times. We now live in an age in which we all have mobile phones, devices which can put us straight through to the police while we’re hiding from an axe-murderer in the woods. In a world in which help can be contacted at the simple click of a button, suspense can be tricky to create. And to have the phone’s signal be unavailable or the battery drained of power is now considered a cliché to roll one’s eyes at. Horror films date all the way back to the late 1890s, really getting its blood pumping in the ’20s and ’30s, a time when Lon Chaney’s goofy make-up in 1925′s “The Phantom of the Opera” had audience members fainting in cinema screenings. Nowadays, we look back at this and laugh, as each new decade sees filmmakers upping the ante and desensitising us to past eras of horror. Currently, it seems to be a popular trend to just cut up your protagonists, focus on their shrieks of anguish, spray some blood on the camera lens, reveal some surgically enhanced tits, and call what you’ve made a horror. With all its history of mixed attempts at shocking and horrifying, the genre is increasingly difficult to sustain and enliven while keeping it fresh, hence we keep getting these same tired old gore celebrations. It’s true that originality comes only so often from this area of filmmaking, but there are some contemporary horrors that stand above all else of the times. And since the turn of the 21st Century, there have been some right corkers worthy of recognition as slices of gruelling terror. Here is my list of the top 10 horror flicks since the year 2000.