# What is the best slasher movie of all time?

> From the genre's foundational texts to self-aware reinventions and modern reboots, slasher fans have remarkably strong loyalties about which entry set the gold standard. Which is definitive?

*By YPB Team · Published June 3, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-slasher-movie-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Psycho (1960)** — score 1000/1000
   Alfred Hitchcock's boundary-shattering proto-slasher — killing its star in the first act, introducing Norman Bates, and making audiences afraid of showers forever.
2. **Scream (1996)** — score 947/1000
   Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's brilliant meta-slasher that both deconstructed and revitalized the genre, with Ghostface asking the rules while breaking them all.
3. **Halloween (1978)** — score 789/1000
   John Carpenter's lean, relentless original — Michael Myers stalking babysitters in Haddonfield — invented the slasher template with its POV camerawork, synth score, and Shape in white.
4. **Candyman (1992)** — score 710/1000
   Bernard Rose's atmospheric supernatural slasher set in Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project — summoning the hook-handed Candyman by mirror — fusing urban legend with social commentary.
5. **Halloween (2018)** — score 609/1000
   David Gordon Green's direct sequel to Carpenter's original — erasing all other sequels — Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode now a fortified survivalist facing one last confrontation with Myers.
6. **Sleepaway Camp (1983)** — score 473/1000
   Robert Hiltzik's low-budget summer-camp slasher cult classic, remembered for its eccentric characters, brutal kills, and one of the most shocking twist endings in horror history.
7. **Black Christmas (1974)** — score 284/1000
   Bob Clark's Canadian proto-slasher predating Halloween — a sorority house stalked by an obscene phone-calling killer — the template the subgenre would be built on.
8. **Peeping Tom (1960)** — score 284/1000
   Michael Powell's controversial 1960 British study of a serial killer who films his victims' dying moments, effectively ended Powell's career but is now recognized as one of the greatest horror films ever made.
9. **Friday the 13th (1980)** — score 284/1000
   Sean S. Cunningham's iconic summer-camp slasher that launched Jason Voorhees and a decade of imitators, beloved for its gory Tom Savini effects and a killer twist ending.
10. **Suspiria (1977)** — score 284/1000
   Dario Argento's hallucinatory Italian giallo-slasher set in a German dance academy, its supersaturated Technicolor palette and Goblin score making it the most visually radical horror film of its era.
11. **Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)** — score 284/1000
   Tobe Hooper's gritty, almost unbearable 1974 masterpiece of rural terror, introducing Leatherface and producing a film whose raw power still disturbs decades later.
12. **A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)** — score 1/1000
   Wes Craven's inventive slasher set in the dream world, introducing Freddy Krueger's razor-gloved horror and one of the genre's most terrifying concepts: you can die in your sleep.
13. **I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)** — score 1/1000
   Jim Gillespie's teen slasher with Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar pursued by a hook-wielding fisherman, a defining late-90s slasher and a post-Scream blockbuster.
14. **Urban Legend (1998)** — score 1/1000
   Jamie Blanks's campus slasher built around murders staged as famous urban legends, a sleek post-Scream entry with a strong cast and a neat final-act inversion.

Tags: movies, horror, classics, all-time