Jyl’s Top Ten Horror Movies

Jyl gives us her top 10 spooky season movies and we’re not surprised at all with the outcome, or the fact that it’s a baker’s dozen…

Blog manager Tom asked each of us to send in our top ten horror movies of all time. If you know me at all, you know I can never pick a top ten favorite anything. My number one pick will always be the same. But the other nine (in particular order) could change at any given time based on my mood and vibes.

1. Poltergeist (1982)
My forever number one. My first horror movie long before I should have been watching horror movies. It’s creepy and somehow still feels cozy…like childhood nightmares wrapped in TV static.

2. IT (1990)
I love how it mixes real coming-of-age emotion with pure nightmare fuel. It’s campy, weirdly funny, and still manages to hit that primal childhood fear of something lurking in the drain.

3. Jaws (1975)
Honestly, nothing beats the suspense of not seeing the shark.

4. The Descent (2005)
Caves? Absolutely not. It’s tense, brutal, and the kind of horror that makes you forget to breathe.

5. Insidious (2010)
This one just feels haunted. The sound design, the jump scares, the demon — it gets me every time.

6. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
It’s all vibes and panic and started my love of found footage movies. You never see anything, but it still manages to feel completely hopeless and real.

7. The Witch (2015)
The atmosphere is unreal — every frame feels cursed. Bleak, slow, and hypnotic. Iconic.

8. Halloween (1978)
So simple, yet so effective. I love a good slasher! Horror fans will understand when I say this is a comfort movie for me.

9. Hereditary (2018)
It’s grief and guilt and total chaos. That one scene (you know the one) lives rent-free in my head forever.

10. Midsommar (2019)
Daylight horror feels so wrong. It’s beautiful, disturbing, and feels like a breakup set in hell.

And because I was never good at following directions, here are three more that I love and round this out to an appropriate thirteen:

11. Sinners
Beautiful and cinematic in the most unsettling way. Every frame feels intentional and you simply cannot look away.

12. American Psycho (2000)
Stylish, sharp, and completely unhinged. It’s capitalism, vanity, and violence all dressed in designer suits.

13. The Thing (1982)
The definition of paranoia. The isolation, the distrust, the body horror — it’s perfection in the snow.

Jyl Glenn is a writer, editor, formatter, anthologist, poet, and a medical-legal writer and consultant. Her lifelong love affair with horror began at a very early age when she was left unattended on the weekend Poltergeist debuted on HBO. And then she figured out she could read any horror book she liked as long as she hung out at the public library, even if the librarian deemed it not to be age appropriate. Jyl was born and raised in New York and now lives in Tulsa with her dog. She loves creepy art, dark poetry, and pink dinosaurs. When she isn’t dabbling in the macabre—she’s most likely asleep.

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions of the staff of Memento Mori Ink do not necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or Crystal Lake Publishing. Thank you for understanding.