Horror Movies That Keep You On The Edge Of Your Seat From Start To Finish, Ranked

Sure, The Descent is a nightmare for the claustrophobic among us - filmed almost entirely in tight cave sets, often lit only with flashlights, flares, and other tools the film's group of spelunkers would have had on hand - but even before they get into the caves, things start out from a pretty intense early shock.

Once they do make their way underground, they're faced with tight quarters, grievous harm, the threats of falling, and of course, the creepy, humanoid monsters that make this particular cave system their home.

We can debate all day whether this or the Ridley Scott original is better - and there's little doubt that 1979's Alien is, in most ways, the scarier of the pair - but when it comes to piling on the pace and never letting up, James Cameron's 1986 sequel may be the movie to beat.

From the desperate boardroom sequence of the film's opening to the climactic fight with the alien queen, Aliens just keeps accelerating - and if it ever had brakes, it has forgotten where they are and no longer cares.

It's a legendary performance from the late Rutger Hauer. It's a classic horror story of the perils of picking up strangers along the road. It's a slasher movie and an action movie and a road movie and a desert movie. It's visceral and unrelenting.

It's also much darker and stranger even than its logline makes it sound - a haunting urban legend come to life, with Hauer's maniacal hitchhiker taking on the almost mythic undertones of the boogeyman.

Flipping the script on the 1967 home invasion classic Wait Until Dark, in which Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman who is menaced by villains, Don't Breathe sees a group of delinquents busting into the home of a blind man for what they think will be an easy score. However, this is a horror movie, and it turns out they've bitten off a whole lot more than they can chew.

Fede Alvarez, who previously directed the 2013 Evil Dead remake, decided to scale back the red stuff for this outing and amp up the tension instead. Variety called it "a muscular exercise in brutal, relentless peril," while Rolling Stone's Peter Travers was even more to the point, writing, "This is some weird, twisted sh*t."