As they were happening, the 2000s seemed like a low point for horror. The slasher revival that launched with Scream in 1996 had waned, remakes cluttered theaters, and torture porn was being talked about like it was the end of civilization. However, with more than 15 years since the end of the decade now passed, it’s clear that the 2000s were in fact a high point for horror—especially if you look beyond Hollywood.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});So if you’re ready for a reappraisal. Or if you just want to frost your tips, pull on some low-rise jeans, and blast some nü-metal, then check out these great scary movies from an underrated era.Ginger Snaps (2000)Since the earliest variations of the werewolf myth, lycanthropy revealed the horror of the monster still within the modern, civilized man. That last word is used intentionally because, more often than not, werewolves were wolf men, not women.Director John Fawcett and screenwriter Karen Walton turn that assumption upside down with Ginger Snaps, a coming-of-age horror story. Shortly after a series of dog attacks befall their Canadian suburb, Ginger Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle) hits puberty, and begins acting in ways that frighten her sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins). Is Ginger becoming a beast? Or is she becoming a woman? Ginger Snaps answers, “Both.”The Others (2001)The success of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense opened the door for a resurgence of prestige ghost stories. The Others, written and directed by Alejandro Amenábar, is one of the few to match the quality of the originator, precisely because of the way it handles character drama.Set in 1945 Jersey, The Others follows mother Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) as she tries to maintain normalcy for her children Anne and Nicholas (Alakina Mann and James Bentley) while her husband (Christopher Eccleston) is at war. However, when strange phenomena besets the family, Grace must defend her family from an unbelievable truth.Pulse (2001)Even by 2001, it became commonplace to observe that the internet connected us, but made us lonelier than ever. But the power of writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse isn’t in the novelty of its argument. Rather, it’s in the feelings of dread and sorrow it invokes.Kursosawa’s ambling narrative focuses a group of young people whose friends go missing shortly after they start logging onto the net. Slowly, they discover that cyberspace serves as a conduit between our world and the spiritual, blurring the line between the living and the dead. Heady as that sounds, Pulse works in the sublime, including one of the scariest scenes put to film, in which a ghost slowly ambles toward its victim.28 Days Later (2002)Hard to believe today, as The Walking Dead continues to amble on with countless spinoffs, but zombies had long fallen out of fashion before the 2000s. So when Danny Boyle and Alex Garland teamed up for 28 Days Later, the concept seemed like a throwback and reinvention of a forgotten premise.Boyle and Garland effectively reanimated the genre by giving it a shocking new direction. When courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in an empty hospital, he enters an England ravaged by a rage virus, a disease that turns ordinary humans into rabid beasts. Together with a group of survivors, played by Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, and Megan Burns, Jim tries to find something like civilization—if such a thing is even possible anymore.The Ring (2002)Given the glut of mediocre foreign language remakes that filled movie theaters and video stores in the 2000s, it’s easy to forget what an incredible job director Gore Verbinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger did translating the thoroughly Japanese Ringu to American sensibilities with The Ring. The Ring contains all of the horror of the original, but plays in a Western context that invokes a fear of technology not native to this country.The movie’s success rests in part on a strong central performance by Naomi Watts as journalist Rachel, who begins investigating a cursed video tape after her niece’s grotesque death. As she and her friend Noah (Martin Henderson) dig into the mystery of haunted girl Samara (Daveigh Chase), they put everything at risk, including her young son Aidan (David Dorfman).A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)The Ring managed to improve upon its source material, but most American versions failed to capture the tone of the original. Such was certainly the case with A Tale of Two Sisters, whose American take The Uninvited was a sad imitation of the Korean original, written and directed by Kim Jee-woon.The two sisters in question are teenager Su-mi (Im Soo-jung) and her younger sibling Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young), who cannot accept their father’s new wife Eun-joo (Yum Jung-ah). More than just youthful rebellion, the girls’ mistrust of their step-mother stems from questions about the death of their biological mother, questions that grow more pressing as hauntings begin. Part fairy tale, part ghost story, A Tale of Two Sisters weaves a narrative too unique and complex to be simply transported to another part of the world.Shaun of the Dead (2004)In lesser hands, Shaun of the Dead would feel like a series of empty signifiers, like listening to a hyperactive, overly-caffeinated kid list his favorite horror movies. Even with the capable Edgar Wright behind the camera, Shaun of the Dead indulges in its homages, particularly to the zombie films of George R. Romero. But the movie has more on its mind than just touting its genre bonafides.Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the script with Wright, gives a star-making performance as Shaun, an aimless twenty-something who spends too much time playing video games with his best mate Ed (Nick Frost) to save his relationship with his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield). But when the dead begin to rise around his Crouch End neighborhood, Shaun finally finds his purpose, leading his pals through the apocalypse to get back his girl, rescue his mom, and, of course, have a pint.The Descent (2005)To most Americans, few things sound scarier than the foggy marshes of Scotland. Judging by writer/director Neil Marshall’s The Descent, Scots come to the mountains of the U.S. to get their scares, and with good reason. The Descent is one of the few movies that’s so much scarier before the monsters show up, when we’re just watching a group of spelunking women squeeze through suffocatingly tight spaces.Those women include Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), still traumatized by the death of her husband and child a year earlier. When her best friend Juno (Natalie Mendoza) brings Sarah on a cave exploration in North Carolina, everyone hopes that she can finally heal. However, the opposite happens, as tensions mount between the women and the spaces through which they squeeze grow tighter. All that before they encounter albino monsters from the center of the Earth.Slither (2006)These days, of course, James Gunn is best known for running DC Studios alongside Peter Safran and directing huge superhero movies like Superman. But back in the 2000s, Gunn was just transitioning out of his education writing for schlockmeisters Troma Entertainment and working on the live-action Scooby-Doo movies. From that experience came Gunn’s debut feature, the somehow warm-hearted gross-out picture, Slither.A riff on the standard alien invasion movie, Slither takes place in Wheelsy, South Carolina, where police chief Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion) still harbors feelings for schoolteacher Starla (Elizabeth Banks), even though she’s married local rich guy Grant Grant (Michael Rooker). When alien worms attack the town and transform citizens into gooey zombies, Grant becomes the leader, but his enduring love for Starla remains, making Slither both sweet and revolting. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)With its fantasy trappings, Pan’s Labyrinth isn’t as pure horror as, say, Guillermo del Toro’s 2001 ghost story The Devil’s Backbone. But by setting the tale of a girl who finds another strange other world in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, del Toro gives Pan’s Labyrinth an edge that few movies the era could match. The horror and wonder of Pan’s Labyrinth comes through little girl Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), whose life changes for the worse when her mother (Ariadna Gil) marries Captain Vidal (Sergi López). In what may be a real adventure or what may be a coping mechanism, Ofelia discovers a doorway to the underworld, where she meets a faun (Doug Jones) who sends her on magical quests that are somehow less frightening than what she experiences in her real life.The Host (2006)Most of the movies on this list, even those not from America stick to a single genre. Not so with Bong Joon Ho’s The Host, which operates mostly as a kaiju film, but takes huge tonal swings, from family melodrama to slapstick comedy and everything in between. Instead of feeling discordant, the shifts make The Host a surprisingly nuanced and human look at how people deal with disaster.Co-writing with Ha Joon-won and Baek Chul-hyun, director Bong turns to his regular star Song Kang-ho to play Park Gang-du, an underachieving snack bar proprietor and doting father of Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung). When a beast emerges from the Han River and captures Hyun-seo, Gang-du and his family, including Olympic archer Park Nam-joo (Bae Doona), must deal with the fall-out, even as the truth of the monster’s origin comes clear.Saw III (2006)Of course, most would argue that the original Saw is the best of the series (if not the most recent entry, Saw X), and with good reason. James Wan and Leigh Whannell pulled off an indie miracle, using resources so limited that they had to use crash zooms of a car being rocked from the outside to create a chase sequence. But here’s the thing: with its minimal plot and mostly off-screen gore, Saw is hardly indicative of what the franchise became.For a better representative of the Saw series, we turn to Saw III, written by Whannell and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. In this entry, the Jigsaw Killer John Kramer (Tobin Bell) puts a grieving father (Angus Macfadyen) through an ordeal that includes some of the gnarliest traps of the series. Further, Saw III leans hard into the overwrought police drama that would become the franchise’s true signature.[REC] (2007)Found footage movies were all the rage in the 2000s and 2010s, in part because they were extremely cheap to make. But rarely did found footage offerings achieve the level of immediacy the format promised. The Spanish demonic possession movie [REC], co-directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza (who co-write with Luiso Berdejo) stands as a notable outlier.[REC] has a simple premise, in which reporter Ángela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) visits a Barcelona firehouse to shoot a segment about overnight work. The firefighter get called to an emergency at a downtown apartment, which Ángela initially considers a stroke of good luck, finally providing some excitement in an otherwise dull outing. What they get, however, is a true nightmare, one that’s just as scary for audiences, thanks to Balagueró and Plaza’s deft use of the found-footage format.Let the Right One In (2008)Horror movies love to fall back on the old trope that humans are the real monster. But rarely has it been done as well as in Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire film from Tomas Alfredson and John Ajvide Lindqvist. The acts of cruelty doled out on lonely protagonist Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) are so upsetting, that you almost forget that his only friend is Eli (Lina Leandersson) a much, much older vampire who presents as a young girl.This isn’t to say that Let the Right One In doesn’t have its moments of terror involving Eli. From the film’s perfectly-measured climax involving bullies at a pool to every scene involving her familiar Håkan (Per Ragnar), Alfredson never lets the audience forget that Oskar runs the risk of losing his life to a bloodsucker. It’s just that Let the Right One In shows that Oscar’s life is pretty rough even without monsters involved.The House of the Devil (2009)With the days of Halloween (originally titled The Babysitter Murders) and When a Stranger Calls far behind us, movies about the perils of watching other people’s kids have fallen out of fashion. Perhaps that’s why writer/director Ti West sets The House of the Devil in the 1980s, when teens and college kids would regularly go to stranger’s houses for money.That’s what happens to Samantha Hughes (Jocelin Donahue), who takes a babysitting gig and then keeps it even after learning she’s in fact been hired by Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan) to watch his elderly mother-in-law, not a child. From that moment on, Samantha knows something is wrong, as does the audience. But West keeps the explicit stuff off-screen for much of the movie’s run-time, slowly building tension until a glorious payoff, one that begins with a sad fate for Samantha’s best friend, played by current auteur Greta Gerwig.The post The 15 Best Horror Movies of the 2000s appeared first on Den of Geek.