(Photo by courtesy Everett Collection)

The 60 Best 1960s Horror Movies

Unearth the best 1960s movies ever and you’ll see the decade started off screaming. Psycho titillated audiences showing Janet Leigh in a bra before serving up one of the most shocking death scenes ever committed to screen – it still shocks some 60 years later. Both Psycho and Peeping Tom released the same year and both share comment on voyeurism, with the latter going as far as implicating the viewer in its POV murder shots. Introducing such a lurid concept was enough to get Peeping Tom pulled from theaters, and all but killed director Michael Powell’s career.

The introduction of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in the late ’40s created a new palate for international cinema, and while the ’50s were filled with prestige pics like The Seventh Seal and Seven Samurai, genre movies from abroad began to light up theaters. This includes horror classics like Eyes Without a Face, Kwaidan, Black Sunday, Blood and Black Lace, and Hour of the Wolf. And after ramping up in the ’50s, British horror entered a prestige era with The Haunting, House of Usher, The Devil Rides Out, and Village of the Damned.

By 1968, the Hays Code (which delineated what violence, sex, and themes could be depicted on American screens) was all but gone, and that same year The Night of the Living Dead birthed a new age of independent cinema and the zombie genre itself. Speaking of birth: Rosemary’s Baby also came out in ’68, capping a decade of memorable psychological thrillers like The Innocents, What Ever happened to Baby Jane?, Persona, and Seconds.

To compile this list of ’60s horror, we took every critically-approved genre movie of the decade, and then ranked them by Tomatometer score, with Certified Fresh films first! Now, read on for the best 1960s horror movies!

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