"Every genre has its films that serve as the gold standard of the style, and that goes doubly true for horror movies. The best horror movies convey the best things about the genre while still being excellently made films on the technical side in their own right. It's safe to say that some of them are even near perfect, with little to no flaws that hold them back no matter how many years it may have been since they first debuted on cinema screens.

There are several aspects that horror movies have to succeed in to be considered near-perfect. For one, they must be sufficiently scary, able to summon genuine dread and terror without the use of cheap jump scares or fake-outs. They also have to be proficient films as a whole, avoiding the usual pitfalls of bad movies like poor acting, shoddy writing, low-quality production design or cinematography, and lackluster editing or sound design. When a horror film is able to succeed in all of these categories while also adding something new to the formula, it creates a truly legendary experience..."