The 12 Best Ghost Movies, Ranked

For centuries, poets and philosophers have written about how phantasmagoria and spectral evocation lie at the heart of photography — and the same is very much true of motion pictures. The earliest experiences in movement-imitating sequential photography have an eerie, liminal quality to them, like dispatches from another world altogether; just have a look at the 1889 Monkeyshines shorts, believed to be the first American films ever, and tell us if they don’t feel like seeing a ghost.

From 1889 to now, movies have largely retained that ghostly aptitude. Film, the realm par excellence of images and impressions that detach themselves from — and eventually outlive — their subjects, is still arguably the best-suited medium for evoking a world beyond and dramatizing its interactions with ours. Therefore, you can count the 12 best ghost films ranked below, ranging from horror to comedy to romance and back, as 12 of the best ghost stories ever, period.

The singular, startlingly modern films of Olivier Assayas have brushed up against horror and the supernatural on more than one occasion. But 2017’s “Personal Shopper” was a turning point for him in the way that it directly tackled the mystery of being alive, the unknowability of what comes after, and the strange interaction between that uncertainty and the numbing, de-spiritualized rhythms of contemporary life. It’s an enormously sad and beautiful film, despite — or rather because of — its beguiling inscrutability.

Kristen Stewart — in one of her very best performances, and the first that saw her anchor a daring auteurist vision all by herself following her breakthrough supporting turn in Assayas’ own “Clouds of Sils Maria” — stars as Maureen Cartwright, a young woman who works as a personal shopper in Paris for supermodel Kyra Gellman (Nora Waldstätten). While dealing with the various uncanny and depersonalizing trappings of her glossy profession, Maureen tries to get in touch with her mediumship, hoping to receive a signal from her recently deceased twin brother Lewis that might confirm the afterlife exists.

But does it? Is Lewis there? Is Maureen alone? Does the unknown number sending her constant text messages have anything to do with her questions? “Personal Shopper” ponders it all with equal parts dread and curiosity, cutting out the middleman to present viewers with a horror movie where death itself, in all its overwhelming mystery, is the de-facto villain.

Frequently cited as the first Bollywood horror film, Kamal Amrohi’s “Mahal” became a box office smash in 1949 despite skeptical critical reviews.  It has since gone on to overcome these reviews and be widely lauded as one of the finest achievements in the history of Indian horror cinema. A dark romance of Gothic inflexions set within a spectacular abandoned palace, it’s one of those movies where the architecture and the set design tell half the story. But to reduce “Mahal” to its mighty achievements in art direction would be to undersell the enormous force of its thorny phantasmagorical storytelling.

The plot follows Hari Shankar (Ashok Kumar), an attorney who moves into a majestic palace that has been unoccupied since the death of its original owner and his lover Kamini (Madhubala) a half-century earlier. Alone in his new home, Shankar begins to be visited by a mysterious, terrifying apparition. He eventually learns that the palace is still haunted by the ghost of Kamini, who’s irrepressibly drawn to Shankar in a way that suggests he might be the reincarnation of her late lover. Sure enough, Shankar reciprocates her fascination, and so begins an epic, patient, exquisitely-scored impossible romance that pits the two lovers against the very forces of death and time. Very few ghost romances in movie history have ever been as shrewd and surprising in their approach to the subject as this one.

It takes a very special film to launch a fantasy franchise without being based on any prior material — let alone to prompt a sequel nearly four decades later, and have that sequel kill it at the box office. Add in the sheer kookiness of the core narrative concept and the amount of confidence, poise, and directorial personality it evinced even as Tim Burton’s second-ever feature film, and “Beetlejuice” becomes something of a miracle movie.

The 1988 film was effectively the first to introduce the world to Burton’s particular brand of sumptuous, dollhouse-esque Gothic fantasy, and to his signature tone somewhere between arch goofiness, lurid melodrama, and sincere horror. It was also the film responsible for introducing the world to Winona Ryder, in a spunky, charismatic teen goth role that immediately clued everyone in on what she was about, and for catapulting Michael Keaton into worldwide superstardom. Both performances rank among the best ever in Tim Burton movies.

What’s truly fascinating about “Beetlejuice” in a historical sense, however, is how much it acts as a spiritual continuation of Burton’s superficially very different debut film, “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” (which also inspired another horror classic) Like that trailblazing 1985 classic, “Beetlejuice” is, for all its horror-adjacent elements and its POV-flipped haunted house story, essentially an anarchic live-action cartoon. It’s a miraculously amorphous and unpredictable quasi-blockbuster that keeps bending itself out of shape, breaking its own rules, and zigzagging to unbelievable places in the name of comedy and mayhem.

There’s something to be said for a classic, elegant, dread-filled haunted house flick, and as such movies go, it doesn’t get much better, or spookier, than “The Others.” Alejandro Amenábar’s 2001 thriller has tension-building formal dynamics down to an art form, from its use of seen and unseen space to the way it times every creak and strange noise in the soundscape for maximum spine-tingling efficiency. On top of that, it features one of the most clever and thoughtful explorations of the basic unwanted-presence-in-the-manor hook ever committed to film, offering genuinely bracing psychological and existential insights into the concept of being haunted and what it might say about humans’ relationship to death and transience.

On top of that, it has Nicole Kidman in one of her most transfixing, self-possessed, painstakingly precise performances. Kidman plays Grace Stewart, the owner of an isolated country house in the island of Jersey in 1945, who works overtime to protect her photosensitive children (Alakina Mann and James Bentley) from direct sunlight. After hiring a new house staff, Grace begins, along with her kids, to experience inexplicable events that suggest there may be something sinister afoot in the house. Will Grace accept what’s happening in front of her? Will she be able to reconcile it with her Christian faith? Do her new employees know more than they let on? Watch “The Others” to find out, and rest assured, the answers are even more shocking than whatever it is you expect.

There is something ineffable, inimitable, nearly unexplainable about “Ghostbusters,” especially in the how and why of its success as a shaggy blockbuster comedy. For starters, take the shagginess: Despite its large budget and profusion of top-shelf ’80s stars, this is not a movie encumbered by even the slightest bit of concern with traditional Hollywood structuring, themes, life lessons, or reigning standards of “character development.” Secondly, it’s just plain bizarre as a tonal gamble, constantly unserious and self-effacing even as it yokes itself to mounting world-threatening stakes and hits on moments of genuine terror.

Most crucially, “Ghostbusters'” sense of humor is not at all what you expect from a movie in this budget and genre bracket: The majority of the humor stems not from grandiloquent setpieces or pratfalls or grand feats of scale, but from rapport and improvisation. This is arguably the birthplace of the contemporary riffing-based studio comedy — hardly the most intuitive choice for a movie about men catching ghosts.

And yet, it all works. Not only that, it works like gangbusters. (No pun intended.) There’s a reason “Ghostbusters” became one of the most classic, nostalgically revered American comedies of all time, capable of launching so many scenes and moments into common cultural parlance. As if the unassuming novelty of it all and the endlessly inventive world-building weren’t enough, it’s just an absolutely, resolutely hilarious film from start to finish, a sustained feat of cast chemistry that no movie of its ilk has been able to replicate.

One of the absolute high points of the Japanese New Wave is “Kwaidan,” Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 anthology film about the entrails of the liminal world between life and death. Based on four ghost-themed Japanese folk tales as registered in writing by Lafcadio Hearn, “Kwaidan” is notable as one of the most extraordinary formal feats in film history, using expressionistic shadows, scrupulous choreography, and radically unusual camera angles to imprint a hot cinematic charge upon largely theater-inspired storytelling. It’s Kobayashi at his most inspired and adventurous — which, considering we’re talking one of the most inspired and adventurous filmmakers in history, makes “Kwaidan” a general-field pinnacle of those two adjectives.

The four tales — titled, in order, “The Black Hair,” “The Woman of the Snow,” “Hoichi the Earless,” and “In a Cup of Tea” — are best discovered with little prior knowledge of their plots. Aside from the uniting theme of dalliances with the realm of the dead, they vary greatly in setting, pacing, and narrative focus; Kobayashi uses the anthology format as an opportunity to explore different ways of conjuring dread, from slow-burning deliberateness to unmitigated sensory assault. But even if every viewer is bound to have their favorites as with any anthology flick, each chapter in “Kwaidan” is lush and terrifying in its own way, and as a whole unit, they make up one of the most dazzling displays of horror craftsmanship ever.

It’s impossible to talk about the history of ghost cinema without talking about Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” Actually, scratch that– you need to talk about “The Shining” to be able to talk about the history of cinema, full stop. Certainly there haven’t been more than a handful of other movies that managed to inspire such feverish, awestruck cults, or to capture the collective unconscious for quite as long and to quite the same extent. That it was originally a critically reviled, Razzie-nominated box office flop only makes it even more worthy of hushed reverence — like an indecipherable but jaw-dropping monolith at the center of Kubrick’s own oeuvre.

Funnily enough, “The Shining” can also be described as a movie where almost nothing happens. Somehow, by harnessing the full breadth of his ability to tap into primal, oneiric terror just with images and designs, Kubrick manages to make three people passing the time in an empty hotel feel like epic storytelling, every ghostly apparition and surrealist segue drawing us deeper into a semiotic labyrinth as maddening as the film’s own hedge maze sets. By the time the paranoia and slipping sanity of it all explode into actual, concrete violence in the material world, it’s almost hard to remember that the violence in question is coming in as a disruptive force; without any deaths or clearly-established perils, Kubrick manages to make the film’s first 100 minutes as terrifying as anything in film history.

Jack Clayton’s “The Innocents” isn’t just one of the scariest and most influential horror films ever made; it’s one of the best films of all time in any genre, a sacramental masterpiece of British cinema that cast a shadow over every supernatural thriller made afterwards. Adapted from Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” (also the source material for Netflix’s “The Haunting of Bly Manor”), this 1961 film both is and isn’t a traditional, straightforward chiller about things that go bump in the night; indeed, part of what makes it so extraordinary is that it’s as much a precursor to something like “Repulsion” as to subsequent haunted house flicks like “The Haunting.”

The plot follows Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), the new governess at a large country manor, as she begins to suspect that the estate is haunted and that the two kids under her care (Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens) have been possessed. The kicker, here, is that this may not be a ghost story at all; honoring the subjective POV of James’ novella but infusing it with even stronger ambiguity, there’s always a hovering possibility that everything we see is only happening in Miss Giddens’ head. Ergo, “The Innocents” is both effective paranormal horror and a bold, trailblazing psychological thriller about one woman’s mental meltdown — with Kerr, one of the greatest film actors of all time, delivering the most intense and unnerving performance of her career.

There’s a strong case to be made for Mati Diop as the most vital filmmaker to have emerged into the world stage in the past few years. Even before she was winning the Berlinale Golden Bear and garnering Oscar buzz with her 2024 experimental documentary “Dahomey,” she had already laid claim to that title with her debut “Atlantics.” Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2019 (making it second only to “Parasite” for the Palme d’Or), “Atlantics” is self-evidently one of the most extraordinary, fully-formed cinematic visions of the 21st century, as well as a movie that reconfigures and redesigns the possible expressive pathways of ghost cinema.

Mame Bineta Sane stars as Ada, a Senegalese teenager living in the shadow of a massive futuristic skyscraper about to be opened in a Dakar suburb. She’s in love with one of the building’s underpaid construction workers, Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré), yet promised to the wealthy Omar (Babacar Sylla). One day, the workers take off across the Atlantic for Spain; while Ada anxiously awaits news of her lover, she begins to experience strange events, which you’d best experience unspoiled. Suffice to say “Atlantics” presents the richest, saddest, most beguiling and idea-brimming ghost romance in movie history, which Diop shoots with an eye unlike any other director’s, capturing poetic, surrealistic vibrancies of Dakar that feel as startling and revelatory as the twists and turns in her story.

For all the rap Kenji Mizoguchi gets as a rigid, ultra-orthodox formal classicist who codified the rules and mores of Japanese cinema that would later be broken by the New Wave and subsequent iconoclastic movements, there’s no denying the sheer power the man’s cinema had, nor the vast oceanic trenches of talent that informed his disciplined visual ethic — especially when, as in “Ugetsu,” Mizoguchi took it upon himself to get weird.

“Weird” actually feels like almost too paltry a word to describe the extent to which Mizoguchi challenged himself and radicalized his imagery in “Ugetsu,” one of the boldest genre exercises ever undertaken by any filmmaker. What’s extra impressive is that “Ugetsu” managed to become extremely popular worldwide despite its experimental zest. But watch it, and you’ll have no trouble understanding why that was; it’s simply an irresistible film, almost too entrancing to process, with a command of otherworldly imagery and storytelling that makes it feel like a dream you slip into in real time. “Pure cinema” wouldn’t begin to cut it.

The script, by Matsutarō Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, adapts two tales from Ueda Akinari’s “Ugetsu Monogatari,” combining them into the story of two 16th-century Japanese potters (Masayuki Mori and Eitaro Ozawa) whose descent into the jaws of greed is accelerated when one of them is seduced by a mysterious ghostly noblewoman (Machiko Kyō, in one of film history’s most iconic performances). It was Mizoguchi’s first and only fantasy film, but you’d never tell just from watching it.

Like every film that passes into legend in a relatively short timespan, “The Sixth Sense” sometimes weighs more like an idea than a movie in the popular imagination. It’s the ghost horror drama that literally everyone saw, the one where Haley Joel Osment sees dead people. It’s the triumph that made the world raise up M. Night Shyamalan as the next pop cinema great before his career veered in increasingly controversial directions, and it’s the other movie in which Toni Collette has to deal with the supernatural because of her creepy kid and so on and so forth. Frequently lost in all that hubbub, of course, is the fact that it’s just an incredible movie — even watched now, 26 years later, with prior knowledge of its legendary twist.

If you happen to be unaware of that twist, stop what you’re doing right now and go watch “The Sixth Sense” without reading anything else about it. If you do know the reveal and worry it might dull the overall impact of the film, go watch it ASAP anyway. Shyamalan’s command of emotionally charged fantasy storytelling is so great, so perfectly rendered by his attentive and persuasive camera, that “The Sixth Sense” announces itself as a masterpiece long before you get to the late-movie shocks. Few other horror films have ever been so adept at grabbing hold and not letting go.

In 2025, it’s still rare that we get actually good, actually insightful movies about the shifting mental and existential paradigms of human life in the digital era. It may just be the case that some filmmakers feel like they shouldn’t even bother. After all, Kiyoshi Kurosawa already had everyone beaten to the punch as early as 2001.

“Pulse,” Kurosawa’s sadness-drenched Y2K horror about a group of young people in Tokyo who begin to notice inklings of spectral phenomena in their computers, is utterly, overpoweringly terrifying in a way that most horror movies don’t even allow themselves to approach. Kurosawa cloaks the characters’ world in a darkness as spiritual as it is physical, emphasizing with clairvoyant prescience the all-consuming loneliness of contemporary life, the ways in which the internet both feeds it and feeds off of it, and the festering evil at the core of the digitized collective unconscious.

To boot, the director himself has the verve of a possessed man behind the camera, employing his generational mastery of framing, editing, and spatial disorientation to conjure a vision of both the digital world and the supernatural world — here melded into a single purgatorial nether-realm — that feels nothing less than definitive. It’s a ghost movie that makes almost every other ghost movie feel superfluous.