The box office numbers help decide some of the top scary movies. The box office website, Box Office Mojo, categorizes horror movies into categories like slasher, torture, supernatural and remakes. Top performing movies in these categories include "Scream" with $103 million, "The Ring" with $129 million, "The Blair Witch Project" with $140 million and "The Sixth Sense" with $193 million. Some classic horror films took a slow rise at the box office, but eventually found fans, like with "Scream," which made only $6 million in its opening weekend.
A majority of the top scary films can attribute their success to critical reviews. The movie website Rotten Tomatoes compiles professional critic reviews and gives an overall percentage for each movie. Only 11 movies out of thousands received the perfect 100 percent score. This includes "Aliens," "The Evil Dead," "Frankenstein" and "Them." Other notable scores includes "The Silence of the Lambs" at 96 percent, "A Nightmare on Elm Street" at 94 percent, "Halloween" at 93 percent, and "Slither" at 85 percent.
The top horror movies have often been defined as to whether they received a remake or not. A horror remake is indicative of the movie's original success and interest to create a new form. Box Office Mojo lists some of the most successful horror remakes as "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "The Amityville Horror," "Friday the 13th" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street." These remakes along with the original films could all be considered some of the top 100 scariest movies.
Sequels show the success of the original film and help warrant it as one of the top scary movies. The "Friday the 13th" series has more than eight sequels, the "Scream" series has had three sequels and the "Saw" series has six sequels, as of 2011. All of the sequels were created to keep the fan base and interest based off the scare factor and popularity of the original film. Other popular horror movie franchises include "A Nightmare on Elm Street," "Final Destination," "Jaws," "I Know What You Did Last Summer," "Child's Play," "Paranormal Activity" and "The Exorcist."
Horror villain icons like Leatherface, Jason Vorhees and Freddy Kruger are all part of main stream pop culture because of their popularity in some of the scariest movies. Other iconic villains include Norman Bates from "Psycho," Jigsaw from "Saw," Frankenstein from the "Frankenstein" series of films, Michael Myers from "Halloween" and Ghostface from "Scream." The scary movie characters have become Halloween costumes and an integral part of horror movies.
Several movie and horror film website have compiled their own "Top 100 Scary Movie Lists." The Internet Movie Database lists the "Top 50 Horror Films" according to fan ratings. This includes "Psycho," "Alien" and "The Shining" as the top three. Reel created a "Top 100 Scary Movie" list that includes "Don't Look Now," "Rosemary's Baby" and "Suspiria" as the top three choice. Other "Top 100" lists include Darkweb's "Horror 100" and Best Horror Film's "The 100 Best Horror Films of All Time."