There Are Only Two Perfect Horror Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes
There is no such thing as a perfect movie.
No matter how integral a certain film may be to the history of cinema, no matter how widely beloved it might be by a mass audience, and no matter how politically and sociologically relevant it may have been to the modern world, there is always an error, a nitpick, an omission, or a production problem that can be included. No work of art is going to be 100% unassailable, largely because a wide swath of humanity will be able to see it, and no two people are going to feel exactly the same way about it.
In modern parlance, the closest critics and audiences may be able to come to a measurable consensus is the approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The way Rotten Tomatoes works: professional critics, writing for a broad gallery of approved outlets, submit a review to RT, selecting it to be "fresh" or "rotten." The critic gets to select on which side of that binary they fall. If 60% of critics submit "positive" reviews, then the film is deemed "fresh." 59% or less, and the film is "rotten." Fans are also welcome to create RT accounts and log in to deem a film "fresh" or "rotten." Those votes are tallied as the "audience score."
By that gauge, there currently only two horror films on Rotten Tomatoes that have an enviable 100% approval rating: Remi Weekes' 2020 immigration thriller "His House" and Shin'ichirō Ueda's 2019 comedic zombie mockumentary "One Cut of the Dead." By Rotten Tomatoes' own metrics, these movies are better than some of the most notable horror classics in cinema history.
(It's worth noting that the new release "Late Night With the Devil" is currently sitting at 100%, but time will tell if that holds.)
One Cut of the Dead (2019)
To wit: "One Cut of the Dead" and "His House" have outstripped notable horror classics like "The Bride of Frankenstein" (98%), "Get Out (98%), "Jaws" (97%), "Nosferatu" (97%), "Psycho" (97%), and John Carpenter's original "Halloween" (96%). They are also better reviewed than other comparatively low-percentage films like "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (89%), "The Thing" (84%), "The Shining" (83%), "The Haunting" (82%), "Scream" (81%), and "The Exorcist" (78%).
Many might consider many of the above films to be perfect, but that's not always the case. For "The Shining," for instance, critic David Denby felt the film to be pompous and un-scary. In the case of "The Bride of Frankenstein," one critic named Mike Massie, writing for a website called Gone with the Twins, criticized the film's slapstick humor, feeling it undercut the film's potential horror.
Critics were, however, 100% united on "One Cut of the Dead," a wild, three-part film about a low-budget horror production gone awry (based on 97 reviews). In "Cut," a film crew arrives at an abandoned water filtration plant to film a zombie thriller ... in one prolonged take. A quirk of the film-within-a-film's production design, however, accidentally resurrects zombies for real. The filmmakers, feeling ambitious, decide to film their movie anyway, careful to keep the cameras rolling in order to save film stock. The second and third parts of the movie pull back additional layers of "reality," pulling further and further into overlapping metanarratives about the making of "One Cut." It's just as much an act of media analysis as a zombie comedy.
Elisabeth Vincentelli, writing for the New York Times, felt that Ueda's film refreshed tired meta-narrative jokes, and was refreshingly disgusting. Likewise, Variety, IndieWire, the Hollywood Reporter, and RogerEbert.com all praised the flick.
His House (2020)
The other film to achieve the rare status of 100% approval on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 125 reviews) is the Netflix-distributed, Dinka-language thriller "His House," a film about South Sudanese immigrants settling in England. The drama follows a single family as they wait in months-long queues only to be placed in a terrible, run-down house on the outskirts of London. The locals are all racist, and their attempts at assimilation produce disheartening results. Shortly thereafter, they begin seeing a shadowy ghost-like figure lurking in their house. The family matriarch Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) becomes convinced this is an apeth, a witch-like spectre that followed them from Sudan. The ghost represents, quite clearly, the war and violence Rial physically fled, but will never be able to forget.
Noted creature actor Javier Botet played the apeth. Horror fans may know Botet for playing the title roles in "Mama" and "Slender Man," as well as the diseased hobo in the "It" movies and Dracula in "The Last Voyage of the Demeter." Also appearing is noted British actor Matt Smith.
Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times loved the way director Remi Weekes blended B-movie horror thrills with salient themes of the immigrant experience. Amy Nicholson called it "an absolute knockout," and Nick Allen reviewed the film from Sundance, saying "From the start, 'His House' sucks you in with having hope for this couple to find some kind of new life in this impossible system, but a growing unease about what kind of trap they might be in."
If you haven't seen "His House" or "One Cut of the Dead," perhaps these venerable Rotten Tomatoes approval ratings can serve as the ultimate recommendation. Every critic who wrote about them gave them both a passing grade. That's a lot.