The 25 Best Horror Movies of the 21st Century, Ranked

From razor-edged satires to dark fairy tales, inspired haunted house riffs and nerve-shredding accounts of supernatural possession, the 2000s have been a goldmine for fright freaks.

Luca Guadagnino’s sumptuous horror romance, adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis, is a love story bathed in the pools of blood spilled during the cannibal protagonists’ feeding times. The Italian director also bathes the movie in unexpected sweetness, poetry, lush sensuality and emotional depth. Evincing simmering chemistry, Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet play the protein-diet drifters on a cross-country road trip, feasting whenever they can, “bones and all,” on human flesh. Separating and reuniting, they find a home in each other and attempt to live a normal life, until the past — in the maximum-eccentricity form of Mark Rylance — catches up with them in a shattering final act. Guadagnino cites Terrence Malick’s Badlands as an influence, but this oddly tender trail of death evokes a whole panoply of American outsider tales.