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The 35 Best 1950s Horror Movies

See! Atomic monsters, sinister science, and beasts from beyond the moon!

Watch! As society exposes their deep-seated anxieties and fears!

Discover! The best horror movies of the 1950s!

After a devastating World War, America entered into the protracted Cold War with the Soviet Union, racing against the other to reach and conquer space first, while cultivating a massive arsenal of nuclear weaponry. Contrasted with the United States’ prosperous post-War economy and the rise of consumerism and suburbia, 1950s horror films reflected the pervading invisible fear of death from above. Plenty of the monsters in creature features were nuclear in origin, from Them! to Godzilla to It Came from Beneath the Sea to The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and beyond. The Space Age launched in this decade and with it a fear of what we’ll carry from our cosmic sojourns back to Earth, as played out in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Blob, and The Thing from Another World.

Other defining highlights of the decade include psychological dramas (The Night of the Hunter, Diabolique, The Bad Seed), gimmicks (a skeleton flew overhead audiences for House on Haunted Hill, and The Tingler indeed electrically tingled seats), Hammer Films (Quatermass Xperiment, Horror of Dracula), and the Creature from the Black Lagoon trilogy.

To compile this list of ’50s horror, we compiled every critically supported movie and then listed them by Tomatometer, with Certified Fresh films first. —Alex Vo

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