The Sublime and the Sinister: 10 Aesthetically Pleasing Horror Films
What are aesthetically pleasing horror films, and why do we love them?
History and pop culture are filled with examples of dangerous allure. The sirens’ song, a delectable gingerbread house or a queen who hides are wickedness behind her beauty. Intrigue, delight and beauty masking danger are concepts that permeate society across all art forms. With the advent of cinema, it wasn’t long until the creatives behind the camera moved past simply telling us stories of sirens and succubi; the medium itself became the mask for hiding its horrors beneath.
Horror as a genre has always thrived on shock, gore and the utterly grotesque, but some of its most memorable works are those that dwell in contradiction. These are the movies that tap into the tension between the visually pleasing and the deeply unsettling.
The appeal of this tension isn’t new. Philosophers have long grappled with the concept of the sublime, with Longinus describing it as an ecstatic state achieved through abstract concepts such as grandeur of thought and elevated composition. In the 18th Century, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant refined this further, likening it to something that is both beautiful and terrifying, like standing before a dark cathedral or looking upon a raging storm.
We are drawn to dangerous beauty. There’s something within humanity that desires such seductions. Seduction via ornate set design, sumptuous costume, striking cinematography and elegant framing. We crave words that sooth and destroy simultaneously, or worlds that act as a stark contradiction, juxtaposing the horrors that unfold within them.
Of course, beauty is subjecting, but cinema history offers countless examples of this aesthetically pleasing horror. Movies that mesmerise even as they horrify. Here, we’ve chosen just ten. Will you fall under their spell and add them to your watchlist this Halloween?
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1. House of Usher (1960)
Gothic horror cinema is both a precursor and a cornerstone of aesthetic horror. Gothic literature already comes with a perfect blend of horror and beauty; think moonlit graveyards, ruined castles, dilapidated mansions and the tragic figures who inhabit them.
Roger Corman’s House of Usher is a quintessential example of Gothic horror, which displays the principles of aesthetically pleasing horror beautifully. Corman uses atmosphere and visual design to evoke dread and decay, eschewing gore and explicit violence.
Corman made a name for himself in the movie industry for his ability to produce low-budget films that were highly profitable, with a quick turnaround. He established himself as a king of the B movie in doing so, with works that included Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) and my personal favourite, The Wasp Woman (1959).
Despite his undeniable success, it was House of Usher that elevated his career. Feeling the weight of his typecast, he desired to involve himself in a more ambitious, artistically-driven filmmaking endeavour. He saw Edgar Allan Poe’s masterpiece as the opportunity to create a movie steeped in atmosphere, a horror movie that went beyond ghosts and monsters, an existential narrative where human guilt, desire and repression were the true monsters.
The film’s success launched Corman’s series of Poe adaptations, including The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964).
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2. Crimson Peak (2015)
Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak stands as a rich example of aesthetically pleasing horror, a film that prioritises atmosphere, visual beauty and emotional intensity over pure fright. It clearly draws from Gothic horror as a foundational template, with many parallels to its predecessors and sharing much in common with House of Usher. Both films feature isolated, decaying mansions that mirror the psychological disintegration of their inhabitants.
In House of Usher, the house physically collapses under the weight of the family’s curse. In Crimson Peak, Allerdale Hall’s gradual ruin reflects moral corruption. The doomed sibling relationship between Roderick and Madeline Usher finds a modern echo in Thomas and Lucille Sharpe, whose obsessive bond drives the narrative.
The film is steeped in Gothic motifs. However, del Toro reanimates Gothic horror for a modern audience. Narratively, he modernises the melodrama. Mia Wasikowska’s Edith has much more agency than her classic counterparts as a writer and investigator unearthing the truth. Through meticulous design, del Toro makes Allerdale Hall bleed, breathe and groan, becoming a living embodiment of moral and physical decay. The palette of deep reds, ochres and icy blues turns horror into an art form, evoking beauty and dread in tandem.
As an example of aesthetically pleasing horror, Crimson Peak aligns with del Toro’s philosophy that horror should romance the macabre. The film’s ghosts are not just threats, but visual poetry. Transparent, mournful figures rendered in swirling tendrils of ectoplasmic colour. The stylisation transforms fear into fascination, emphasising emotional resonance and tragic beauty over shock.
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3. Suspiria (1977)
Dario Argento’s Suspiria is a striking evolution of the Gothic horror genre, and it’s one of the cleanest examples of aesthetically pleasing horror I can offer.
The dance academy, Suspiria’s key setting, serves much the same role as the decaying castles and mansions of its gothic horror predecessors. It’s full of secrets, locked rooms and hidden passages. It also embodies the sublime, grand and strikingly beautiful. However, there’s an expressionistic colour palette throughout the building, and the movie as a whole. As an example of truly beautiful horror, Suspiria moves beyond suggesting a period or atmosphere with Gothic, shadowy shades of the colour spectrum. Suspiria’s Technicolor reds, greens and blues evoke vivid dreamlike unreality, signal emotional states and warn of the supernatural at play. Argento’s powerful application of colour is a feature synonymous with beautiful horror films.
Narratively, there’s much in common with Gothic horror, too. In Suzy Bannion, we have a Gothic heroine in peril. Isolated, yet curious, caught in a web of lies where supernatural dangers are more than just a suggestion. Gothic stories often blur reality. Are paranormal forces exerting themselves, or are these the delusions of our protagonists? Suspiria updates this.
Here the threat is explicit. There is no allegory. The clear supernatural threat in Suspiria serves as a foundation to enact art-horror, an exploration of beauty and terror intertwined, with dreamlike editing, and a Goblin soundtrack that assaults the senses. The film prioritises sensation and mood over logic.
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4. Midsommar (2019)
Ari Aster’s Midsommar sets its horror in broad daylight, a stark contrast to its Gothic forebears. With its idyllic Scandinavian landscapes and bright, white, flower-laden costumes, our senses admire the beauty, while our minds sense the danger. It feels too beautiful. The dissonance is haunting, the brightness and beauty clashing with the violence that befalls the people on screen.
Like all great examples we could term aesthetically pleasing horror, we’re given time to absorb Midsommar’s atmosphere. We know our protagonist brings heavy emotional weight with them, lacking support from her boyfriend and friendship circle. We almost believe this Eden-like environment could be her escape and salvation. The setting plays the role of the siren here, and it’s not long until the subtle notes of danger crescendo into a cacophony that cannot be ignored. The movie’s brightness illuminates its horrors. Bloody, broken and mutilated bodies are displayed with perfect clarity, burned into the minds of its audience. There may be nothing lurking in the shadows, but Midsommar’s beautiful, expansive landscapes leave nowhere for its victims, or us, to hide.
Sunshine and horror might be strange bedfellows, but together they make the foundation.
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5. Sleeping Beauty (1959)
I know, I know, some of you may be wondering what this is doing here, but stay with me for a minute.
Those with more discerning parents than my own may not have had much familiarity with the horror genre as children. However, the Golden Age of Disney may have produced one of my favourite examples of an entry point to aesthetically pleasing horror.
In Sleeping Beauty, the masterful work of Eyvind Earle gave children an animated, illuminated manuscript, filled with Gothic wonder. The movie’s thorn-covered castle, ominous towers and storm-lit skies are all in keeping with Gothic traditions. Aesthetically, it’s mid-century modernism, with bold shapes and bright colours suggesting medieval stained glass. It’s a world of painterly beauty, frame after frame, lauded for its distinctive and ambitious visual style.
The hyper-stylised long lines and geometric shapes of Sleeping Beauty’s landscapes find expression in the character design, too. Disney’s Maleficent is statuesque and captivating, her movement soft yet purposeful. Often depicted surrounded by her hoard of minions, the movie’s most chaotic element, they serve to highlight the villain’s wicked beauty.
The dragon, Maleficent’s final form, perfectly expresses what for me is the core of aesthetic horror. Her angular, jagged wings and elongated form amplify Earle’s medieval, tapestry-like aesthetic. Unquestionably beautiful, the dragon’s sheer scale aligns it with the concept of the sublime. It is dark and alluring in hues of black and violet that contrast with her neon green flame.
While not strictly a horror film, I truly believe that Sleeping Beauty is one of the entry points that grounds us in the space that exists between beauty and horror, preparing us for the intersect.
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6. The Company of Wolves (1984)
Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves recently appeared on Kimberley’s essential werewolf films post, and stands as one of the most striking examples of a fairytale-like form of aesthetically pleasing horror.
The film’s dreamlike visual language transforms the traditional werewolf narrative into a sumptuous nightmare. Mist-shrouded forests glow with unnatural reds, candlelit interiors pulse with sensual menace and transformations unfold as grotesque yet mesmerising contortions of flesh and fur. There’s a fusion of Gothic opulence and folkloric strangeness that situates The Company of Wolves within a lineage of horror that is just as much about enchantment as fear.
Like Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the film uses fairytale imagery as a framework for exploring the uncanny and forbidden. Both stories hinge on thresholds set between childhood and adulthood, innocence and desire, life and death. In The Company of Wolves, fairytale motifs become the vehicle for confronting suppressed sexuality and the fear of female power. In Sleeping Beauty, the aesthetic grandeur conceals anxieties about purity and awakening. Fantasy thus provides a symbolic vocabulary through which horror can be rendered beautifully, a space where the grotesque is not rejected but stylised.
The contribution of fantasy and fairytale to aesthetically pleasing horror is crucial because these forms already inhabit the borderland between wonder and terror. Films like Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) continue this tradition, using mythic and baroque imagery to visualise inner psychological horror. In these works, as in The Company of Wolves, the monstrous is not alien but intimately human, embodied in beauty, desire and transformation. The result is horror, not of revulsion, but of fascination.
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7. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive is an exemplary case of aesthetically pleasing horror. Rather than relying on traditional horror conventions like jump scares or gore, the film constructs a haunting beauty through its visual composition, soundscape and existential themes, transforming the vampire myth into an exploration of art, decay and longing.
The film’s protagonists are centuries-old vampires who embody both the allure and melancholy of immortality. Their world is steeped in artistic refinement, filled with rare instruments, decaying architecture and candlelit interiors. This carefully curated mise-en-scène transforms their nocturnal existence into a visual poem. The slow pacing and muted colour palette, dominated by deep reds, golds and shadows, evoke a sensual yet desolate atmosphere. Horror here lies not in violence, but in vampirism combined with the aesthetics of time and entropy. The beauty of things that fade.
Jarmusch’s use of music further enhances this. The droning, hypnotic soundtrack by SQÜRL blurs the boundary between pleasure and unease, immersing the audience in a dreamlike, almost narcotic state. The auditory texture amplifies the film’s emotional resonance, making the passage of time and decay palpable.
Ultimately, the film’s horror is aesthetic and philosophical, not visceral. It confronts viewers with the terror of eternity, the fragility of art and the seductive decay of beauty.
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8. Byzantium (2012)
Vampire cinema naturally lends itself to aesthetically pleasing horror, merging beauty, decay and desire into a single, intoxicating form. Vampires embody contradiction. Life within death, seduction within monstrosity, immortality shadowed by despair. These tensions allow filmmakers to explore horror with a sense of reflection and elegance, emphasising mood and sensuality over shock.
Neil Jordan’s Byzantium exemplifies this union of the beautiful and the horrific. Like Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, it replaces terror with melancholic allure, crafting spaces suffused with anguish, resentment and regret. Yet, Jordan pushes Gothic tropes into new terrain by entwining them with femininity and trauma. The mother-daughter vampires, Clara and Eleanor, embody two responses to eternity. Clara’s survivalist ferocity contrasts with Eleanor’s quiet, lyrical melancholy, beauty and brutality bound together.
The process of rebirth is among the film’s most haunting sequences, one that plays out several times throughout Byzantium. The scene unfolds with a shadowy cave, bats, a meeting with oneself and a magnificent waterfall that explodes into a shower of blood. That last image distils the essence of aesthetically pleasing horror, with violence rendered as visual poetry.
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9. The Cell (2000)
In Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, we have a big shift in tone and subject matter. Across my entries, horror has had a tendency to lean toward fantasy or the supernatural, but here is where we diverge into science fiction. As our lives have become increasingly dictated by innovation, does it come as any surprise that aliens have replaced the malevolent or benevolent gods of some of our stories? As man reached out into the stars, the cosmos reached back into our imaginations.
Technology drives the narrative in The Cell. Its application is altruistic, yet ultimately positions our protagonists in great danger. To support visual storytelling, The Cell takes us into surreal dreamscapes both beautiful and terrifying.
The film’s exploration of the mindscape of a serial killer allows for lavishly surreal, painterly visuals. Baroque sets, sculptural costumes and tableaux that look like living art installations. The most disturbing sequences inside the killer’s psyche are simultaneously macabre and magnificent. Blood-drenched, yet meticulously composed.
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10. Annihilation (2018)
Alex Garland’s Annihilation is the final movie in our list of aesthetically pleasing horror, another science fiction example. If The Cell inhabits a technologically-driven space, then Annihilation is where other worlds come to life.
Annihilation’s alien force is truly ambiguous, which supports the visual choices made. Rather than presenting a definable monster with a clear, antagonistic will, the alien manifests as an evolving ecosystem. It’s a refractive field that mutates everything within its sphere of influence, capable of manifesting awe-inspiring beauty and terrorising abominations in equal measures. The quest for answers, for daring to engage with this world, comes at a price. Your identity, recycled for The Shimmer’s next sublime manifestation. It’s a disquieting reminder that not all mysteries exist to be solved and sometimes the most haunting horror comes in forms that we cannot comprehend.
Despite the movie’s inherent strangeness, there’s something of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) to its structure. A group of curious adults, each in possession of a unique character flaw, enters a magical world. It certainly sounds familiar, but instead of a magical chocolate factory, we’re taken to a world of abstraction.
Final Thoughts
From the sirens who sang sailors to their doom to the luminous terror of Annihilation’s Shimmer, our fascination with beauty entwined with danger has never waned. Cinema, with its power to enchant the eye before unsettling the soul, became the perfect medium for such seduction. The filmmakers behind these works understand that horror need not hide in shadow. It can wear a crown of flowers and bask in the midday sun and, if anything, we’ll be all the more wary for it.
Across these films, horror becomes a mirror for our yearning to look upon what should repel us. Whether through the ghosts of crumbling castles or cosmic anomalies, aesthetically pleasing horror invites us not to recoil, but to marvel. And sometimes it has us doing both.
If you have any examples of aesthetically pleasing horror films that you love, I would love to hear about them in the comments below.
Edward Swift
Edward is a circus coach/performer who enjoys musing life's great mysteries. He was raised by the television, the television of the 80s and 90s to be precise, affording him the strong opinions of someone approaching middle age. Ed's great loves include hanging upside down and his unbelievably adorable cat.
Edward Swift
Edward is a circus coach/performer who enjoys musing life's great mysteries. He was raised by the television, the television of the 80s and 90s to be precise, affording him the strong opinions of someone approaching middle age. Ed's great loves include hanging upside down and his unbelievably adorable cat.