Official film poster for The Mummy (1932)

A fresh survey of 2,000 movie lovers has once again put The Exorcist on top, with respondents naming the 1973 shocker the greatest horror movie of all time. For longtime genre fans, that result tracks with decades of critics’ lists and audience rankings that have repeatedly crowned William Friedkin’s possession thriller the definitive horror film.

The poll asked a broad cross-section of moviegoers to pick a single “best ever” horror title, and The Exorcist made the head-turning sprint into first place. While the outlet’s coverage centers on the winner, the wider history of “best horror” surveys is packed with familiar rivals: Tobe Hooper’s grimy trailblazer The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has topped expert polls in the past, and slasher staples like Halloween routinely sit near the summit of all-time lists. The new survey suggests that, even with streaming-era scares readily available, the old-school classics still haunt viewers the hardest.

Part of the film’s enduring pull comes from how singular it still feels. Directed by William Friedkin and adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own novel, The Exorcist blends clinical realism with nightmarish religious horror, grounding demonic possession in everyday family life in Washington, D.C. Its deliberate pacing, documentary-like opening in Iraq, and shockingly physical depiction of evil set it apart from contemporaries that either leaned entirely on atmosphere or on pure exploitation. More than half a century later, critics still cite its practical effects, sound design, and unnervingly matter-of-fact tone as benchmarks for the genre.

The poll is only the latest in a long streak of coronations. A Time Out London expert survey in 2012 named The Exorcist the greatest horror film ever made, and a later poll of over 100 horror professionals for HitFix reached the same conclusion. Time Out’s updated 2026 list of the 100 best horror films again places the movie at number one, underscoring how firmly it has lodged in the canon. On the fan side, a massive Ranker poll of “must-see” horror movies with over 45,000 voters currently lists The Exorcist as the top choice, with tens of thousands of upvotes keeping it ahead of newer contenders. Even franchise-focused surveys tilt the same way: a Harris Interactive poll commissioned by AMC found respondents naming The Exorcist the best horror series, ahead of juggernauts like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween.

Aggregator lists built from critic and audience scores tell a similar story. Rotten Tomatoes’ curated guide to the 200 best horror films slots The Exorcist high among a stacked field that runs from Universal monster movies to modern “elevated” horror. Contemporary rankings often acknowledge the impact of recent standouts like Hereditary and Get Out, but still frame them in relation to Friedkin’s film, which remains the measuring stick for possession and religious horror narratives. Genre outlets routinely describe it as “horror royalty,” and even when they rank the scariest films rather than the “best,” it rarely falls far from the top.

All of that context makes Higgy Pop’s new survey less a surprising upset and more a reaffirmation of how deeply The Exorcist is wired into horror fandom’s collective brain. In an era where audiences are spoiled with inventive indies and big-budget genre hybrids, a 50-year-old studio film still claiming the crown says a lot about the staying power of slow-burn dread and practical, in-camera terror. For fans, it’s a reminder that revisiting the classics isn’t just nostalgia; it’s checking back in with the foundations that continue to shape every exorcism, possession, and faith-versus-evil story that arrives on screens today.