Actor Willem Dafoe has been in nine horror movies throughout his career, and his contributions to the genre run the gamut from acclaim to disdain, inviting a ranking from worst to best. The screen veteran has spent years balancing artsy independent projects with more mainstream fare. Appearing in everything from Lars von Trier films to Sam Raimi superhero blockbusters, Dafoe has managed to balance the accessible and the experimental in a way that few actors can pull off.
This has never stopped Willem Dafoe from taking risks in his choice of projects. From the twisty historical epic The Northman to appearances in installments of the MCU and the DCEU, he has kept his career path varied by signing on to star in a diverse range of roles. The actor’s fearless attitude is never more obvious than when viewers look at his horror pedigree.
Where many actors try out a handful of horror roles early in their career before pivoting to more “respectable” projects, Willem Dafoe has never shied away from the darker, stranger side of genre cinema despite his status as a successful leading man. While the four-time Oscar-nominee could prioritize worthy dramas given his fame and acclaim, Dafoe has instead appeared in a vampire movie, a trio of bizarre art-horror films, an anime adaptation, a gothic mystery, a sci-fi body horror from genre legend David Cronenberg, and a dark satirical black comedy/psychological chiller. Of course, not all of these risks have paid off. Here is a ranking of all of Willem Dafoe's horror movies in order from worst to best.
Anamorph (2008)
Anamorph is an intriguing but ultimately underwhelming dark psychological horror movie intended to cash in on the Saw franchise’s success. The twisty story of Willem Dafoe’s detective trying to work out why a case feels so familiar isn’t as gratuitously gory as its competitors. Alas, the overlong and convoluted plot of Anamorph also isn’t particularly interesting, making it the actor's least essential horror outing.
Daybreakers (2009)
Daybreakers had the potential to be great. Set in an alternate future where vampires are the dominant species, the ambitious sci-fi horror tells a convoluted story of a heroic vampire attempting to find a cure for his kind while Willem Dafoe's "cured" vampire leads a human resistance. While not as neutered as the Twilight saga’s harmless vampires, the bloodsuckers of Daybreakers are distinctly unthreatening. This proves problematic when they are the movie’s main characters since the vampires of Daybreakers aren’t likable enough to root for nor are they scary enough to fear, leaving this particular Willem Dafoe horror movie stranded in an unfortunate middle ground.
Death Note (2017)
There is a lot to like about this adaptation from Netflix. The gore is surprisingly plentiful and delivered with glee, star Nat Wolff and his love interest, Margaret Qualley, are both likable and engaging, LaKeith Stanfield is as reliable as ever, and Willem Dafoe steals the show as the horror movie's campy (sort of) villain. However, Death Note was still a devastating disappointment for fans of the original manga and anime, and even fans of the earlier live-action movie version due to the many changes made from the source material.
Antichrist (2009)
Lars von Trier’s horror drama Antichrist is not for the faint of heart, but the movie makes that fact admirably clear right away by opening its action by intercutting between the death of a small child and a graphic sex scene. Things only get darker from there as Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s mourning couple take an ill-advised trip to the remote woods to work through their grief. Viewers should expect extreme body horror from this experimental effort, but for those who don’t mind incredibly graphic imagery, Antichrist is an undeniably striking, bracing, and atypically sincere piece of filmmaking from the divisive von Trier.
Nightmare Alley (2021)
Guillermo del Toro’s many horror movies run the gamut from coming-of-age fantasies to ghost stories to vampire action flicks, but none are quite as brutal as Nightmare Alley. Ostensibly a detective thriller, its plot takes a turn for the appropriately nightmarish about an hour in and never turns back. Willem Dafoe is as creepy as ever in this unremittingly dark tale, but he is only as unsettling as Cate Blanchett, Bradley Cooper, and the rest of the ensemble cast’s morally ambiguous monsters.
eXistenZ (1999)
To be fair to the trippy eXistenZ, in which Willem Dafoe has a small role, it is not as gross as David Cronenberg’s most extreme body horror movies. However, the story of a game developer hunted by terrorists in what might turn out to be an elaborate virtual reality game is probably the filmmaker's most mind-melting effort. While not as graphically violent as Crimes of the Future, eXistenZ saw Cronenberg reckon with the futuristic fusion of man and machine first and, for all of its dated moments, it remains a prescient piece of creepy sci-fi satire.
The Lighthouse (2019)
Before Robert Eggers was given a big budget and a larger canvas for The Northman, the filmmaker proved he wasn’t a one-movie wonder with 2018’s claustrophobic horror movie The Lighthouse. With a seemingly simple story of a pair of lighthouse operators (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) who slowly succumb to madness in their remote abode, this hallucinatory nightmare ends up being far more than that summary implies. The Lighthouse is blackly comedic, surprisingly scary, and an interesting interrogation of male relationships, but it is also notable for featuring another one of Robert Pattinson's weird accents.
Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
The ambitious meta-horror movie Shadow of the Vampire sees Willem Dafoe play a fictionalized, and vampiric, version of real-life Nosferatu star Max Shreck. At once a period piece about the making of the horror classic and a stark, inventive vampire horror of its own, Shadow of the Vampire is the sort of project that could easily get lost in its own self-satisfied cleverness. However, the 2000 psychological horror is instead a rich, compelling treatise on identity, artifice, and cinema that also boasts one of Willem Dafoe’s most underrated performances in the actor’s long career.
American Psycho (2000)
American Psycho is a rare case of a supposedly un-filmable book becoming a spectacularly successful movie. The Bret Easton Ellis adaptation keeps almost all the source novel’s gore offscreen, focusing on the minutiae of the titular stockbroker/serial killer’s everyday existence. American Psycho’s bizarre ending may take a few viewings to decipher, but for viewers who want a razor-sharp dissection of the Reaganomics era and the moral rot at its core, Mary Harron’s movie is hard to beat. Witty, creepy, and utterly unique in its tone, American Psycho is a classic adaptation as well as supporting star Willem Dafoe’s strongest horror movies.