28 Suspenseful Horror Logline Examples

Logline Examples for Horror Films

Delve into our list of compelling horror logline examples, each crafted to demonstrate how to capture the eerie and suspenseful essence of a horror story in just one or two impactful sentences.

1. Psycho: A Phoenix secretary embezzles $40,000 from her employer's client, goes on the run, and checks into a remote motel run by a young man under the domination of his mother. / An Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece
2. Rear Window: A wheelchair-bound photographer spies on his neighbors from his apartment window and becomes convinced one of them has committed murder. / It only takes one witness to spoil the perfect crime
3. The Silence of the Lambs: A young F.B.I. cadet must receive the help of an incarcerated and manipulative cannibal killer to help catch another serial killer, a madman who skins his victims. / From The Terrifying Best Seller
4. Alien: The crew of a commercial spacecraft encounter a deadly lifeform after investigating an unknown transmission.
5. Psycho: A Phoenix secretary embezzles $40,000 from her employer's client, goes on the run, and checks into a remote motel run by a young man under the domination of his mother.
6. The Shining: A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where a sinister presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from both past and future.
7. The Exorcist: When a 12-year-old girl is possessed by a mysterious entity, her mother seeks the help of two priests to save her.
8. Rosemary's Baby: A young couple trying for a baby moves into an aging, ornate apartment building on Central Park West, where they find themselves surrounded by peculiar neighbors.
9. Night of the living dead: A ragtag group of Pennsylvanians barricade themselves in an old farmhouse to remain safe from a horde of flesh-eating ghouls that are ravaging the East Coast of the United States.
10. Frankenstein: Dr. Frankenstein dares to tamper with life and death by creating a human monster out of lifeless body parts.
11. Halloween: Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween night 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again.
12. The Birds: A wealthy San Francisco socialite pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people.
13. Zombieland: A shy student trying to reach his family in Ohio, a gun-toting bruiser in search of the last Twinkie and a pair of sisters striving to get to an amusement park join forces in a trek across a zombie-filled America.
14. Saw: Two strangers awaken in a room with no recollection of how they got there, and soon discover they're pawns in a deadly game perpetrated by a notorious serial killer.
15. American Psycho: A wealthy New York City investment banking executive, Patrick Bateman, hides his alternate psychopathic ego from his co-workers and friends as he delves deeper into his violent, hedonistic fantasies.
16. The Fly: A brilliant but eccentric scientist begins to transform into a giant man/fly hybrid after one of his experiments goes horribly wrong.
17. A Quiet Place: In a post-apocalyptic world, a family is forced to live in silence while hiding from monsters with ultra-sensitive hearing.
18. An American Werewolf in London: Two American college students on a walking tour of Britain are attacked by a werewolf that none of the locals will admit exists.
19. The Omen: Mysterious deaths surround an American ambassador. Could the child that he is raising actually be the Antichrist? The Devil's own son? 
20. Dracula: The centuries old vampire Count Dracula comes to England to seduce his barrister Jonathan Harker's fiancée Mina Murray and inflict havoc in the foreign land.
21. Jacob's Ladder: Mourning his dead child, a haunted Vietnam War veteran attempts to uncover his past while suffering from a severe case of dissociation. To do so, he must decipher reality and life from his own dreams, delusions, and perceptions of death.
22. Carrie: Carrie White, a shy, friendless teenage girl who is sheltered by her domineering, religious mother, unleashes her telekinetic powers after being humiliated by her classmates at her senior prom.
23. The Haunting: Hill House has stood for about 90 years and appears haunted: its inhabitants have always met strange, tragic ends. Now Dr. John Markway has assembled a team of people who he thinks will prove whether or not the house is haunted.
24. Split: Three girls are kidnapped by a man with a diagnosed 23 distinct personalities. They must try to escape before the apparent emergence of a frightful new 24th.
25. PI: A paranoid mathematician searches for a key number that will unlock the universal patterns found in nature.
26. Scream: A year after the murder of her mother, a teenage girl is terrorized by a new killer, who targets the girl and her friends by using horror films as part of a deadly game.
27. Possession: A woman starts exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior after asking her husband for a divorce. Suspicions of infidelity soon give way to something much more sinister.
28. Eraserhead: Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.