One of the best horror movies

Rating: 8/10 (6 June 2020)

7/10 seems like a fair estimation for this movie, but you have to heavily balance the excellent impact on the viewer and the way the movie unfolds. Given that, it should easily have 8/10.
What I feel Signs did excellently (and that a lot of modern horror movies fail at) is establish a baseline of normality. They show characters going about their usual lives, with nothing out of the ordinary. The story and associated tension develops slowly and naturally. It's almost boring.
Some shallow evidence of a weird phenomena are showed, but there is no killer to jump out in the bathroom while one of the side-characters is taking a shower. There is no screaming and no blood. Just a faint feeling of something being wrong.
By the time the first aliens are shown, you are legitimately startled. This is precisely because you're not used to it. If the first 10 minutes of the movie would have shown a non-human claw or spaceship hovering about Earth, that surprise would have been completely eradicated.
Most horror movies should take notes from how Signs was constructed and what it really takes to build up a scare.