"Empire" magazine named it the fifth best film of 2008. The French film journal "Cahiers du Cinéma" named the film as the third best of 2008. Bloody Disgusting ranked the film number twenty in their list of the "Top 20 Horror Films of the Decade", with the article calling the film "A brilliant conceit, to be sure, backed by a genius early marketing campaign that followed the less-is-more philosophy to tantalizing effect...much like "Blair Witch" nearly ten years earlier, "Cloverfield" helped prove, particularly in its first half hour, that what you don't see can be the scariest thing of all".