20. Tales From the Crypt (1972, dir. Freddie Francis)
SYNOPSIS: Five people are touring some cemetery catacombs. They get lost and meet an old monk who warns them of their impending dooms.
I have a soft spot for horror anthologies (the genre lends itself well to conciseness), and this is probably the best of them. It has an oddly quaint charm to it while still being legitimately creepy and nasty at times, and the surfeit of morbid death-imagery makes it feel almost like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: The Movie. Most people seem to disagree, but my favorite segment is the second one, in which the sudden shift to first-person camera P.O.V. instills a sense of foreboding, even though you can probably guess what's coming. Ditto the gleefully sadistic ending - if you know anything about anything you can predict it, but it works anyway. An ideal Halloween-party sort of movie.
19. House on Haunted Hill (1959, dir. William Castle)
SYNOPSIS: An eccentric rich guy invites a group of people who desperately need money to a "party" at a mansion where murder seems to occur a lot.
This was the scariest thing I was allowed to watch before the age of 9 or 10, and though tame by modern standards, there are a couple parts that are still potential pants-pissers for the uninitiated - one involving a really gruesome and ugly severed head, for example. William Castle was known for his tie-in gimmicks, but he actually creates a legitimately spooky atmosphere here. There's something sinister about the opening bit in which one character's face just sort of appears out of the darkness to inform us of the house's unsavory history, and the ending feels more ambiguous than it really is (in a good way). Plus Vincent Price is in it.
18. Friday the 13th (1980, dir. Sean Cunningham)
SYNOPSIS: Some college kids go to an old summer camp to renovate it for re-opening. Someone with a grudge gets very mad at them.
The filmmakers even admitted that this was basically a ripoff of Halloween, but I actually like it better. The northern-U.S. backwoods setting reminds me of all the places I spent vacations as a kid (not to mention places that are like, a 5-minute drive from where I live), which makes the simple "someone kills people in an isolated setting one-by-one" premise work, and the revenge-oriented backstory is actually quite disturbing. The climax is campy, but in an entertainingly depraved way thanks to the presence of one of the horror genre's all-time great villains (and yes, I know which film in the series I am writing about - seriously). That shock ending creeps me out every time. This is, to borrow Pauline Kael's phrase, "Great Trash".
17. The Ring (2002, dir. Gore Verbinski)
SYNOPSIS: People who watch a bizarre videotape die mysteriously seven days later.
The premise may be kind of stupid-sounding, but this movie is actually scary as hell. And this, the American remake, is actually scarier than the 1998 Japanese original (though both are nonetheless good). Here, for once in the history of cinema, having an entire film's worth of nothing but BLUE COLOR WASH is a positive, since it makes everything seem cold, wet, and bleak. An undercurrent of sinister dread underlies all that happens. Everyone seems to huddle around in fear of vague, but all-powerful supernatural forces. The tape is really eerie. And the big "money shot" scare at the end was some sort of generational milestone for people around my age - "Where were you when [spoiler] Samara CRAWLED OUT OF THE FRICKING TV SET."
16. Night of the Living Dead (1968, dir. George Romero)
SYNOPSIS: Dead people come back to life to feed upon the living, for no particular reason. A few survivors barricade themselves in a farmhouse.
One of the two films (the other being Psycho) which inaugurated the "modern" era of horror. Made for cheap in black-and-white, at a time when nobody used black-and-white anymore - but here it just adds to the starkness of what's going on. The natural order has been overturned, and everyone in this movie fails miserably at everything. The apparent heroine goes catatonic a quarter of the way into the film, the apparent hero then turns out to be wrong, and the one good idea had by anyone degenerates into a BARBECUE. This is all capped off with a cruel "OOOPS!" of an ending followed by what looks vaguely like Holocaust pictures. (For some reason, when I was in 8th grade, they showed this on the school's closed-circuit TV system on Halloween - assuming that just because it was an old B&W film, it couldn't possibly contain graphic depictions of severed limbs being eaten or people being stabbed to death with trowels, etc.)
15. The Sixth Sense (1999, dir. M. Night Shyamalan)
SYNOPSIS: A child psychologist attempts to help a young boy who is really afraid of... something.
Given how "mainstream" it is and how reviled its creator has become, it would be easy to forget that this is a really good, and quite frightening, film, and that it almost singlehandedly revitalized supernatural horror cinema after the blah-ness of the 1990's. It wisely takes its time, setting up the (very sympathetic and believable) characters and building a sense of mystery, before cutting loose in the second half with a smorgasbord of pure nightmare fuel. The ghosts (does that count as a spoiler?) are scary here less due to cheap "jump scares" than due to simple fact that ghosts, being glitches in the fabric of reason and reality, are inherently terrifying; the film recognizes and uses this fact. And once again we have a twist ending which, though much spoilered, was a big deal at the time. I didn't see it coming (though I was only like 14 and I've never been the type of person who tries to "outsmart" a movie).
14. Hellraiser (1987, dir. Clive Barker)
SYNOPSIS: A guy moves into his brother's house after said brother vanishes. Then his wife starts being very naughty, and his daughter subsequently must deal with the infernal fallout.
For all that this movie seemed hip and contemporary when it first came out, it is actually very old-fashioned, being an extension of the Gothic horror of the 18th and 19th Centuries - it's about sexual repression making people do bad things, and demons then showing up to punish them for their sins (although, as is pointed out, not everyone views an eternity of BDSM as "punishment"...). Thus there is a melancholy romanticism at work here, emphasized by the mournful score. Pinhead and his cohorts only show up a couple times, but they make a big impression when they do - I still get chills at the part when the heroine, who is otherwise perfectly virtuous, decides in about four seconds that she's keen enough to escape the demons that she's willing to give them someone else in her place. Jesus wept, indeed.
13. (Bram Stoker's) Dracula (1992, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
SYNOPSIS: A 400-year-old Transylvanian vampire seeks new brides / food sources in England.
This is, in many ways, the definitive Dracula film (although Lugosi is still great), full of welcome excess; and though they kinda tried to turn it into a love story for some reason, the horror elements are still front and center, what with all the blood-vomiting, baby-eating, and rape-by-werewolf. It's debatable if Coppola was exactly sure of what the hell kind of movie he wanted to make, but that's okay, because there's enough cool stuff on display to make up for it. Notably, the ham-to-ham combat (I wish I was the one who invented that phrase, but I didn't) between Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins, and the almost Expressionistic portrayal of Transylvania as a primeval wasteland, and London as a labyrinth of dark alleys and foggy parks and graveyards. The bigger a fan you are of Cradle of Filth, the better this movie gets.
12. Dawn of the Dead (1978, dir. George Romero)
SYNOPSIS: Four people flee to a shopping mall and attempt to build normal lives within the boundaries prescribed by a zombie apocalypse.
A truly bizarre film. Aside from the basic premise, and a few nasty scenes, it's not really "scary" at all, being moreso some sort of social satire. The beginning is hell on earth, with society devolving into total chaos; once the protagonists implement their plan to re-colonize a mall, though, we are treated to a treatise on the meaningless banality of life - though life is still probably better than undeath. Eventually some obnoxious bikers show up and everything goes back to hell. In contrast to the straight-faced bleakness of its predecessor, this one seems to revel in black comedy (zombies wandering directly into bullets never fails to amuse me) and the kind of armchair philosophy one often hears at 3 a.m. after much alcohol has been consumed.
11. The Exorcist (1973, dir. William Friedkin)
SYNOPSIS: The Devil possesses a 12-year-old girl for no particular reason. Her mother and a couple of priests must save her.
Most "best horror films" lists tend to have this as #1, or maybe #3 at lowest. I don't find it to be that great, but it's still a classic. The fact that it turned American society on its head upon its initial release says as much about how Puritanical the U.S. was (and kinda still is) as it does about anything else, since most of the horror comes from A) the assumption that Satan is literally real and possesses the power to actually do stuff like... B) force a CHILD, the embodiment of INNOCENCE (omg) to *gasp* spout profanity and behave in a sexually suggestive fashion!!! (and also kill people.) Seriously, though, this is a well-made film, with three-dimensional characters and shocking imagery - even atheists are apt to be unnerved by the subliminal demon-face thing, the "Help Me" bit, and some interesting flaunting of the rules of human biology. There's also something creepy about the idea of Evil Itself lurking in... the bedroom upstairs.
10. Rosemary's Baby (1968, dir. Roman Polanski)
SYNOPSIS: A pregnant young woman comes to suspect that her eccentric old neighbors, and perhaps even her husband, may have sinister designs on her child.
This is brilliant, classy stuff, at once subtle and outrageous. I tend to respond more to its black humor and don't find it particularly scary, but then again, I'm not a woman. Pregnancy is one of the scariest things most people will ever deal with, and here we have a worst-case-scenario outcome - Rosemary, in her sense of isolation from people who can help or understand her, in her claustrophobic old apartment, becomes increasingly paranoid, but the ultimate result is even worse than what she feared. Throughout the film, everyone lies to her, condescends to her, and manipulates her (she's a mild-mannered former Catholic schoolgirl, all but incapable of stopping savvier individuals from taking advantage of her) while she struggles with both religious guilt and the fact that the thing in her uterus is tormenting and possibly killing her. I have more sympathy for "women's issues" as a result of seeing this film than I do from any number of other, more obviously feminist sources. And yet, the ending (possibly my favorite movie ending ever) is both scary and hysterically funny.
9. The Evil Dead (1981, dir. Sam Raimi)
SYNOPSIS: Five college kids vacationing at a cabin in the mountains find an ancient book that unleashes malevolent spirits.
This is what weeds out the "casual" horror fans. Obviously made on a tiny budget by amateurs, and yet few films manage such a sustained level of dread, intensity, and nauseating repulsiveness, all delivered via creative camerawork. The woodsy, autumnal setting is desolate, the characters basic but relatable, and after the first 10 minutes or so, the onslaught is unrelenting. The evil spirits called up by the Sumerian Book of the Dead can pretty much do whatever they feel like in the course of making mortals their prey - animate trees, obscure the sky with fog, make the walls bleed, or randomly transform people into flesh-eating, nursery-rhyme spouting undead demon zombie things. The unpredictability and sense of the characters' total helplessness is a big part of this movie's success. For all the over-the-top gore on display, though, there is also some downright eerie stuff, notably the card-reading scene... ugh.
8. Alien (1979, dir. Ridley Scott)
SYNOPSIS: Space miners investigate a distress signal coming from an abandoned planet and accidentally pick up an unpleasant stowaway.
Here we have the most basic of horror plots: People are trapped, and there is a monster. In this case however, "trapped" doesn't even begin to cover it. They're in the middle of frickin' outer space. And the titular creature doesn't just want to kill them - it wants to completely violate them in the rudest fashion imaginable. And their employers (who are many, many light-years away) couldn't give a crap. The universe is a big, dark, empty place, and chances are, there are a lot of very weird things in it - things that can cause men to give birth and do something to women so horrible the movie apparently can't even bear to show it. All this unfolds via a sequence of classic set-pieces dripping with cold, black atmosphere and sold by the excellent cast (Veronica Cartwright plays one of the best-ever characters whose chief function is to be a gibbering wreck and make everyone else uncomfortable - the viewer wants to slap her, but then give her a hug). Also, that other alien, the dead one at the beginning, is freaky-looking.
7. Frankenstein (1931, dir. James Whale)
SYNOPSIS: A scientist creates an artificial human out of dead body parts. It doesn't turn out quite the way he hoped.
A well-aged cheese. I was one of those kids who loved ancient horror films so I'm biased, but even kids weaned on jump scares and graphic torture scenes might find this entertaining, given the panache on display - loopy and distorted sets, glorious overacting ("NOW I KNOW WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE GOD!"), and a story which gets more disturbing the more you think about it. That Dr. Frankenstein achieves his dream is impressive; the problem is that this success results in a hideously deformed creature that causes nothing but death and terror for everyone else, even though it lacks the mental ability or the frame-of-reference to understand what it's doing. One could argue that almost every technological breakthrough is something of a Frankenstein's Monster - there are always nasty little side effects that we couldn't quite foresee. In this case, one such side effect is a slack-jawed, glassy-eyed father marching through the streets of the local village, carrying his dead daughter in his arms. The common, decent people aren't prepared to deal with "complicated" things like this, and soon the lynch mobs are forming. Now that's scary.
6. The Thing (1982, dir. John Carpenter)
SYNOPSIS: Men at a base in Antarctica are infiltrated by an alien parasite that can assume human form.
Nobody liked this movie when it first came out, which is weird because everybody thinks it's awesome now. It's too gory, they said. Yes! Yes it is! Hah! Rob Bottin here comes up with some of the best non-computerized special effects ever. They still look cool today. The cast consists entirely of dudes, they said. The famous "blood test" scene, in which everyone is forced to submit to an initiation process to DETERMINE IF THEY'RE A MAN, would not have worked half as well if everyone wasn't male - just as I cannot fully fathom the estrogen-based horror of Rosemary's Baby, women cannot fully comprehend the horror of not being One Of The Guys. Women, children, and animals are not Men(TM), and thus are excused, but if you're a grown male who doesn't qualify as a Man(TM), what are you? A... thing. I could write way more along these lines, like how when I was in junior high school, if there was even the slightest suspicion that a guy might be gay (homosexuality was viewed as a state of non-manliness), everyone would scootch away from him and pretend like they didn't know him. But, all that sort of crap aside, this movie is just really freaking scary due to the fact that we don't even know what the monster IS. It mimics its victims - what was its original form? Did it even have an original form? If it mimics them perfectly, would they even know that they were an alien replicant, or would they still feel like their usual selves? And as in several other films on this list, severe isolation plays a role in beefing up the tension. The fact that the Thing was found in Antarctica is more of a good thing for the rest of mankind, though, since, in a more populated area, it could quickly infect everyone. Then we'd all be asking where the real men are these days.
5. Nosferatu (1922, dir. F.W. Murnau)
SYNOPSIS: Same basic thing as in Bram Stoker's Dracula, only the vampire isn't interested in romance.
Once, long ago, vampires were scary. They were hideous dead things that parasitically fed upon the living to sustain their shadowy and blasphemous existence, like a cross between zombies and mosquitoes. This movie takes that interpretation and goes even further with it - the vampire is here presented as the embodiment of plague. Swarms of rats accompany him to his new home, and he even looks a bit like a rat himself. When Bram Stoker first wrote Dracula (this being an unauthorized adaptation of said novel), one of the big subjects on everyone's minds was SYPHILIS. A few years before this movie was made, Germany was involved in World War 1, where soldiers spent much of their time huddling in grave-like trenches accompanied by lots and lots of corpse-eating rats. Everything in this film is suggestive of DEATH. The fact that it's an old silent movie gives it a jerky, weird, unnatural feel, like the sort of bad dream people have when they're sick. There is no real moral ambiguity here, but that's okay. Sometimes we need easy, direct parables about light and dark. The movie is in black and white; the presence of the vampire is announced by his shadow; and he is vulnerable to sunlight. (On a final, personal note: Nosferatu has no official soundtrack, and is in the public domain, so multiple versions of it exist - I am most familiar with the soundtrack done by my friend's one-man band Funeralizer, which employed mellow acoustic guitar for the quieter scenes, and black metal for the scary parts. Nothing would suit the film better.)
4. Suspiria (1977, dir. Dario Argento)
SYNOPSIS: An American girl goes to a trippy German dance academy where gruesome murders are taking place.
You know how people are always talking about how most of the classic fairy tales, in their original, pre-Disney form, were really violent and gory and mean-spirited? Well, here you go. Almost everything in this film could have come directly out of Grimm's, despite technically being set in the present. For all its horror and suspense, it's also gorgeous (and has one of my favorite theme tunes - good luck getting it out of your head). The sets look like something from an expensive stage play. Vibrant blue, green, and red light colors most of the major shots, typically being contrasted with black (what else?). This is combined with a pounding musical score produces a sort of sensory overload during the intense parts. All the major characters in this film are female. Aside from a couple of psychiatrists who show up towards the end to provide unintentionally-funny exposition, every man in this movie is subservient to powerful older women; the one who dares to defy them comes to a bad end. And the younger women fare just as bad, if not worse - they are misled and patronized, and destroyed with a sadistic vengefulness if they upset the status quo. The ensuing murder sequences are ferociously nasty. Two of the deaths in particular are more brutal than most anything seen outside of pure exploitation films (despite the relative fakeness of the gore). One of them caught me completely off-guard when first I saw it. And when the Old Boys' (or Girls') Network is aided by dark forces (which are given a source, but never really explained), that's just that much more power to be abused in an institutional setting. It's hard not to root for our doe-eyed heroine, but one gets the impression that she is not going to have anything resembling an easy time earning her freedom from the strictures of corruption and entrenched selfishness. For now, I'll just say that the resolution involves the scariest zombie I've ever seen.
3. Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
SYNOPSIS: A woman steals some money from her boss and flees to be with her divorced boyfriend. Along the way, she stops by a motel run by a young man who seems a bit odd.
Watch this movie as though you didn't already know anything about it, and it will reward you. Its major plot twist was so stunning, when it first came out, that it singlehandedly killed the noir genre, and replaced it with a new form of horror film. Said twist is associated with one of the most famous scenes in cinema, which still plays mercilessly on that fear we all have of being caught with our pants down, having to give a speech when naked, and, you know, being stabbed with a butcher's knife. But aside from all that "historical", film-geek stuff, Psycho is CREEPY. There's nothing supernatural going on here, and there doesn't need to be. It's like when you find someone's stash of unsavory porn, or when you're over at someone's house and get caught in the middle of a really ugly family argument - only much, much worse. Any time the killer shows up (especially at the end, in full view, though even the more obscured shots earlier have the effect), I feel not only chilled, but unclean. The implications of what's going on here are just plain wrong. And the aforementioned climactic scene ("Mrs. Bates...?") is one of cinema's crowning achievments in combining horrible imagery, unnerving music, and clever editing and camerawork into utter nightmarishness.
2. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper)
SYNOPSIS: Five college kids (this is where the "five college kids" thing started, incidentally) drive around randomly in TEXAS. They meet some... people.
The first time I saw this, at the age of 15 or thereabouts, I was sort of shell-shocked and had to sit down and stare at a wall for an hour or so. Roger Ebert gave it a mediocre review, saying that it was "just an exercise in terror." Well, yeah. No wonder it is spoken of with pure reverance by hardcore horror buffs. The first half of it consists of DREAD. Hot, hazy, smelling-of-rot dread, the morbid feeling that something really bad is about to happen. It does. The second half then consists of, well, terror. There is simply no other film in existence which creates, and then sustains, the same level of out-of-control fear and general insanity found in the latter portion of TCM. Not bad considering it's an indie film made by a first-time director with the cooperation of mostly unknown local actors. Marilyn Burns, playing our main heroine Sally, turns running around and screaming a lot into an art form, and I'm not being snarky or sarcastic when I say that - the basic idea of what's going on in this movie has been done many times since, but if you haven't seen this, the pure wellspring from which coarser waters flow, you simply don't know what you're missing. There is not nearly as much gore as you might think. On the other hand, to say that "it's all suggestion" would be incorrect. We don't see much in the way of gory violence; what we do see is DEATH and DECAY. And MEAT. This is a film about the slaughter of animals and their transformation first into meat (or headcheese), and then into bones. There are lots of bones, corpses, decaying dead things, and so forth lying around, so there is no ambiguity whatsoever what fate is in store for the unfortunate victims. The disenfranchised, forgotten-by-progress villains (and yes, there are several of them, not just one guy named "Leatherface") are so far gone that they don't even grasp what they're doing - witness the nauseating scene in which one of the girls desperately offers them sex if they'll let her live, only for them (and they're all male) to completely miss the point, or not care, because they see her simply as a cow mooing pointlessly before being converted into beef. Or "long pork", I guess. You might say that chipmunks bred in labs until they lost their original instincts, then released into a field, only to SUDDENLY AND UNEXPECTEDLY encounter a hawk, would react to their situation in much the same way that modern, civilized people have been reacting to this movie for the last few decades.
1. The Shining (1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
SYNOPSIS: A dysfunctional family signs on as winter caretakers at a very isolated, very haunted hotel.
This movie literally traumatized me when I saw it at the age of 10. I didn't attempt to watch it again until I was 18, and then only with the cajoling and reassurance of friends, after which it got somewhat easier. Although I'm still uncomfortable with long hallways and, when imager-searching for the above poster, I was nervous that I might accidentally see certain things that I do NOT want to see unless prepared. I sometimes wonder what the hell my dad was thinking, letting me watch it at that age. Of course, now that I'm grown up, I've come to respect this film for being so good at what it does. The simplest way to describe The Shining is to say that everything about it feels like a terrible nightmare. Not in the same pulse-pounding way as TCM, above, but in the sense of complete and utter wrongness, of uncanniness - the sense that every normal-seeming thing is an impostor, is lying to you and wants to hurt you - preferably mentally and spiritually, rather than just physically. The ghosts in this movie are the scariest things ever to appear on celluloid. They don't leap out from the dark, they just stand there, or slowly walk forward. And that's all they need to do, because the instant they appear, a warning siren goes off in the viewer's head - something is wrong! Something is very wrong here! Kubrick, no stranger to visual style, implicitly grasped that a foul parody of normalcy, presenting itself openly in the light, is somehow worse than anything waiting to strike from the shadows. The ghosts operate on this principle, and so, worse yet, does the Torrance family. When Danny goes to get his toy fire truck from the bedroom, where his father Jack is supposedly sleeping and must not be disturbed, what ensues is so, well, disturbed, that its subtlety seems to conceal an almost limitless amount of depravity. In this scene, as in most of the rest of the film, everything that everyone does makes everything worse. None of them understand one another, or the ways in which their failure to communicate is furthering the goals of a horrific and endemic evil. We can pretty much guess what's going to happen (or almost happen, or kinda happen, anyway...) right from the beginning - one character explicitly spells it out. It then proceeds to happen. In slow motion. Nothing anyone can do will make it any better. The supernatural and realistic elements play off each other in such a way that each becomes even more frightening by the relationship between them. For all its subtlety and claustrophobia, though, the movie feels big and epic. It doesn't just take place in a haunted house, it takes place in what is pretty much the apotheosis of haunted houses, perched on a mountain in the most inhospitable landscape in America, a place where the layout and architecture make little sense and the elements outside seem to be conspiring to trap the Torrances there, forever. It's not just a ghost story, or a psycho-thriller, or a movie about precognition and telepathy, or a really messed-up drama about how alcoholism tears families apart; it's all of the above. There are a lot of theories about this film's subtext. While those are somewhat interesting, the text, i.e. the main, surface story, is interesting enough by itself that to ignore it in favor of abstract sociopolitical speculation would be to do it a disservice. We can clearly see here that timid, neurotic women will allow their husbands to get away with far more than they should; that children have a completely different perspective on things, which adults often lose the ability to comprehend after they "grow up", to the detriment of both; that the preoccupation with the past, whether focusing on the negative (Ullman the manager being overly concerned about the Grady murders that took place in the hotel ten years ago) or the positive (Jack fantasizing about the glamorous parties that that took place in the hotel in the 1920's) often creates self-fulfilling prophecies. ...Anyhow (*cough*), this is just a great horror movie, and a classic piece of cinema. I'm surprised that it's as popular as it is - it's like two and a half hours long, and very little actually "happens" for most of that time. But it's burrowed its way into the collective consciousness all the same, and almost every major scene or aspect has attained classic, cultural-meme status. (A year or two ago, the film's facebook page was asking people what they thought was the "scariest scene". Interestingly, the one that I saw the most responses for was... not the elevator's worth of blood, not the Grady girls, not Jack's two-minute stare, not Room 237, not "All work and no play", not Redrum, not "Here's Johnny", but, rather, the first thing Wendy sees during the climax, after she runs up the stairs, simply because it is such a pure and utter "WTF???" moment.) Oh, as for the actors: Jack Nicholson is waaaay over the top, but he's damn entertaining to watch, as usual. Shelley Duvall gives the best performance in the film. Her character is supposed to be weak and annoying, yet she is meant to be the audience surrogate. That, presumably, is why a lot of people don't like her - they don't like feeling helpless, confused, unglamorous, nervous, dependent, vaguely complicit in unsavory things, locked out of the proverbial loop, condescended to, and obliged to keep everything calm and nice and normal to the best of their meager abilities. Yet we're rooting for her by the end. Scatman Crothers is also very good, though his role is chiefly to provide exposition and then set up a cruel misdirection of the audience. Nevertheless, one finds oneself trying to imagine what sorts of things he must have seen in that damn place over the years; it's a wonder he's still sane.
