Horror films

[Mattrick]

I just finished watching The Lazarus Effect on Netflix, and I have to admit it was better than I expected. Kind of reminded me of Event Horizon...

DanaR, if you like found footage, check out The Conspiracy.

The Conspiracy was good! I haven't watched The Lazarus Effect yet, but it's in my queue.

I love Event Horizon, one of the few movies that still gives me the heebies if I watch it alone. Another one that weirds me out is In the Mouth of Madness. Sam Neill does creepy well.

In The Mouth Of Madness is a horror classic. "Did I ever tell you my favourite colour was blue?" (Young Hayden Christiansen as paper boy at the end. I drive past the church all the time.)

[needfulthings]

He may just be, I doubt we'll ever know!!! He is a man of means and intrigue. He's never in one place too long and travels like the wind. He also doesn't drink beer often, but when he does, he drinks Dos Equis!!! LOL LOL
How wrong can you be.:nope:
1. Retired
2. Was Blue Collar Worker
3.Home 24/7 98% of the time
4. Travels at 55-70 mph
5. Drinks Quinness
:lol::lol::lol:

http://imageshack.com/a/img905/3470/aNhT7r.jpg

[allasorte]

Extraordinary Tales 2015. Animation stories of several Edgar Allen Poe tales. If you like Poe I'd assume you would like this animation. Done by different creators with different styles. I enjoyed it, especially for Halloween.

[Heather19]

So our theater had a special showing of Dracula, the original one with Bela Lugosi last night, so we went to see it. And as a bonus they showed the Spanish language version right after it. An interesting thing that I never knew was that after Tod Browning wrapped filming for the day, another crew came in, used the same sets and filmed a Spanish version of the film at night. We only watched maybe the first half hour because it was getting late and what we saw was very, very similar to the other one. Also I didn't like who they had cast as Dracula, he just seemed kind of goofy.

Bruce, I'm guessing you've seen it? How does the rest of the film compare, is it very similar? They said it was longer so they were able to flesh out the characters a bit more, but what we saw, minus a few different camera angles, was just like the English version.

[Ricky]

after Tod Browning wrapped filming for the day, another crew came in, used the same sets and filmed a Spanish version of the film at night

That's a really cool fun fact. I've never seen any movie version of Dracula, but the book has been on my to-read list for a couple years.

[Heather19]

You should watch Nosferatu! Max Schreck is so creepy in that movie. Not to mention, for being made before Universal's Dracula, the effects were much better. Him popping up from the coffin was much better than the camera panning away from the unopened coffin and back to see Dracula standing beside it.

I also watch The Sentinel the other night. I couldn't believe everyone that was in it. A very young Jeff Goldblum, a young Christopher Walken, a naked Beverly D'Angelo, and also from Christmas Vacation uncle Lewis.

[divemaster]

I also watch The Sentinel the other night.

Not familiar with this one. Is it good? (aside from the cast).


I couldn't believe everyone that was in it....a naked Beverly D'Angelo...

Please to discuss further this important element.

[Heather19]

I also watch The Sentinel the other night.

Not familiar with this one. Is it good? (aside from the cast).
It was ok, a good rainy day rental. Nothing spectacular though. It ended up on my list because either someone raved about it or I saw it on one of those must see horror movie lists.




I couldn't believe everyone that was in it....a naked Beverly D'Angelo...

Please to discuss further this important element.

Yeah I was quite shocked. Not to mention another thing she does in the film. I wasn't expecting it from her :lol: She was pretty young in it too, I think it might have been her first movie.

[needfulthings]

http://imageshack.com/a/img907/7559/prQwVh.jpg

[divemaster]

Yeah I was quite shocked. Not to mention another thing she does in the film. I wasn't expecting it from her :lol: She was pretty young in it too, I think it might have been her first movie.

Added to Netflix queue!

[Ricky]

You should watch Nosferatu! Max Schreck is so creepy in that movie. Not to mention, for being made before Universal's Dracula, the effects were much better. Him popping up from the coffin was much better than the camera panning away from the unopened coffin and back to see Dracula standing beside it.

It's been in my queue since you (I think it was you) mentioned/recommended it years ago. I just never seem to get around to watching it. One of these years though!

[Heather19]

Make that year Now! :D

[needfulthings]

Nosferatu is a must...
http://imageshack.com/a/img910/1573/LfaiB5.jpg
and I also recommend these two.
http://imageshack.com/a/img911/2649/AcRlZZ.jpg

[needfulthings]

As for the Spanish Dracula you will find it included in both these sets as well on the new Blu-ray.
http://imageshack.com/a/img905/1678/D5rBaO.jpg

[Heather19]

What did you think of it Bruce? Is it very similar to the english version? What we saw was almost identical, minus a few different shots.

[needfulthings]

:unsure:Has been years since I have watched it...Will screen it tonight & get back to you.

[becca69]

Yeah I was quite shocked. Not to mention another thing she does in the film. I wasn't expecting it from her :lol: She was pretty young in it too, I think it might have been her first movie.

Added to Netflix queue!

I didn't see this title. Is it only on DVD?

[divemaster]

I guess. I don't do streaming.

[needfulthings]

I watched it last night & can say that I do like both films The Spanish one has some shoots of Dracula rising from a smoke filled boxhttp://imageshack.com/a/img911/4395/AT09Pw.jpg
(That does not match the coffin seen earlier from footage from the Bela version) http://imageshack.com/a/img903/7539/HRy6RW.jpg
& there is also footage of Bela in the London night) The Endings are quite different Carlos carries Eva down the staircase meets Renfield sets her down chokes Renfield & throws him OFF the staircase.http://imageshack.com/a/img907/8804/IlQuOU.jpg
Mina walks with Bela. Bela chokes Renfield & he rolls down the last stairs & Bela carries Mina to the bottom. Because of the day/night shoot the door to the cellar is pried open in the day shooting & broken open & destroyed for the night shoot also the ending is a little clearer in the Spanish film it shows Juan & Eva going up stairs & Van Helsing standing over Renfields body assuming to put this soul at rest.
http://imageshack.com/a/img907/5751/cUMBAj.jpg

Plus there is a little more female skin.:evil:
http://imageshack.com/a/img905/4999/P7PMhe.jpg

[Heather19]

Thanks Bruce! We saw his first coffin scene, which I thought was much better executed than the one with Bela. I'll have to give the full movie a watch some time.

[Jean]

haven't read anything in this thread yet, but:

came here to say that the only good horror I've watched recently was Babadook ("has anyone by any chance seen it and blah blah blah") and the first two things I see are: 1) there is a user Babadook 2) my nearest and dearest :rose: has Babadook as her avatar

http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear4bis.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear4bis.gif.html)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear4bis.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear4bis.gif.html)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear4bis.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear4bis.gif.html)

[Mattrick]

I've watched The Babadook like five times! It's a gem.

[divemaster]

I rented the Babadook and watched it this week. I very much enjoyed it. In clicking around the internet I came across a couple of theories that intrigued me. I've since purchased the DVD (come on Amazon!) and will watch it again shortly. Not sure if there is a commentary track, but I'll be looking a the film with a somewhat different frame of mind this time.

Oh, and welcome back, Jean!

[Jean]

has there been any discussion about it here? has someone posted a review or something?

[Heather19]

haven't read anything in this thread yet, but:

came here to say that the only good horror I've watched recently was Babadook ("has anyone by any chance seen it and blah blah blah") and the first two things I see are: 1) there is a user Babadook 2) my nearest and dearest :rose: has Babadook as her avatar

http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear4bis.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear4bis.gif.html)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear4bis.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear4bis.gif.html)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear4bis.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear4bis.gif.html)

:huglove: welcome back Jean

Yes, I loved the movie. One of my favorites from this past year, and one of the best horror films I've seen in quite some time. Another good recent horror film you should check out Jean is It Follows.

[Jean]

great!! I already have it on my watchlist, now I'll sure get around to watching it at last

[mae]

So pumped to finally have Jean back! :excited: You have so much to catch up with, though, old bear! :panic:

[Jean]

http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/0134-bear.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/0134-bear.gif.html)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/0134-bear.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/0134-bear.gif.html)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/0134-bear.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/0134-bear.gif.html)
I am still not very good at reading, but I am going to exercise this ability here http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear_grin.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear_grin.gif.html)

tried to read The Babadook reviews at imdb, had tons of good laugh! "Worst movie ever" - that was expected, there's not a movie in the world without such a review - but the reasons they give, oh, that was tops!! "The little boy is annoying" and "it's not really a ghost story!!" - LOL, thankfully, there are other people there who try to explain that it's just the point. (not very successfully, though - since we all know that there's no reasoning with most people at imdb)

[needfulthings]

:clap::clap::dance::dance::emot-roflolmao::emot-roflolmao::rock::rock:
HAPPY TO SEE YOU BACK.

[allasorte]

Creepshow I, II, III. Long time since I've seen 1 and 2. Never knew there was a third made. Wish I never knew that as it was terrible. Anyway, a blast from the past with Creepshow and it brought back old memories :).

[allasorte]

The Hollow I really didn't like at all.
The Hallow was a European film and it was shockingly not that bad at all
Extinction 2015 with Mathew Fox. Actually a good zombie movie though it was more about loneliness and making amends. Not that bad. And had a unique zombie twist......for once.

[Heather19]

I just watched this fun horror film The Final Girls. I'd definitely recommend it. This girl who's mom was a famous Scream queen of the 80s passes away. She goes to see a showing of her most famous film, and ends up getting transported into the film where they must fight off the killer.

[Jean]

have been watching horrors again

The Visit - very decent, devinitely fun to watch, well-acted and soundly filmed. Unfortunately
I kept hoping for a better twist. Not that I expected the one that was there - but after it came, I was disappointed: the story became much too straight. I had kept imagining things... mother actually having done somethng on "that day"... the horrible depravity and evil inside the family, not outside... Well, you know.

Anguish - fantastic score. Fantastic. Beautifully acted, too, I really fell in love with that amoeba-like, somnambulistic young actress trying her best to plausibly present mildly autistic condition. Too bad the storyline sucked.

June - Oops. Watched it the day before yesterday, and alreadly have problems remembering what it was about. But I don't remember falling asleep while watching, either, so gave it a generous 2 instead of the 1 it deserves.

[Heather19]

Jean, try to find Goodnight Mommy. Not exactly horror, but I think you'll really enjoy it. Oh and if you want a fun mindless film check out Krampus.

[Jean]

couldn't find either where I get them http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear_sad.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear_sad.gif.html)

[Ricky]

Watched Sinister 2 last night. For a sequel, I actually really enjoyed it. You kind of know the "aim" since it's pretty much the same as the first (demonic spirit corrupts kids to get them to murder their families), but it was executed really well. Good acting and development for characters we actually care about, well edited, hardly any jump scares. I think my only complaint would be the abrupt ending with its lack of a wrap-up.

Also, is it just me or are child actors getting better?

[Jean]

it's really good to hear. I was put off by all the negative reviews (mainly amounting to: ...and then they went and ruined it) and never watched it. It's nice to know there's another horror out there that bears might enjoy.

(just finished As Above, So Below, which was gawd-awful)

[Ricky]

Have you seen the first Sinister, Jean?

And yeah, As Above, So Below WAS awful.

[becca69]

have been watching horrors again

The Visit - very decent, devinitely fun to watch, well-acted and soundly filmed. Unfortunately
I kept hoping for a better twist. Not that I expected the one that was there - but after it came, I was disappointed: the story became much too straight. I had kept imagining things... mother actually having done somethng on "that day"... the horrible depravity and evil inside the family, not outside... Well, you know.

Anguish - fantastic score. Fantastic. Beautifully acted, too, I really fell in love with that amoeba-like, somnambulistic young actress trying her best to plausibly present mildly autistic condition. Too bad the storyline sucked.

June - Oops. Watched it the day before yesterday, and alreadly have problems remembering what it was about. But I don't remember falling asleep while watching, either, so gave it a generous 2 instead of the 1 it deserves.

I really liked the Visit. I was so overwhelmed at how well it came out since my good friend worked on it (when it was still called Sundowning) and she said it was probably going to be terrible. A friend of hers did the editing and he did a wonderful job of it. I thought the twist was good because I never would have guessed that.

[Jean]

Have you seen the first Sinister, Jean?Oh yes, - twice. It was fun to watch: sufficiently creepy, very enjoyable, the mocumentary fragments were perfect. That's why I didn't want to watch the sequel, after all those reviews


And yeah, As Above, So Below WAS awful.yeah, sooooo boring... I've just watched a ridiculously bad horror called Pernicious, but being super-dumb, poorly acted and altogether idiotic, I still managed to winkle some fun out of it, while AASB was just a waste of time

[becca69]

Have you seen the first Sinister, Jean?

And yeah, As Above, So Below WAS awful.

I liked AASB :o

[Jean]

http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear_unsure.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear_unsure.gif.html)

[Ricky]

Jean, if you liked the first I want to say that you'll enjoy 2 as well. It doesn't have that "true crime" aspect that the first one had--it's much more focused on a mom and her two kids and Bughuul's influence over them.

Let me know what you think when you see it.


I liked AASB :o

Shh...no you didn't. :lol:

But I did like The Visit a lot and was surprised at how good it was as well.

[Jean]

bears adore it when horror movies are focused around moms and especially their kids! thank you for the tip-off!! http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif.html)

[Ricky]

No problem! The kids were especially good and believable. The family dynamic reminded me (a little) of parts of Goodnight Mommy, especially with the twins.

[allasorte]

Sinister 2 was better then I thought it would be and I enjoyed it. Not as good as the first one as I did love Hawke in that movie.
As Above So Below had a good idea, but it failed miserably for me and I am tired of cam movies.
Regression just popped up with Ethan Hawke. Long drawl about Hawke being a cop and checking into a murder with satanic dispositions. I didn't like it at all :( and I really like Hawke a lot.
The Visit I complained earlier about in this thread. I hated it. Sorry.

I'm waiting for The VVitch. February 23rd it is coming to rent/own.

[Lookwhoitis]

Under the Shadow is trying to be this year's Babbadook at Sundance 2016. Its an Iranian horror film about the Djinn.

I liked it.

[Ricky]

I'm waiting for The VVitch. February 23rd it is coming to rent/own.

I'm pretty sure it's getting a wide theatrical release. I've seen the trailer a few times at the movies. But yeah, it looks really good. And I also want to see The Boy. I'm a sucker for creepy doll movies.

Saw The Forest last week and it was terrible.

[allasorte]

I'm waiting for The VVitch. February 23rd it is coming to rent/own.

I'm pretty sure it's getting a wide theatrical release. I've seen the trailer a few times at the movies. But yeah, it looks really good. And I also want to see The Boy. I'm a sucker for creepy doll movies.

Saw The Forest last week and it was terrible.
I heard that about the Forest. And yes I am curious about The Boy and will see it regardless. I will see the Forest though. Have to get the horror fix lol.

[fernandito]

Under the Shadow is trying to be this year's Babbadook at Sundance 2016. Its an Iranian horror film about the Djinn.

I liked it.

Really want to see that.

[Heather19]

It sounds good. I don't think I've seen a film about the Djinn yet.

I also thought The Witch was getting a wide release next month as well, is this not the case? I'm looking forward to this one. I'm also dying to see The Boy.

[Jean]

Lots of thanks to Ricky! I really enjoyed the second Sinister - bears love those evil child movies! Don't know why all that hate in the comments I read elsewhere - a good, sound, wholesome horror film, just what bears like.

The only thing bears love more than that is a dismal, morbid, dreary horror film, and this craving was more or less satisfied by Canal, a 2014 Irish film. Nothing especially new or groundbreaking about it, but it sure was dismal enough, bears liked.

[Mattrick]

It sounds good. I don't think I've seen a film about the Djinn yet.

I also thought The Witch was getting a wide release next month as well, is this not the case? I'm looking forward to this one. I'm also dying to see The Boy.

I'm so sick of these horror movies about dolls. So boring and not creepy.

[Mattrick]

Lots of thanks to Ricky! I really enjoyed the second Sinister - bears love those evil child movies! Don't know why all that hate in the comments I read elsewhere - a good, sound, wholesome horror film, just what bears like.

The only thing bears love more than that is a dismal, morbid, dreary horror film, and this craving was more or less satisfied by Canal, a 2014 Irish film. Nothing especially new or groundbreaking about it, but it sure was dismal enough, bears liked.

Sinister two was alright? I really liked the original and I always avoid horror sequels.

[Jean]

It depends on how seriously you treat horror movies. One might say that while the original film presented an (arguably) fresh aspect, the sequel is thoroughly traditional and doesn't offer any new perspective on anything. Which I personally don't mind in the least, provided it is entertaining.

[Ricky]

Lots of thanks to Ricky! I really enjoyed the second Sinister - bears love those evil child movies! Don't know why all that hate in the comments I read elsewhere - a good, sound, wholesome horror film, just what bears like.

No problem, Jean! I'm glad you liked it as well. And I agree, it wasn't bad like so many people seem to say (though it did pretty well at the box office).


I'm so sick of these horror movies about dolls. So boring and not creepy.

You should take that back. They may be watching. :scared:

Puppets/dolls/marionettes are one of the things that freak me out the most, so I think it's one of the horror sub-genres most likely to "scare" me.


the sequel is thoroughly traditional and doesn't offer any new perspective on anything. Which I personally don't mind in the least, provided it is entertaining.

I agree. It had just enough new elements (and I really liked the characters) to make it not a total rehash of the first. Also, like you said, it was entertaining.

Plus, I really loved how they focused on the kids' points of view.

[Mattrick]

Maybe if they make a horror film about thos3 maleovent elf on a shelf dolls. They have hooves.

[Tommy]

Sinister 2 surprised me as well because it was slaughtered by the critics but I really enjoyed it.

[Lookwhoitis]

well, the Witch has been given the official "thumbs up" by the Satanic Temple, so there's that... :ghost_002:

http://www.indiewire.com/article/beware-horror-fans-the-witch-has-just-been-named-an-official-satanic-experience-20160203?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=IW_post

looking forward to seeing it again as it was one of my favorite Sundance films last year

[dnemec]

I normally just look around here, but I had to share, especially since you were talking about dolls.

I caught an 1987 movie on tv called "Dolls," and if you love/hate creepy doll movies, you have absolutely got to see it. It was such a delightfully bad movie, but totally entertaining. Well, if you have a love/hate relationship with the creepy little things it is. I kept cracking up and cheering on the dolls.

Anyway, just had to share. :redface:

[Ricky]

Just looked it up. I'm blaming you for my nightmares tonight.

[dnemec]

Just looked it up. I'm blaming you for my nightmares tonight.

:lol:

[needfulthings]

:evil:
http://imageshack.com/a/img924/984/BOjmwt.jpg

[allasorte]

The VVitch. I loved the scenery, the acting, but the ending was so.......dumb. That hurts my value of the movie :(.
Victor Frankenstein. Better then I thought it would be and I do enjoy watching McAvoy and Daniel Radcliiffe. I'm guessing it was a sort of prequel because of the ending?
The Forest. I always wondered why this was never a movie. Great history behind this damned forest. They make a movie, it sucks, so I guess I know why lol.

[allasorte]

:evil:
http://imageshack.com/a/img924/984/BOjmwt.jpg

DOH! I miss your old avatar though.

[allasorte]

Movies just haven't been out there. Good ones, or many good ones. A few here and there but not many. The trend seems to be TV shows these days. Anyway, I figured I would mention "Broken" 2008 I believe. With Lena Headly from Game of Thrones. Not a bad movie and she does a really good job in it. She is in a car accident and believes she saw herself and that is why she got into one. I can't give out anymore information to spoil it.

[firemonkey66]

One of my favorite horror movies of all time is In the Mouth of Madness. It was directed by John Carpenter in the early nineties and Sam Neill was the main actor. It's a little hokey in places and the special effects aren't always spectacular, but I always loved how the story comes full circle at the end. Anything unbelievable or unrealistic (relatively speaking) gets explained away perfectly in the end. And it has some really creepy scenes in it that make it worth a watch.

[needfulthings]

http://imageshack.com/a/img922/8534/uR1j77.jpghttp://imageshack.com/a/img924/8297/gk3hlG.jpg

[needfulthings]

SUTTER CANE?
:evil:
http://imageshack.com/a/img922/2892/dGZYLU.jpg

[allasorte]

I liked In the Mouth of Madness. Sutter Cane is such a cool name.

[mattgreenbean]

One of my top ten horror films.

[Mattrick]

Did I ever tell you my favourite colour is blue?

Stayed home when I was a kid. Watched Event Horizon and In The Mouth of Madness. Called it Sam Neill night. Was awesome.

[allasorte]

Did I ever tell you my favourite colour is blue?

Stayed home when I was a kid. Watched Event Horizon and In The Mouth of Madness. Called it Sam Neill night. Was awesome.

I always enjoyed him and it's a shame he isn't in more things. He was in a show. It had terrible ratings but I really liked it a lot. The only way to finish the only season they made was online only and this was before people were going crazy with the internet. The show was called......Happy Town, 2010. I know this isn't the thread for it, but it was sort of supernatural like. More of a murder mystery type show. I liked it.

[Ricky]

I liked Happy Town. :)

[allasorte]

I liked Happy Town. :)
I thought I was the only person that ever saw it. It was actually good! Better then most of the stuff out there IMO.

[firemonkey66]

Did I ever tell you my favourite colour is blue?

Stayed home when I was a kid. Watched Event Horizon and In The Mouth of Madness. Called it Sam Neill night. Was awesome.

Nice, that is a great mini movie marathon! I'm going to have to try that out this weekend. 'Where we're going we won't need eyes to see.' Classic creepy stuff.

[Heather19]

I liked Happy Town. :)
I thought I was the only person that ever saw it. It was actually good! Better then most of the stuff out there IMO.

Loved Happy Town as well. I hated that it got canceled. Were there more episodes released online? I think I only saw what was aired on tv, which wasn't much.

[Ricky]

I think it was just the final episode or two that they burned off online. Not too much.

[allasorte]

I liked Happy Town. :)
I thought I was the only person that ever saw it. It was actually good! Better then most of the stuff out there IMO.

Loved Happy Town as well. I hated that it got canceled. Were there more episodes released online? I think I only saw what was aired on tv, which wasn't much.
Like Ricky said, I believe the final 2 episodes were only aired online and you learned what you needed to. I think it was who the killer was and who Sam Neil was. I think. It has been awhile for sure.

[Mattrick]

Sam Neill was in The Tudors which I'll watch before Game of Thrones.

[Heather19]

I waited forever to watch Game of Thrones, and I'm kicking myself for not giving it a shot earlier. It's amazing!

Back on topic, Matt when are you going to watch Ils?! I've only been talking about it for years :)

[mae]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m-wBUJZiuw

[allasorte]

Conjuring 2 I am hoping it will be good. What have I seen recently?
Before I wake. Thomas Jane is in it. Where an orphan's dreams become real. Eh, nothing special.
I recently just watched Misery. Always loved that book and movie.

[Tommy]

Did I ever tell you my favourite colour is blue?

Stayed home when I was a kid. Watched Event Horizon and In The Mouth of Madness. Called it Sam Neill night. Was awesome.

Nice, that is a great mini movie marathon! I'm going to have to try that out this weekend. 'Where we're going we won't need eyes to see.' Classic creepy stuff.

Love Sam Neill...probably my favorite movie of his is Possession (1981)

[Tommy]

Has anyone here seen the 2007 french horror film Inside AKA À l'intérieur? It is absolutely one of my favorite horror movies of all time.

[needfulthings]

There are two versions of INSIDE the R rated that runs 75min & the UNRATED that runs 82min. The copy I have is the R rated (BUT ALWAYS ONTHE LOOK-OUT:evil:)
http://imageshack.com/a/img922/920/X3CUjT.jpghttp://imageshack.com/a/img922/9093/BrGsS3.jpg

[Tommy]

Wow, that is pretty heavily cut. I've only seen the uncut, unrated version (and that one I've seen in french with english subtitles and also the english dubbed version which, is surprisingly well done for a dub). It would be interesting to watch the R rated to see what they took out. It gets more brutal every time I watch it. :thumbsup:

EDIT: It appears to be available on Amazon...

Amazon.com Inside (Unrated) (http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Unrated-Beatrice-Dalle/dp/B00125WATQ)

[needfulthings]

:wtf:
:evil:Just rechecked my collection and turns out that I do have both versions.:doh:
http://imageshack.com/a/img922/5971/Wk9XHb.jpg
This version opens with the disclaimer 'That this DVD is for sale only! so Blockbuster ONLY RENTED the R- RATED version and SOLD the unrated.

[Tommy]

:lol:

[Sai Sheb]

Love old school horror! The man with the long fingernail, was the first I watched... loved clown house, dolls, puppet master. I live and was born in Pontefract, chequerfield road ... where the film "when the lights went out" is based... it's a very dark area and spirits follow families no matter where they move ..... Boo!

[Sai Sheb]

[QUOTE=

Anyone seen an American Werewolf in London? That's another one of my favourite horrors. In some places funny, but the best moment is seeing THAT transformation scene. One of the most painful to watch werewolf transformations I've ever watched, and one that actually gave me nightmares! Not often I can say that about horror films![/QUOTE]

Love American werewolf in London... " stay away from Moors , beware the moon"

[needfulthings]

Just got done screening the unrated version of INSIDE.....and I must say is the only thing missing from this movie is...
http://imageshack.com/a/img922/8038/p5feOp.jpg
OH WAIT! '' NOW THE REAL INSIDE STORY CAN BE TOLD''...INSIDE 2 ''GETTING OUT WAS A BITCH...BUT NOW LET THE REAL BLOODBATH BEGIN''

[Tommy]

It's awesome isn't it Bruce? I like to watch it every year around Christmas time. :evil: In fact, it's probably my favorite Christmas movie! :clap:

[needfulthings]

Just to let you know the TWAT nurse has been cut from the R-RATED VERSION & SHE WAS ONE OF THE BEST PARTS.

[Tommy]

Just to let you know the TWAT nurse has been cut from the R-RATED VERSION & SHE WAS ONE OF THE BEST PARTS.

LMAO why the hell did they cut her out? That's hilarious.

[needfulthings]

:shoot:You know how TUFF they are on SMOKING in movies these days!:lol:

[Heather19]

Netflix doesn't have Inside :( I'll have to look elsewhere I guess.

Just watched The Boy. I was a bit disappointed, but I guess I am with most current horror films these days. It wasn't even scary, and it had the perfect premise to work off of.

[needfulthings]

Unless you are a BIG fan of films like
http://imageshack.com/a/img921/355/GXmKQJ.jpg
I would say '' THIS FILM MAY NOT BE YOUR CUP OF TEA"
But if you have a copy of this book in your collection...THEN KEEP LOOKING.
http://imageshack.com/a/img923/9771/1H7A0U.jpg

[Tommy]

I wish I could talk more about the plot without giving anything away but yes, it is quite brutal and I am rarely scared by a film and I wasn't really with this one either but it did creep me the hell out and had me shouting at the screen a few times. I showed it to a friend of mine who isn't into extreme horror like I am and he was a bit upset with me afterwards. Also, Béatrice Dalle is an absolute horror ICON. She's in several crazy movies but another I love from her is Trouble Every Day. It can be called horror but some may not see it that way. I did.

[allasorte]

Netflix doesn't have Inside :( I'll have to look elsewhere I guess.

Just watched The Boy. I was a bit disappointed, but I guess I am with most current horror films these days. It wasn't even scary, and it had the perfect premise to work off of.

Yeah, it was a turd. "Before I wake" was better, but nothing special though.

[needfulthings]

http://imageshack.com/a/img921/5592/3TOeXU.jpg

http://imageshack.com/a/img922/8898/XDuiLm.jpg

[Sai Sheb]

Hey guys, is gore anything like Hostel cos I loved them films?

[Mattrick]

https://scontent-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/r90/13418919_10157133175370571_2872327723593450344_n.j pg?oh=cdea158ff4eb3f9e2fac570d0854267a&oe=57D66C72

The Xenomorph truly is my longest relationship. I found this in a grade 2 or 3 notebook.

[needfulthings]

http://imageshack.com/a/img922/1885/lX7VOK.jpg

http://imageshack.com/a/img922/9459/iy2bMr.jpg

http://imageshack.com/a/img924/6628/5DjSJo.jpg

http://imageshack.com/a/img922/4080/Hp6Be8.jpg

[Tommy]

I just learned there is also a Demons 4 and a Demons 5 both on Youtube. I will have to catch up!

[Darkthoughts]

Heather - not really what I'd call a horror, but I found it in that section...have you seen the Norwegian film, Thale? I think you'd dig it. Trollhunter also.

[Heather19]

Lisa! :couple:

No, I've never even heard of it. Just looked it up and it's on netflix so I'll watch it soon. And I loved Trollhunter.

[Darkthoughts]

:rose: Long time eh? :D

It's brilliant, I've been learning Norwegian for a year now, so I'm kinda obsessed with anything norsk.

[Heather19]

That's awesome. Do you have any other ones to recommend. I've only seen a handful of Norwegian films. I've seen Dead Snow, and Cold Prey, and a few non horrors. Have you seen Kitchen Stories? It's not horror, but I would highly recommend it. I think you'd really enjoy it.

And I watched Thale last night. Thanks, I really enjoyed it :)

[Tommy]

Dead Snow 2 and Cold Prey 2 are both good as well Heather.

[Heather19]

They've been on my list too watch since they came out. I don't know why I haven't gotten around to watching them yet.

[Darkthoughts]

I'll check those too, Tommy - I've seen Dead Snow, but not the second one. I'll see if I can get hold of Kitchen Stories - I've watched a distinct lack of films since I stopped getting recommendations from you and Feev, Heather :D I did have a list of Norwegian films somewhere, but I can't find it...I watch anything I can really for the practise :)

Tonight however, I am finally getting around to watching Black Sheep, which has been sat on my shelf for aaaages...

[allasorte]

Sorry guys. I have a hard time reading subtitles. I read slow as I delve into the story to view my mental surroundings. I cannot interpret characters, indulge in scenery, or visually understand what I am seeing if I have to read too. Anime is the worst for me. I'd rather have hard coded English, but that is easily hidden in animation, not acted movies. If I'm going to read something, it will be a book. I do try many times to attempt subtitled movies, but they ruin it for me. That's just me. However, "Ils" was a rare subtitled movie I enjoyed simply because there wasn't much talking.

[divemaster]

90% of the movies I watch are subtitled. I don't even notice it. I've never considered what I'm doing as "reading" subtitles, and I've never felt like I've missed any part of the movie on the screen. The subtitles are there and my brain just absorbs them automatically. It's like breathing--I don't have to tell myself to breathe every 4 seconds or so, it just happens.

Maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe other folks can reach this level of movie enjoyment with practice. If the latter, I'd say it is well worth it. There are so many good movies from other countries. If I had to limit myself to English language movies...man, I don't even want to think of how horrible an existence that would be.

(True, some cheap Hong Kong DVDs are subtitled so badly, both in grammar and word usage as well as the "white words on white background" phenomena, that it does require a bit more effort. But in some respects that's part of the charm of a grade-B HK kung-fu flick)

[Heather19]

I agree. It makes me sad to hear that people won't watch a film because it's subtitled. There's so many great foreign films that it'd be a shame to limit yourself. I also don't feel like I'm reading. Maybe I'm lucky as well. I look at the subtitles and it just goes into me that I can then watch whats happening on screen as well.

[allasorte]

Here is a helping hand as to what not to watch. I didn't, just blew through them like the wind. A genius is the one who invented "fast forward."

Cabin Fever, not the shitty one from 2002,but the shittier one from 2016. Has the movie world really come to this?
February, a long drawl of nothing that looks great in fast forward.
The Shallows, if I wanted to watch a sexy woman in a bikini sit on a rock all day I'd go to the beach.
I hope I have saved some lost souls today.

[allasorte]

Forgot to throw into the mix Visions 2015 and Cell.
Visions, had some known actors but nothing worth getting excited over. I enjoyed the beginning and then it lost me.
Cell, The Stephen King adaption. Just plain awful.

[Jean]

I have watched The Boy
Nice, but soooooo nothing special

Have also watched a shit ton of horrors, but at the moment don't seem able to remember any.

[Mattrick]

Here is a helping hand as to what not to watch. I didn't, just blew through them like the wind. A genius is the one who invented "fast forward."

Cabin Fever, not the shitty one from 2002,but the shittier one from 2016. Has the movie world really come to this?
February, a long drawl of nothing that looks great in fast forward.
The Shallows, if I wanted to watch a sexy woman in a bikini sit on a rock all day I'd go to the beach.
I hope I have saved some lost souls today.

I'm going to watch the shallows.

[Heather19]

Just watched The Invitation. Really enjoyed it. For those that like slow horrors I'd definitely recommend it. Jean and Matt, I think you'll both enjoy it.

[Ricky]

That one is next in my queue.

[killjoy72]

Just watched The Invitation. Really enjoyed it. For those that like slow horrors I'd definitely recommend it.
I just watched this yesterday. It was great! I second the recommendation.
Has anyone hear seen Deathgasm yet? Sort of a mix of Spinal Tap meets Evil Dead II meets Dead Alive. I was pleasantly surprised. A really fun little gorefest!

[mae]

Is The Invitation similar to Coherence?

[killjoy72]

I'm going to watch the shallows.

Did you see this yet? I really enjoyed it myself. If only it ended like two minutes earlier I would've loved it.

[killjoy72]

Is The Invitation similar to Coherence?
Not really to me. I though it was a bit....
More like The Purge, with a little bit of Lord Of Illusions thrown on top.

[Ricky]

Coherence is definitely what came to mind the first time I saw the trailer.

[Jean]

Just watched The Invitation. Really enjoyed it. For those that like slow horrors I'd definitely recommend it. Jean and Matt, I think you'll both enjoy it.
I just watched this yesterday. It was great! I second the recommendation.
k, you two did it
bears are watching it now

[Heather19]

And what did you think Jean?

I'm not sure I'd compare it to Coherence. It's pretty different.

[Jean]

And what did you think Jean?
very enjoyable

I was also happy to visit imdb and make sure that nothing changed during my prolonged absence: there's, as usual, a number of reviews entitled "the worst movie ever". I am glad they haven't abandoned the tradition which prescribes that every film have at least one of those.

for me, though, it was, just as you predicted it would be, very satisfying. One of the very rare cases of screenwriters actually doing something subtle. The athmosphere is sickening, and the whole thing really bleak http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif.html)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif.html)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif.html)



I'm not sure I'd compare it to Coherence. It's pretty different.and how about that one? would you recommend it to a bear?

[Heather19]

And what did you think Jean?
very enjoyable

I was also happy to visit imdb and make sure that nothing changed during my prolonged absence: there's, as usual, a number of reviews entitled "the worst movie ever". I am glad they haven't abandoned the tradition which prescribes that every film have at least one of those.

for me, though, it was, just as you predicted it would be, very satisfying. One of the very rare cases of screenwriters actually doing something subtle. The athmosphere is sickening, and the whole thing really bleak http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif.html)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif.html)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bear_thumb.gif.html)



I'm not sure I'd compare it to Coherence. It's pretty different.and how about that one? would you recommend it to a bear?

I would. It's not a favorite of mine, but it was very well done. It's not really a horror though, more scifi-ish?
I can't remember if I've already mentioned these to you yet but I would also recommend When Animals Dream and It Follows.

[Jean]

Heather :rose:!!!!!!!!!!! It Follows was devastating. Loved loved loved it.

I remember not liking Donnie Darko, that everyone's favorite... this one has the same vibes, but really really suits my taste. I wish I could summon old bears' power and write something long about it, because it sure wants analyzing. Deliciously made (well, not without some cheapening moments... but even those look rather like a tribute to the 80s than the director's helplessness), with such special texture - very tangible and at the same time dream-like... archetypal and postmodern... I am in love with that film now, think will watch it again.

[mae]

Bears should watch Stranger Things if they can. I believe Netflix is now available in Russia, too.

[Jean]

it's a series, right? bears are not sure they are up to it yet

[WeDealInLead]

Heather :rose:!!!!!!!!!!! It Follows was devastating. Loved loved loved it.



It Follows was one of the best movies I watched last year. So damned creepy and unsettling. It looked incredible too, especially considering the budget must've been whatever change they'd got begging on the street corner.

[Heather19]

I had no doubt in my mind that you would love that one Jean :couple: One of the best horror films in recent years. I would also second Pablo's recommendation of Stranger Things. It's only 8 episodes long so it's not a huge undertaking. Plus it has a lot of King vibes to it which should also appeal to you.

[Heather19]

Heather :rose:!!!!!!!!!!! It Follows was devastating. Loved loved loved it.



It Follows was one of the best movies I watched last year. So damned creepy and unsettling. It looked incredible too, especially considering the budget must've been whatever change they'd got begging on the street corner.

Goes to show you don't need a flashy budget or over the top special effects to pull off a well executed horror film. I loved the retro vibe to it. And the music was especially good. I think I'm going ro have to go buy it so I can watch it again now :D

[Jean]

looks llike I found where to watch Stranger Things

will finish watching Coherence now (an outstandingly enjoyable watch so far) and look into that other thing

[Jean]

watching Stranger Things! Like it a lot, thank you!!!!!!!!!! :rose: :rose: :rose:

[Mattrick]

I'm not sure when I'll get to watch Stranger Things since I don't have Netflix and KickassTorrents was blown up.

[DoctorDodge]

Glad that bears loved It Follows. Definitely one of my favourite horrors in recent years. I really adored how much it knew how to build tension, especially when using long shots and avoiding flashy edits. Also happy to hear that bears are enjoying Stranger Things, too! :D

[mae]

watching Stranger Things! Like it a lot, thank you!!!!!!!!!! :rose: :rose: :rose:

Yes, please post your thoughts in the Stranger Things thread!

[allasorte]

I'm not sure when I'll get to watch Stranger Things since I don't have Netflix and KickassTorrents was blown up.
do a google search on top 10 torrents. It will tell you were to go :).

[Jean]

yes, or maybe just try googling "watch Stranger Thngs online"? that's what I did

[allasorte]

yes, or maybe just try googling "watch Stranger Thngs online"? that's what I did

A lot of pop ups and you need good internet speed but "couch tuner" is free and pretty good.

[mae]

Or you know, Netflix :unsure:

[allasorte]

Or you know, Netflix :unsure:
True, but many don't have Netdlix and the majority of users are in the US.

[needfulthings]

http://imageshack.com/a/img922/5150/VXAZ8S.jpg
http://imageshack.com/a/img922/3187/zogZkZ.jpg

http://imageshack.com/a/img924/5342/9LJ9K2.jpghttp://imageshack.com/a/img921/2590/8ht6hp.jpg

[killjoy72]

Nice Bruce! I love Troma's Mother's Day. I didn't know they also made a Fathers Day.

[Ricky]

Just saw Lights Out. Very enjoyable with good pacing and characters you care about. A little too much "wandering around in a dark, quiet house" for me, though (and a few more jump scares than it needed). Otherwise, pretty good.

[needfulthings]

http://imageshack.com/a/img923/600/Wd1PdK.jpg
http://imageshack.com/a/img924/802/MVkRut.jpg

[Jean]

oh my friends!! only two episodes of Stranger Things left to go, and alas! it will be over - over - over!.. I could watch it for ever... so good, so sweet, so cozy and moving and funny! those kids are amazing - yes, Heather, I definitely see what you meant when you said there's something for bears there!

oh can't thank you enough!..

(that it has nothing to do with horrors is quite another matter, lol)

[allasorte]

Stranger Things was very good but too short. Jean, what about Penny Dreadful?

[Ricky]

Speaking of Penny Dreadful, watching the final two episodes tonight. Will let you know what I think afterwards. But so far I'm not too keen on this season as a whole. Splitting up all the characters hasn't worked for me.

[Jean]

Jean, what about Penny Dreadful?what about it? do you think bears should watch it? ***interested bear***

[Ricky]

That depends, do you enjoy genuinely scary horror? What about a TV show that brings to life some of the genre's best literary characters? Or the best exorcism/possession sequence in film or TV? Or amazing dialogue?

Nah, you probably wouldn't like any of that.

;)

[Heather19]

Penny Dreadful just showed up on Netflix recently. Excited to finally be able to watch it. I think they have 2 seasons available. Is this all there is, or are there a few more?

Jean, so glad you're enjoying Stranger Things! Although I knew you would. To me it was very reminiscent of some of Kings stories for some reason. Also go visit the Stranger Things thread. I posted a fun little video that played side by side some of the films it's referenced.

[allasorte]

Penny Dreadful just showed up on Netflix recently. Excited to finally be able to watch it. I think they have 2 seasons available. Is this all there is, or are there a few more?

Jean, so glad you're enjoying Stranger Things! Although I knew you would. To me it was very reminiscent of some of Kings stories for some reason. Also go visit the Stranger Things thread. I posted a fun little video that played side by side some of the films it's referenced.

3 seasons total was the creators vision. Like Ricky said the 3rd season broke the cast up a bit on their own journeys. That didn't bother me as much as it officially ending for good. your episode guide would be 8, 10, 9 for the three seasons. Overall I loved the show, the characters, scenery, etc. They added some new very good characters season 3, but no true "finale" for them. Just assumptions the creator of the show tells you in an interview after the fact online. Is that a bad thing? Depends on the viewer. I could have used one more season to see where characters were going.

[allasorte]

Jean, what about Penny Dreadful?what about it? do you think bears should watch it? ***interested bear***

I would. It is only 3 seasons and done done.

[Jean]

That depends, do you enjoy genuinely scary horror? What about a TV show that brings to life some of the genre's best literary characters? Or the best exorcism/possession sequence in film or TV? Or amazing dialogue?

Nah, you probably wouldn't like any of that.

;)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bearmood_hahaha.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bearmood_hahaha.gif.html)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bearmood_hahaha.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bearmood_hahaha.gif.html)http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bearmood_hahaha.gif (http://s91.photobucket.com/user/mishemplushem/media/Facilitation/bearmood_hahaha.gif.html)

[mae]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXEF1lcW-oQ

[allasorte]

Nina Forever: Shanon mentioned this movie in another post and I agree with her. Boring movie, but made better with a perfect rack lol.
Holidays: Horror movie done with many holiday themes. Nothing special or worthwhile to me.

[killjoy72]

Holidays: Horror movie done with many holiday themes. Nothing special or worthwhile to me.

I liked some of the stories in this anthology. At least they were each short enough that if one were bad at least it was over quickly. Easter (so bizarre!) and the New Years episodes were the highlights for me.
And maybe (?) Halloween, cuz Kevin Smith.

[allasorte]

Holidays: Horror movie done with many holiday themes. Nothing special or worthwhile to me.

I liked some of the stories in this anthology. At least they were each short enough that if one were bad at least it was over quickly. Easter (so bizarre!) and the New Years episodes were the highlights for me.
And maybe (?) Halloween, cuz Kevin Smith.

New Years I liked the most. Easter was interesting. But the others I didn't enjoy. St. Patrick's Day :(.

[divemaster]

I just watched The Invitation last night. I really, really liked it. The pacing was perfect and the characters interesting. And here's the thing...I had no idea where the movie was going. I'm sure a lot of people picked up on certain things and pat themselves on the back for having "figured it out" or whatever, but I just fell into the movie and let it take me for a ride. The reveal in the third act caught me completely by surprise. Was the third act perfect? No. But I forgive it. Mentally, I was scoring a "4/5" rating until the very final scene. Wow! Instant bump up to 5/5!

I see a lot of people trashing the movie in comments (Netflix, IMdB) and I can only assume they were expecting Saw or Silent Hill or whatever. Do these people not know how to appreciate a slowly building mystery? I like a good mindless horror, but a movie like this, done well, is extremely fulfilling. I like some of the ambiguity of the film and I've found myself going over certain scenes in my mind, now with the benefit of hindsight. It also goes to show that it doesn't take gallons of blood, a bloated budget, and expensive CGI (or cheap CGI, for that matter) to make a good, smart movie. In this day and age of Gore Part VII and I Eat Your Flesh, with no imagination, I tip my hat to the screenwriter and director of The Invitation, who prove that you can make an atmospheric, intelligent thriller with nothing more than 12 (or so) people at a dinner party, a good script, and good actors.

[Heather19]

Excellent review. I really loved the buildup as well. I couldn't figure out what was going on, if the guy was paranoid, or if he was on to something, and something horrible was really going to happen. I think I was leaning more to him being paranoid, so it also caught me off guard when things went down. I do wish they would make more horror films like this these days.

[divemaster]

Excellent review. I really loved the buildup as well. I couldn't figure out what was going on, if the guy was paranoid, or if he was on to something, and something horrible was really going to happen. I think I was leaning more to him being paranoid, so it also caught me off guard when things went down. I do wish they would make more horror films like this these days.

Yeah, I knew it was a cult, but I was thinking it was maybe your typical Hollywood New Age woo woo and finding your inner consciousnesses or whatever. I had no inkling it was a suicide cult and what awaited the dinner guests at the end of the night, although in retrospect, the clues were all over the place.

In fact, if a movie is more mystery or psychological thriller, then I don't even look for "horror" elements. Like Jacob's Ladder or The Sixth Sense. Are these "horror" movies? Yeah, I guess. But watching them pokes at completely different parts of the nerve stem than a more traditional horror.

Also, I only watched the trailer for The Invitation after watching the movie. I literally knew nothing about the film other than a positive mention here (thanks, Heather!). I think that helped my enjoyment immensely. I mean, the trailer gives away basically the entire 3rd act! I know they have to put butts in seats, but geeze! If I was watching the movie knowing what was coming up, I would not have enjoyed it half as much. For movies like this, you pretty much have to go in cold.

[Heather19]

Oh wow, good thing I didn't watch the trailer :lol: I hate trailers for horror films because they usually give away the best scares. I'm glad you listened to my mention of it and gave it a view. I think I came across a mention of it somewhere online where it was listed as one of the horror films of 2016 that you have to see. I was home sick in bed and scrolling thru netflix and I came across it, and remembered the article I had read. Another one they mentioned that is also streaming on netflix is The Pack. Has anyone here seen it yet? And if so would you recommend it?

[fernandito]

In fact, if a movie is more mystery or psychological thriller, then I don't even look for "horror" elements. Like Jacob's Ladder or The Sixth Sense. Are these "horror" movies? Yeah, I guess. But watching them pokes at completely different parts of the nerve stem than a more traditional horror.

Well said.

Now that we're on it, I think I prefer psychological thrillers to out and out horror films.

The former aren't really interested in cheap jump scares, they drill down deep into the subconscious.

That scene in Jacob's Ladder when they drag that guy away and you see their heads shaking violently inside the cab.. fuck that gave me the creeps for days.

[Ricky]

I think the trailer for The Invitation factored into my disappointment with it. They made it seem so tense, creepy, and mysterious (which it was, to a degree, though not as much as I would've liked), so I was expecting it to be that way throughout the whole movie. It just moved too slowly for me. They're not incredibly similar except for the mystery and dinner party elements, but I liked Coherence much, much more. That one had me on the edge of my seat the whole time.

[allasorte]

I think the trailer for The Invitation factored into my disappointment with it. They made it seem so tense, creepy, and mysterious (which it was, to a degree, though not as much as I would've liked), so I was expecting it to be that way throughout the whole movie. It just moved too slowly for me. They're not incredibly similar except for the mystery and dinner party elements, but I liked Coherence much, much more. That one had me on the edge of my seat the whole time.

Totally agree.
I did truly enjoy the Conjuring 2. A bit long for a horror movie though. But not complaining.

[Heather19]

I went to see Rob Zombie's latest film 31 last night. Loved it. It was an all out gore fest, so I'd only recommend it if you're into those types of films. They also showed a q&a with Zombie after the film, and there was one thing that he said which was something to the effect of how there's a very particular type of film that he loves, and it's definitely not for everyone. And he makes those types of films. He knows he's catering to a very small particular crowd, and that most people won't like his films, but he doesn't care. He does it for himself and people like him that love those films. I can definitely see that. It seems like most people hate his films and don't appreciate them.

They also showed a sneak peak about a documentary that's being made about the film. I'm dying to see it now. They pretty much went over an entire scene in the film and showed how it was made. I love in depth filmmaking stuff like that.

[Ricky]

You went to the one-night Q&A special, right? I was wondering if you would go. I was considering it, then I saw that tickets at my theater were $16.50. Since his films are hit and miss for me I figured I'd wait for the wide release or DVD. The Q&A does sound like it would've been cool, though. Was it live streamed (and how long was it)?

So, if I liked Devil's Rejects, but wasn't a fan of House of 1,000 Corpses or Lords of Salem, do you think I'll like 31?

[Heather19]

I did. Luckily we went to see Don't Breath last week because they showed a quick preview for the one night event. I marked it in my calendar instantly. They showed 2 of his music videos prior to the movie, and then a quick Q&A (which was maybe 15 min? and pretaped) and then that sneak peak at the documentary which was even longer than the Q&A. Although most people left right after the movie, so I'm not sure they knew about the bonus stuff playing after the film.

As for you liking the film, I'm going to guess no? Only since you didn't like House of 1000 Corpses. But I could be wrong. I hope you give it a shot at some point and enjoy it. It is much faster paced than Lords of Salem. Actually probably the exact opposite. It's pretty much non-stop minus the opening sequence that sets up the characters. To me it was just one of those fun gory types of horror films. Another interesting thing from the Q&A was when he was talking about shooting this film in 20 days. He had to really trim the fat, and make the script really tight. I guess he had 22 or 23 days to shoot Lords of Salem, and at that time he hadn't worked so quickly, and the film slightly suffered because of it. He kept reshooting several scenes, and in the end didn't have time to shoot some scenes that he wanted to include. It does make me wonder if he had more time if the film would have been better because maybe those scenes would have added to the film. Also this one was primarily shot in one location so he didn't have to waste time moving and resetting up everything, and he also wondered had he filmed Lords of Salem primarily in the apt, if he could have made it a much tighter film.

[Ricky]

I'll never understand why people are in such a rush to leave the theater. When I went to see Don't Breathe, about half of the full audience had left before the last scene. But I guess maybe you're right and they didn't realize their ticket to 31 included all the bonus stuff. It sounds like it was a good Q&A. I never heard of the documentary, though.

I'll see 31 at some point (I also need to see his version of Halloween). The fast pacing of it is promising.

[Tommy]

His first Halloween was OK. The first hour of it was great but the second part got boring with Jason smashing everything for a good thirty minutes. Halloween II made the girl sitting beside me throw up. That's about the best I can say about that one.

[Heather19]

I love his version of Halloween. I know a lot of people don't like it because it's different from the original, but if you view them as two different entities hopefully you'll appreciate it. And it's funny because one of the things I love about his remake is that he gives Michael Myers a backstory, and you see him as a kid, and how he ends up becoming this "monster". Going back to the Q&A he actually talked about this exact thing. He loved those monster movies from the 30's like Frankenstein and Wolfman, and then how you had a rush of films like Halloween and Nightmare on Elm St. The early ones had you rooting for the monster to some extent because you felt sympathy for them. They were monsters after all and just doing what monsters do. Whereas in this generation of horror films that empathy for the villain was lost. It's not to say one is right or wrong. But when he went to make Halloween he wanted to capture that aspect and bring it to Michael Myers.

I think the documentary is called In Hell Everyone Loves Popcorn. He did something similar for Halloween and it was on the dvd release of the film (it's 4 1/2hrs long!), so I wonder if that's what he'll do with this one.

[Heather19]

His first Halloween was OK. The first hour of it was great but the second part got boring with Jason smashing everything for a good thirty minutes. Halloween II made the girl sitting beside me throw up. That's about the best I can say about that one.

I didn't care for the second one either. I tried to rewatch a few years later to see if after my disappointment I could appreciate it in some way, but it didn't work. That and The Haunted World of El Superbeasto are the only two films of his I haven't enjoyed.

[Tommy]

I haven't seen Superbeasto yet.

I'm of two minds about The Lords of Salem. I really appreciate what he tried to do there but it was very hard to make Sheri Moon Zombie a sympathetic character after having seen her craziness in all his other films. But I'm not entirely sure the film wants us to be sympathetic with her if that makes any kind of sense.

I love The Devil's Rejects and really liked House of 1000 Corpses though.

How would you rank 31 compared to his others Heather?

[Heather19]

That's one thing that irritates me about his films, is that he always casts her in a leading role. I wish that one time he wouldn't.

I'd rank them:
House of 1000 Corpses
The Devil's Rejects
31
Halloween
Lords of Salem
Halloween II
The Haunted World of El Superbeasto

[needfulthings]

http://imageshack.com/a/img923/4444/RCUUxd.jpghttp://imageshack.com/a/img924/3452/9ElKvt.jpg

[Ricky]

That's one thing that irritates me about his films, is that he always casts her in a leading role. I wish that one time he wouldn't.

Agreed. I like her a lot, but it seems like he uses her as a crutch.

I think 31 opens wide on the 16th, so I'll try to see it in theaters.

EDIT: I'm reading some reviews that mention a lot of shakey cam. Is that accurate? I get nauseous watching "found footage" (or films shot like it) on the big screen.

[Jean]

I liked Coherence much, much more. That one had me on the edge of my seat the whole time.I absolutely loved Coherence (except the final part, which I found silly, unless, as I probably already said somewhere, they thought of it first and then wrote the rest to accommodate the ending, and then the two didn't really fit together), especially the way they
endlessly talked and talked, just like people - I believe - actually would behave in a situation like this, getting bogged down in their problems, irrelevant to the situation, or theorizing and experimenting... and talking, talking all the time! - instead of rushing about yelling "why are you doing this to me" or similar nonsense

[allasorte]

I liked Coherence much, much more. That one had me on the edge of my seat the whole time.I absolutely loved Coherence (except the final part, which I found silly, unless, as I probably already said somewhere, they thought of it first and then wrote the rest to accommodate the ending, and then the two didn't really fit together), especially the way they
endlessly talked and talked, just like people - I believe - actually would behave in a situation like this, getting bogged down in their problems, irrelevant to the situation, or theorizing and experimenting... and talking, talking all the time! - instead of rushing about yelling "why are you doing this to me" or similar nonsense

agreed

[allasorte]

Don't Breathe: Yes people have mentioned it on the movie thread, but I figured I would mention it here briefly. Liked it a lot, but the repetition of the ending was too much. I feel it wasn't needed.
Lights Out: It wasn't bad, not great, but not bad. Had some nice ideas within it. At the same time things didn't make sense with how the spirit moved around if light was the "enemy."
Friend Request: Not as bad as I thought it would be but also nothing that popped out as good either.

I'm trying not to give out spoilers. Anytime someone marks a spoiler, come on, I have to read it! So I'm not posting anything like that.

[allasorte]

Oujia Origin of Evil: I figured this would be awful. I was wrong. The first 40 minutes really set up the plot and characters well. Some creepy things would happen with no jump scares. There were some though, but surprised I liked the movie. The little girl was very good in it and creepy. A nice movie to watch at night. It was no Conjuring 1 and 2 or It Follows or Stranger Things, but it wasn't that bad.

[Ricky]

I agree, for the most part. The characterization was nice and I liked how the spent time on them without feeling the need to shoehorn in jump scares (though there were some, like you said). If it was more suspenseful or had some good scares, I would have liked it even more. And yes, the little girl was great (I saw her when she was on The Millers, but didn't recognize it was the same actress until I went on IMDB).

[allasorte]

I agree, for the most part. The characterization was nice and I liked how the spent time on them without feeling the need to shoehorn in jump scares (though there were some, like you said). If it was more suspenseful or had some good scares, I would have liked it even more. And yes, the little girl was great (I saw her when she was on The Millers, but didn't recognize it was the same actress until I went on IMDB).

Didn't know that about the Millers....didn't remember her as being her. Funny thing. Re-watched the prequel The Thing. Saw Tormond in it!

[Mattrick]

Maggie was pretty bad.

[allasorte]

Maggie was pretty bad.

I know right? Like really bad. Almost like affirmative action for zombies. Thumbs way down!

[Heather19]

Watched The Shallows the other night. Thought I had heard some decent reviews of it, but the movie was a bit ridiculous and very unbelievable.

[allasorte]

Watched The Shallows the other night. Thought I had heard some decent reviews of it, but the movie was a bit ridiculous and very unbelievable.

I was super disappointed as well. Unless of course, you like watching an attractive woman in a bikini straddle a rock all day. Rating? 4/10

[needfulthings]

:evil: I think I will just stay with.....
http://imageshack.com/a/img924/8025/xazfAp.jpg

[allasorte]

:evil: I think I will just stay with.....
http://imageshack.com/a/img924/8025/xazfAp.jpg

Much better lol

[Still Servant]

Watched The Shallows the other night. Thought I had heard some decent reviews of it, but the movie was a bit ridiculous and very unbelievable.

I was super disappointed as well. Unless of course, you like watching an attractive woman in a bikini straddle a rock all day. Rating? 4/10

Well, that doesn't hurt! I loved The Shallows. Fantastic cinematography and I loved the struggle for survival. I thought it was well made.

[needfulthings]

http://imageshack.com/a/img921/8701/eAntui.jpg

[Heather19]

http://imageshack.com/a/img921/8701/eAntui.jpg

Love it! I actually have that action figure too :D

[needfulthings]

http://imageshack.com/a/img921/3671/HhRK1y.jpg

[needfulthings]

1985
http://imageshack.com/a/img923/8287/JG6aem.jpg

2008
http://imageshack.com/a/img923/2053/wQehfU.jpg

2012
http://imageshack.com/a/img923/1091/OxM4gI.jpg

[allasorte]

Bye Bye Man: crap crap movie.

[Tommy]

Loved Hush

[Jean]

Bye Bye Man: crap crap movie.
you must have been really desperate for a horror film, to have picked one that has imdb and RT ratings, respectively, 3.8 and 23, and whose synopsis starts with "When three college students move into an old house off campus..." )))

[allasorte]

Bye Bye Man: crap crap movie.
you must have been really desperate for a horror film, to have picked one that has imdb and RT ratings, respectively, 3.8 and 23, and whose synopsis starts with "When three college students move into an old house off campus..." )))

Giving it a shot as you may never know.....and yes Bears, a little desperate too :).

[Jean]

bears feel this way pretty often themselves

(and, God as my witness, have watched tons and tons of crap...)

[Mattrick]

While more creepy thriller than horror, Get Out was awesome. Such a vein seems to be where Hollywood is going these days, which I am okay with, since thrillers were dead for so long...and thrillers basically defined the 90's. I'd rather take a well-made, taut thriller than a shitty horror movie, and I've barely liked any horror films to come out of Hollywood in years, it's all indie and foreign-made films which excel in the genre.

[Heather19]

I second Get Out. Just watched it last night and absolutely loved it. I guess it is horror or thriller even, but it's definitely not a terrifying film that's going to scare you. There's a lot of humor tossed in there which takes away the scary aspect of it. That said though, it works really well together and don't let that deter you from watching it.

[Mattrick]

It is no easy feat to make an audience feel unsettled while they're laughing at something hilarious.

[Jean]

It is no easy feat to make an audience feel unsettled while they're laughing at something hilarious.no easy for sure, but giving the most powerful thrills. My adored Pontypool is a classic example (let alone The Tenant et al.)

[Mattrick]

I need to rewatch both of those. Pontypool is amazing. I still can't believe how hard my friend laughed at The Tenant. It was more of a dark comedy than anything else to me, but considering how affected my friend was when he brother committed suicide, hearing him cackle during the ending of The Tenant made the experience all the more surreal to me. Then you have my roommate, who saw Polanski put on a dress and lipstick and he left the room.

[mae]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKTicVgp8zU

[allasorte]

Leatherface. Simply a terrible movie. It never should have been made, or at least, not this adaptation, story line, or director.

[Jean]

Heather!!! :rose: :rose: :rose:

a wonderful thing happened to me: I re-watched In the Mouth of Madness, and can't believe I was so reserved about it the first time. I remember you being surprised and saying "I was sure you would love it" - what I can't remember is why I did not perfectly love it that first time. Now I loved every moment of it (especially in that town, of course, but all the rest too); in addition to being really entertaining, very well made, genuinely creepy and at times even scary, it has a story that is original and interesting, which doesn't often happen to horror films these days. Tons of thanks again!!

[Heather19]

So glad you enjoyed it Jean :) It's a great movie.

[fernandito]

In The Mouth of Madness is an extremely underrated horror film. It would be depreciated in today's landscape of cheap jump scares. Like you said Jean, it's genuinely creepy and the sense of dread that permeates the entire film is awesome.

[allasorte]

Wish Upon. A bit repetitive story line when wishing is concerned with these types of movies. Not great, not bad, but forgotten. 4/10
The Sound. Rose McGown. Story about an unbeliever in ghosts and goes down into a subway looking for a story. Nothing to write home about. 4/10

[mae]

https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/10/the-100-scariest-movies-of-all-time/

The 100 Scariest Movies of All Time

Why do we love being scared? It can’t be the way it makes our heart beat at rapid rates. Or how it keeps us up at night, leaving us to clutch our sheets as we stare at our half-open closets and listen for the faintest sounds down the hall. What the hell is it then? What gives us the oomph to spend 24 hours at vintage theaters for horror movie marathons? Why do we feel the need to sit down and watch John Carpenter’s Halloween for the 568th time every time October rolls around? It’s really odd.

For some, it’s an emotional release. Watching masked murderers hunt down hapless idiots or seeing nuclear families flee from the fractured promise of the American dream is a spiritually cynical escape from our own problems. It’s a cleansing of sorts that filters out our own personal anxieties that stem from real-world problems. So, in effect, these 90-minute B-fests serve as a therapeutic experience that a) costs less than your average therapist and b) traditionally involves candy and/or beer.

For others, it’s a nostalgic thing. Growing up throughout the ’80s and ’90s, and even throughout the ’00s to a certain extent, there was a mythology to the horror movie genre. What made you scared said so much about you as a person. Whether your skin crawled over the sight of gore or your spines tingled at the sound of a werewolf, it was your fear to cultivate, and you wore that fear as a badge of courage. It was something to talk about on the playgrounds and in the aisles of your local video shop.

Today, that connection seems different, if only because everything has been sterilized by being parsed out through various streaming services. We seek out horror in different ways now, not through physical scouring but through mindless scrolling. It’s kind of the same, but it’s also not really the same — overall, it feels like something’s been missing from the experience. But, here’s the thing: Fear will always find us, no matter what changes, and this list is definitive proof of that notion.

Because no matter the time nor the medium, these films will scare you.

[mae]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygkp1_OE9L0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyq-hEmiJdc

http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/253826/puppet-master-toulons-trunk-box-set-pre-orders-go-live-10217/

If you’re in the market for what is no doubt THE ULTIMATE PUPPET MASTER COLLECTIBLE – Toulon’s Trunk, then pay attention! Pre-orders are on their way to going LIVE! Make sure you nab yours come October 2, 2017!

From the Press Release:
A replica of the mystical Andre Toulon’s travelling case in the Puppet Master franchise, Toulon’s Trunk is a stunning wood and metal-forged box set containing all 11 official Puppet Master films remastered on Blu-ray as well as a bonus disc, a mini Blade figure (more mini figures will be released this year to add to the collection), collectible booklet, startling new cover artwork for each film, and much more! Each box set will be numbered and signed by producer Charles Band.

The first 100 copies of Toulon’s Trunk will be available for pre-sale on 10/02 and on sale 10/16 exclusively at FullMoonDirect.com. More copies will be available in November.

And be sure to watch the World Premiere of the 11th and wildest Puppet Master movie, Puppet Master: Axis Termination’s, first installment, “War Toys,” available EXCLUSIVELY this Friday, September 15th, on Full Moon’s Amazon channel in the U.S., U.K.. and Germany.

http://www.fullmoondirect.com/The-Ultimate-Puppet-Master-Collectable-Trunk_p_1210.html

ORDERS START SHIPPING NOVEMBER 19th


A replica of the mystical Andre Toulons travelling case in the Puppet Master franchise, Toulons Trunk is a stunning wood and metal-forged box set containing all 11 official Puppet Master films remastered on Blu-ray as well as a bonus disc, a mini Blade figure (more mini figures will be released this year to add to the collection), collectible booklet, startling new cover artwork for each film, and much more!

NOTES (PLEASE READ)!

**The cost will be the same for all copies: only the 1st 100 trunks will be signed/#'d, the 2nd 100 trunks will be signed only

**We ship worldwide via USPS: you will receive a tracking # from stamps.com once your order ships (please check your spam folder)

**Free Domestic shipping on all orders over $50

**Estimated International shipping costs are: Canada $40, Australia/UK $50

**All trunks will be carefully double packaged with bubble wrap/padding to help avoid damage during transit

http://www.dreadcentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/puppet-master-blu-collection.jpg

[Girlystevedave]

I don't think I realized there were THAT many Puppet Master films.

[allasorte]

The Devil's Candy 2015. I actually enjoyed this movie. Acting was good, nice story, but a little too short. It is about an artist that seems to be channeling the thoughts of a disturbed killer who's parents used to live in the house the artist and his family bought. Overall I liked it.

[fernandito]

I love Puppet Master :wub:

[mae]

I love Puppet Master :wub:

As do I, and I'm seriously considering getting this trunk. Or maybe if they come out later with a smaller version.

[allasorte]

Last post was 11-17, is the horror genre dead people?!
Insidious The Last Key. Everything you felt would happen; did. The attempted humor was awful, the story was bland, and the movie I forgot what happened. I saw it a while ago and I figured I would mention it in passing. 5/10

[allasorte]

Pyewacket 2017. Story of a girl that moved with her mother and she despises the move and attempts to summon a demon to kill her mother. I love the atmosphere (I miss the changing seasons and hope one day soon I will move back home), the actors did great job in this flick and I was impressed. A slow moving film, but something I was glad I found. 7/10

Devil's Gate. A different movie which was interesting, but an odd movie. Sometimes the acting felt fine and sometimes it felt forced. Wasn't for me. 4/10

The Strangers: Prey at Night. I saw the first one, and felt this was exactly the same film, just a couple years later. I almost couldn't get through it. 4/10

[mae]

I don't think I realized there were THAT many Puppet Master films.


I love Puppet Master :wub:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCapOyP9xE8

[fernandito]

I'm fucking down^ :lol:

Love Puppet Master.

[mae]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaRZiKHadjc

[mae]

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=23827

Thirty of the most iconic cinematic masterpieces starring the most famous monsters of horror movie history come together on Blu-ray for the first time ever in the Universal Classic Monsters: Complete 30-Film Collection on August 28, from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.

From the era of silent movies through present day, Universal Pictures has been regarded as the home of the monsters. The Universal Classic Monsters: Complete 30-Film Collection showcases all the original films featuring the most iconic monsters in motion picture history including Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Starring some of the most legendary actors including Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains and Elsa Lanchester in the roles that they made famous, these films set the standard for a new horror genre and showcase why these landmark movies that defined the horror genre are regarded as some of the most unforgettable ever to be filmed.

Universal Classic Monsters: Complete 30-Film Collection includes a 48-page collectible book filled with behind-the-scenes stories and rare production photographs and is accompanied by an array of bonus features including behind-the-scenes documentaries, the 1931 Spanish version of Dracula, Featurettes on Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., and Jack Pierce, 13 expert feature commentaries, archival footage, production photographs, theatrical trailers and more. The perfect gift for any scary movie fan, the collection offers an opportunity to experience some of the most memorable horror films of our time.

The Universal Classic Monsters: Complete 30-Film Collection includes Dracula(1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Werewolf of London (1935), Dracula's Daughter (1936), Son of Frankenstein (1939), The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The Invisible Woman(1940), The Mummy's Hand (1940), The Wolf Man (1941), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), The Mummy's Ghost (1942), The Mummy's Tomb (1942), Invisible Agent(1942), Phantom of the Opera (1943), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), Son of Dracula (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), The Mummy's Curse (1944), The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944), House of Dracula (1945), She-Wolf of London(1946), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, and includes a 3D version), Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955), Revenge of the Creature(1955 and includes a 3D version) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).

Special Features:

Behind-the-Scenes Documentaries
3D Versions of Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature
1931 Spanish Version of Dracula
Featurettes on Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., and Jack Pierce
13 Expert Feature Commentaries
Archival Footage
Production Photographs
Theatrical Trailers

http://images.static-bluray.com/news/upload/9825.jpg

[Ben Staad]

That looks awesome in reference to the above post. <I Forgot to quote>

https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Monsters-Complete-30-Film-Collection/dp/B00L8QP082

I wonder if there is a substantial difference between the Bluray and DVD sets?

[mae]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO_8WA44HwU

[Girlystevedave]

Man, I need to check that out. It looks like it could be pretty fun.

Also, Jason kicking that boom box at 2:58 got me pretty cracked up. :lol:

[Ricky]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaRZiKHadjc

Just wanted to say this is a great podcast. They talk about all kinds of horror films/TV each week and it's a lot of fun. Essential viewing for people who like horror commentary. :thumbsup:

[mae]

Glad you like it, Ricky, I like a lot of what Collider does, plus I'm just a big Perri fan. Here's their playlist for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW-BWE-hEIPYFKS3f0pobJjN-llGJi_Am

[Ricky]

Yeah, I got into Collider this year with their Comic Con coverage (and Perri really knows her stuff). They need to be on the East coast so I can work for them. :lol:

The episode last week with Lin Shaye was really good.

[allasorte]

Slender Man. It simply wasn't very good. I heard Sony changed a lot of the story because of the true events that took place when those young girls killed a "friend" to protect themselves from the slender man. I don't like when stupidity dictates other's thought. Kind of like Ridley Scott changing the Prometheus trilogy when his idiot fans complained about "no aliens" in Prometheus. Those same idiots are complaining about "no engineers" in the underwhelming Alien Covenant. I'm disappointed on both accounts.

[Iwritecode]

Slender Man. It simply wasn't very good. I heard Sony changed a lot of the story because of the true events that took place when those young girls killed a "friend" to protect themselves from the slender man. I don't like when stupidity dictates other's thought. Kind of like Ridley Scott changing the Prometheus trilogy when his idiot fans complained about "no aliens" in Prometheus. Those same idiots are complaining about "no engineers" in the underwhelming Alien Covenant. I'm disappointed on both accounts.

FWIW, they didn't actually kill her. They just stabbed her 19 times and left her to die. But she survived. :eek:

[allasorte]

Slender Man. It simply wasn't very good. I heard Sony changed a lot of the story because of the true events that took place when those young girls killed a "friend" to protect themselves from the slender man. I don't like when stupidity dictates other's thought. Kind of like Ridley Scott changing the Prometheus trilogy when his idiot fans complained about "no aliens" in Prometheus. Those same idiots are complaining about "no engineers" in the underwhelming Alien Covenant. I'm disappointed on both accounts.

FWIW, they didn't actually kill her. They just stabbed her 19 times and left her to die. But she survived. :eek:

Stunned she lived. Thanks for the proper "post."

[Tommy]

So anyone taking my advice and watching Inside yet??? It's been out for over a decade now and I have no one to talk to about it! Well Bruce watched it but he's been exiled. Please, someone watch it (the unrated version) this year and share the trauma with me, please. :biggrin: If you are brave and do watch it, do it alone and in the dark. SO effective!

[Heather19]

I'm still waiting for Netflix to get it. They carry most dvd's but not that one for some reason :(

[Tommy]

Stupid Netflix! :mad:

[allasorte]

So anyone taking my advice and watching Inside yet??? It's been out for over a decade now and I have no one to talk to about it! Well Bruce watched it but he's been exiled. Please, someone watch it (the unrated version) this year and share the trauma with me, please. :biggrin: If you are brave and do watch it, do it alone and in the dark. SO effective!

What is it about? Year it was made? Bruce is banished??? I love that guy. Can you explain?

[mae]

Perfect timing:

https://www.indiewire.com/2018/10/best-horror-movies-all-time-scary-films-1202012183/

The 100 Greatest Horror Movies of All-Time

Why does it feel like horror movies are always undervalued? One thing’s for certain: In this age of geekery reigning supreme, critics and academics no longer dismiss the genre as disreputable with the kneejerk regularity some once did. But even now there’s talk of “elevated horror,” of artier explorations of dread and terror — Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” and Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” being two very recent examples — that are clearly distinguished from, well, non-elevated horror. The idea being that they engage your brain more than just showing brains being splattered against the wall.

How can films that fire your adrenal glands, send shivers down your spine, raise goosebumps, and quicken breath — that inspire such an intense physical reaction — also be cerebral experiences? We forget all the time that, as Anna Karina’s Pierrot Le Fou character Marianne Renoir says, “There can be ideas in feelings.”

What scares people says a lot about them — as the recent debate about what it means if a viewer finds certain elements of “Get Out” scary or funny revealed very clearly. “Get Out” showed the similarity between horror and comedy, the two genres most often expected to provoke an immediate, visceral reaction. Maybe the aversion some viewers have to both genres is a fear of losing control: of laughing so hard you snort or having to turn away in fright, of embarrassing yourself. A lot of people simply don’t want to lose control, no matter what. What’s funny is that horror, like comedy, is a genre in which each filmmaker has to assert his or her utmost control over the material, has to perfectly calibrate the storytelling, so that we can lose it. Extreme control so that the audience can lose control.

The IndieWire staff put together this list of the 100 Greatest Horror Movies of All-Time to celebrate these intensely primal, personal films. Our writers and editors suggested over 150 titles and then voted on a list of finalists to determine the ultimate ranking. We hope it’s a list that captures the wide range and diversity of the genre, from underseen Laird Cregar vehicles to a Russian chiller based on a Nikolai Gogol story, from J-Horror to the Mexican gem “Alucarda.” Brace yourself for these movies: losing control will never be so much fun.

100. “Village of the Damned” (Wolf Rilla, 1960)
What if the children aren’t our future? That’s the dastardly question facing George Sanders as a professor in the small English village of Midwich whose wife was impregnated by an extraterrestrial force along with all the other nearby women of child-bearing age. Sanders’ character is learned, sophisticated, and tolerant, and he believes the young alien children who are born — all with platinum blonde hair and glowing eyes — deserve the benefit of the doubt. He quickly realizes he’s wrong — even about his own “son” — ultimately arriving at a Stalinist solution. Dripping with dread, “Village of the Damned” suggests that the paranoia we dismiss may not always be unfounded. Rather than history’s arc bending toward progress and justice, the future may hold only entropy and decline.

99. “The Ring” (Gore Verbinski, 2002)
Gore Verbinski’s supernatural tale is a remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film “Ringu,” based on the novel of the same name by Koji Suzuki. A journalist investigates the legend of a videotape comprised of disturbing, mystifying images which when watched, leads to a phone call foretelling the viewer’s death in seven days. Led by an impassioned performance from Naomi Watts, this enigmatic ghost story is heavy on atmosphere — thanks in part to it’s gloomy, isolated Seattle setting — and offers up some genuine scares. Dark, unsettling, and deliberately paced, several thrilling twists that gradually reveal the film’s mystifying plot will hold the audience’s attention. The first American “J-Horror” remake, fans of the original should find this remake nearly as compelling. It spawned 3 sequels and paved the way for more American remakes of Japanese horror films, including “The Grudge.”

98. “The Changeling” (Peter Medak, 1980)
From “The Uninvited” to “The Innocents,” horror loves a good ghost story, and 1980’s “The Changeling” remains one of the genre’s very best. After the tragic death of his family, a composer moves into an historic mansion in Seattle, but the idyllic home also harbors the spirit of a distressed child, one who was hidden away in the home before being killed, and who is ready to seek revenge on the family who erased him from their past. “The Changeling” also packs on plenty of scares, especially the film’s unsettling séance scene, which undoubtedly inspired 2001’s “The Others.” Although “The Changeling” isn’t as well known as some of horror’s other ghost stories, it’s a favorite of both Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who is rumored to have screened it during the production of “Poltergeist.” Featuring a powerhouse performance by George C. Scott and well as a compelling mystery at its core, “The Changeling” is an understated horror gem worth discovering.

97. “Alucarda” (Juan López Moctezuma, 1977)
Alucarda has lived at a convent her whole life, but her world changes with the arrival of Justine, another young orphan. The two girls become inseparable, with their friendship often bordering on a sexual relationship. While out in the woods, they come across a strange burial ground and accidentally unleash a demonic force, which soon possesses them and threatens to tear apart the entire convent and everyone in it. Much like Ken Russell’s “The Devils,” “Alucarda” is rife with sexual ecstasy in a religious setting, where iconography turns sacrilegious. The young girls pledge their bodies both to each other and to the devil, shown in his most beastly form, with cloven hooves and curled horns, a furry nightmare that undoubtedly served as the inspiration for some of Guillermo del Toro’s most fantastic monsters. As the coven gathers to pray, the girls, now fully possessed, cannot stand anything holy, and the entire chapel descends into chaos, making for an unforgettable finale. “Alucarda” might not be as well known as “The Exorcist,” but it’s a possession film unlike any other, one that doesn’t fall back on the genre’s tired tropes, allowing it to truly shock.

96. “Tales from the Hood” (Rusty Cundieff, 1995)
An updated twist on the British Amicus Production anthology horror films, popular during the ’60s and ’70s, Cundieff’s cult classic uses satire to tackle race and racism (among other themes), while also staying true to horror genre conventions. It unfolds in much the same style as the Amicus films, which typically followed a group of strangers who come together to face some evil soothsayer, and in a series of flash-forward or flashback sequences, learn how they will die, or how they died. In “Hood”, three wanna-be hoodlums visit a funeral parlor run by a kooky, creepy mortician (played with verve by Clarence Williams III), with the intention of buying “found” drugs from him to then sell on the street. Of course, they each get more than they bargained for when Williams instead recites four grim horror stories that spook them, after which the mortician reveals his true self, and the delinquent trio come to learn their ultimate fate. Not only does “Hood” effectively lampoon the Amicus anthology premise, but it also makes potent commentary (sometimes with biting humor) on a range of issues specific to the black experience, like police brutality, institutional racism and gang violence. Certain aspects might feel dated 23 years later, but “Hood” still packs a wallop. Cundieff produced a lesser sequel in 2018.

95. “Messiah of Evil” (Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, 1973)
“Messiah of Evil” is an underseen gem that manages to creep under the skin despite its very low budget. When a woman heads to a seaside town to look for her missing father, she finds the creepy hamlet has been infiltrated by an undead cult. It’s never quite clear if the undead are zombies or vampires, but their presence is unshakably ominous. While “Messiah of Evil” is lesser known, it’s full of iconic and memorable scenes (a victim being devoured in a supermarket, another surrounded by the undead at the movies) that recall to mind some of George A. Romero’s best work. Co-written and co-directed by husband-and-wife team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who would later co-write “American Graffiti” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Messiah of Evil” is worth seeking out.

94. “A Bay of Blood” (Mario Bava, 1971)
In 1963, Mario Bava released “The Girl Who Knew Too Much,” kickstarting the giallo subgenre that would dominate Italian horror for years to come. In 1971, Bava reinvented the genre once again with his early slasher “A Bay of Blood,” where the murder of a wealthy heiress kicks off a greed-fueled murder spree, which also targets a group of innocent teenagers camping out nearby. “A Bay of Blood” would serve as a key inspiration for “Friday the 13th” and its subsequent sequel, with the franchise copying two murders from Bava’s film nearly shot for shot. It remains a vital watch for horror fans, and a reminder of how Bava continued to push horror into new and interesting realms, the reverberations of which are still felt today.

93. “Trouble Every Day” (Claire Denis, 2001)
Connecting sex and violence in a vampire movie is hardly new terrain, but through the lens of director Claire Denis — and the way her camera studies of bodies in motion — it becomes a natural extension of her quieter dramas and a somber look at man’s nature. Normally Paris is the perfect romantic city for a honeymoon, but our groom, an American scientist (Vincent Gallo), is there to search for his ex-lover Coré (Béatrice Dalle), with whom he shares a desire for blood when aroused. Coré has become an “Under the Skin”–like seductress, luring men to hidden locations with the promise of sex, before ripping them to shreds. Eventually, Coré’s keeper Léo (Alex Descas) – another scientist of sorts – tracks her down, buries the bodies, and locks her back up in his basement laboratory. It’s a pattern that defines their relationship. “Trouble Every Day” was somewhat panned following its Cannes premiere, but has been reexamined quite a bit over the years as Denis’ work looks more intentional and layered with each passing year.

92. “The Tenant” (Roman Polanski, 1976)
The third film in Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” is less well-known than the previous two (“Repulsion” and “Rosemary’s Baby”), but utilizes the same subtle breaks with reality to capture the director’s unique brand of psychological horror – never making it clear if what we are seeing is imagined or really happening. Polanski himself stars as the unassuming new tenant who is made to feel unwelcome by his new Parisian neighbors as the memory of the previous tenant — who attempted suicide by throwing herself out the window — hovers over the film. In “The Tenant,” Polanski, who spent most of his life as an immigrant, captures the feeling of what it feels like to never quite fit in and experience reality in different way than others.

91. “Goodnight Mommy” (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, 2014)
There’s horror that you see and horror that you can feel. A slow psychological build from unassuming start to fiery end, this is unnerving filmmaking — and not just because of the fierce bodily harm on display. It’s drenched in the insidious, unsettling feeling buried within: the idea that your own family’s inability to recognize you can metastasize into something so brutal. Featuring the rare twist that’s improved by a straightforward, matter-of-fact reveal, “Goodnight Mommy” is a harsh spin on the fear of the unknown that permeates so many of the stories on this list. Yes, it may feel like an endurance test. But there’s an extraordinary element of control here, in which each fresh affront is carefully doled out with masterful precision.

90. “The Leopard Man” (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
It can’t be stated enough how influential the films of producer Val Lewton remain, the true auteur behind an extraordinary run of horror films for RKO in the 1940s. In their lo-fi ingenuity they suggested that more personal visions could be afforded to independent filmmakers — the smaller the budget the less scrutiny from the financiers. But their reliance on suggestion over shock would prove an important influence on even blockbuster filmmaking — Spielberg took Lewton’s lesson to heart with “Jaws” that what you don’t see can be scarier than what you do. “The Leopard Man” may be on the lesser end of the Lewton canon, but in the hands of one of his go-to directors, Jacques Tourneur, this whodunit about a rash of killings is dripping with rich detail in its unique New Mexico setting. Oh, it also has as chilling a murder scene as you’ll ever see.

89. “Viy” (Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov, 1967)
Based on a story by Nikolai Gogol, “Viy” is one of the rare horror movies made in Russia during the Soviet era. A group of seminary student wandering the countryside spend a night in the company of a witch, who is murdered by one of the students. In the morning, they discover the witch was actually the daughter of a wealthy landowner, and now the men must pass three nights locked in the local church, protecting her body from evil spirits. The horrors the men encounter over the three nights could rival some of Guillermo del Toro’s best monsters: goblins with melting flesh, pointy demons, and jagged skeletons, disarticulated hands breaking through the walls of the church, and the spirit of the young witch, clad in an etherial white gown and daisy-chain flower crown, bloody tears in her eyes, alternatively beautiful and terrifying. Some of the scares in “Viy” are outdated, but it remains a fascinating glimpse at the type of filmmaking once hidden behind the Iron Curtain.

88. “The Hunger” (Tony Scott, 1983)
It’s hard to imagine anyone ever wanting to leave David Bowie behind, but that’s just what Catherine Deneuve does as the ethereal vampire Miriam in “The Hunger.” Although he was turned over 200 years prior and promised eternal life, Bowie’s John begins to age rapidly, causing him to realize eternal life doesn’t mean eternal youth. Repulsed by his appearance, Miriam spurns him and begins looking for a new conquest, which she soon finds in Sarah (Susan Sarandon), a doctor specializing in aging who was looking to help John. But Sarah isn’t as compliant as Miriam’s former lovers, and as Sarah struggles to adapt to her new way of life, it puts her in direct conflict with Miriam, threatening to expose her centuries-old secret. “The Hunger” is an atmospheric vampire film unlike any other. While much has been made about Sarandon and Deneuve’s steamy lesbian sex, the film is also known for its opening sequence, where John and Miriam are on the prowl for lovers they can turn into a meal. The iconic sequence later served as the inspiration for Lady Gaga’s introduction on “American Horror Story: Hotel.”

87. “Masque of the Red Death” (Roger Corman, 1964)
It’s incredible how much Roger Corman could get out of so little. This Edgar Allan Poe adaptation starring Vincent Price as the wickedly decadent nobleman Prince Prospero whose many sins come back to plague him (literally) is a masterpiece of production design. One sequence follows someone walking through a chain of linked rooms in Price’s castle and each room’s furnishings and wallpaper are entirely one eye-popping color. This is as much a film for the eyes as Argento’s “Suspiria” and “Inferno” but if the bold hues in those gorefests seem often unmotivated by the story, Corman’s bold stylistic choices serve a political message: that the indifferent one-percent puts so much time into a design for living that they’ve forgotten all purpose for living.

86. “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (Wes Craven, 1984)
Whatever meta rabbit holes the subsequent “Elm Street” installments may have navigated, Freddy Krueger’s original tale is decidedly old-fashioned. Simply, it’s about how young people always have to pay for the mistakes of preceding generations: when the parents of Elm Street took justice into their own hands and burned their neighbor Krueger alive after discovering he was a pedophile, he comes back as a ghost to menace their children. Craven’s message is clear: Krueger needed to be brought to justice, but people taking the law into their own hands is never justice. Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy is the finest Final Girl since Laurie Strode in her quest to both defeat Krueger and grapple with her parents’ sin. You feel her vulnerability and identify with her so strongly as horrible frights await her: Krueger’s hateful telephone calls (somehow even literally lashing his tongue out through the phone receiver) and his claw-like hand emerging from the bathwater when she’s soaking in the tub. Those are indelible images, but it’s to Craven’s credit that they work not to dehumanize Nancy, but to cause you to identify and empathize with her all the more.

85. “Antichrist” (Lars von Trier, 2009)
The first film in master provocateur Lars von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy,” it drew much controversy, and generated a myriad of theses and analyses, as with every other von Trier film. Beautifully stylized, dense with mourning and despair, telling the story of a couple who, after the death of their child, retreat to a cabin in the woods where the man has bizarre visions and the woman engages in increasingly violent sexual behaviour, “Antichrist” is said to have been influenced by von Trier’s own struggles with depression at the time of its writing. It is evident. Certainly divisive when it was released, it can ultimately be regarded as a meditation on human responses to psychological trauma. Prepare to be confronted by its at times graphic cruelty. At the very least, audiences will be captivated by its striking tableaux and strong performances from Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. “Melancholia” and “Nymphomaniac” complete von Trier’s trilogy.

84. “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (Robert Aldrich, 1962)
The best horror movies include both surface-level scares for an escapist jolt and deeper fears we can all relate to. Robert Aldrich’s adaptation of Henry Farrell’s pulp novel could’ve been just shock and schlock in its depiction of two sisters, one a former child star Jane (Bette Davis) whose fame was eclipsed by the later success of her movie star sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), who will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair following an accident for which Jane is blamed. These two have been forgotten by the world and when we join them it seems they’ve been living out the same daily routine for decades — Jane slouches up the stairs taking meals up to Blanche with a sneer and a snide remark. Their lives are already over: they’re doomed to just rehash the same grievances from ages ago ad infinitum. The only thing that could change is if Jane’s resentment curdles into murderous rage. It does. The real fear Davis and Crawford tap into so urgently is fear of regret, building up to a final scene of ennui set on a beach that rivals the far more self-consciously arty beach-set ending notes of contemporaneous ennui in “The 400 Blows” and “La Dolce Vita”: “You mean this whole time we could have been friends?”

83. “The Ghost Ship” (Mark Robson, 1943)
Kind of like John Ford’s “The Long Voyage Home” by way of “The Shining,” “The Ghost Ship” is Val Lewton’s slow-burn study of how passive-aggression can boil over into murderousness. Sailor Tom Merriam (Russell Wade) of the merchant vessel Altair come to suspect that something’s wrong with Captain Stone (Richard Dix) — at key moments he seems to go into a negative panic, at others he likes to bore the crew with dry, lengthy explanations of his views on authority. After one crewman, Louie (a young Lawrence Tierney), questions one of Stone’s orders, the captain replies, “You know, there are captains who might hold this against you, Louie.” Shortly thereafter, Louie is crushed to death by the anchor chain. Coincidence? Obviously not. But even if the rest of the crew suspect Stone’s a killer, they’d rather ignore his crimes or explain them away rather than get on his bad side while at sea — it’s up to Wade’s Merriam to play the part of a high-seas Will Kane, shake them out of their apathy, and recognize that the captain’s behavior should not be normalized. No one else wants to rock the boat.

82. “The Skin I Live In” (Pedro Almodovar, 2011)
Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar is in full Hitchcock mode for this twisty, sexy medical revenge thriller adapted from Thierry Jonque’s 2005 crime novel, “Tarantula.” Reunited with his protegé Antonio Banderas (“Matador”) after two decades, Almodovar digs into an offbeat plastic surgeon who pursues the far reaches of transgenic therapy, using pig genes to create impenetrable human skin. He also is keeping gorgeous Vera (Elena Anaya) captive in his home, refreshing her epidermis behind a white face mask. Housemaid Marilia (Maris Paredes) is also one of many mysteries to be revealed — his wife’s face was burned in an accident, for one thing — in a strange world where anything can (and does) happen.

81. “Suspiria” (Luca Guadagnino, 2018)
There are many horror films in which the filmmaking transcends its B-movie script, but Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” remake is manages to do the exact opposite — this dense and erudite script at times requires Cliff’s Notes and a Witches 101 college-level course to understand, but the filmmaking is so intense and virtuoso that it serves as its own exposition. A movement elicits violence, a cut its supernatural connection. Compositions become lust, while sound embodies the world’s discord. Even for Guadagnino devotees, the depths of his raw filmmaking skill demonstrated in this film will astound, as much as the bone-crunching violence will unsettle.

80. “Kuroneko” (Kaneto Shindo, 1968)
Kaneto Shindo directed 48 films in his 100 years on this planet, none more unsettling than “Kuroneko.” Much of the Japanese auteur’s work was haunted by the atomic bomb dropped on his hometown of Hiroshima, making this masterful film something of an exception: An enigmatic ghost story set during Japan’s Heian period, it features murderous samurai, the baleful ghosts of two women seeking revenge on the soldiers who raped and killed them, and a black cat whose presence portends death. “Kuroneko” is more frightening for what it doesn’t show than for what it does, which isn’t to say that what’s on display isn’t terrifying in its own right; rarely have spirits been so justifiably angry. Getting vengeance beyond the grave is better than nothing, but it’s also cold comfort — after all, they’re still dead.

79. “Martyrs” (Pascal Laugier, 2008)
The New French Extremity movement that dominated French horror during the ’90s and early aughts came to an appropriate close with 2008’s “Martyrs.” Two young women, both of whom suffered extreme abuse as children, seek out revenge on the people they believe to be their captors, and in the process uncover ties to a religious cult darker than they could ever imagine. Imbued with the genre’s proclivity for extreme, graphic, and incredibly shocking violence, “Martyrs” lives up to its title and then some, provocatively blurring the lines between extreme pain and ecstasy. “Martyrs” features some of the most jaw-dropping shocks horror has ever offered, and it’s worth going in knowing very little, but be warned, it’s not for the faint of heart.

78. “The Vanishing” (George Sluizer, 1988)
There are unhappy endings, and then there’s “The Vanishing.” Not at all for the faint of heart — or even the normal of heart, really — this dispiriting Dutch thriller proved such a sensation that George Sluizer remade it in English five years later (which went about as well as when Michael Haneke did the same with “Funny Games”). Few missing-person movies are so viscerally upsetting, with the simple case of a man searching for his girlfriend after she, well, vanishes from a gas station without a trace packing a gut-punch that’s rarely been equaled in the three decades since Sluizer’s film was made. To say any more would be to give far too much away, but let it be known that you, too, may leave “The Vanishing” feeling as though you’ve lost something that can’t be found again.

77. “House on Haunted Hill” (William Castle, 1959)
William Castle’s love of gimmickry added a spooky touch to the end of the filmmaker’s classic haunted house thriller, as an actual skeleton would be rigged in the theater to take flight over a (hopefully stunned) audience just as something similar was unfolding within the film itself. As was so often the case with Castle’s films, the addition of that extra bit of horror and humor only increased the impact of a film that, flying skeletons notwithstanding, is as well-crafted as they come. Knowing the plot — and this is a plot that has been mercilessly cribbed by lesser films for decades — doesn’t dilute its power, and the twists that follow one particularly bad dinner party, set over the course of one particularly bad night, are fresh as ever. Bolstered by star Vincent Price as an appropriately secretive millionaire who invites a mixed group to his house for an evening of thrills, chills, and murder revelations, Castle’s best film is also a seminal addition to the genre itself. Hell, even Hitchcock was said to be a fan.

76. “Brotherhood of the Wolf” (Christophe Gans, 2001)
Adapted from the David Farland novel about the 18th century French urban legend of the giant Beast of Gévaudan, the $29 million horror martial-arts actioner was shot at the Chateau de Roquetaillade and stars Samuel Le Bihan as Knight and royal naturalist Grégoire de Fronsac, who investigates a mysterious giant wolf-beast with metal claws terrorizing the French countryside. Fronsac figures out that the beast is an instrument of a secret society, The Brotherhood of the Wolf, which is trying to undermine the king and take over the country. He and his Iroquois companion Mani (Mark Dacascos) try to capture the beast who may be more lion than wolf. The stylish Sergio Leone-inspired entertainment scored over $70 million worldwide.

75. “Sisters” (Brian De Palma, 1973)
Brian De Palma has always worn his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock on his cinematic sleeve, and 1973’s “Sisters” puts his own twist on “Rear Window.” Grace, an investigative journalist, accidentally witnesses her neighbor murdering a man, but when the police arrive, there’s no evidence of the crime. Although everyone is convinced she’s crazy, Grace tries to uncover the truth about her neighbor, who may or may not be hiding her murderous twin sister from the world, but the dark secrets Grace ultimately destroy her in the end. “Sisters” is simultaneously the kind of lurid thriller one has come to expect from De Palma, but it’s also a surprisingly prescient film that shows the detrimental fallout of gaslighting and not believing women.

74. “Raw” (Julia Ducournau, 2016)
First-time director Julia Ducournau terrified and titillated Cannes audiences with her gruesome coming-of-age tale, combining classic cannibalism scares with a distinctly female perspective. The film follows a young student (Garance Marillier) who discovers some uncomfortable truths about herself (and the world) when she heads off to vet school (truly, the ideal setting for a body horror film). Marillier’s Justine is a dedicated vegetarian, so when she’s forced to endure a revolting hazing ritual that involves lots of blood and raw liver, she’s shocked to discover just how much she enjoys the taste of flesh. As Justine’s hunger for consuming meat grows, so does her desire to experience the pleasures of the flesh in different ways. It’s visceral, challenging, and often just plain jaw-dropping.

73. “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” (John McNaughton, 1986)
Shot on 16mm in less than a month, this chilly $110,000 indie built its X-rated cult reputation on the film festival circuit and made a name for curly-haired Michael Rooker, who magnetically anchors the movie as the eponymous murderer Henry. The bloodthirsty slasher moves doggedly from town to town, changing his modus operandi to avoid detection by local police. He is briefly joined by an old prison buddy Otis (Tom Towles) on a Chicago killing spree; the duo not only annihilate an entire family but put it on video for their later enjoyment. When Otis’s hard-luck sister Becky falls for Henry, it can’t be good.

72. “Hour of the Wolf” (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
Before this 1968 outing, Ingmar Bergman had occasionally dabbled with horror elements in his career, particularly with 1957’s “The Seventh Seal” and 1960’s “The Virgin Spring,” but “Hour of the Wolf” found the esteemed director fully giving into the genre with haunting results. An artist and his wife live on a remote island, where the artist is troubled by his past and what he believes to be demons haunting him. During the “hour of the wolf,” the time where most births and deaths occur, the artist opens up to his wife about the darkness in his past, his childhood traumas, and a former lover, before realizing that the past might not be as far away as he once believed, and might instead be waiting for him across the island. “Hour of the Wolf” feels like a surreal fever dream (or nightmare), raising plenty of questions about what is really happening and what is imagined. It wouldn’t be a Bergman film without Liv Ullman, Max von Sydow, and a lot of existential questions, but “Hour of the Wolf” also features a creepy mini-opera, foreshadowing Bergman’s later take on “The Magic Flute.” It might be the director’s only horror film, but it’s an eerie and truly unforgettable one.

71. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
Francis Ford Coppola unleashes the sexuality that was always lurking underneath Bram Stoker’s original “Dracula” in sumptuous color and delicious visuals. Created on a soundstage with no visual effects, the film has been criticized for its mannered performances and ornate extravagance, but few films in Hollywood’s modern era have used color and costume so expressively, as designer Eiko Ishioka’s work takes center stage in revealing the burning internal emotions of the characters. As 26 years have passed, it’s impossible to not feel the film’s heartbeat come pouring through Coppola’s precision, as the film has aged like a fine a wine.

70. “The Seventh Victim” (Mark Robson, 1943)
Val Lewton usually gave the horror films he produced a unique setting: a Greek island in “Isle of the Dead,” a Caribbean island in “I Walked With a Zombie,” 19th century Edinburgh in “The Body Snatcher.” A greater challenge is to mine eeriness and menace from a perfectly quotidian setting, such as the New York City subway. That’s what did in “The Seventh Victim,” which, more than “Cat People,” which was also set in Manhattan, dives into the dread of the ordinary in New York City life. A young girl goes in search of her missing sister with the help of a craggy PI — he’s stabbed to death and she runs from the scene, so terrified she ends up doing a complete circuit on the subway. When it stops at the station where she got on — right near the private detective was murdered — two men board, propping him up, trying to act like he’s still alive. They’re obviously the ones who killed him and they’re counting on New Yorkers’ indifference to their surroundings as their cover to dispose of him. It’s so chilling because this actually could happen. Turns out a Satanic cult is involved — clearly a prototype for the devil-worshipping Manhattanites in “Rosemary’s Baby” — but “The Seventh Victim” stays with you because it reveals an essential truth: personal demons are always scarier than literal ones.

69. “High Tension” (Alexandre Aja, 2003)
One of the most divisive and best known New French Extremity entries, “High Tension” put director Alexandre Aja on the map with American audiences with his brutal psychological thriller. Marie heads to her classmate Alex’s secluded country home to study for final exams, but the idyllic country retreat becomes a bloodbath when a vicious serial killer slaughters the entire family, taking Alex hostage. Marie then transforms into the ultimate Final Girl, fighting to rescue her Alex before she meets a devastating end… except not everything is what it seems. The film’s big twist has divided audiences since its premiere in 2003, but “High Tension” still remains a thrilling slasher, packed with plenty of scares and gore to satisfy even the most skeptical horror fans.

68. “Dressed to Kill” (Brian De Palma, 1980)
Brian De Palma was at the height of his powers as the master of pastiche when he made this riveting Hitchcockian horror tale about elevator murderers and people insecure in their own bodies. At first the story of a promiscuous woman (Angie Dickinson), “Dressed to Kill” borrows a page from “Psycho” by taking its apparent protagonist out of the picture after the first act. From there, the specter of a mysterious trans woman named Bobbi on a killing spree hovers throughout the story, as she stalks Liz (Nancy Allen) while a psychiatrist (Michael Caine) makes frantic attempts to warn the police about the threat at hand. The twist about Bobbi’s real identity is obvious to any engaged viewer, but De Palma’s stylish riff on slasher tropes uses the familiarity of its winding plot to deliver a brilliant meditation on fluid sexual identity — and the frustrations of being forced to suppress it — long before the concept had much visibility in popular culture. It’s a brilliant, risky examination of femininity, the terror involved in being the object of an insatiable male gaze, and what happens when latent desires remain underserved. No horror movie made today has the guts to go there.

67. “Black Christmas” (Bob Clark, 1974)
Bob Clark is perhaps best known for his other holiday-themed film, “A Christmas Story,” but 1974’s “Black Christmas” deserves just as much attention. Set in a sorority house over Christmas break, a group of college women are stalked and slowly picked off by a deranged killer hiding inside the abode. The plot sounds formulaic, but “Black Christmas” remains timeless thanks to its terrifying and elusive killer, “Billy,” whose backstory is never revealed, as well as a foreboding ending that doesn’t offer much hope for the film’s Final Girl, Jess. But beyond this, “Black Christmas” is also remarkably feminist for its time, as Jess chooses an abortion and a career over being locked into a loveless relationship. Likewise, the terror felt by the women as they are plagued by obscene phone calls makes it clear that some horrors are all too common, and don’t require a boogeyman in a mask.

66. “The Descent” (Neil Marshall, 2005)
One year after a tragic accident, six adventurous girlfriends meet in a remote part of the Appalachians for their annual spelunking trip. After an accident traps the group deep below, they unexpectedly come face to face with a race of monstrous humanoid creatures lurking under the earth. Neil Marshall’s tense, thrilling, and claustrophobic survival horror film stars a rare all-female cast who bludgeon their way through thrilling scene after scene in this deftly-directed and well-acted cinematic nightmare, that also serves as a meditation on issues of morality and vengeance. One of the more exhilarating creature features of the 21st century, it spawned a lesser sequel, although without Marshall’s involvement.

65. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (Don Siegel, 1956)
What’s worse than death? A lot of horror movies try to answer that — just dying, which every single person who’s ever lived experiences, can’t be the scariest thing facing us. Siegel suggests that losing your individuality is indeed something worse. Small town doctor Kevin McCarthy begins to suspect something is off in his community — some people are starting to act suspiciously robotic. Then a friend shows him a perfect doppelganger — a “pod person” — that’s growing on a pool table in his home. It seems some sinister force, possibly aliens, are quietly taking over by replacing people with exact duplicates. A metaphor for conformity and loss of free will that’s influenced everything from “The Stepford Wives” to “Get Out,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is a powerful dramatization of the fear and alienation that results when you think something is wrong that everyone else thinks is right.

64. “A Tale of Two Sisters” (Kim Jee-woon, 2003)
Korean horror has provided some of the greatest scares in recent years, and “A Tale of Two Sisters” is another wonderfully warped and terrifying entry, filled with vengeful ghosts and surprising twists. A young girl, Su-mi, returns home to her father’s secluded estate after a stay in a mental institution. She is happy to be reunited with her younger sister, Su-yeon, but less than pleased to see her stepmother, Eun-joo. Eun-joo was once a nurse for the girls’ dying mother, and there is mutual resentment between the girls and their stepmother. When Eun-joo begins lashing out at the girls, targeting Su-yeon especially, their father is blind to the abuse, setting up a brutal conflict that will cause painful secrets to surface, threatening to drive a wedge between the two sisters for good. “A Tale of Two Sisters” is a psychological thriller that pulls the rug from beneath viewers more than once, foregoing the more obvious twists and reveals for a truly heartbreaking ending that will make you want to rewatch the film all over again.

63. “Let the Right One In” (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
At the exact time “Twilight” was being mainlined into our cultural veins, this quiet and beautiful Swedish film was the exact antidote audiences do desperately needed. Director Tomas Alfredson doesn’t always seem concerned with genre convention in his intimate story of a bullied 12-year old and the vampire he befriends. In the digital age, horror films are too often reliant on a flavorless shadowy look, but in Hoyt Van Hoytema’s cinematography not only can we see into the darkness, it is filled with one of the most unique color palettes in modern cinema. While creating an atmosphere in which we sense a lurking presence in the dark haze, the gorgeous and muted colors create an intimacy with the young characters.

62. “Jacob’s Ladder” (Adrian Lyne, 1990)
That filmmaker Adrian Lyne is best-known to mainstream audiences for his erotic thrillers like “Unfaithful” and “9 1/2 Weeks” shouldn’t deter horror fans from experiencing his bracing, stomach-churning “Jacob’s Ladder.” After all, Lyne’s sexier work provides a window into his ability to center stories on the human body, a concept twisted to hallucinogenic ends in this Tim Robbins-starring story. Essentially a film about the after-effects of the Vietnam War, Lyne skillfully builds the tension and terror as Robbins’ Jacob attempts to navigate through the “normal” world after living through the hell of battle. While the film doesn’t shy away from the nerve-shredding visions that plague Jacob (from pre-war memories to a party scene that sees him almost totally given over to his monsters, real or imagined), it also offers up compelling evidence that the true terrors of this world aren’t just boogeymen — and that’s far worse.

61. “Evil Dead II” (Sam Raimi, 1987)
While ’80s horror franchises like “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” stumbled through underdeveloped sequels, director Sam Raimi had the gall to bring something totally fresh to the sequel to his breakout cabin-in-the-woods shocker “The Evil Dead” — punchlines. As the sole survivor of the ghoulish threats from the previous film, Bruce Campbell’s kooky party boy Ash returns to the scene of the earlier events, where the monstrous spirits once again hurl themselves at him from every direction. As a wild-eyed Ash attempts to vanquish the demonic presence surrounding him in the walls from every angle, Raimi merges the gruesome intensity of the splatter genre with the surreal comedic heights of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Yes, there’s a famous amputation scene that unites Ash with his iconic chainsaw arm, but “Evil Dead II” is more than just a gory playground. In one defining moment, the camera veers close to Ash’s face as he cracks up in deranged laughter, while everything around him — including a lamp shade — join in. It’s a brilliant illustration of the thin line between comedy and horror that this movie walks so well, right up until the surprise twist of an ending that establishes a third entry in this original horror franchise that heads in a whole new direction altogether. Few examples of the genre have burst through so many expectations while remaining satisfying the whole way through.

60. “Poltergeist” (Tobe Hooper, 1982)
“The Shining” and other ghost stories have used the conceit of building on a Native American burial ground leading to supernatural unrest: Manifest Destiny as both original sin and inciting incident. “Poltergeist” gives that notion a Reagan-era twist: the problem here is that a new gated community has been built over what was formerly the town cemetery. “They’re just… people,” the real estate developer behind the project says, as direct an indictment of corporate inhumanity as served up by any film ever. The ghosts of the no-longer-resting-in-peace invade one family’s house through the pacifying trappings of suburbia: the toys for the kids and the TV for the adults. Considering how many people believe their TV sets are haunted — Northwestern University professor Jeffrey Sconce even wrote a book on the subject titled “Haunted Media” — it’s surprising electronic apparitions haven’t been explored even more onscreen. Or maybe it’s just that “Poltergeist” did it so definitively.

59. “The Sixth Sense” (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)
M. Night Shyamalan’s breakout feature earned the filmmaker the reputation of being beholden to his big narrative twists, and while that may still be the case (his latest twist went so far as to inspire an entire new movie), it’s hard to question the power of his biggest reveal. The Bruce Willis-starring feature is creepy enough without its final act jaw-dropper, with the actor as a hangdog child psychologist palling around with a terrified young kid (Haley Joel Osment) who comes armed with one of modern cinema’s most indelible catchphrases (it’s hard to beat “I see dead people,” and who would want to try?). What a pair they make, and Shyamalan skillfully guides the film so it seems as if they’re working towards one conclusion, before veering into an entirely different one that’s as jarring as they come. It’s a film that begs for an instant rewatch, all the better to pick up all the tiny, terrifying clues that Shyamalan has laid out along the way.

58. “The Haunting” (Robert Wise, 1963)
Adapted by Nelson Gidding from the 1959 novel “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson (who suggested the film title), “The Haunting” stars Julie Harris as Eleanor, a shy woman who once experienced poltergeists. She joins a group organized by a paranormal investigator (Richard Johnson), including a mod lesbian psychic (Claire Bloom), and the son of the house’s current owner (Russ Tamblyn), to study a death-plagued abandoned haunted mansion. The filmmaker made the most of a much lower budget than “West Side Story” by taking the shoot to England. He used an experimental 30 mm wide-angle Panavision camera to unsettling effect to portray the film’s most memorable character — the house — from odd, jarring, dislocated angles, often showing Eleanor’s mentally unstable point-of-view. The crew bent walls, destabilized a spiral staircase, applied photo-sensitive makeup to make the actors look pale when they stood in a “cold spot,” delivered a jump scare when a missing woman’s head pops out, and most disturbing, “morphed” a woman from childhood to old age by photographing four actresses at different ages and uniting them with dissolves. While the movie received mixed reviews on release, it has built a cult following and is considered by many — including Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg — to be one of the scariest horror films of all time. Having seen it when it first came out, I for one am scarred for life.

57. “The Conjuring” (James Wan, 2013)
A well-polished fictionalized account of the real-life cases of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, Wan’s film shows the supernatural seekers taking on the case of the Perron family, new owners of a Rhode Island home that appears to be haunted. An offspring of “The Exorcist,” set on an isolated, vast, animated compound, if it feels familiar it’s because the film relies on old-school horror film motifs for its scares. But it’s still effective, thanks in part to believable performances by its cast, notably stars Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as Ed and Lorraine, who have a natural on-screen chemistry. And Wan’s decision to limit his use of computer generated effects is wise. The first film in what has come to be called “The Conjuring Universe,” it’s spawned a sequel and three spin-offs which have collectively earned over $1.5 billion at the box office worldwide, making this the highest-grossing horror movie franchise in history.

56. “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (David Lynch, 1992)
Conceived as both a prologue to — and a postscript for — the original “Twin Peaks” television series, David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” has since been renovated into something of a bridge between the old and new iterations of the show; the dark nexus of that particular universe. But to focus on its function within Lynch’s mythology is to overlook “Fire Walks with Me” as an experience unto itself; even in a vacuum, it’s one of the most emotionally harrowing movies ever made. Lynch has said that he “was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside.” This film, which mostly follows Laura (Sheryl Lee) in the days leading up to her murder, crystallizes how this story has always swung between the intractable trauma of abuse and the overwhelming power of love. Positioning Laura’s father (a scarring Ray Wise) as the pit beneath that pendulum, “Fire Walk with Me” shines a light into the void beneath a quaint Washington town, and finds that heaven and hell might be a lot closer together than they seem from street level. The scares will get under your skin, and the residue they live behind will stay under your fingernails.

55. “The Fog” (John Carpenter, 1980)
“A celebration of our past!” declares the triumphal banner hanging over the town square of Antonio Bay, California in honor of its centennial celebration. Director John Carpenter, in his first film after the landmark “Halloween,” makes us ask an important question: who wrote that history we’re celebrating? The ghosts that are coming out of the mists rolling in off the Pacific have a very different perspective on Antonio Bay and its residents, and if they can’t write their own story in the history books, they will write a tale of present-day revenge instead — in blood. With a setting much like “The Birds,” “The Fog” is a masterpiece of mood. And it features both Jamie Lee Curtis and her mother Janet Leigh — but this is no escapist horror pastiche. How much do the people of today bear guilt for the crimes of their forebears? Are reparations owed? Carpenter examines the crushing weight of the past and suggests that history may be the ultimate horror story.

54. “The Babadook” (Jennifer Kent, 2014)
In the last 20 years, no director has come to her first feature so fully formed as both a storyteller and a master of cinema as actress-turned-writer/director Jennifer Kent. Kent’s tale of a widowed mother (Essie Davis) battling her son’s fear of a storybook character come to life is hide-under-your-seat terrifying, but instead of relying on lazy scare tricks that have come to define the genre in recent years, Kent uses precise compositions and clockwork-like precision to build tension and draw viewers into a scene. Kent is not simply a master technician, but one who uses the horror genre to tackle a subject (the burden of motherhood) that doesn’t get discussed in polite company and creates something that is for more hard-hitting than any “important” piece of Oscar bait.

53. “The Witch” (Robert Eggers, 2015)
Robert Eggers’ astonishingly confident New-England Folktale is not fucking around. And, just to make sure you know that right from the start, one of its first scenes finds a demonic hag — the skin on her back painted with the light of a full moon — stealing a baby from the Puritan family that’s been exiled to the fringe of her woodland domain and crushing the child into bits with a pestle and mortar. There are any number of reasons why “The Witch” is such a giddily perverse experience (the director’s Kubrickian rigor and his fetish for period details not least among them), but the film is ultimately such a startling sight to behold because of Eggers’ straight-faced commitment to the bit. He leans into the fears and fascinations of 17th century life and he leans into them hard, and that unflinching approach makes it possible for modern-day viewers to believe in the power of the devil, and the goat that might serve as his messenger. Tie it together with a go-for-broke finale, throw in a star-making Anya Taylor-Joy performance into the mix, and you’ve got a new American classic that trembles with the echoes of the first horrors visited upon this country.

52. “Frankenstein” (James Whale, 1931)
It’s only fitting that a novel as influential and forward-thinking as Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” would inspire a similarly unique and enduring big-screen classic. James Whale’s take on the tale of a striving doctor and the freakish creature he cobbles together from the dead contributed mightily to how people envision the monster, with Boris Karloff’s big-headed and lumbering portrayal still serving as the gold standard. But while Frankenstein’s monster (always “Frankenstein’s monster,” never just “Frankenstein”!) is an object of terror in the film, Whale also made sure to overlay all that understandable horror with Shelley’s own message about the beastliness of humanity itself.

51. “The Spiral Staircase” (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
“There’s no room in the whole world for imperfection,” the main villain declares. He’s a serial killer who’s been on a spree murdering women who are disabled. And now he’s targeting a young maid (Dorothy Maguire) who’s mute — we know she’s in his sights because we see her from his point-of-view. When he looks at her, he sees her face without a mouth entirely, much like the image of Keanu Reeves with his mouth sealed shut in “The Matrix.” Director Robert Siodmak conceived a visual language for murderous hate here — the villain is so intolerant of anyone he views as less than “perfect” that he literally sees them differently. In this case, targeting the disabled calls to mind Nazi persecution of people with physical and mental disabilities — World War II had ended just a year earlier, and Siodmak himself had fled the Nazis due to his Jewish heritage. The result is that “The Spiral Staircase” is a work of Gothic Horror for a world still reeling from the Holocaust.

50. “Candyman” (Bernard Rose, 1992)
A boogieman terrorizing a public housing project? The film’s setting alone separates it from many of its slasher movie brethren. Based on Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden,” director Bernard Rose relocates the story from Barker’s native Liverpool to the dilapidated, “scary” buildings of the Cabrini-Green projects in Chicago. It was an inspired decision that amended the original story’s classist undertones into explicitly racial ones, turning this into more of a subversive meditation on race. The unsettling legend about the hook-handed terror focuses on a skeptical white doctoral candidate working on a thesis on urban legends, who learns of the Cabrini-Green Candyman legend and goes to investigate. Starring Virginia Madsen as an atypical slasher movie heroine, the film boasts one of the more intriguing horror-movie villains, with a complexity rooted in a tragic backstory that makes him sympathetic: a famous black artist and son of slaves who pays a steep price, amputation and a grisly death, for falling in love with a white man’s daughter who hires him to paint her portrait. Digging a little deeper than your average horror film, the film stars the physically imposing Tony Todd as Candyman, whose sonorous, chilly voice haunts long after the movie ends.

49. “The Lodger” (John Brahm, 1944)
In Hitchcock’s silent version of “The Lodger” from 1927, the (not-quite-yet) Master of Suspense inaugurated a version of his “wrong man innocently persecuted” formula he’d later perfect in “The 39 Steps” and “North by Northwest.” John Brahm’s remake goes in a decidedly different direction: it’s no spoiler to say that Mr. Slade (Laird Cregar), who’s taken a room in the London home of a middle-aged couple (Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood), is in fact the killer. Obsessed with his late brother, who died after drinking himself to death following a broken heart, Mr. Slade blames the female sex in its entirety for his untimely passing. So he’s taken to murdering random women as payback. Cregar is 6’3” and over 300 pounds but, as physically imposing as he is, his Slade is the fragile male ego on two legs. Particularly threatening to him is female sexual empowerment, and so when he watches the music-hall performer daughter (Merle Oberon) of his landlord and landlady prance about the stage, his face becomes a contorted masque of toxic masculinity: he’s attracted to her but hates her, lusts after her but wants to kill her. The male gaze has never been more weaponized than in this scene, and it’s a testament to Brahm’s sophistication that he understood, in 1944 no less, how the act of looking could be an act of violence — with the actual killing that follows almost an afterthought.

48. “Carnival of Souls” (Herk Harvey, 1962)
A waking nightmare that’s every bit as ghoulish as its title suggests, Herk Harvey’s “Carnival of Souls” — a singular one-off as storied as “Night of the Hunter” and twice as eerie — is an indelible tour through a funhouse of our deepest fears. Shot for a measly $33,000, and imbued with the morbid unease of a rediscovered snuff film, this micro-budget classic stars Candace Hilligoss as Mary, the sole survivor of an ill-fated drag race. Dredging herself out of the water and re-entering a world that feels ominously shadowed by her near-death experience, Mary finds herself trapped in a stretch of American nowhere that’s as inescapable as the Twilight Zone, and twice as dark. Once upon a time, this was the kind of nameless movie you might stumble upon at 2 A.M. on TCM; the kind of thing you felt you shouldn’t be watching. Today, even though you can watch it on a Criterion Collection Blu-ray or stream it on your laptop, Harvey’s unnerving masterpiece still retains every last drop of its delirious power.

47. “Ganja & Hess” (Bill Gunn, 1973)
An original treatise on sex, religion and African-American identity, iconoclastic filmmaker Bill Gunn’s 1973 allegorical classic subverts the vampire genre. Anthropologist Hess Green is stabbed with an ancient ceremonial dagger by his unstable assistant, endowing him with the blessing of immortality and the curse of an unquenchable thirst for blood. When the assistant’s wife Ganja comes searching for her vanished husband, she and Hess form an unexpected partnership. Gunn uses vampirism as a proxy for addiction, although the complexity of the plot makes it nearly impossible to reduce the film to any one simple metaphor. Drastically recut by distributors unhappy with Gunn’s highly stylized version that flirts with the conventions of blaxploitation and horror cinema, it was re-released under other titles. And so, for many years, what was essentially a bastardized version of the film (re-edited without Gunn’s involvement) was all that was available. Forty years later, Kino Lorber made the film gods happy by re-releasing the film, restored to Gunn’s original vision.

46. “It Follows” (David Robert Mitchell, 2014)
“It’s right behind you!” is a common, and cheesy, horror refrain, but David Robert Mitchell’s lyrical coming-of-age vision gave it entirely fresh currency. A murderous creature visible only to the afflicted pursues its prey with a slow, relentless march forward, manifesting as their worst fears; the only solution is to have sex with someone to pass the threat forward. But if one person dies, the monster makes its way back down the line. This brilliant gimmick enables “It Follows” to assemble a series of frantic teenagers in a desperate attempt to figure out a solution to their conundrum. B, but the body count is fated to rise, and Mitchell’s evocative storytelling makes it clear that nothing can totally rescue them from the shocking physical transformations of young adulthood. Sex, which often dooms characters in horror movies, has never been such a menacing cinematic threat.

45. “The Blair Witch Project” (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
Few movies have been as parodied and intimated in the last 20 years as “The Blair Witch Project”; fewer still are as scary. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s endlessly influential exercise in found-footage horror has been hotly debated since before it even premiered — is it real or is it not? — and remains polarizing even now. Lost in that debate is how terrifying it still is. Getting lost in the woods has never looked so scary, especially as seen through a trio of film students’ grainy camcorder; Myrick and Sánchez maximized their notoriously tiny budget by having most of the action occur offscreen and forcing us to mentally fill in the details. That it introduced both found footage and viral marketing to the general public may be a mixed blessing, but don’t hold that against it: “The Blair Witch Project” brings new meaning to the phrase “often imitated, never duplicated.”

44. “The Brood” (David Cronenberg, 1979)
The big reveal in the Canadian auteur’s breakout movie “The Brood” is Samantha Eggar lifting her white drape to show Art Hindle the multiple “babies” growing from her torso, opening the biggest sac to lick the blood off her newborn. Following “Rabid” and “Shivers,” “The Brood” signaled the arrival of a cerebral filmmaker with icky ideas about the hazards of science, from armpits with sex organs and veined penis-shaped parasites with ears and mouths crawling in and out of body cavities, to psycho-plasmic hives that become humans, born out of anger and forming an army. Made for about $1 million with a tiny crew of seven, “The Brood” used a mix of analog prosthetics and clever manipulation of light and dark in a pre-CGI world to create believable, naturalistic menace. When Roger Corman picked up the movie stateside, horror mavens Joe Dante and John Carpenter helped to cut the trailer. Cronenberg’s “Videodrome,” “Scanners,” and “The Fly” came later.

43. “I Saw the Devil” (Kim Jee-Woon, 2011)
A visually canny director with a sharp sense of humor, Kim adeptly plays with genres, from his sixth film, the wacky Oriental western hit “The Good, The Bad, and the Weird” to serial killer thriller “I Saw the Devil,” which also stars Lee Byung-hun. This time, Lee is a homicide detective on the hunt for a brilliant serial killer who whacked his pregnant wife in a haunting opening sequence. This movie is not for the squeamish — Kim takes the violence about as far as anyone ever has, bringing you along for the ride via intricate tracking cameras as the detective starts to emulate the insane devil he is chasing. This vengeance plot, with all its gore and evil, is in the service of art. And it’s funny, too, as the detective and the killer engage in a strange game of one-upmanship. Despite being hit with restrictive ratings for violence in Korea, cutting some of the violence and limiting the theaters where it could play, the movie was a monster hit. Kim was able to keep more horror in the international version.

42. “Freaks” (Tod Browning, 1932)
“One of us, one of us!” As sad as it is scary, Tod Browning’s career-ending pre-Code masterpiece is not at all the movie you expect it to be. Its title gives the impression of an exploitative sideshow attraction, and though “Freaks” is certainly carnivalesque in the way it showcases its cast — including conjoined twins, a bearded lady, and the famous “pinheads” — it’s ultimately most notable for the empathy it shows them at the expense of the “normal” characters who mistreat them. Endlessly controversial when it was first released, with one woman even threatening to sue MGM after claiming the movie was responsible for her having a miscarriage, it has since been reevaluated as the one-of-a-kind classic it is. Better late than never.

41. “Possession” (Andrzej Zulawaki, 1981)
The demise of a marriage has often made lent heft to some of the best dramas, but it’s not often that it makes for an unforgettable horror movie. When Anna reveals to her husband, Mark, that she is having an affair, it sends him to the brink of madness. Although he is struggling to keep it together, Mark hires a private investigator to follow Anna, while also having an affair with his son’s teacher, who could pass for Anna’s double. Tucked away inside of a shabby apartment halfway across a war-torn Berlin, Anna is hiding with a secret lover lifted straight out of H.P. Lovecraft’s worst nightmares. Bolstered by a tour-de-force performance by Isabelle Adjani, who won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival after the film’s 1980 premiere, and her unforgettable subway breakdown, “Possession” is a film like no other, and one that still manages to truly shock over thirty years later.

40. “The Others” (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001)
Arguably the most satisfying gothic horror movie since “The Innocents,” Alejandro Amenábar’s fogbound delight is more than just a loving homage to Jack Clayton’s undying ghost story, it’s also a bonafide classic in its own right. Gleefully inverting age-old genre tropes in order to explore the subject of grief from the inside out, the film stars Nicole Kidman (in one of her finest leading roles) as a harried mother who retreats to a haunted manor on the Channel Islands in the aftermath of World War II. Waiting in vain for her husband to return from the battlefield and help care for their photosensitive children, the woman begins to unravel. Is she having a breakdown, or is it possible that the phantom of an old lady really did possess her daughter? The truth is only revealed after more than 100 minutes of richly atmospheric chills, as “The Others” building to one of the great twists in movie history. It’s a rug-pull done right — one that recasts everything that came before it in the cold light of day, and suggests that people can be as haunted as the houses they call home.

39. “The Devils” (Ken Russell, 1971)
Ken Russell tackled history in 1971 with “The Devils,” an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudon.” The film depicts the real-life account of Urbain Grandier, a 17th century priest accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun, the hunchbacked Sister Jeanne. Russell dives deep into the religious hypocrisy and sacrilegious imagery, turning history into infamy, and singlehandedly giving birth to the Nunsploitation genre. One of the film’s most divisive scenes, nicknamed the “rape of Christ” shows the abbey’s nuns running rampant with sexual ecstasy, turning the church into a brothel, as orgies break out, priests masturbate into pages of the bible, and a bevy of naked nuns begin molesting a giant crucifix in orgasmic pleasure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “The Devils” was banned, rated X, and heavily censored upon release, and while versions of the film have finally become available to watch, the true director’s cut has never been released. Still, it remains a fascinating rumination on the corruption of power and the danger when sexual repression bleeds into hysteria.

38. “Black Sunday” (Mario Bava, 1960)
In 1960, Italian horror maestro Mario Bava catapulted his career with “Black Sunday,” a loose adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story “Viy,” which would also later be adapted into one of the only horror movies ever made in the Soviet Union. The film also launched the career of Barbara Steele, who starred as Asa Vajda, a witch burnt at the stake, who returns from the dead hundreds of years later to seek revenge of the descendants of her killers. Asa’s torment is palpable and appropriately horrific. She has a death mask, studded with spikes, nailed onto her face before she is burned alive. In one of the film’s best scene, as Asa comes back to life, the mask is peeled away from her face, still preserved after centuries, but bloated with nail marks. Although the film is a stunning example of Italian Gothic horror, it was banned in the U.K. until 1968 because of its violence, with some of the film’s gore censored in the U.S. as well. Despite years of censorship, “Black Sunday” is wonderfully atmospheric and moody, with foggy graveyards and dripping dungeons that seem lifted from some of the best horror films of the 1930s. Bava would soon move on to the technicolor world of gialli, but “Black Sunday” remains one of his best.

37. “Hausu” (Obayashi Nobuhiko, 1977)
The story goes that Japanese movie studio Toho was tired of losing money on movies that made sense, and so they greenlit Obayashi Nobuhiko’s “Hausu” — a potentially career-ending script that no in-house director would touch — thinking that it was time to lose money on a movie that didn’t. They only got half of what they bargained for: An utterly delirious (and strangely cheerful) ghost story about a teen girl named Gorgeous (Ikegami Kimiko) who takes a group of friends to her aunt’s haunted house, Obayashi’s magnum opus is a demented funeral parade of phantasmagoric delights. A killer mattress, a carnivorous piano, and a demonic cat are just the tip of the iceberg of a wild, super fun, and disarmingly playful movie in which even the smallest moments are touched with madness. A forgotten gem until the Criterion Collection rescued the film from obscurity and turned it into a cult phenomenon, “Hausu” may not make a lick of sense, but it was a hit in its own time, and an even bigger one in ours.

36. “Don’t Look Now” (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
Why are there so many horror movies about the grieving process? It’s a big question, but “Don’t Look Now” is as comprehensive an answer as you’re likely to find. For one thing, Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece — a splintered and unshakeable portrait of two parents (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) in mourning over the death of their young daughter — has inspired a zillion lesser films to explore the same terrain. For another, this morbid Daphne du Maurier adaptation complicates Hitchcockian psychology with Borges-inspired surrealism to illustrate how genre language can tap into trauma more directly than standard dramas might allow. Spooky twin sisters, spectral visions, the murk of Venetian canals, one infamous sex scene, and the most disturbing reveal in all of cinema combine to articulate the isolating madness that follows loss, and the consequences that come from surrendering to it.

35. “Hangover Square” (John Brahm, 1945)
Watch almost any Laird Cregar performance and you’ll instantly become a fan. One of the finest character actors of the early 1940s, he was poised to have the horror movie career that Vincent Price ultimately had until tragedy struck: over 300 pounds for most of his adulthood, and thus limited to character roles in Hollywood, he wanted to be a leading man. Therefore, through extreme dieting and exercise he lost 100 pounds in less than a year, which so strained his heart that he died at age 31 before his last film could be released: “Hangover Square.” And it’s a masterpiece. Cregar plays a sensitive pianist who suffers from sleepwalking and, while doing so, kills women. When he wakes up he has no memory of the killings at all. Can he be held responsible for the murders since he’s literally unconscious when committing them? But, he is still committing them. It taps into a deep fear that no matter how good a person we think we may be, there may be some horrible dark side just waiting to crawl out.

34. “The Devil’s Backbone” (Guillermo Del Toro, 2001)
The magic of Guillermo Del Toro’s filmmaking is his ability to mix terror and wonder in a way that heightens both emotions without ever feeling trite. Set during the Spanish Civil War (it was shot in Spain and backed by Pedro Almodovar), this ghost story is told from the perspective of Carlos (Fernando Tielve), a 12-year-old boy who is a new arrival at an ominous orphanage after his father was killed in the war. Carlos, haunted by visions of a mysterious apparition, tries to piece together the mystery of what happened the night a bomb hit the orphanage’s courtyard (but strangely didn’t explode) and a young boy (who now haunts the house) was killed. The film is more unsettlingly creepy than edge-of-your-seat scary, revealing the true horror is being a child during wartime. Del Toro has called “Backbone” his most personal film.

33. “Scream” (Wes Craven, 1996)
A horror maestro in his own right, Wes Craven’s decision to send up the very genre that made him a household name could have been a messy, dumb disaster — instead, he made “Scream,” which is both very funny and very scary, and functions just fine as a slasher film, even as it unpacks typical slasher fare. The Neve Campbell-starring feature first satirizes horror films in general, then slasher films in particular, as the tiny town of Woodsboro, California is held hostage by a masked killer with no clear motives, beyond slicing and dicing teenagers in increasingly amusing ways. But while that concept would go on to breed a whole other franchise in the form of “Scary Movie” (fun fact: “Scream” was originally titled “Scary Movie”), Craven added a special twist: what if this whole thing could be scary, too? Eventually the film reveals itself to be a genuinely gruesome, seriously clever horror outing that still doesn’t shy away from poking holes in the genre. And poking holes in plenty of teens, too.

32. “Near Dark” (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)
Kathryn Bigelow couldn’t get her revisionist Western funded, so she rode the 1980s vampire wave to make this unique genre-hybrid. A gorgeous, gory, and (romantically) gooey film set in small midwestern town, “Near Dark” is a complicated love story about a vampire Mae (Jenny Wright) and Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), the boy she falls in love with and bites one very eventful evening, but whose essence proves to be non-violent, making her fall for him that much more. Bigelow’s nomadic vampire tribe, however, is violent and the director brings the visceral brutality in a bar scene that is anything but romantic. All of this capped off with one of those ’80s-inflected Tangerine Dream scores that transports audiences to an entirely different headspace. For those who wish Bigelow never left genre for prestige, this film is a reminder of how dense her “less serious” films were right from the start.

31. “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (Robert Wiene, 1920)
Putting the expression in German Expressionism, this seminal horror silent has remained a definitive achievement in spooky storytelling by creating a nightmarish world where nothing is certain. As lanky somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) commits a series of murders at the behest of the titular hypnotist (Werner Krauss), director Robert Wiene sets the drama in the confines of a labyrinthine environment that makes the upside-down look downright homey. Shadowy buildings hover in the background at awkward angles and roads veer off in dizzying directions. The ceilings often look as though they might close in on these frantic characters — and, with the brilliant plot twist of the final act, that’s essentially what they do. Told within the confines of a flashback, the movie presents itself as the story of a young man (Friedrich Feher) whose world falls apart as he becomes aware of the doctor’s evil scheme; with time, however, it’s clear that this unreliable narrator may be a victim of his own confusion, and the brilliance of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” is that it places us right there at the center of his insanity. Nearly a century later, the final twist still comes as a surprise to new audiences.

30. “The Wicker Man” (Robin Hardy, 1973)
“Shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent,” says the Lord of Summerisle in Robin Hardy’s bonkers classic. And who, you ask, is the Lord of Summerisle? Not telling. Even more than most horror movies, “The Wicker Man” demands to be seen with as little foreknowledge as possible — stories about cops arriving on tiny islands to investigate a little girl’s disappearance rarely end well, but there’s little preparing oneself for this one. The 2006 remake was regrettable — aside from Nicolas Cage’s performance, which was pleasingly bizarre — but the original remains a must-see for the way it continually subverts your expectations.

29. “The Innocents” (Jack Clayton, 1961)
Do they ever return to possess the living? That’s the question asked in the hilariously misleading trailer for Jack Clayton’s unnerving adaptation of “The Turn of the Screw,” which stars screen royalty Deborah Kerr as a young governess hired to look after two children on a rural estate. The home is large yet claustrophobic, the kids as off-putting as they are cherubic; you can surely tell where this is going if ever you’ve seen a haunted-house movie, but rest assured you’ve never seen one quite like “The Innocents.” A true exercise in less-is-more horror, the script — adapted from Henry James’ novel by Truman Capote and William Archibald — privileges brief glimpses and hard-to-place sounds over anything overt. As for the question posed by the trailer, it’s hardly a spoiler to say that yes, they do return to possess the living.

28. “Pulse” (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)
Movies about how we live with (and on) the internet weren’t as common in 2001 as they are now, but few have made as lasting an impression as “Pulse.” Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s best film is terrifying not only for its ghosts but for its insights as well — ideas can’t be exorcised. Otherworldly spirits are akin to a computer virus in the film, which slowly veers toward the apocalyptic as the living vanish and ghosts take their place to say things like “death was eternal loneliness”; as with a lot of great horror, “Pulse” transcends its genre roots to become something more. It, too, is like a computer virus in that sense — it grows and changes at an almost imperceptible rate, affecting you in ways you never could have anticipated.

27. “The Omen” (Richard Donner, 1976)
The first installment of “The Omen” trilogy still holds up as one of the eeriest movies of all time. It tells the story of an “innocent” young boy who, unbeknownst to himself and everyone around him — including his diplomat father and his wife— just might be the Antichrist. Preferring mood and atmosphere over shock and awe, and boasting some genuinely chilling scenes, including grisly death sequences — by hanging, decapitation and impalement — and a famously foreboding Oscar-winning score (led by its theme song “Ave Satani,” composed by Jerry Goldsmith) — the film presents a scenario that would be any parent’s worst nightmare. “The Omen,” aided by a solid cast led by an outstanding Gregory Peck, treats its subject seriously, which adds to its believability. The pale-faced Harvey Stephens as the devil child is sufficiently sinister. The film spawned two sequels, and a 2006 remake that should be avoided — at least not without seeing the original first.

26. “Bride of Frankenstein” (James Whale, 1935)
“Science, like love, has its little surprises…” Frankenstein’s monster is an abstraction, a blank canvas onto which viewers can project just about anything they like — namely, and most obviously, man’s propensity for violence and a tendency to violently reject that which reflects our worst qualities back at us. The townsfolk in “Frankenstein” and its superior sequel turn ugly upon first sight of this particular abyss, never even taking the time to actually gaze into it; here, the Bride would appear to represent a welcome opportunity for companionship despite not actually appearing until the last few minutes and thus never fulfilling that role. Almost no one gets their just deserts in “Bride of Frankenstein,” which is part of why it’s more notable some 80-odd years later for its ability to evoke pity than for what few scares it still produces. Someone certainly belongs dead, but I’m not sure it’s them.

25. “Suspiria” (Dario Argento, 1977)
After perfecting the giallo with 1975’s “Deep Red,” Dario Argento tackled the supernatural with “Suspiria,” the first installment in his Three Mothers Trilogy. American ballet student Suzy lands a spot at a prestigious dance academy in Germany, but the school is home to an ancient evil that Suzy must find and destroy before it devours her. With the exception of his follow up film, 1980’s “Inferno,” Argento has never quite made anything as jaw-dropping as “Suspiria.” Resplendent with garish set pieces and dazzling pops of red, blue, and green, “Suspiria” counters the film’s absolutely brutal and iconic death scenes with true beauty. It’s nearly impossible to do justice to “Suspiria” with words; it’s a piece of cinema that must truly be experienced, which is perhaps why Luca Guadagnino didn’t dare remake the film, but instead tried to convey how Argento’s version made him feel in his 2018 take.

24. “The Birds” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)
For one, it’s the only Hitchcock film ever to imply its ending is the end of the world — a reading reinforced by Robert Boyle’s original concept art showing the Golden Gate Bridge covered in birds, even San Francisco lost to our new avian overlords. For another, it’s as pure an expression as any ever put on film of how much we take normalcy for granted. We’re going along, all seems fine. You may be a San Francisco socialite (Tippy Hedrin) looking to pull an elaborate prank on a smug denizen of Bodega Bay (Rod Taylor). And suddenly, stunning disaster strikes — in this case, as one of the characters puts it, “the bird war” — and your life may be changed forever, no going back, say goodbye to normal. All our lives are lived on a razor’s edge but we just choose, for the most part, not to think about it. The second half of Hitchcock’s film is almost beat for beat perfect, including a stunning scene set in a diner in which townfolks bring many different views to the table about how to deal with the crisis: there’s the evangelist who quotes Scripture to make sense of what’s happening; the scientist who thinks reason holds the answer; the drunk just passing through who thinks wholesale slaughter is the solution; the conspiracy theorist who decides to blame Hedrin’s character: “I think you’re evil! Eviiiiillll!!!” The scariest question to ask is: would any of us handle the end any better?

23. “I Walked With a Zombie” (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
Do you believe the lies you tell? Producer Val Lewton’s masterful film says that when you finally do believe your own falsehoods, well, anything can happen. In this most philosophical of classic Hollywood films, a young nurse (Frances Dee) travels to the Caribbean isle of St. Sebastian to look after the wife of a wealthy planter (Tom Conroy). She can walk and stare off plaintively into the distance, but in no other way does she seem to be conscious. The Afro-Caribbean community thinks she’s a “zombie,” per voodoo lore — she was cursed because she had an affair with her husband’s brother. And the nurse comes to believe that too. What follows is one of Hollywood’s earliest looks at what happens when white people try to co-opt black culture. A sense of profound melancholy suffuses “I Walked With a Zombie,” the melancholy of the colonized: “That’s why they still weep when a child is born and make merry at a burial.”

22. “Repulsion” (Roman Polanski, 1965)
Roman Polanski’s portrait of an introverted woman (Catherine Deneuve) who loses her mind while left alone in her apartment is a disturbing portrait of an abused, alienated woman whose experiences with assault and loneliness driver her to the brink of insanity. Deneuve’s disquieting performance finds the poor Belgian woman enduring a series of hardships — living in close quarters with her promiscuous sister, then trapped at home, where she endures horrific assaults both real and imagined — until finally she lashes out, with bloody, devastating consequences. Polanski’s gritty, stripped-down black-and-white storytelling keeps the tension high throughout; there’s no big revelation or unexpected twist, but this masterful look at the pratfalls of gender imbalance was ahead of its time in many ways. Polanski himself may be a tarnished name, but “Repulsion” has only grown more valuable with age: It highlights the horrors of abuse by proving that even isolated incidents can have terrible long-term impacts, and escape is not an option when the horror lingers in the mind.

21. “Carrie” (Brian De Palma, 1976)
Your prom night may have been bad, but it wasn’t “Carrie” bad. Sissy Spacek is among the few performers to earn an Oscar nod for starring in a horror film, and with good reason: Her chilling turn is the main reason Brian De Palma’s killer adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is thought of as a justified revenge saga instead of something even darker. Pig blood and telekinesis remain its most attention-grabbing elements, neither of which would amount to much were “Carrie” not so devastating in its depiction of an especially traumatic adolescence. De Palma was on fire during this period — “Sisters,” “Blow Out,” and “Dressed to Kill” were all made within five years of “Carrie” — but this supernatural horror flick is still his crowning achievement.

20. “The Fly” (David Cronenberg, 1986)
David Cronenberg takes mid-century genre fun, injects it with gruesome gore and a truly warped point-of-view, and somehow still makes a film that was so good it became a mainstream hit. Jeff Goldblum plays a scientist who tests his teleportation breakthrough on himself and becomes a horsefly. Through incredible practical effects, the very graphic film is the peak of Cronenberg’s exploration of what became known as “body horror,” as the film meditates on disease and aging in ways that are as unsettling as the themes themselves. While the film pushes boundaries, underneath is a conventional monster film that positions us to search for and find the human buried beneath the horror.

19. “Get Out” (Jordan Peele, 2017)
Writer-director Jordan Peele catapulted beyond his sketch-comedy roots for a category-bursting work about race and privilege in American society that moviegoers had never truly wrestled with before. The outrageous premise — rich white liberals brainwashing black people to be their mind slaves — finds its match in the legitimate foundations of a psychological thriller, as well as the sobering portrait of a black man grappling with a troubled past and uncertain present. Its creepiest aspects sneak up on you: The movie’s observations about awkward race relations are funny because they’re true (even as the plot takes its wildest turns) and terrifying for the same reasons, often leaving viewers uncertain if they should laugh or contemplate the scarier implications of the punchlines. That’s the zeitgeist in a nutshell. Any history book on the American mood in 2017 will forever take its cues from “Get Out.”

18. “The Silence of the Lambs” (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
Hannibal Lecter was already a known cultural quantity when Jonathan Demme came on board to direct the second film to feature the murderous Thomas Harris creation, but the canny pairing of Anthony Hopkins as the serial killer and Jodie Foster as the bright-eyed FBI agent on his tail turned him into nothing less than a cultural touchstone. Aided by chilling catchphrases (surely, fava bean stock dropped after the film debuted, right?) and a cadre of natty prison duds (plus human-flesh face-mask), Hopkins poured his prodigious talents into every inch of Lecter’s chilling frame. It’s never entirely clear what he’s thinking, and while Demme kits out his film with enough other elements to keep it chugging right along, from Foster’s full-bodied turn to Buffalo Bill doing his own thing with literal full bodies, it’s always clear that he’s the one pulling each string. The film would be formidable enough if it was just another serial killer thriller, but Demme, Hopkins, and Foster push it to go deeper at every moment, eventually finding that real terror doesn’t always have a reason, but it does have a taste.

17. “Nosferatu” (F. W. Murnau, 1922)
In many ways, “Nosferatu” is the “Citizen Kane” of horror. Bram Stoker’s estate tried, fairly successfully, to bury the film — winning a copyright case that called for all prints to be destroyed and bankrupting the studio (Prana) that produced the film. Yet F. W. Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation of “Dracula” was an imaginative revision of the vampire story that helped define the genre and was so technically awe-inspiring that it launched one of film history’s most storied and influential directing careers. More than anything, though, it is Max Schreck’s inimitable performance as Count Orlok that a century later makes this film a marvel.

16. “Jaws” (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
Humans think they’ve conquered the planet. Humanity reigns so completely supreme that people are shocked when nature bares its teeth and shows who is really in charge. That’s the underlying horror of what’s otherwise more a late-20th century riff on Melville in Steven Spielberg’s epochal blockbuster. And sometimes when imminent nature-related disaster is staring you in the face, it’s more politically convenient, as Amity’s mayor (Murray Hamilton) finds, to just deny that any danger is present at all. As I’ve written here before, “Jaws” is a Manifest Destiny film, about the particularly American impulse to inhabit all spaces we desire to inhabit — if people just stayed out of the water, or chose to swim in Amity pools instead, we’d have no story.

15. “Cat People” (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
Producer Val Lewton’s films were about creating low-budget B-movie horror with cinema, and Jacques Tourneur was his greatest practitioner, adding a layer of evocative style that few A-pictures of the day could match. Tourneur’s “Cat People” uses the camera and sound to create the presence of a supernatural force without even showing it. Take this example of the pool scene and how its sense of an ominous, lurking presence is built with framing, subjectivity, and editing. Then, like with his classic noir “Out of the Past,” Tourneur employs cinematography that takes an eerily and sexually charged atmosphere that brings the film’s unusual premise — a Serbian woman (Simone Simon) who is convinced she descends from cats and transforms into one when aroused or angered — to life.

14. “28 Days Later” (Danny Boyle, 2002)
Danny Boyle’s dynamically-directed visionary take on zombie horror is absolutely terrifying. Set 28 days after a viral epidemic ravages Britain, the film follows survivors struggling to make sense of the aftermath, while seeking safety. Moving beyond the typical zombie thrills and onto something even more horrifying — as a survival mechanism, human beings are forced to lose their humanity — the film presents a gripping representation of a country totally crippled by a mysterious new disease. The hideously virulent and incurable sickness leaves its hosts in a permanent and appalling state of aggression, filled with incredible rage. The film questions whether this kind of blinding, violent fury is something that already exists inside us, and the virus simply brings it out. Boyle’s decision to shoot the film on consumer grade digital video cameras, gives the film an effective grit and grime, and a necessary realism, although it’s not without moments of surreal beauty. What’s maybe scariest about “28 Days Later” is that the scenario it presents isn’t at all unrealistic.

13. “Audition” (Takashi Miike, 1999)
Kiri, kiri, kiri. Either these words haunt you or you’ve never heard them — there isn’t much of an in between. Takashi Miike recently released his 100th film, though it’s unlikely that it or any of his 98 other works could ever reach the same vaunted status as “Audition.” An adaptation of Ryū Murakami’s novel of the same name, it begins and ends in such profoundly different ways that anyone watching with no foreknowledge of its plot wouldn’t even know it’s a horror movie for a good long while. (The somewhat misleading premise involves a widower who holds auditions for a new wife.) By the time you realize what’s really at work, it’s far too late to turn back — not only because it’s so immersive, but because it’s as difficult to walk away from as the femme fatale at its center.

12. “Dawn of the Dead” (George A. Romero, 1978)
George A. Romero’s particular genius was to reacquaint his audience with familiar spaces by making them seem alien. “Dawn of the Dead” is set in a Monroeville, PA shopping mall, where a number of survivors of the zombie apocalypse have barricaded themselves from the undead hordes. Of course, a mass slaughter of the zombies still inside is required first — an explosion of violence being a necessary prelude to any consumerist binge. But once our survivors have finished their purge, they go a little crazy: it’s like living in this mall and having the run of it is as good as living in paradise. They go nuts playing arcade games, stocking up on the mall’s seemingly bottomless reserves of food and candy — who cares if those reserves are actually finite or if no one can ever go outside again? It can’t last, of course. The end of the world has rarely been less a tragedy and more a farce.

11. “Deep Red” (Dario Argento, 1975)
Dario Argento didn’t create the giallo genre, that honor goes to Mario Bava, but he perfected it with 1975’s “Deep Red,” often referred to as the greatest giallo of all-time. The film kicks off with a psychic who sense the dark thoughts of a murderer in the audience, one who later targets and kills her. David Hemmings stars as a pianist who witnesses the murder, which draws him into a dark mystery that puts his life at risk. Argento employs many of the genre’s signature trades, a black-gloved, knife-wielding killer; deliciously over the top death sequences; twists, turns, and false reveals; and a wonderfully warped backstory that eventually reveals the killer’s identity. Argento would soon gain international acclaim with 1977’s “Suspiria,” but “Deep Red” remains a thrilling murder mystery and Argento’s very best.

10. “Night of the Living Dead” (George Romero, 1968)
George Romero’s subversive independent black-and-white film is a classic of horror and zombie lore, almost single-handedly inventing the modern zombie. Made for peanuts, the special effects are simple and sparse and the actors non-professional – the film’s grittiness works in its favor, giving it a raw realism that’s all-the-more disturbing. Romero has said that the role of Ben wasn’t written for a black actor, and that any perceived racial commentary in the film was coincidental. However, one can’t ignore the symbolism in Duane Jones’ casting — at the time, a very rare heroic role for a black actor in a film surrounded by white actors — against the backdrop of a racially-charged America undergoing significant social change, as a result of the Civil Rights Movement. Race is never a spoken issue in the film, but Romero’s casting choice opened it up to various interpretations and analyses, especially its incredibly bleak, unforgettable ending. The film spawned several sequels, and remakes, notably a 1990 reboot that starred Tony Todd playing the role of Ben.

9. “Alien” (Ridley Scott, 1979)
You can survive “Alien,” but you can never truly escape it — and not just because Ridley Scott will probably never stop making sequels and/or prequels. “Alien” has drifted so far from its origins since its violent birth nearly 40 years ago that it can be difficult to remember how terrifying the original film is, so here’s a reminder: USCSS Nostromo and its crew wake up early from hypersleep after receiving a distress signal. John Hurt meets a not-so-friendly creature called a facehugger. Said creature gives birth to something even worse that kills everyone onboard the Nostromo not named Ellen Ripley. In space no one can hear you scream, but those of us on earth aren’t so lucky.

8. “The Thing” (John Carpenter, 1982)
John Carpenter creates paranoia, fear, and isolation in “The Thing” with an intensity few filmmakers have ever matched. When Antarctic researchers cross paths with an alien life form with the ability to imitates other life forms, mistrust and terror is built shot by shot until it explodes. The practical effects and creature design are some of the best in film history. A film that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go.

7. “Eyes Without a Face” (Georges Franju, 1960)
Fairy tales can often tap into the same primal fears as horror films: fears of rejection, loneliness, aging, the loss of beauty. In Georges Franju’s telling of a plastic surgeon father obsessed with saving his daughter’s looks — her face was disfigured in an accident — “Eyes Without a Face” is a horror movie in the guise of a twisted fairy tale, right down to its tinkly, child-like Maurice Jarre score. The father’s only solution is a face transplant: which means killing women so he can steal their faces. But his daughter’s body inevitably rejects the skin grafts. There’s so much at work here: the idea that a loss of beauty is the same as death itself (the father has held a funeral for his daughter and he keeps her hidden away from the world) and that beauty is worth killing for (with lab attendant Alida Valli as the “huntsman” archetype in this cockeyed Snow White story, going out and abducting young women). “Eyes Without a Face” says that the ultimate sadness is when happiness itself becomes inequity: that in order to gain something for yourself the only solution is to take from another.

6. “Psycho” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
“Psycho” is practically the anno domini of cinema — there’s a before and an after, in which nothing has ever been the same. Perhaps all to today’s collective hand-wringing about “what’s a film? and what’s TV?” goes back to “Psycho,” which Hitchcock shot with the crew of his TV show “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” the Paramount logo at the beginning bearing the grainy lines of TV interlace as an in-joke affectation. Who cares about the medium? It’s the vision that matters — and Hitchcock proved with “Psycho” how impossible it would be for all his many imitators to capture his style. For all the scares and shocks — and that shower scene — it’s the humor that sticks with you in Psycho: the “oh, my God” moment when Norman subtly freaks out as Marion Crane’s car briefly stops sinking into the swamp, the sheriff’s wife recalling how she picked out Mrs. Bates’s burial dress (“periwinkle blue”), the “come at me” challenge to believe the pseudoscientific nonsense the psychiatrist spouts at the end to try to “explain” everything that’s happened — when it’s clear no explanation could ever suffice. There are some things in life that are just like that, and “Psycho” is Hitchcock’s cinematic smirk at our futile attempts to make sense of the senseless.

5. “Halloween” (John Carpenter, 1978)
There were plenty of horror movies before John Carpenter’s iconic slasher debuted in 1978, but “Halloween” found the perfect formula to transform the spooky holiday into an unforgettable one. With a pulsing theme, the perfect Final Girl in Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode, and boogeyman who can’t seem to die, “Halloween” changed the genre forever. After inexplicably murdering his older sister on Halloween when he was just six, Michael Myers has spent most of his life in an asylum, but on a fateful Halloween night in 1978, he returns home to Haddonfield for a murderous rampage that terrorizes Laurie and her friends. With his disfigured face hidden behind a ghoulish white mask, Myers stalks and stabs his way through the film, impervious to both bullets and blows. Though Carpenter would technically kill him off in 1980’s “Halloween II,” Myers proved so popular he resurrected once more in 1988 to spawn an entire franchise still beloved by horror fans.

4. “The Exorcist” (William Friedkin, 1973)
Nearly half a century after its release, “The Exorcist” remains one of the scariest movies ever made for one reason — there is a primal discomfort from the contrast between an innocent young girl and the demon possessing her soul. Linda Blair’s seminal performance as 12-year-old Regan, whose head twists around and spews vomit as she unleashes disturbing laughter and unfiltered vulgarities, embodies the idea that nothing is sacred. Even the prospects of a Bbible-toting Max von Sydow doesn’t guarantee that everything will turn out rosy for poor Regan and her family. Friedkin, who was hardly exclusive to the horror genre, approaches William Peter Blatty’s novel with the same sophistication he brought to innumerable other genres at the height of his career. One of the most profitable movies in history, “The Exorcist” gave birth to has birthed several sequels and a television series, but none of them have matched the clarity with which the original unravels the mythology of upper-middle-class America with in such profound, disturbing moments so credible that even Friedkin came out of the experience as a true believer. Decades later, his exorcism documentary “The Devil and Father Amorth,” about the inspiration for the character in the movie, proved just how much this seminal achievement continues to haunt its maker — and generations of moviegoers as well.

3. “Rosemary’s Baby” (Roman Polanski, 1968)
Unsettling from the moment Mia Farrow starts singing over those haunting opening credits, Roman Polanski’s masterpiece digs its claws into you and leaves as ghastly a mark as it does on Rosemary herself. Evil isn’t an unknowable entity in this still-timely tale of a woman being gaslit by her husband and neighbors; it’s the Satanist next door. Pregnancy is stressful enough when there isn’t a coven of witches chanting in the night, and it’s made doubly distressing by poor Rosemary’s suspicions that they’ve made a pact with Lucifer involving her unborn child. So cerebral in its approach to psychological horror that it deserves a PhD, “Rosemary’s Baby” has only grown more uncomfortable with time — and not just because we know more about Polanski now than we did 50 years ago.

2. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
The 1970’s changed the horror genre forever, and Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was the catalyst. A group of friends stumble upon a literal house of horrors in Texas, filled with a deranged family of cannibals led by one of horror’s most terrifying villains, Leatherface, clad in a mask stitched together from human skin. By escaping the clutches of the chain saw-wielding Leatherface, Sally became horror’s first Final Girl, a survivor who emerges from a chrysalis of terror to become a blood-soaked angel of vengeance. Although Final Girls have undergone several empowering transformations over the years, the trope remains one of horror’s greatest feminist accomplishments. Like J.R.R. Tolkein’s Éowyn, who defiantly declares “I am no man” before slaying the seemingly indestructible Lord of the Nazgûl, Final Girls have destroyed some of horror’s biggest boogeymen, thanks to the path paved by Hooper’s Sally.

1. “The Shining” (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
The fault lies not in the ghosts that haunt us but in ourselves. Wouldn’t Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) have ended up going down his psychotic path in “The Shining” no matter what? When we first meet him, he’s already been involved in an incident of domestic abuse with his son. Nicholson certainly plays Jack like he’s demented from almost the very beginning — cue chills: “You see? It’s alright. He saw it on the television.” “The Shining” has a certain dream logic to it, much like that of Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” nine years later — it suggests everything you fear but dismiss may actually be true. That dread in the pit of your stomach isn’t lying. If your instinct is telling you that your husband may try to kill you and your son, there’s probably a very good reason for that instinct. Denial is necessary a lot of times just to get through life, to make it through each dayn— but horror movies always invariably show that denial is also what may kill you. It certainly almost kills Wendy and Danny in “The Shining,” but they wake up and change and see the reality of their situation without making any more excuses, and so they get to live. A lot of us don’t — marching blindly through life so rigidly we might as well be frozen in the snow, doomed to keep repeating our mistakes over and over again like we really have always been the caretaker after all.

[Heather19]

So happy to see The Shining at the top of the list. There's some good ones on there, and a bunch I still need to watch.

[webstar1000]

How is the hell is the original SAW not on there?????

[mae]

How is the hell is the original SAW not on there?????

It's good but greatest of all time? All in all I like the list a lot. I do need to see a few of these I've not seen. There are quite a few I'd throw out there, too:


A Cure for Wellness (2016)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Annihilation (2018)
Cold Fish (2010)
Dracula (1931)
From Hell (2001)
Funny Games (1997 and 2007)
Gerald's Game (2017)
Hereditary (2018)
John Dies at the End (2012)
Kill List (2011)
Kwaidan (1964)
Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)
Mandy (2018)
May (2002)
Onibaba (1964)
Orphan (2009)
Ravenous (1999)
Santa Sangre (1989)
Session 9 (2001)
Spring (2014)
The Bad Seed (1956)
The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
The Cell (2000)
The Mothman Prophecies (2002)
The Woman (2011)
Them! (1954)
Train to Busan (2016)
Under the Skin (2013)
Vampyr (1932)
Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)

[webstar1000]

How is the hell is the original SAW not on there?????

It's good but greatest of all time? All in all I like the list a lot. I do need to see a few of these I've not seen. There are quite a few I'd throw out there, too:


A Cure for Wellness (2016)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Annihilation (2018)
Cold Fish (2010)
Dracula (1931)
From Hell (2001)
Funny Games (1997 and 2007)
Gerald's Game (2017)
Hereditary (2018)
John Dies at the End (2012)
Kill List (2011)
Kwaidan (1964)
Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)
Mandy (2018)
May (2002)
Onibaba (1964)
Orphan (2009)
Ravenous (1999)
Santa Sangre (1989)
Session 9 (2001)
Spring (2014)
The Bad Seed (1956)
The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
The Cell (2000)
The Mothman Prophecies (2002)
The Woman (2011)
Them! (1954)
Train to Busan (2016)
Under the Skin (2013)
Vampyr (1932)
Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)


I would put the first one in the top 100 for sure.

[allasorte]

I just re-watched "Rosemary's Baby." For it's time, I guess it was scary? For 2018, it's a chick flick. Sorry, but Exorcist, Alien, and The Thing should be higher.

[Tommy]

Perfect timing:

https://www.indiewire.com/2018/10/best-horror-movies-all-time-scary-films-1202012183/

The 100 Greatest Horror Movies of All-Time

Why does it feel like horror movies are always undervalued? One thing’s for certain: In this age of geekery reigning supreme, critics and academics no longer dismiss the genre as disreputable with the kneejerk regularity some once did. But even now there’s talk of “elevated horror,” of artier explorations of dread and terror — Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” and Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” being two very recent examples — that are clearly distinguished from, well, non-elevated horror. The idea being that they engage your brain more than just showing brains being splattered against the wall.

How can films that fire your adrenal glands, send shivers down your spine, raise goosebumps, and quicken breath — that inspire such an intense physical reaction — also be cerebral experiences? We forget all the time that, as Anna Karina’s Pierrot Le Fou character Marianne Renoir says, “There can be ideas in feelings.”

What scares people says a lot about them — as the recent debate about what it means if a viewer finds certain elements of “Get Out” scary or funny revealed very clearly. “Get Out” showed the similarity between horror and comedy, the two genres most often expected to provoke an immediate, visceral reaction. Maybe the aversion some viewers have to both genres is a fear of losing control: of laughing so hard you snort or having to turn away in fright, of embarrassing yourself. A lot of people simply don’t want to lose control, no matter what. What’s funny is that horror, like comedy, is a genre in which each filmmaker has to assert his or her utmost control over the material, has to perfectly calibrate the storytelling, so that we can lose it. Extreme control so that the audience can lose control.

The IndieWire staff put together this list of the 100 Greatest Horror Movies of All-Time to celebrate these intensely primal, personal films. Our writers and editors suggested over 150 titles and then voted on a list of finalists to determine the ultimate ranking. We hope it’s a list that captures the wide range and diversity of the genre, from underseen Laird Cregar vehicles to a Russian chiller based on a Nikolai Gogol story, from J-Horror to the Mexican gem “Alucarda.” Brace yourself for these movies: losing control will never be so much fun.

100. “Village of the Damned” (Wolf Rilla, 1960)
What if the children aren’t our future? That’s the dastardly question facing George Sanders as a professor in the small English village of Midwich whose wife was impregnated by an extraterrestrial force along with all the other nearby women of child-bearing age. Sanders’ character is learned, sophisticated, and tolerant, and he believes the young alien children who are born — all with platinum blonde hair and glowing eyes — deserve the benefit of the doubt. He quickly realizes he’s wrong — even about his own “son” — ultimately arriving at a Stalinist solution. Dripping with dread, “Village of the Damned” suggests that the paranoia we dismiss may not always be unfounded. Rather than history’s arc bending toward progress and justice, the future may hold only entropy and decline.

99. “The Ring” (Gore Verbinski, 2002)
Gore Verbinski’s supernatural tale is a remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film “Ringu,” based on the novel of the same name by Koji Suzuki. A journalist investigates the legend of a videotape comprised of disturbing, mystifying images which when watched, leads to a phone call foretelling the viewer’s death in seven days. Led by an impassioned performance from Naomi Watts, this enigmatic ghost story is heavy on atmosphere — thanks in part to it’s gloomy, isolated Seattle setting — and offers up some genuine scares. Dark, unsettling, and deliberately paced, several thrilling twists that gradually reveal the film’s mystifying plot will hold the audience’s attention. The first American “J-Horror” remake, fans of the original should find this remake nearly as compelling. It spawned 3 sequels and paved the way for more American remakes of Japanese horror films, including “The Grudge.”

98. “The Changeling” (Peter Medak, 1980)
From “The Uninvited” to “The Innocents,” horror loves a good ghost story, and 1980’s “The Changeling” remains one of the genre’s very best. After the tragic death of his family, a composer moves into an historic mansion in Seattle, but the idyllic home also harbors the spirit of a distressed child, one who was hidden away in the home before being killed, and who is ready to seek revenge on the family who erased him from their past. “The Changeling” also packs on plenty of scares, especially the film’s unsettling séance scene, which undoubtedly inspired 2001’s “The Others.” Although “The Changeling” isn’t as well known as some of horror’s other ghost stories, it’s a favorite of both Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who is rumored to have screened it during the production of “Poltergeist.” Featuring a powerhouse performance by George C. Scott and well as a compelling mystery at its core, “The Changeling” is an understated horror gem worth discovering.

97. “Alucarda” (Juan López Moctezuma, 1977)
Alucarda has lived at a convent her whole life, but her world changes with the arrival of Justine, another young orphan. The two girls become inseparable, with their friendship often bordering on a sexual relationship. While out in the woods, they come across a strange burial ground and accidentally unleash a demonic force, which soon possesses them and threatens to tear apart the entire convent and everyone in it. Much like Ken Russell’s “The Devils,” “Alucarda” is rife with sexual ecstasy in a religious setting, where iconography turns sacrilegious. The young girls pledge their bodies both to each other and to the devil, shown in his most beastly form, with cloven hooves and curled horns, a furry nightmare that undoubtedly served as the inspiration for some of Guillermo del Toro’s most fantastic monsters. As the coven gathers to pray, the girls, now fully possessed, cannot stand anything holy, and the entire chapel descends into chaos, making for an unforgettable finale. “Alucarda” might not be as well known as “The Exorcist,” but it’s a possession film unlike any other, one that doesn’t fall back on the genre’s tired tropes, allowing it to truly shock.

96. “Tales from the Hood” (Rusty Cundieff, 1995)
An updated twist on the British Amicus Production anthology horror films, popular during the ’60s and ’70s, Cundieff’s cult classic uses satire to tackle race and racism (among other themes), while also staying true to horror genre conventions. It unfolds in much the same style as the Amicus films, which typically followed a group of strangers who come together to face some evil soothsayer, and in a series of flash-forward or flashback sequences, learn how they will die, or how they died. In “Hood”, three wanna-be hoodlums visit a funeral parlor run by a kooky, creepy mortician (played with verve by Clarence Williams III), with the intention of buying “found” drugs from him to then sell on the street. Of course, they each get more than they bargained for when Williams instead recites four grim horror stories that spook them, after which the mortician reveals his true self, and the delinquent trio come to learn their ultimate fate. Not only does “Hood” effectively lampoon the Amicus anthology premise, but it also makes potent commentary (sometimes with biting humor) on a range of issues specific to the black experience, like police brutality, institutional racism and gang violence. Certain aspects might feel dated 23 years later, but “Hood” still packs a wallop. Cundieff produced a lesser sequel in 2018.

95. “Messiah of Evil” (Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, 1973)
“Messiah of Evil” is an underseen gem that manages to creep under the skin despite its very low budget. When a woman heads to a seaside town to look for her missing father, she finds the creepy hamlet has been infiltrated by an undead cult. It’s never quite clear if the undead are zombies or vampires, but their presence is unshakably ominous. While “Messiah of Evil” is lesser known, it’s full of iconic and memorable scenes (a victim being devoured in a supermarket, another surrounded by the undead at the movies) that recall to mind some of George A. Romero’s best work. Co-written and co-directed by husband-and-wife team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who would later co-write “American Graffiti” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Messiah of Evil” is worth seeking out.

94. “A Bay of Blood” (Mario Bava, 1971)
In 1963, Mario Bava released “The Girl Who Knew Too Much,” kickstarting the giallo subgenre that would dominate Italian horror for years to come. In 1971, Bava reinvented the genre once again with his early slasher “A Bay of Blood,” where the murder of a wealthy heiress kicks off a greed-fueled murder spree, which also targets a group of innocent teenagers camping out nearby. “A Bay of Blood” would serve as a key inspiration for “Friday the 13th” and its subsequent sequel, with the franchise copying two murders from Bava’s film nearly shot for shot. It remains a vital watch for horror fans, and a reminder of how Bava continued to push horror into new and interesting realms, the reverberations of which are still felt today.

93. “Trouble Every Day” (Claire Denis, 2001)
Connecting sex and violence in a vampire movie is hardly new terrain, but through the lens of director Claire Denis — and the way her camera studies of bodies in motion — it becomes a natural extension of her quieter dramas and a somber look at man’s nature. Normally Paris is the perfect romantic city for a honeymoon, but our groom, an American scientist (Vincent Gallo), is there to search for his ex-lover Coré (Béatrice Dalle), with whom he shares a desire for blood when aroused. Coré has become an “Under the Skin”–like seductress, luring men to hidden locations with the promise of sex, before ripping them to shreds. Eventually, Coré’s keeper Léo (Alex Descas) – another scientist of sorts – tracks her down, buries the bodies, and locks her back up in his basement laboratory. It’s a pattern that defines their relationship. “Trouble Every Day” was somewhat panned following its Cannes premiere, but has been reexamined quite a bit over the years as Denis’ work looks more intentional and layered with each passing year.

92. “The Tenant” (Roman Polanski, 1976)
The third film in Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” is less well-known than the previous two (“Repulsion” and “Rosemary’s Baby”), but utilizes the same subtle breaks with reality to capture the director’s unique brand of psychological horror – never making it clear if what we are seeing is imagined or really happening. Polanski himself stars as the unassuming new tenant who is made to feel unwelcome by his new Parisian neighbors as the memory of the previous tenant — who attempted suicide by throwing herself out the window — hovers over the film. In “The Tenant,” Polanski, who spent most of his life as an immigrant, captures the feeling of what it feels like to never quite fit in and experience reality in different way than others.

91. “Goodnight Mommy” (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, 2014)
There’s horror that you see and horror that you can feel. A slow psychological build from unassuming start to fiery end, this is unnerving filmmaking — and not just because of the fierce bodily harm on display. It’s drenched in the insidious, unsettling feeling buried within: the idea that your own family’s inability to recognize you can metastasize into something so brutal. Featuring the rare twist that’s improved by a straightforward, matter-of-fact reveal, “Goodnight Mommy” is a harsh spin on the fear of the unknown that permeates so many of the stories on this list. Yes, it may feel like an endurance test. But there’s an extraordinary element of control here, in which each fresh affront is carefully doled out with masterful precision.

90. “The Leopard Man” (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
It can’t be stated enough how influential the films of producer Val Lewton remain, the true auteur behind an extraordinary run of horror films for RKO in the 1940s. In their lo-fi ingenuity they suggested that more personal visions could be afforded to independent filmmakers — the smaller the budget the less scrutiny from the financiers. But their reliance on suggestion over shock would prove an important influence on even blockbuster filmmaking — Spielberg took Lewton’s lesson to heart with “Jaws” that what you don’t see can be scarier than what you do. “The Leopard Man” may be on the lesser end of the Lewton canon, but in the hands of one of his go-to directors, Jacques Tourneur, this whodunit about a rash of killings is dripping with rich detail in its unique New Mexico setting. Oh, it also has as chilling a murder scene as you’ll ever see.

89. “Viy” (Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov, 1967)
Based on a story by Nikolai Gogol, “Viy” is one of the rare horror movies made in Russia during the Soviet era. A group of seminary student wandering the countryside spend a night in the company of a witch, who is murdered by one of the students. In the morning, they discover the witch was actually the daughter of a wealthy landowner, and now the men must pass three nights locked in the local church, protecting her body from evil spirits. The horrors the men encounter over the three nights could rival some of Guillermo del Toro’s best monsters: goblins with melting flesh, pointy demons, and jagged skeletons, disarticulated hands breaking through the walls of the church, and the spirit of the young witch, clad in an etherial white gown and daisy-chain flower crown, bloody tears in her eyes, alternatively beautiful and terrifying. Some of the scares in “Viy” are outdated, but it remains a fascinating glimpse at the type of filmmaking once hidden behind the Iron Curtain.

88. “The Hunger” (Tony Scott, 1983)
It’s hard to imagine anyone ever wanting to leave David Bowie behind, but that’s just what Catherine Deneuve does as the ethereal vampire Miriam in “The Hunger.” Although he was turned over 200 years prior and promised eternal life, Bowie’s John begins to age rapidly, causing him to realize eternal life doesn’t mean eternal youth. Repulsed by his appearance, Miriam spurns him and begins looking for a new conquest, which she soon finds in Sarah (Susan Sarandon), a doctor specializing in aging who was looking to help John. But Sarah isn’t as compliant as Miriam’s former lovers, and as Sarah struggles to adapt to her new way of life, it puts her in direct conflict with Miriam, threatening to expose her centuries-old secret. “The Hunger” is an atmospheric vampire film unlike any other. While much has been made about Sarandon and Deneuve’s steamy lesbian sex, the film is also known for its opening sequence, where John and Miriam are on the prowl for lovers they can turn into a meal. The iconic sequence later served as the inspiration for Lady Gaga’s introduction on “American Horror Story: Hotel.”

87. “Masque of the Red Death” (Roger Corman, 1964)
It’s incredible how much Roger Corman could get out of so little. This Edgar Allan Poe adaptation starring Vincent Price as the wickedly decadent nobleman Prince Prospero whose many sins come back to plague him (literally) is a masterpiece of production design. One sequence follows someone walking through a chain of linked rooms in Price’s castle and each room’s furnishings and wallpaper are entirely one eye-popping color. This is as much a film for the eyes as Argento’s “Suspiria” and “Inferno” but if the bold hues in those gorefests seem often unmotivated by the story, Corman’s bold stylistic choices serve a political message: that the indifferent one-percent puts so much time into a design for living that they’ve forgotten all purpose for living.

86. “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (Wes Craven, 1984)
Whatever meta rabbit holes the subsequent “Elm Street” installments may have navigated, Freddy Krueger’s original tale is decidedly old-fashioned. Simply, it’s about how young people always have to pay for the mistakes of preceding generations: when the parents of Elm Street took justice into their own hands and burned their neighbor Krueger alive after discovering he was a pedophile, he comes back as a ghost to menace their children. Craven’s message is clear: Krueger needed to be brought to justice, but people taking the law into their own hands is never justice. Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy is the finest Final Girl since Laurie Strode in her quest to both defeat Krueger and grapple with her parents’ sin. You feel her vulnerability and identify with her so strongly as horrible frights await her: Krueger’s hateful telephone calls (somehow even literally lashing his tongue out through the phone receiver) and his claw-like hand emerging from the bathwater when she’s soaking in the tub. Those are indelible images, but it’s to Craven’s credit that they work not to dehumanize Nancy, but to cause you to identify and empathize with her all the more.

85. “Antichrist” (Lars von Trier, 2009)
The first film in master provocateur Lars von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy,” it drew much controversy, and generated a myriad of theses and analyses, as with every other von Trier film. Beautifully stylized, dense with mourning and despair, telling the story of a couple who, after the death of their child, retreat to a cabin in the woods where the man has bizarre visions and the woman engages in increasingly violent sexual behaviour, “Antichrist” is said to have been influenced by von Trier’s own struggles with depression at the time of its writing. It is evident. Certainly divisive when it was released, it can ultimately be regarded as a meditation on human responses to psychological trauma. Prepare to be confronted by its at times graphic cruelty. At the very least, audiences will be captivated by its striking tableaux and strong performances from Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. “Melancholia” and “Nymphomaniac” complete von Trier’s trilogy.

84. “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (Robert Aldrich, 1962)
The best horror movies include both surface-level scares for an escapist jolt and deeper fears we can all relate to. Robert Aldrich’s adaptation of Henry Farrell’s pulp novel could’ve been just shock and schlock in its depiction of two sisters, one a former child star Jane (Bette Davis) whose fame was eclipsed by the later success of her movie star sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), who will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair following an accident for which Jane is blamed. These two have been forgotten by the world and when we join them it seems they’ve been living out the same daily routine for decades — Jane slouches up the stairs taking meals up to Blanche with a sneer and a snide remark. Their lives are already over: they’re doomed to just rehash the same grievances from ages ago ad infinitum. The only thing that could change is if Jane’s resentment curdles into murderous rage. It does. The real fear Davis and Crawford tap into so urgently is fear of regret, building up to a final scene of ennui set on a beach that rivals the far more self-consciously arty beach-set ending notes of contemporaneous ennui in “The 400 Blows” and “La Dolce Vita”: “You mean this whole time we could have been friends?”

83. “The Ghost Ship” (Mark Robson, 1943)
Kind of like John Ford’s “The Long Voyage Home” by way of “The Shining,” “The Ghost Ship” is Val Lewton’s slow-burn study of how passive-aggression can boil over into murderousness. Sailor Tom Merriam (Russell Wade) of the merchant vessel Altair come to suspect that something’s wrong with Captain Stone (Richard Dix) — at key moments he seems to go into a negative panic, at others he likes to bore the crew with dry, lengthy explanations of his views on authority. After one crewman, Louie (a young Lawrence Tierney), questions one of Stone’s orders, the captain replies, “You know, there are captains who might hold this against you, Louie.” Shortly thereafter, Louie is crushed to death by the anchor chain. Coincidence? Obviously not. But even if the rest of the crew suspect Stone’s a killer, they’d rather ignore his crimes or explain them away rather than get on his bad side while at sea — it’s up to Wade’s Merriam to play the part of a high-seas Will Kane, shake them out of their apathy, and recognize that the captain’s behavior should not be normalized. No one else wants to rock the boat.

82. “The Skin I Live In” (Pedro Almodovar, 2011)
Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar is in full Hitchcock mode for this twisty, sexy medical revenge thriller adapted from Thierry Jonque’s 2005 crime novel, “Tarantula.” Reunited with his protegé Antonio Banderas (“Matador”) after two decades, Almodovar digs into an offbeat plastic surgeon who pursues the far reaches of transgenic therapy, using pig genes to create impenetrable human skin. He also is keeping gorgeous Vera (Elena Anaya) captive in his home, refreshing her epidermis behind a white face mask. Housemaid Marilia (Maris Paredes) is also one of many mysteries to be revealed — his wife’s face was burned in an accident, for one thing — in a strange world where anything can (and does) happen.

81. “Suspiria” (Luca Guadagnino, 2018)
There are many horror films in which the filmmaking transcends its B-movie script, but Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” remake is manages to do the exact opposite — this dense and erudite script at times requires Cliff’s Notes and a Witches 101 college-level course to understand, but the filmmaking is so intense and virtuoso that it serves as its own exposition. A movement elicits violence, a cut its supernatural connection. Compositions become lust, while sound embodies the world’s discord. Even for Guadagnino devotees, the depths of his raw filmmaking skill demonstrated in this film will astound, as much as the bone-crunching violence will unsettle.

80. “Kuroneko” (Kaneto Shindo, 1968)
Kaneto Shindo directed 48 films in his 100 years on this planet, none more unsettling than “Kuroneko.” Much of the Japanese auteur’s work was haunted by the atomic bomb dropped on his hometown of Hiroshima, making this masterful film something of an exception: An enigmatic ghost story set during Japan’s Heian period, it features murderous samurai, the baleful ghosts of two women seeking revenge on the soldiers who raped and killed them, and a black cat whose presence portends death. “Kuroneko” is more frightening for what it doesn’t show than for what it does, which isn’t to say that what’s on display isn’t terrifying in its own right; rarely have spirits been so justifiably angry. Getting vengeance beyond the grave is better than nothing, but it’s also cold comfort — after all, they’re still dead.

79. “Martyrs” (Pascal Laugier, 2008)
The New French Extremity movement that dominated French horror during the ’90s and early aughts came to an appropriate close with 2008’s “Martyrs.” Two young women, both of whom suffered extreme abuse as children, seek out revenge on the people they believe to be their captors, and in the process uncover ties to a religious cult darker than they could ever imagine. Imbued with the genre’s proclivity for extreme, graphic, and incredibly shocking violence, “Martyrs” lives up to its title and then some, provocatively blurring the lines between extreme pain and ecstasy. “Martyrs” features some of the most jaw-dropping shocks horror has ever offered, and it’s worth going in knowing very little, but be warned, it’s not for the faint of heart.

78. “The Vanishing” (George Sluizer, 1988)
There are unhappy endings, and then there’s “The Vanishing.” Not at all for the faint of heart — or even the normal of heart, really — this dispiriting Dutch thriller proved such a sensation that George Sluizer remade it in English five years later (which went about as well as when Michael Haneke did the same with “Funny Games”). Few missing-person movies are so viscerally upsetting, with the simple case of a man searching for his girlfriend after she, well, vanishes from a gas station without a trace packing a gut-punch that’s rarely been equaled in the three decades since Sluizer’s film was made. To say any more would be to give far too much away, but let it be known that you, too, may leave “The Vanishing” feeling as though you’ve lost something that can’t be found again.

77. “House on Haunted Hill” (William Castle, 1959)
William Castle’s love of gimmickry added a spooky touch to the end of the filmmaker’s classic haunted house thriller, as an actual skeleton would be rigged in the theater to take flight over a (hopefully stunned) audience just as something similar was unfolding within the film itself. As was so often the case with Castle’s films, the addition of that extra bit of horror and humor only increased the impact of a film that, flying skeletons notwithstanding, is as well-crafted as they come. Knowing the plot — and this is a plot that has been mercilessly cribbed by lesser films for decades — doesn’t dilute its power, and the twists that follow one particularly bad dinner party, set over the course of one particularly bad night, are fresh as ever. Bolstered by star Vincent Price as an appropriately secretive millionaire who invites a mixed group to his house for an evening of thrills, chills, and murder revelations, Castle’s best film is also a seminal addition to the genre itself. Hell, even Hitchcock was said to be a fan.

76. “Brotherhood of the Wolf” (Christophe Gans, 2001)
Adapted from the David Farland novel about the 18th century French urban legend of the giant Beast of Gévaudan, the $29 million horror martial-arts actioner was shot at the Chateau de Roquetaillade and stars Samuel Le Bihan as Knight and royal naturalist Grégoire de Fronsac, who investigates a mysterious giant wolf-beast with metal claws terrorizing the French countryside. Fronsac figures out that the beast is an instrument of a secret society, The Brotherhood of the Wolf, which is trying to undermine the king and take over the country. He and his Iroquois companion Mani (Mark Dacascos) try to capture the beast who may be more lion than wolf. The stylish Sergio Leone-inspired entertainment scored over $70 million worldwide.

75. “Sisters” (Brian De Palma, 1973)
Brian De Palma has always worn his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock on his cinematic sleeve, and 1973’s “Sisters” puts his own twist on “Rear Window.” Grace, an investigative journalist, accidentally witnesses her neighbor murdering a man, but when the police arrive, there’s no evidence of the crime. Although everyone is convinced she’s crazy, Grace tries to uncover the truth about her neighbor, who may or may not be hiding her murderous twin sister from the world, but the dark secrets Grace ultimately destroy her in the end. “Sisters” is simultaneously the kind of lurid thriller one has come to expect from De Palma, but it’s also a surprisingly prescient film that shows the detrimental fallout of gaslighting and not believing women.

74. “Raw” (Julia Ducournau, 2016)
First-time director Julia Ducournau terrified and titillated Cannes audiences with her gruesome coming-of-age tale, combining classic cannibalism scares with a distinctly female perspective. The film follows a young student (Garance Marillier) who discovers some uncomfortable truths about herself (and the world) when she heads off to vet school (truly, the ideal setting for a body horror film). Marillier’s Justine is a dedicated vegetarian, so when she’s forced to endure a revolting hazing ritual that involves lots of blood and raw liver, she’s shocked to discover just how much she enjoys the taste of flesh. As Justine’s hunger for consuming meat grows, so does her desire to experience the pleasures of the flesh in different ways. It’s visceral, challenging, and often just plain jaw-dropping.

73. “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” (John McNaughton, 1986)
Shot on 16mm in less than a month, this chilly $110,000 indie built its X-rated cult reputation on the film festival circuit and made a name for curly-haired Michael Rooker, who magnetically anchors the movie as the eponymous murderer Henry. The bloodthirsty slasher moves doggedly from town to town, changing his modus operandi to avoid detection by local police. He is briefly joined by an old prison buddy Otis (Tom Towles) on a Chicago killing spree; the duo not only annihilate an entire family but put it on video for their later enjoyment. When Otis’s hard-luck sister Becky falls for Henry, it can’t be good.

72. “Hour of the Wolf” (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
Before this 1968 outing, Ingmar Bergman had occasionally dabbled with horror elements in his career, particularly with 1957’s “The Seventh Seal” and 1960’s “The Virgin Spring,” but “Hour of the Wolf” found the esteemed director fully giving into the genre with haunting results. An artist and his wife live on a remote island, where the artist is troubled by his past and what he believes to be demons haunting him. During the “hour of the wolf,” the time where most births and deaths occur, the artist opens up to his wife about the darkness in his past, his childhood traumas, and a former lover, before realizing that the past might not be as far away as he once believed, and might instead be waiting for him across the island. “Hour of the Wolf” feels like a surreal fever dream (or nightmare), raising plenty of questions about what is really happening and what is imagined. It wouldn’t be a Bergman film without Liv Ullman, Max von Sydow, and a lot of existential questions, but “Hour of the Wolf” also features a creepy mini-opera, foreshadowing Bergman’s later take on “The Magic Flute.” It might be the director’s only horror film, but it’s an eerie and truly unforgettable one.

71. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
Francis Ford Coppola unleashes the sexuality that was always lurking underneath Bram Stoker’s original “Dracula” in sumptuous color and delicious visuals. Created on a soundstage with no visual effects, the film has been criticized for its mannered performances and ornate extravagance, but few films in Hollywood’s modern era have used color and costume so expressively, as designer Eiko Ishioka’s work takes center stage in revealing the burning internal emotions of the characters. As 26 years have passed, it’s impossible to not feel the film’s heartbeat come pouring through Coppola’s precision, as the film has aged like a fine a wine.

70. “The Seventh Victim” (Mark Robson, 1943)
Val Lewton usually gave the horror films he produced a unique setting: a Greek island in “Isle of the Dead,” a Caribbean island in “I Walked With a Zombie,” 19th century Edinburgh in “The Body Snatcher.” A greater challenge is to mine eeriness and menace from a perfectly quotidian setting, such as the New York City subway. That’s what did in “The Seventh Victim,” which, more than “Cat People,” which was also set in Manhattan, dives into the dread of the ordinary in New York City life. A young girl goes in search of her missing sister with the help of a craggy PI — he’s stabbed to death and she runs from the scene, so terrified she ends up doing a complete circuit on the subway. When it stops at the station where she got on — right near the private detective was murdered — two men board, propping him up, trying to act like he’s still alive. They’re obviously the ones who killed him and they’re counting on New Yorkers’ indifference to their surroundings as their cover to dispose of him. It’s so chilling because this actually could happen. Turns out a Satanic cult is involved — clearly a prototype for the devil-worshipping Manhattanites in “Rosemary’s Baby” — but “The Seventh Victim” stays with you because it reveals an essential truth: personal demons are always scarier than literal ones.

69. “High Tension” (Alexandre Aja, 2003)
One of the most divisive and best known New French Extremity entries, “High Tension” put director Alexandre Aja on the map with American audiences with his brutal psychological thriller. Marie heads to her classmate Alex’s secluded country home to study for final exams, but the idyllic country retreat becomes a bloodbath when a vicious serial killer slaughters the entire family, taking Alex hostage. Marie then transforms into the ultimate Final Girl, fighting to rescue her Alex before she meets a devastating end… except not everything is what it seems. The film’s big twist has divided audiences since its premiere in 2003, but “High Tension” still remains a thrilling slasher, packed with plenty of scares and gore to satisfy even the most skeptical horror fans.

68. “Dressed to Kill” (Brian De Palma, 1980)
Brian De Palma was at the height of his powers as the master of pastiche when he made this riveting Hitchcockian horror tale about elevator murderers and people insecure in their own bodies. At first the story of a promiscuous woman (Angie Dickinson), “Dressed to Kill” borrows a page from “Psycho” by taking its apparent protagonist out of the picture after the first act. From there, the specter of a mysterious trans woman named Bobbi on a killing spree hovers throughout the story, as she stalks Liz (Nancy Allen) while a psychiatrist (Michael Caine) makes frantic attempts to warn the police about the threat at hand. The twist about Bobbi’s real identity is obvious to any engaged viewer, but De Palma’s stylish riff on slasher tropes uses the familiarity of its winding plot to deliver a brilliant meditation on fluid sexual identity — and the frustrations of being forced to suppress it — long before the concept had much visibility in popular culture. It’s a brilliant, risky examination of femininity, the terror involved in being the object of an insatiable male gaze, and what happens when latent desires remain underserved. No horror movie made today has the guts to go there.

67. “Black Christmas” (Bob Clark, 1974)
Bob Clark is perhaps best known for his other holiday-themed film, “A Christmas Story,” but 1974’s “Black Christmas” deserves just as much attention. Set in a sorority house over Christmas break, a group of college women are stalked and slowly picked off by a deranged killer hiding inside the abode. The plot sounds formulaic, but “Black Christmas” remains timeless thanks to its terrifying and elusive killer, “Billy,” whose backstory is never revealed, as well as a foreboding ending that doesn’t offer much hope for the film’s Final Girl, Jess. But beyond this, “Black Christmas” is also remarkably feminist for its time, as Jess chooses an abortion and a career over being locked into a loveless relationship. Likewise, the terror felt by the women as they are plagued by obscene phone calls makes it clear that some horrors are all too common, and don’t require a boogeyman in a mask.

66. “The Descent” (Neil Marshall, 2005)
One year after a tragic accident, six adventurous girlfriends meet in a remote part of the Appalachians for their annual spelunking trip. After an accident traps the group deep below, they unexpectedly come face to face with a race of monstrous humanoid creatures lurking under the earth. Neil Marshall’s tense, thrilling, and claustrophobic survival horror film stars a rare all-female cast who bludgeon their way through thrilling scene after scene in this deftly-directed and well-acted cinematic nightmare, that also serves as a meditation on issues of morality and vengeance. One of the more exhilarating creature features of the 21st century, it spawned a lesser sequel, although without Marshall’s involvement.

65. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (Don Siegel, 1956)
What’s worse than death? A lot of horror movies try to answer that — just dying, which every single person who’s ever lived experiences, can’t be the scariest thing facing us. Siegel suggests that losing your individuality is indeed something worse. Small town doctor Kevin McCarthy begins to suspect something is off in his community — some people are starting to act suspiciously robotic. Then a friend shows him a perfect doppelganger — a “pod person” — that’s growing on a pool table in his home. It seems some sinister force, possibly aliens, are quietly taking over by replacing people with exact duplicates. A metaphor for conformity and loss of free will that’s influenced everything from “The Stepford Wives” to “Get Out,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is a powerful dramatization of the fear and alienation that results when you think something is wrong that everyone else thinks is right.

64. “A Tale of Two Sisters” (Kim Jee-woon, 2003)
Korean horror has provided some of the greatest scares in recent years, and “A Tale of Two Sisters” is another wonderfully warped and terrifying entry, filled with vengeful ghosts and surprising twists. A young girl, Su-mi, returns home to her father’s secluded estate after a stay in a mental institution. She is happy to be reunited with her younger sister, Su-yeon, but less than pleased to see her stepmother, Eun-joo. Eun-joo was once a nurse for the girls’ dying mother, and there is mutual resentment between the girls and their stepmother. When Eun-joo begins lashing out at the girls, targeting Su-yeon especially, their father is blind to the abuse, setting up a brutal conflict that will cause painful secrets to surface, threatening to drive a wedge between the two sisters for good. “A Tale of Two Sisters” is a psychological thriller that pulls the rug from beneath viewers more than once, foregoing the more obvious twists and reveals for a truly heartbreaking ending that will make you want to rewatch the film all over again.

63. “Let the Right One In” (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
At the exact time “Twilight” was being mainlined into our cultural veins, this quiet and beautiful Swedish film was the exact antidote audiences do desperately needed. Director Tomas Alfredson doesn’t always seem concerned with genre convention in his intimate story of a bullied 12-year old and the vampire he befriends. In the digital age, horror films are too often reliant on a flavorless shadowy look, but in Hoyt Van Hoytema’s cinematography not only can we see into the darkness, it is filled with one of the most unique color palettes in modern cinema. While creating an atmosphere in which we sense a lurking presence in the dark haze, the gorgeous and muted colors create an intimacy with the young characters.

62. “Jacob’s Ladder” (Adrian Lyne, 1990)
That filmmaker Adrian Lyne is best-known to mainstream audiences for his erotic thrillers like “Unfaithful” and “9 1/2 Weeks” shouldn’t deter horror fans from experiencing his bracing, stomach-churning “Jacob’s Ladder.” After all, Lyne’s sexier work provides a window into his ability to center stories on the human body, a concept twisted to hallucinogenic ends in this Tim Robbins-starring story. Essentially a film about the after-effects of the Vietnam War, Lyne skillfully builds the tension and terror as Robbins’ Jacob attempts to navigate through the “normal” world after living through the hell of battle. While the film doesn’t shy away from the nerve-shredding visions that plague Jacob (from pre-war memories to a party scene that sees him almost totally given over to his monsters, real or imagined), it also offers up compelling evidence that the true terrors of this world aren’t just boogeymen — and that’s far worse.

61. “Evil Dead II” (Sam Raimi, 1987)
While ’80s horror franchises like “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” stumbled through underdeveloped sequels, director Sam Raimi had the gall to bring something totally fresh to the sequel to his breakout cabin-in-the-woods shocker “The Evil Dead” — punchlines. As the sole survivor of the ghoulish threats from the previous film, Bruce Campbell’s kooky party boy Ash returns to the scene of the earlier events, where the monstrous spirits once again hurl themselves at him from every direction. As a wild-eyed Ash attempts to vanquish the demonic presence surrounding him in the walls from every angle, Raimi merges the gruesome intensity of the splatter genre with the surreal comedic heights of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Yes, there’s a famous amputation scene that unites Ash with his iconic chainsaw arm, but “Evil Dead II” is more than just a gory playground. In one defining moment, the camera veers close to Ash’s face as he cracks up in deranged laughter, while everything around him — including a lamp shade — join in. It’s a brilliant illustration of the thin line between comedy and horror that this movie walks so well, right up until the surprise twist of an ending that establishes a third entry in this original horror franchise that heads in a whole new direction altogether. Few examples of the genre have burst through so many expectations while remaining satisfying the whole way through.

60. “Poltergeist” (Tobe Hooper, 1982)
“The Shining” and other ghost stories have used the conceit of building on a Native American burial ground leading to supernatural unrest: Manifest Destiny as both original sin and inciting incident. “Poltergeist” gives that notion a Reagan-era twist: the problem here is that a new gated community has been built over what was formerly the town cemetery. “They’re just… people,” the real estate developer behind the project says, as direct an indictment of corporate inhumanity as served up by any film ever. The ghosts of the no-longer-resting-in-peace invade one family’s house through the pacifying trappings of suburbia: the toys for the kids and the TV for the adults. Considering how many people believe their TV sets are haunted — Northwestern University professor Jeffrey Sconce even wrote a book on the subject titled “Haunted Media” — it’s surprising electronic apparitions haven’t been explored even more onscreen. Or maybe it’s just that “Poltergeist” did it so definitively.

59. “The Sixth Sense” (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)
M. Night Shyamalan’s breakout feature earned the filmmaker the reputation of being beholden to his big narrative twists, and while that may still be the case (his latest twist went so far as to inspire an entire new movie), it’s hard to question the power of his biggest reveal. The Bruce Willis-starring feature is creepy enough without its final act jaw-dropper, with the actor as a hangdog child psychologist palling around with a terrified young kid (Haley Joel Osment) who comes armed with one of modern cinema’s most indelible catchphrases (it’s hard to beat “I see dead people,” and who would want to try?). What a pair they make, and Shyamalan skillfully guides the film so it seems as if they’re working towards one conclusion, before veering into an entirely different one that’s as jarring as they come. It’s a film that begs for an instant rewatch, all the better to pick up all the tiny, terrifying clues that Shyamalan has laid out along the way.

58. “The Haunting” (Robert Wise, 1963)
Adapted by Nelson Gidding from the 1959 novel “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson (who suggested the film title), “The Haunting” stars Julie Harris as Eleanor, a shy woman who once experienced poltergeists. She joins a group organized by a paranormal investigator (Richard Johnson), including a mod lesbian psychic (Claire Bloom), and the son of the house’s current owner (Russ Tamblyn), to study a death-plagued abandoned haunted mansion. The filmmaker made the most of a much lower budget than “West Side Story” by taking the shoot to England. He used an experimental 30 mm wide-angle Panavision camera to unsettling effect to portray the film’s most memorable character — the house — from odd, jarring, dislocated angles, often showing Eleanor’s mentally unstable point-of-view. The crew bent walls, destabilized a spiral staircase, applied photo-sensitive makeup to make the actors look pale when they stood in a “cold spot,” delivered a jump scare when a missing woman’s head pops out, and most disturbing, “morphed” a woman from childhood to old age by photographing four actresses at different ages and uniting them with dissolves. While the movie received mixed reviews on release, it has built a cult following and is considered by many — including Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg — to be one of the scariest horror films of all time. Having seen it when it first came out, I for one am scarred for life.

57. “The Conjuring” (James Wan, 2013)
A well-polished fictionalized account of the real-life cases of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, Wan’s film shows the supernatural seekers taking on the case of the Perron family, new owners of a Rhode Island home that appears to be haunted. An offspring of “The Exorcist,” set on an isolated, vast, animated compound, if it feels familiar it’s because the film relies on old-school horror film motifs for its scares. But it’s still effective, thanks in part to believable performances by its cast, notably stars Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as Ed and Lorraine, who have a natural on-screen chemistry. And Wan’s decision to limit his use of computer generated effects is wise. The first film in what has come to be called “The Conjuring Universe,” it’s spawned a sequel and three spin-offs which have collectively earned over $1.5 billion at the box office worldwide, making this the highest-grossing horror movie franchise in history.

56. “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (David Lynch, 1992)
Conceived as both a prologue to — and a postscript for — the original “Twin Peaks” television series, David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” has since been renovated into something of a bridge between the old and new iterations of the show; the dark nexus of that particular universe. But to focus on its function within Lynch’s mythology is to overlook “Fire Walks with Me” as an experience unto itself; even in a vacuum, it’s one of the most emotionally harrowing movies ever made. Lynch has said that he “was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside.” This film, which mostly follows Laura (Sheryl Lee) in the days leading up to her murder, crystallizes how this story has always swung between the intractable trauma of abuse and the overwhelming power of love. Positioning Laura’s father (a scarring Ray Wise) as the pit beneath that pendulum, “Fire Walk with Me” shines a light into the void beneath a quaint Washington town, and finds that heaven and hell might be a lot closer together than they seem from street level. The scares will get under your skin, and the residue they live behind will stay under your fingernails.

55. “The Fog” (John Carpenter, 1980)
“A celebration of our past!” declares the triumphal banner hanging over the town square of Antonio Bay, California in honor of its centennial celebration. Director John Carpenter, in his first film after the landmark “Halloween,” makes us ask an important question: who wrote that history we’re celebrating? The ghosts that are coming out of the mists rolling in off the Pacific have a very different perspective on Antonio Bay and its residents, and if they can’t write their own story in the history books, they will write a tale of present-day revenge instead — in blood. With a setting much like “The Birds,” “The Fog” is a masterpiece of mood. And it features both Jamie Lee Curtis and her mother Janet Leigh — but this is no escapist horror pastiche. How much do the people of today bear guilt for the crimes of their forebears? Are reparations owed? Carpenter examines the crushing weight of the past and suggests that history may be the ultimate horror story.

54. “The Babadook” (Jennifer Kent, 2014)
In the last 20 years, no director has come to her first feature so fully formed as both a storyteller and a master of cinema as actress-turned-writer/director Jennifer Kent. Kent’s tale of a widowed mother (Essie Davis) battling her son’s fear of a storybook character come to life is hide-under-your-seat terrifying, but instead of relying on lazy scare tricks that have come to define the genre in recent years, Kent uses precise compositions and clockwork-like precision to build tension and draw viewers into a scene. Kent is not simply a master technician, but one who uses the horror genre to tackle a subject (the burden of motherhood) that doesn’t get discussed in polite company and creates something that is for more hard-hitting than any “important” piece of Oscar bait.

53. “The Witch” (Robert Eggers, 2015)
Robert Eggers’ astonishingly confident New-England Folktale is not fucking around. And, just to make sure you know that right from the start, one of its first scenes finds a demonic hag — the skin on her back painted with the light of a full moon — stealing a baby from the Puritan family that’s been exiled to the fringe of her woodland domain and crushing the child into bits with a pestle and mortar. There are any number of reasons why “The Witch” is such a giddily perverse experience (the director’s Kubrickian rigor and his fetish for period details not least among them), but the film is ultimately such a startling sight to behold because of Eggers’ straight-faced commitment to the bit. He leans into the fears and fascinations of 17th century life and he leans into them hard, and that unflinching approach makes it possible for modern-day viewers to believe in the power of the devil, and the goat that might serve as his messenger. Tie it together with a go-for-broke finale, throw in a star-making Anya Taylor-Joy performance into the mix, and you’ve got a new American classic that trembles with the echoes of the first horrors visited upon this country.

52. “Frankenstein” (James Whale, 1931)
It’s only fitting that a novel as influential and forward-thinking as Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” would inspire a similarly unique and enduring big-screen classic. James Whale’s take on the tale of a striving doctor and the freakish creature he cobbles together from the dead contributed mightily to how people envision the monster, with Boris Karloff’s big-headed and lumbering portrayal still serving as the gold standard. But while Frankenstein’s monster (always “Frankenstein’s monster,” never just “Frankenstein”!) is an object of terror in the film, Whale also made sure to overlay all that understandable horror with Shelley’s own message about the beastliness of humanity itself.

51. “The Spiral Staircase” (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
“There’s no room in the whole world for imperfection,” the main villain declares. He’s a serial killer who’s been on a spree murdering women who are disabled. And now he’s targeting a young maid (Dorothy Maguire) who’s mute — we know she’s in his sights because we see her from his point-of-view. When he looks at her, he sees her face without a mouth entirely, much like the image of Keanu Reeves with his mouth sealed shut in “The Matrix.” Director Robert Siodmak conceived a visual language for murderous hate here — the villain is so intolerant of anyone he views as less than “perfect” that he literally sees them differently. In this case, targeting the disabled calls to mind Nazi persecution of people with physical and mental disabilities — World War II had ended just a year earlier, and Siodmak himself had fled the Nazis due to his Jewish heritage. The result is that “The Spiral Staircase” is a work of Gothic Horror for a world still reeling from the Holocaust.

50. “Candyman” (Bernard Rose, 1992)
A boogieman terrorizing a public housing project? The film’s setting alone separates it from many of its slasher movie brethren. Based on Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden,” director Bernard Rose relocates the story from Barker’s native Liverpool to the dilapidated, “scary” buildings of the Cabrini-Green projects in Chicago. It was an inspired decision that amended the original story’s classist undertones into explicitly racial ones, turning this into more of a subversive meditation on race. The unsettling legend about the hook-handed terror focuses on a skeptical white doctoral candidate working on a thesis on urban legends, who learns of the Cabrini-Green Candyman legend and goes to investigate. Starring Virginia Madsen as an atypical slasher movie heroine, the film boasts one of the more intriguing horror-movie villains, with a complexity rooted in a tragic backstory that makes him sympathetic: a famous black artist and son of slaves who pays a steep price, amputation and a grisly death, for falling in love with a white man’s daughter who hires him to paint her portrait. Digging a little deeper than your average horror film, the film stars the physically imposing Tony Todd as Candyman, whose sonorous, chilly voice haunts long after the movie ends.

49. “The Lodger” (John Brahm, 1944)
In Hitchcock’s silent version of “The Lodger” from 1927, the (not-quite-yet) Master of Suspense inaugurated a version of his “wrong man innocently persecuted” formula he’d later perfect in “The 39 Steps” and “North by Northwest.” John Brahm’s remake goes in a decidedly different direction: it’s no spoiler to say that Mr. Slade (Laird Cregar), who’s taken a room in the London home of a middle-aged couple (Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood), is in fact the killer. Obsessed with his late brother, who died after drinking himself to death following a broken heart, Mr. Slade blames the female sex in its entirety for his untimely passing. So he’s taken to murdering random women as payback. Cregar is 6’3” and over 300 pounds but, as physically imposing as he is, his Slade is the fragile male ego on two legs. Particularly threatening to him is female sexual empowerment, and so when he watches the music-hall performer daughter (Merle Oberon) of his landlord and landlady prance about the stage, his face becomes a contorted masque of toxic masculinity: he’s attracted to her but hates her, lusts after her but wants to kill her. The male gaze has never been more weaponized than in this scene, and it’s a testament to Brahm’s sophistication that he understood, in 1944 no less, how the act of looking could be an act of violence — with the actual killing that follows almost an afterthought.

48. “Carnival of Souls” (Herk Harvey, 1962)
A waking nightmare that’s every bit as ghoulish as its title suggests, Herk Harvey’s “Carnival of Souls” — a singular one-off as storied as “Night of the Hunter” and twice as eerie — is an indelible tour through a funhouse of our deepest fears. Shot for a measly $33,000, and imbued with the morbid unease of a rediscovered snuff film, this micro-budget classic stars Candace Hilligoss as Mary, the sole survivor of an ill-fated drag race. Dredging herself out of the water and re-entering a world that feels ominously shadowed by her near-death experience, Mary finds herself trapped in a stretch of American nowhere that’s as inescapable as the Twilight Zone, and twice as dark. Once upon a time, this was the kind of nameless movie you might stumble upon at 2 A.M. on TCM; the kind of thing you felt you shouldn’t be watching. Today, even though you can watch it on a Criterion Collection Blu-ray or stream it on your laptop, Harvey’s unnerving masterpiece still retains every last drop of its delirious power.

47. “Ganja & Hess” (Bill Gunn, 1973)
An original treatise on sex, religion and African-American identity, iconoclastic filmmaker Bill Gunn’s 1973 allegorical classic subverts the vampire genre. Anthropologist Hess Green is stabbed with an ancient ceremonial dagger by his unstable assistant, endowing him with the blessing of immortality and the curse of an unquenchable thirst for blood. When the assistant’s wife Ganja comes searching for her vanished husband, she and Hess form an unexpected partnership. Gunn uses vampirism as a proxy for addiction, although the complexity of the plot makes it nearly impossible to reduce the film to any one simple metaphor. Drastically recut by distributors unhappy with Gunn’s highly stylized version that flirts with the conventions of blaxploitation and horror cinema, it was re-released under other titles. And so, for many years, what was essentially a bastardized version of the film (re-edited without Gunn’s involvement) was all that was available. Forty years later, Kino Lorber made the film gods happy by re-releasing the film, restored to Gunn’s original vision.

46. “It Follows” (David Robert Mitchell, 2014)
“It’s right behind you!” is a common, and cheesy, horror refrain, but David Robert Mitchell’s lyrical coming-of-age vision gave it entirely fresh currency. A murderous creature visible only to the afflicted pursues its prey with a slow, relentless march forward, manifesting as their worst fears; the only solution is to have sex with someone to pass the threat forward. But if one person dies, the monster makes its way back down the line. This brilliant gimmick enables “It Follows” to assemble a series of frantic teenagers in a desperate attempt to figure out a solution to their conundrum. B, but the body count is fated to rise, and Mitchell’s evocative storytelling makes it clear that nothing can totally rescue them from the shocking physical transformations of young adulthood. Sex, which often dooms characters in horror movies, has never been such a menacing cinematic threat.

45. “The Blair Witch Project” (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
Few movies have been as parodied and intimated in the last 20 years as “The Blair Witch Project”; fewer still are as scary. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s endlessly influential exercise in found-footage horror has been hotly debated since before it even premiered — is it real or is it not? — and remains polarizing even now. Lost in that debate is how terrifying it still is. Getting lost in the woods has never looked so scary, especially as seen through a trio of film students’ grainy camcorder; Myrick and Sánchez maximized their notoriously tiny budget by having most of the action occur offscreen and forcing us to mentally fill in the details. That it introduced both found footage and viral marketing to the general public may be a mixed blessing, but don’t hold that against it: “The Blair Witch Project” brings new meaning to the phrase “often imitated, never duplicated.”

44. “The Brood” (David Cronenberg, 1979)
The big reveal in the Canadian auteur’s breakout movie “The Brood” is Samantha Eggar lifting her white drape to show Art Hindle the multiple “babies” growing from her torso, opening the biggest sac to lick the blood off her newborn. Following “Rabid” and “Shivers,” “The Brood” signaled the arrival of a cerebral filmmaker with icky ideas about the hazards of science, from armpits with sex organs and veined penis-shaped parasites with ears and mouths crawling in and out of body cavities, to psycho-plasmic hives that become humans, born out of anger and forming an army. Made for about $1 million with a tiny crew of seven, “The Brood” used a mix of analog prosthetics and clever manipulation of light and dark in a pre-CGI world to create believable, naturalistic menace. When Roger Corman picked up the movie stateside, horror mavens Joe Dante and John Carpenter helped to cut the trailer. Cronenberg’s “Videodrome,” “Scanners,” and “The Fly” came later.

43. “I Saw the Devil” (Kim Jee-Woon, 2011)
A visually canny director with a sharp sense of humor, Kim adeptly plays with genres, from his sixth film, the wacky Oriental western hit “The Good, The Bad, and the Weird” to serial killer thriller “I Saw the Devil,” which also stars Lee Byung-hun. This time, Lee is a homicide detective on the hunt for a brilliant serial killer who whacked his pregnant wife in a haunting opening sequence. This movie is not for the squeamish — Kim takes the violence about as far as anyone ever has, bringing you along for the ride via intricate tracking cameras as the detective starts to emulate the insane devil he is chasing. This vengeance plot, with all its gore and evil, is in the service of art. And it’s funny, too, as the detective and the killer engage in a strange game of one-upmanship. Despite being hit with restrictive ratings for violence in Korea, cutting some of the violence and limiting the theaters where it could play, the movie was a monster hit. Kim was able to keep more horror in the international version.

42. “Freaks” (Tod Browning, 1932)
“One of us, one of us!” As sad as it is scary, Tod Browning’s career-ending pre-Code masterpiece is not at all the movie you expect it to be. Its title gives the impression of an exploitative sideshow attraction, and though “Freaks” is certainly carnivalesque in the way it showcases its cast — including conjoined twins, a bearded lady, and the famous “pinheads” — it’s ultimately most notable for the empathy it shows them at the expense of the “normal” characters who mistreat them. Endlessly controversial when it was first released, with one woman even threatening to sue MGM after claiming the movie was responsible for her having a miscarriage, it has since been reevaluated as the one-of-a-kind classic it is. Better late than never.

41. “Possession” (Andrzej Zulawaki, 1981)
The demise of a marriage has often made lent heft to some of the best dramas, but it’s not often that it makes for an unforgettable horror movie. When Anna reveals to her husband, Mark, that she is having an affair, it sends him to the brink of madness. Although he is struggling to keep it together, Mark hires a private investigator to follow Anna, while also having an affair with his son’s teacher, who could pass for Anna’s double. Tucked away inside of a shabby apartment halfway across a war-torn Berlin, Anna is hiding with a secret lover lifted straight out of H.P. Lovecraft’s worst nightmares. Bolstered by a tour-de-force performance by Isabelle Adjani, who won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival after the film’s 1980 premiere, and her unforgettable subway breakdown, “Possession” is a film like no other, and one that still manages to truly shock over thirty years later.

40. “The Others” (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001)
Arguably the most satisfying gothic horror movie since “The Innocents,” Alejandro Amenábar’s fogbound delight is more than just a loving homage to Jack Clayton’s undying ghost story, it’s also a bonafide classic in its own right. Gleefully inverting age-old genre tropes in order to explore the subject of grief from the inside out, the film stars Nicole Kidman (in one of her finest leading roles) as a harried mother who retreats to a haunted manor on the Channel Islands in the aftermath of World War II. Waiting in vain for her husband to return from the battlefield and help care for their photosensitive children, the woman begins to unravel. Is she having a breakdown, or is it possible that the phantom of an old lady really did possess her daughter? The truth is only revealed after more than 100 minutes of richly atmospheric chills, as “The Others” building to one of the great twists in movie history. It’s a rug-pull done right — one that recasts everything that came before it in the cold light of day, and suggests that people can be as haunted as the houses they call home.

39. “The Devils” (Ken Russell, 1971)
Ken Russell tackled history in 1971 with “The Devils,” an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudon.” The film depicts the real-life account of Urbain Grandier, a 17th century priest accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun, the hunchbacked Sister Jeanne. Russell dives deep into the religious hypocrisy and sacrilegious imagery, turning history into infamy, and singlehandedly giving birth to the Nunsploitation genre. One of the film’s most divisive scenes, nicknamed the “rape of Christ” shows the abbey’s nuns running rampant with sexual ecstasy, turning the church into a brothel, as orgies break out, priests masturbate into pages of the bible, and a bevy of naked nuns begin molesting a giant crucifix in orgasmic pleasure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “The Devils” was banned, rated X, and heavily censored upon release, and while versions of the film have finally become available to watch, the true director’s cut has never been released. Still, it remains a fascinating rumination on the corruption of power and the danger when sexual repression bleeds into hysteria.

38. “Black Sunday” (Mario Bava, 1960)
In 1960, Italian horror maestro Mario Bava catapulted his career with “Black Sunday,” a loose adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story “Viy,” which would also later be adapted into one of the only horror movies ever made in the Soviet Union. The film also launched the career of Barbara Steele, who starred as Asa Vajda, a witch burnt at the stake, who returns from the dead hundreds of years later to seek revenge of the descendants of her killers. Asa’s torment is palpable and appropriately horrific. She has a death mask, studded with spikes, nailed onto her face before she is burned alive. In one of the film’s best scene, as Asa comes back to life, the mask is peeled away from her face, still preserved after centuries, but bloated with nail marks. Although the film is a stunning example of Italian Gothic horror, it was banned in the U.K. until 1968 because of its violence, with some of the film’s gore censored in the U.S. as well. Despite years of censorship, “Black Sunday” is wonderfully atmospheric and moody, with foggy graveyards and dripping dungeons that seem lifted from some of the best horror films of the 1930s. Bava would soon move on to the technicolor world of gialli, but “Black Sunday” remains one of his best.

37. “Hausu” (Obayashi Nobuhiko, 1977)
The story goes that Japanese movie studio Toho was tired of losing money on movies that made sense, and so they greenlit Obayashi Nobuhiko’s “Hausu” — a potentially career-ending script that no in-house director would touch — thinking that it was time to lose money on a movie that didn’t. They only got half of what they bargained for: An utterly delirious (and strangely cheerful) ghost story about a teen girl named Gorgeous (Ikegami Kimiko) who takes a group of friends to her aunt’s haunted house, Obayashi’s magnum opus is a demented funeral parade of phantasmagoric delights. A killer mattress, a carnivorous piano, and a demonic cat are just the tip of the iceberg of a wild, super fun, and disarmingly playful movie in which even the smallest moments are touched with madness. A forgotten gem until the Criterion Collection rescued the film from obscurity and turned it into a cult phenomenon, “Hausu” may not make a lick of sense, but it was a hit in its own time, and an even bigger one in ours.

36. “Don’t Look Now” (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
Why are there so many horror movies about the grieving process? It’s a big question, but “Don’t Look Now” is as comprehensive an answer as you’re likely to find. For one thing, Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece — a splintered and unshakeable portrait of two parents (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) in mourning over the death of their young daughter — has inspired a zillion lesser films to explore the same terrain. For another, this morbid Daphne du Maurier adaptation complicates Hitchcockian psychology with Borges-inspired surrealism to illustrate how genre language can tap into trauma more directly than standard dramas might allow. Spooky twin sisters, spectral visions, the murk of Venetian canals, one infamous sex scene, and the most disturbing reveal in all of cinema combine to articulate the isolating madness that follows loss, and the consequences that come from surrendering to it.

35. “Hangover Square” (John Brahm, 1945)
Watch almost any Laird Cregar performance and you’ll instantly become a fan. One of the finest character actors of the early 1940s, he was poised to have the horror movie career that Vincent Price ultimately had until tragedy struck: over 300 pounds for most of his adulthood, and thus limited to character roles in Hollywood, he wanted to be a leading man. Therefore, through extreme dieting and exercise he lost 100 pounds in less than a year, which so strained his heart that he died at age 31 before his last film could be released: “Hangover Square.” And it’s a masterpiece. Cregar plays a sensitive pianist who suffers from sleepwalking and, while doing so, kills women. When he wakes up he has no memory of the killings at all. Can he be held responsible for the murders since he’s literally unconscious when committing them? But, he is still committing them. It taps into a deep fear that no matter how good a person we think we may be, there may be some horrible dark side just waiting to crawl out.

34. “The Devil’s Backbone” (Guillermo Del Toro, 2001)
The magic of Guillermo Del Toro’s filmmaking is his ability to mix terror and wonder in a way that heightens both emotions without ever feeling trite. Set during the Spanish Civil War (it was shot in Spain and backed by Pedro Almodovar), this ghost story is told from the perspective of Carlos (Fernando Tielve), a 12-year-old boy who is a new arrival at an ominous orphanage after his father was killed in the war. Carlos, haunted by visions of a mysterious apparition, tries to piece together the mystery of what happened the night a bomb hit the orphanage’s courtyard (but strangely didn’t explode) and a young boy (who now haunts the house) was killed. The film is more unsettlingly creepy than edge-of-your-seat scary, revealing the true horror is being a child during wartime. Del Toro has called “Backbone” his most personal film.

33. “Scream” (Wes Craven, 1996)
A horror maestro in his own right, Wes Craven’s decision to send up the very genre that made him a household name could have been a messy, dumb disaster — instead, he made “Scream,” which is both very funny and very scary, and functions just fine as a slasher film, even as it unpacks typical slasher fare. The Neve Campbell-starring feature first satirizes horror films in general, then slasher films in particular, as the tiny town of Woodsboro, California is held hostage by a masked killer with no clear motives, beyond slicing and dicing teenagers in increasingly amusing ways. But while that concept would go on to breed a whole other franchise in the form of “Scary Movie” (fun fact: “Scream” was originally titled “Scary Movie”), Craven added a special twist: what if this whole thing could be scary, too? Eventually the film reveals itself to be a genuinely gruesome, seriously clever horror outing that still doesn’t shy away from poking holes in the genre. And poking holes in plenty of teens, too.

32. “Near Dark” (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)
Kathryn Bigelow couldn’t get her revisionist Western funded, so she rode the 1980s vampire wave to make this unique genre-hybrid. A gorgeous, gory, and (romantically) gooey film set in small midwestern town, “Near Dark” is a complicated love story about a vampire Mae (Jenny Wright) and Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), the boy she falls in love with and bites one very eventful evening, but whose essence proves to be non-violent, making her fall for him that much more. Bigelow’s nomadic vampire tribe, however, is violent and the director brings the visceral brutality in a bar scene that is anything but romantic. All of this capped off with one of those ’80s-inflected Tangerine Dream scores that transports audiences to an entirely different headspace. For those who wish Bigelow never left genre for prestige, this film is a reminder of how dense her “less serious” films were right from the start.

31. “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (Robert Wiene, 1920)
Putting the expression in German Expressionism, this seminal horror silent has remained a definitive achievement in spooky storytelling by creating a nightmarish world where nothing is certain. As lanky somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) commits a series of murders at the behest of the titular hypnotist (Werner Krauss), director Robert Wiene sets the drama in the confines of a labyrinthine environment that makes the upside-down look downright homey. Shadowy buildings hover in the background at awkward angles and roads veer off in dizzying directions. The ceilings often look as though they might close in on these frantic characters — and, with the brilliant plot twist of the final act, that’s essentially what they do. Told within the confines of a flashback, the movie presents itself as the story of a young man (Friedrich Feher) whose world falls apart as he becomes aware of the doctor’s evil scheme; with time, however, it’s clear that this unreliable narrator may be a victim of his own confusion, and the brilliance of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” is that it places us right there at the center of his insanity. Nearly a century later, the final twist still comes as a surprise to new audiences.

30. “The Wicker Man” (Robin Hardy, 1973)
“Shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent,” says the Lord of Summerisle in Robin Hardy’s bonkers classic. And who, you ask, is the Lord of Summerisle? Not telling. Even more than most horror movies, “The Wicker Man” demands to be seen with as little foreknowledge as possible — stories about cops arriving on tiny islands to investigate a little girl’s disappearance rarely end well, but there’s little preparing oneself for this one. The 2006 remake was regrettable — aside from Nicolas Cage’s performance, which was pleasingly bizarre — but the original remains a must-see for the way it continually subverts your expectations.

29. “The Innocents” (Jack Clayton, 1961)
Do they ever return to possess the living? That’s the question asked in the hilariously misleading trailer for Jack Clayton’s unnerving adaptation of “The Turn of the Screw,” which stars screen royalty Deborah Kerr as a young governess hired to look after two children on a rural estate. The home is large yet claustrophobic, the kids as off-putting as they are cherubic; you can surely tell where this is going if ever you’ve seen a haunted-house movie, but rest assured you’ve never seen one quite like “The Innocents.” A true exercise in less-is-more horror, the script — adapted from Henry James’ novel by Truman Capote and William Archibald — privileges brief glimpses and hard-to-place sounds over anything overt. As for the question posed by the trailer, it’s hardly a spoiler to say that yes, they do return to possess the living.

28. “Pulse” (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)
Movies about how we live with (and on) the internet weren’t as common in 2001 as they are now, but few have made as lasting an impression as “Pulse.” Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s best film is terrifying not only for its ghosts but for its insights as well — ideas can’t be exorcised. Otherworldly spirits are akin to a computer virus in the film, which slowly veers toward the apocalyptic as the living vanish and ghosts take their place to say things like “death was eternal loneliness”; as with a lot of great horror, “Pulse” transcends its genre roots to become something more. It, too, is like a computer virus in that sense — it grows and changes at an almost imperceptible rate, affecting you in ways you never could have anticipated.

27. “The Omen” (Richard Donner, 1976)
The first installment of “The Omen” trilogy still holds up as one of the eeriest movies of all time. It tells the story of an “innocent” young boy who, unbeknownst to himself and everyone around him — including his diplomat father and his wife— just might be the Antichrist. Preferring mood and atmosphere over shock and awe, and boasting some genuinely chilling scenes, including grisly death sequences — by hanging, decapitation and impalement — and a famously foreboding Oscar-winning score (led by its theme song “Ave Satani,” composed by Jerry Goldsmith) — the film presents a scenario that would be any parent’s worst nightmare. “The Omen,” aided by a solid cast led by an outstanding Gregory Peck, treats its subject seriously, which adds to its believability. The pale-faced Harvey Stephens as the devil child is sufficiently sinister. The film spawned two sequels, and a 2006 remake that should be avoided — at least not without seeing the original first.

26. “Bride of Frankenstein” (James Whale, 1935)
“Science, like love, has its little surprises…” Frankenstein’s monster is an abstraction, a blank canvas onto which viewers can project just about anything they like — namely, and most obviously, man’s propensity for violence and a tendency to violently reject that which reflects our worst qualities back at us. The townsfolk in “Frankenstein” and its superior sequel turn ugly upon first sight of this particular abyss, never even taking the time to actually gaze into it; here, the Bride would appear to represent a welcome opportunity for companionship despite not actually appearing until the last few minutes and thus never fulfilling that role. Almost no one gets their just deserts in “Bride of Frankenstein,” which is part of why it’s more notable some 80-odd years later for its ability to evoke pity than for what few scares it still produces. Someone certainly belongs dead, but I’m not sure it’s them.

25. “Suspiria” (Dario Argento, 1977)
After perfecting the giallo with 1975’s “Deep Red,” Dario Argento tackled the supernatural with “Suspiria,” the first installment in his Three Mothers Trilogy. American ballet student Suzy lands a spot at a prestigious dance academy in Germany, but the school is home to an ancient evil that Suzy must find and destroy before it devours her. With the exception of his follow up film, 1980’s “Inferno,” Argento has never quite made anything as jaw-dropping as “Suspiria.” Resplendent with garish set pieces and dazzling pops of red, blue, and green, “Suspiria” counters the film’s absolutely brutal and iconic death scenes with true beauty. It’s nearly impossible to do justice to “Suspiria” with words; it’s a piece of cinema that must truly be experienced, which is perhaps why Luca Guadagnino didn’t dare remake the film, but instead tried to convey how Argento’s version made him feel in his 2018 take.

24. “The Birds” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)
For one, it’s the only Hitchcock film ever to imply its ending is the end of the world — a reading reinforced by Robert Boyle’s original concept art showing the Golden Gate Bridge covered in birds, even San Francisco lost to our new avian overlords. For another, it’s as pure an expression as any ever put on film of how much we take normalcy for granted. We’re going along, all seems fine. You may be a San Francisco socialite (Tippy Hedrin) looking to pull an elaborate prank on a smug denizen of Bodega Bay (Rod Taylor). And suddenly, stunning disaster strikes — in this case, as one of the characters puts it, “the bird war” — and your life may be changed forever, no going back, say goodbye to normal. All our lives are lived on a razor’s edge but we just choose, for the most part, not to think about it. The second half of Hitchcock’s film is almost beat for beat perfect, including a stunning scene set in a diner in which townfolks bring many different views to the table about how to deal with the crisis: there’s the evangelist who quotes Scripture to make sense of what’s happening; the scientist who thinks reason holds the answer; the drunk just passing through who thinks wholesale slaughter is the solution; the conspiracy theorist who decides to blame Hedrin’s character: “I think you’re evil! Eviiiiillll!!!” The scariest question to ask is: would any of us handle the end any better?

23. “I Walked With a Zombie” (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
Do you believe the lies you tell? Producer Val Lewton’s masterful film says that when you finally do believe your own falsehoods, well, anything can happen. In this most philosophical of classic Hollywood films, a young nurse (Frances Dee) travels to the Caribbean isle of St. Sebastian to look after the wife of a wealthy planter (Tom Conroy). She can walk and stare off plaintively into the distance, but in no other way does she seem to be conscious. The Afro-Caribbean community thinks she’s a “zombie,” per voodoo lore — she was cursed because she had an affair with her husband’s brother. And the nurse comes to believe that too. What follows is one of Hollywood’s earliest looks at what happens when white people try to co-opt black culture. A sense of profound melancholy suffuses “I Walked With a Zombie,” the melancholy of the colonized: “That’s why they still weep when a child is born and make merry at a burial.”

22. “Repulsion” (Roman Polanski, 1965)
Roman Polanski’s portrait of an introverted woman (Catherine Deneuve) who loses her mind while left alone in her apartment is a disturbing portrait of an abused, alienated woman whose experiences with assault and loneliness driver her to the brink of insanity. Deneuve’s disquieting performance finds the poor Belgian woman enduring a series of hardships — living in close quarters with her promiscuous sister, then trapped at home, where she endures horrific assaults both real and imagined — until finally she lashes out, with bloody, devastating consequences. Polanski’s gritty, stripped-down black-and-white storytelling keeps the tension high throughout; there’s no big revelation or unexpected twist, but this masterful look at the pratfalls of gender imbalance was ahead of its time in many ways. Polanski himself may be a tarnished name, but “Repulsion” has only grown more valuable with age: It highlights the horrors of abuse by proving that even isolated incidents can have terrible long-term impacts, and escape is not an option when the horror lingers in the mind.

21. “Carrie” (Brian De Palma, 1976)
Your prom night may have been bad, but it wasn’t “Carrie” bad. Sissy Spacek is among the few performers to earn an Oscar nod for starring in a horror film, and with good reason: Her chilling turn is the main reason Brian De Palma’s killer adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is thought of as a justified revenge saga instead of something even darker. Pig blood and telekinesis remain its most attention-grabbing elements, neither of which would amount to much were “Carrie” not so devastating in its depiction of an especially traumatic adolescence. De Palma was on fire during this period — “Sisters,” “Blow Out,” and “Dressed to Kill” were all made within five years of “Carrie” — but this supernatural horror flick is still his crowning achievement.

20. “The Fly” (David Cronenberg, 1986)
David Cronenberg takes mid-century genre fun, injects it with gruesome gore and a truly warped point-of-view, and somehow still makes a film that was so good it became a mainstream hit. Jeff Goldblum plays a scientist who tests his teleportation breakthrough on himself and becomes a horsefly. Through incredible practical effects, the very graphic film is the peak of Cronenberg’s exploration of what became known as “body horror,” as the film meditates on disease and aging in ways that are as unsettling as the themes themselves. While the film pushes boundaries, underneath is a conventional monster film that positions us to search for and find the human buried beneath the horror.

19. “Get Out” (Jordan Peele, 2017)
Writer-director Jordan Peele catapulted beyond his sketch-comedy roots for a category-bursting work about race and privilege in American society that moviegoers had never truly wrestled with before. The outrageous premise — rich white liberals brainwashing black people to be their mind slaves — finds its match in the legitimate foundations of a psychological thriller, as well as the sobering portrait of a black man grappling with a troubled past and uncertain present. Its creepiest aspects sneak up on you: The movie’s observations about awkward race relations are funny because they’re true (even as the plot takes its wildest turns) and terrifying for the same reasons, often leaving viewers uncertain if they should laugh or contemplate the scarier implications of the punchlines. That’s the zeitgeist in a nutshell. Any history book on the American mood in 2017 will forever take its cues from “Get Out.”

18. “The Silence of the Lambs” (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
Hannibal Lecter was already a known cultural quantity when Jonathan Demme came on board to direct the second film to feature the murderous Thomas Harris creation, but the canny pairing of Anthony Hopkins as the serial killer and Jodie Foster as the bright-eyed FBI agent on his tail turned him into nothing less than a cultural touchstone. Aided by chilling catchphrases (surely, fava bean stock dropped after the film debuted, right?) and a cadre of natty prison duds (plus human-flesh face-mask), Hopkins poured his prodigious talents into every inch of Lecter’s chilling frame. It’s never entirely clear what he’s thinking, and while Demme kits out his film with enough other elements to keep it chugging right along, from Foster’s full-bodied turn to Buffalo Bill doing his own thing with literal full bodies, it’s always clear that he’s the one pulling each string. The film would be formidable enough if it was just another serial killer thriller, but Demme, Hopkins, and Foster push it to go deeper at every moment, eventually finding that real terror doesn’t always have a reason, but it does have a taste.

17. “Nosferatu” (F. W. Murnau, 1922)
In many ways, “Nosferatu” is the “Citizen Kane” of horror. Bram Stoker’s estate tried, fairly successfully, to bury the film — winning a copyright case that called for all prints to be destroyed and bankrupting the studio (Prana) that produced the film. Yet F. W. Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation of “Dracula” was an imaginative revision of the vampire story that helped define the genre and was so technically awe-inspiring that it launched one of film history’s most storied and influential directing careers. More than anything, though, it is Max Schreck’s inimitable performance as Count Orlok that a century later makes this film a marvel.

16. “Jaws” (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
Humans think they’ve conquered the planet. Humanity reigns so completely supreme that people are shocked when nature bares its teeth and shows who is really in charge. That’s the underlying horror of what’s otherwise more a late-20th century riff on Melville in Steven Spielberg’s epochal blockbuster. And sometimes when imminent nature-related disaster is staring you in the face, it’s more politically convenient, as Amity’s mayor (Murray Hamilton) finds, to just deny that any danger is present at all. As I’ve written here before, “Jaws” is a Manifest Destiny film, about the particularly American impulse to inhabit all spaces we desire to inhabit — if people just stayed out of the water, or chose to swim in Amity pools instead, we’d have no story.

15. “Cat People” (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
Producer Val Lewton’s films were about creating low-budget B-movie horror with cinema, and Jacques Tourneur was his greatest practitioner, adding a layer of evocative style that few A-pictures of the day could match. Tourneur’s “Cat People” uses the camera and sound to create the presence of a supernatural force without even showing it. Take this example of the pool scene and how its sense of an ominous, lurking presence is built with framing, subjectivity, and editing. Then, like with his classic noir “Out of the Past,” Tourneur employs cinematography that takes an eerily and sexually charged atmosphere that brings the film’s unusual premise — a Serbian woman (Simone Simon) who is convinced she descends from cats and transforms into one when aroused or angered — to life.

14. “28 Days Later” (Danny Boyle, 2002)
Danny Boyle’s dynamically-directed visionary take on zombie horror is absolutely terrifying. Set 28 days after a viral epidemic ravages Britain, the film follows survivors struggling to make sense of the aftermath, while seeking safety. Moving beyond the typical zombie thrills and onto something even more horrifying — as a survival mechanism, human beings are forced to lose their humanity — the film presents a gripping representation of a country totally crippled by a mysterious new disease. The hideously virulent and incurable sickness leaves its hosts in a permanent and appalling state of aggression, filled with incredible rage. The film questions whether this kind of blinding, violent fury is something that already exists inside us, and the virus simply brings it out. Boyle’s decision to shoot the film on consumer grade digital video cameras, gives the film an effective grit and grime, and a necessary realism, although it’s not without moments of surreal beauty. What’s maybe scariest about “28 Days Later” is that the scenario it presents isn’t at all unrealistic.

13. “Audition” (Takashi Miike, 1999)
Kiri, kiri, kiri. Either these words haunt you or you’ve never heard them — there isn’t much of an in between. Takashi Miike recently released his 100th film, though it’s unlikely that it or any of his 98 other works could ever reach the same vaunted status as “Audition.” An adaptation of Ryū Murakami’s novel of the same name, it begins and ends in such profoundly different ways that anyone watching with no foreknowledge of its plot wouldn’t even know it’s a horror movie for a good long while. (The somewhat misleading premise involves a widower who holds auditions for a new wife.) By the time you realize what’s really at work, it’s far too late to turn back — not only because it’s so immersive, but because it’s as difficult to walk away from as the femme fatale at its center.

12. “Dawn of the Dead” (George A. Romero, 1978)
George A. Romero’s particular genius was to reacquaint his audience with familiar spaces by making them seem alien. “Dawn of the Dead” is set in a Monroeville, PA shopping mall, where a number of survivors of the zombie apocalypse have barricaded themselves from the undead hordes. Of course, a mass slaughter of the zombies still inside is required first — an explosion of violence being a necessary prelude to any consumerist binge. But once our survivors have finished their purge, they go a little crazy: it’s like living in this mall and having the run of it is as good as living in paradise. They go nuts playing arcade games, stocking up on the mall’s seemingly bottomless reserves of food and candy — who cares if those reserves are actually finite or if no one can ever go outside again? It can’t last, of course. The end of the world has rarely been less a tragedy and more a farce.

11. “Deep Red” (Dario Argento, 1975)
Dario Argento didn’t create the giallo genre, that honor goes to Mario Bava, but he perfected it with 1975’s “Deep Red,” often referred to as the greatest giallo of all-time. The film kicks off with a psychic who sense the dark thoughts of a murderer in the audience, one who later targets and kills her. David Hemmings stars as a pianist who witnesses the murder, which draws him into a dark mystery that puts his life at risk. Argento employs many of the genre’s signature trades, a black-gloved, knife-wielding killer; deliciously over the top death sequences; twists, turns, and false reveals; and a wonderfully warped backstory that eventually reveals the killer’s identity. Argento would soon gain international acclaim with 1977’s “Suspiria,” but “Deep Red” remains a thrilling murder mystery and Argento’s very best.

10. “Night of the Living Dead” (George Romero, 1968)
George Romero’s subversive independent black-and-white film is a classic of horror and zombie lore, almost single-handedly inventing the modern zombie. Made for peanuts, the special effects are simple and sparse and the actors non-professional – the film’s grittiness works in its favor, giving it a raw realism that’s all-the-more disturbing. Romero has said that the role of Ben wasn’t written for a black actor, and that any perceived racial commentary in the film was coincidental. However, one can’t ignore the symbolism in Duane Jones’ casting — at the time, a very rare heroic role for a black actor in a film surrounded by white actors — against the backdrop of a racially-charged America undergoing significant social change, as a result of the Civil Rights Movement. Race is never a spoken issue in the film, but Romero’s casting choice opened it up to various interpretations and analyses, especially its incredibly bleak, unforgettable ending. The film spawned several sequels, and remakes, notably a 1990 reboot that starred Tony Todd playing the role of Ben.

9. “Alien” (Ridley Scott, 1979)
You can survive “Alien,” but you can never truly escape it — and not just because Ridley Scott will probably never stop making sequels and/or prequels. “Alien” has drifted so far from its origins since its violent birth nearly 40 years ago that it can be difficult to remember how terrifying the original film is, so here’s a reminder: USCSS Nostromo and its crew wake up early from hypersleep after receiving a distress signal. John Hurt meets a not-so-friendly creature called a facehugger. Said creature gives birth to something even worse that kills everyone onboard the Nostromo not named Ellen Ripley. In space no one can hear you scream, but those of us on earth aren’t so lucky.

8. “The Thing” (John Carpenter, 1982)
John Carpenter creates paranoia, fear, and isolation in “The Thing” with an intensity few filmmakers have ever matched. When Antarctic researchers cross paths with an alien life form with the ability to imitates other life forms, mistrust and terror is built shot by shot until it explodes. The practical effects and creature design are some of the best in film history. A film that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go.

7. “Eyes Without a Face” (Georges Franju, 1960)
Fairy tales can often tap into the same primal fears as horror films: fears of rejection, loneliness, aging, the loss of beauty. In Georges Franju’s telling of a plastic surgeon father obsessed with saving his daughter’s looks — her face was disfigured in an accident — “Eyes Without a Face” is a horror movie in the guise of a twisted fairy tale, right down to its tinkly, child-like Maurice Jarre score. The father’s only solution is a face transplant: which means killing women so he can steal their faces. But his daughter’s body inevitably rejects the skin grafts. There’s so much at work here: the idea that a loss of beauty is the same as death itself (the father has held a funeral for his daughter and he keeps her hidden away from the world) and that beauty is worth killing for (with lab attendant Alida Valli as the “huntsman” archetype in this cockeyed Snow White story, going out and abducting young women). “Eyes Without a Face” says that the ultimate sadness is when happiness itself becomes inequity: that in order to gain something for yourself the only solution is to take from another.

6. “Psycho” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
“Psycho” is practically the anno domini of cinema — there’s a before and an after, in which nothing has ever been the same. Perhaps all to today’s collective hand-wringing about “what’s a film? and what’s TV?” goes back to “Psycho,” which Hitchcock shot with the crew of his TV show “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” the Paramount logo at the beginning bearing the grainy lines of TV interlace as an in-joke affectation. Who cares about the medium? It’s the vision that matters — and Hitchcock proved with “Psycho” how impossible it would be for all his many imitators to capture his style. For all the scares and shocks — and that shower scene — it’s the humor that sticks with you in Psycho: the “oh, my God” moment when Norman subtly freaks out as Marion Crane’s car briefly stops sinking into the swamp, the sheriff’s wife recalling how she picked out Mrs. Bates’s burial dress (“periwinkle blue”), the “come at me” challenge to believe the pseudoscientific nonsense the psychiatrist spouts at the end to try to “explain” everything that’s happened — when it’s clear no explanation could ever suffice. There are some things in life that are just like that, and “Psycho” is Hitchcock’s cinematic smirk at our futile attempts to make sense of the senseless.

5. “Halloween” (John Carpenter, 1978)
There were plenty of horror movies before John Carpenter’s iconic slasher debuted in 1978, but “Halloween” found the perfect formula to transform the spooky holiday into an unforgettable one. With a pulsing theme, the perfect Final Girl in Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode, and boogeyman who can’t seem to die, “Halloween” changed the genre forever. After inexplicably murdering his older sister on Halloween when he was just six, Michael Myers has spent most of his life in an asylum, but on a fateful Halloween night in 1978, he returns home to Haddonfield for a murderous rampage that terrorizes Laurie and her friends. With his disfigured face hidden behind a ghoulish white mask, Myers stalks and stabs his way through the film, impervious to both bullets and blows. Though Carpenter would technically kill him off in 1980’s “Halloween II,” Myers proved so popular he resurrected once more in 1988 to spawn an entire franchise still beloved by horror fans.

4. “The Exorcist” (William Friedkin, 1973)
Nearly half a century after its release, “The Exorcist” remains one of the scariest movies ever made for one reason — there is a primal discomfort from the contrast between an innocent young girl and the demon possessing her soul. Linda Blair’s seminal performance as 12-year-old Regan, whose head twists around and spews vomit as she unleashes disturbing laughter and unfiltered vulgarities, embodies the idea that nothing is sacred. Even the prospects of a Bbible-toting Max von Sydow doesn’t guarantee that everything will turn out rosy for poor Regan and her family. Friedkin, who was hardly exclusive to the horror genre, approaches William Peter Blatty’s novel with the same sophistication he brought to innumerable other genres at the height of his career. One of the most profitable movies in history, “The Exorcist” gave birth to has birthed several sequels and a television series, but none of them have matched the clarity with which the original unravels the mythology of upper-middle-class America with in such profound, disturbing moments so credible that even Friedkin came out of the experience as a true believer. Decades later, his exorcism documentary “The Devil and Father Amorth,” about the inspiration for the character in the movie, proved just how much this seminal achievement continues to haunt its maker — and generations of moviegoers as well.

3. “Rosemary’s Baby” (Roman Polanski, 1968)
Unsettling from the moment Mia Farrow starts singing over those haunting opening credits, Roman Polanski’s masterpiece digs its claws into you and leaves as ghastly a mark as it does on Rosemary herself. Evil isn’t an unknowable entity in this still-timely tale of a woman being gaslit by her husband and neighbors; it’s the Satanist next door. Pregnancy is stressful enough when there isn’t a coven of witches chanting in the night, and it’s made doubly distressing by poor Rosemary’s suspicions that they’ve made a pact with Lucifer involving her unborn child. So cerebral in its approach to psychological horror that it deserves a PhD, “Rosemary’s Baby” has only grown more uncomfortable with time — and not just because we know more about Polanski now than we did 50 years ago.

2. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
The 1970’s changed the horror genre forever, and Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was the catalyst. A group of friends stumble upon a literal house of horrors in Texas, filled with a deranged family of cannibals led by one of horror’s most terrifying villains, Leatherface, clad in a mask stitched together from human skin. By escaping the clutches of the chain saw-wielding Leatherface, Sally became horror’s first Final Girl, a survivor who emerges from a chrysalis of terror to become a blood-soaked angel of vengeance. Although Final Girls have undergone several empowering transformations over the years, the trope remains one of horror’s greatest feminist accomplishments. Like J.R.R. Tolkein’s Éowyn, who defiantly declares “I am no man” before slaying the seemingly indestructible Lord of the Nazgûl, Final Girls have destroyed some of horror’s biggest boogeymen, thanks to the path paved by Hooper’s Sally.

1. “The Shining” (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
The fault lies not in the ghosts that haunt us but in ourselves. Wouldn’t Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) have ended up going down his psychotic path in “The Shining” no matter what? When we first meet him, he’s already been involved in an incident of domestic abuse with his son. Nicholson certainly plays Jack like he’s demented from almost the very beginning — cue chills: “You see? It’s alright. He saw it on the television.” “The Shining” has a certain dream logic to it, much like that of Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” nine years later — it suggests everything you fear but dismiss may actually be true. That dread in the pit of your stomach isn’t lying. If your instinct is telling you that your husband may try to kill you and your son, there’s probably a very good reason for that instinct. Denial is necessary a lot of times just to get through life, to make it through each dayn— but horror movies always invariably show that denial is also what may kill you. It certainly almost kills Wendy and Danny in “The Shining,” but they wake up and change and see the reality of their situation without making any more excuses, and so they get to live. A lot of us don’t — marching blindly through life so rigidly we might as well be frozen in the snow, doomed to keep repeating our mistakes over and over again like we really have always been the caretaker after all.

I 've seen about 85 of those. An interesting list, makes me want to come up with my own....

[mae]

In honor of the movie that's listed twice on that list:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJgRPnH43XU

[dnemec]

Thanks for that list! It never ceases to amaze me when I find one on these lists that I have never heard of. Glad that Freaks is on there - I loved that movie! But there are some on there I just have to question.

[mae]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feLo5dq_hMY

[fernandito]

Watched the Korean film The Wailing last night. A tad too long and occasionally too all over the place tone wise, but those moments of dread throughout really stick with you and those final 20 minutes are magisterial.