Top 10 Horror Films of All Time
(Note: This was meant to come out at or a little before Halloween… but hey, why can’t we celebrate horror cinema whenever we’d like?)
Needless to say in order to condense what the title of this article requires, it’s a task akin to pulling one’s teeth – wisdom teeth, specifically. How does one narrow down a list of ONLY ten great films apart of the horror genre, or films that project those feelings and moods that inspire terror, dread, grab-your-lover-by-the-arm motions, and sometimes yells and (to those in a feisty mood) talk at the screen?
It can only be so subjective, especially if one has seen a lot of horror films (and I’m not THE Biggest Fan Ever, but I’ve seen my share of good stuff and crap over the years, old and new), that these are the horror films that had a big impact on me, as a viewer, as a writer, as someone that likes to be scared but also likes to go BACK to being scared by these particular films. Naturally, after it’s done, I’ll list another ten films without description that are also must-see-great-KEEP-EM-SCARED flicks.
Oh, and technically there are 11 titles. Cause it’s my list and I don’t like to follow rules such as ten little films…
10) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)
Oh what a tangled web the world of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is. It may all be sane in the focus of a madman, or it may just all take place in a crazy world. We see this story in the context of a guy telling a story to his friend or someone on a bench- following the sight of a ‘spirit’, perhaps, drifting by, a woman in a white dress who is in a complete daze.
The story, filmed in 1919, is that of what we would assume is Dr. Caligari, who in a town that could easily be called a geometrical nightmare (all those shapes and curves!), goes to a fair with his own exhibit: a Somnambulist, a person who has been asleep for quite a long time and is just about to be awoken. The question he’s asked is right to the point, and the response is too: “When will I die” “Tomorrow at dawn.” This is not just a cryptic message, we see, as people start to be killed by a mysterious murderer, brought on (or just directly because of) the doctor and his Somnambulust.
Despite the imitations, and despite (or in spite) or those who would dare to be inspired by the work (Tim Burton springs to mind without a flinch, and Shutter Island of course), it stands tall as a mammoth work – surprising since it’s only 70 minutes long – by creating its own view of humanity and the world, of the way a civilization and houses and roads and places can or should or would ever look, and giving its own characters a mood of dread and the Gothic. If you ever need to drag someone to show them how to get “fantastical” with a set, this is it.
Robert Wiene, along with being a competent storyteller, is just a superb director of his actors in these sets. While it would be a little much for me to go on and on about how glorious the staging is within these seemingly un-navigable roads, and how the walls sometimes seem to be closing in or giving an extra edge that you only get in a nightmare, its important to note how well the actors come off here. It’s because of them, as much as Wiene and his crew that one will remember Dr. Caligari long after it ends. One such example is just seeing Conrad Veidt, as the somnambulist, awaken the first time in front of the audience – it’s so chilling and gradual that it draws one in completely, and looking in Cesare’s eyes becomes all the more frightening. In fact, it’s hard to tell which actor gives off the more horrifying aura: the scientist (Krauss, with a great crazy head of hair and catalog of evil facial expressions) or Veidt’s cool demeanor.
Watch it in the dark, and hopefully not alone.
9) Cat People (1942)
Director Jacques Tourner and producer Val Lewton’s first team-up (they would later do I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and the follow-up The Curse of the Cat People), they were independent producer/director people who knew that horror needed a good shot in the arm – and what is in the dark, creeping up around you, behind you, everywhere, would do just the trick
It hit me stronger once it ended how superlative Cat People comes off. It’s got an obvious story, a short one in fact, the kind that if it was written out in just pure fiction instead of a screenplay it would be no longer than 20 pages and made almost in total mind for one of those 40s horror serials. And at a little over 70 minutes, the story never then overstays its welcome. What ends up really remarkable, and ultimately memorable even in its B-movie form, is going completely beneath what’s supposed to scare us and get to the psychological goodies.
I was very affected by the control director Jacques Tourner and his crew had with the mood. This story, and its characters, depend on it to really move us with what’s going on. In making it an early kind of noir, more so perhaps lending to Gothic films of the silent era as opposed to monster movies of the 30s, the filmmakers get inside the head of its main character, and then it becomes really the point of view of many key scenes (a woman walking down a street, or alone at a swimming pool, make for classic set pieces).
8) Night of the Living Dead (1968)
I’ve been reading a book about the making of this film recently, and it made me fall in love with it all over. It’s the original and on some level it can’t be beat for its originality; it’s like when the Rolling Stones first hit things off with Jumping Jack Flash and that was it fr rock and roll – so many after would go for it, make their own greatness, but it’s the first and, at its core, most elemental.
George Romero and company made a film that takes the vampire myth – the director freely admits to borrowing from the novel I Am Legend – and changing them to flesh-eaters, as it would be something much more visceral. It’s a horror film about systems breaking down really, perhaps the first of its kind to address it in a group dynamic. And it wasn’t afraid to make it real by giving us real people; the actors aren’t all professionals, but some had training, and Duane Jones as Ben, though not “written” for a black actor, is really the only one that could’ve pulled it off with such humility. We know why he’s mad at the situation he’s in – we would be too.
Race, class, power, and, as Romero put the whole “zombie” concept, revolution, all in a story filled with gruesome deaths, REAL scares (the opening cemetery scene is a knock-out), and it takes its time to build up to the WHAMMY moments that knock you down; by the last ten minutes, you’ll hopefully, if you are locked into it, be little slabs of jelly.
7) John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)
This is another film I just saw recently again, and on a big screen (yowzers!) What makes John Carpenter’s remake so great and hold up over so many years INSANELY well are these things: the pacing is steadfast, not too slow, not too fast (it gets quickened when the shit hits the fan, but other times it’s more deliberate, gliding through hallways, camera patiently seeing the action unfold), the make-up and special effects are still some of the most groundbreaking and SCARY in horror movies – these things still make me jump, wince, need-something-to-hold-on-
I don’t know if ALL the characters are fully fleshed out – the one black guy that isn’t Keith David doesn’t say much and I guess is the guy out of the group that is just “Aw shit”-Faced fella in this bunch – but there’s enough there to make it so that when trust breaks down, everything breaks down…. till that blood test. Moody Ennio Morricone music – some of his least “show-offy”, not that his other scores are in anyway lessor for doing it, but for this director they synch up just right for Carpenter’s “carpet” effect with scoring (it’s good to have it, but it works best when you almost forget it’s there), claustrophobic sets, and did I mention the fucking special effects? Rob Bottin and, for his one tragic-dog scene, Stan Winston, make some seriously warped creatures.
“You gotta be f****g kidding me,” one of the crew says when seeing this head-crab thing. That’s being subtle about it!
6) The Blair Witch Project & REC (1999/2008)
I’m grouping these two movies together because, frankly, when I think of the ‘found footage’ horror movie, these are the two ones that are essential viewing and have cemented themselves in my brain as how to do them well. Both films have characters under pressure, though in Blair Witch it’s almost like the first “mumblecore” movie (characters going about, no firm “script” but scenarios they have to play out to the best of their abilities – and you could’ve fooled me that they did NOT have a script when first seeing it 14 years ago), where EVERYTHING is in the dark.
The woods themselves are the creepiest serial killer imaginable, and the ‘things’ or whomever that are coming after these poor intrepid filmmakers are more sinister precisely because we never see them. It’s a concept you, admittedly, either buy into or don’t (and oddly enough upon original release, there were not one but TWO big horror films that made huge waves across the world, this and The Sixth Sense, and somehow, this won over for me). That it’s all shot the way it is, with grainy 16mm film and low-grade camcorder technology, ups a certain artistic experimental glee to the proceedings. By the time Heather Donahue is crying into the camera, we understand: we might not have made it that far.
[REC] (by Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza) is just as daring, and throws new media into the mix. Like Blair Witch, it’s about how we make stories out of things, only this time it’s a “Real Time” report that a female news reporter goes after at a building, where a sickness has occurred… that is actually a zombie/infestation.
Later remade as the tepid Quarantine and spawning two sequels, the Spanish 2008 film REC is chock-a-block with intense, you-can’t-stop-this-crazy-train scares, and even puts in some mythology near the end (maybe not the greatest twist, but it helps to elevate this into something that fans can talk about – and it doesn’t lead to uninspired non-sequels like Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2). The filmmakers have a lot of fun in the process, and their film is grim, unrelenting, and it shakes you up in the format; the way to see it, too, is actually on a laptop or computer monitor for the first time. It may play different if it’s in a cinema, but on a laptop the ‘News as it Happens’ approach has extra UMPH. Great gore and effects, and bucket-loads of claustrophobia on the side. If you pair up these two films, well, if you have a heart condition, you have been warned…
5) The Exorcist (1973)
Alright, let’s just be boring and say that The Exorcist is still f***ing chilling to the bone. Shots that William Friedkin designed from paintings (like the shot of Max von Sydow’s Father coming to the house in silhouette and seeing the lone light beaming out from the bedroom window), and taking from some “based on a true story” stuff from writer William Peter Blatty that the director shoots like a documentary is what sells it for me, for us, for the world. It could be that after years of parodies like in the Scary Movie movies that the effect of seeing a little girl spewing green puke and rancid curses in the voice or 70 year old chain smoker Mercedes McCambridge isn’t scary as it used to be.
But the fun of the Exorcist, and the dread, is that Friedkin doesn’t back down from taking this seriously, and with an intensity that is unshakable. The acting is so naturalistic, yet still the actors giving screen performances (and it’s people like Ellen Burstyn and von Sydow and Lee J. Cobb, you can’t go wrong there), and there is a bit of mythology too – in maybe the only slightly over-long sequence at the beginning where the older Father goes about old ruins in Iraq to find… spooky things… as they say, the devil’s in the details. And this is still the film to beat when it comes to stories of demonic possession, by far.
4) Psycho (1960)
Um, should I explain this one? Sort of a given, no? It’s like saying Shakespeare’s Macbeth/Hamlet is the greatest blah-blah. Here, let the Master give you a tour for this one:
3) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
The impact of seeing this, even on a small TV screen in my bedroom, at the probably too-tender young age of 12 has never left me. Like Friedkin’s film, Tobe Hooper’s gift and intelligence with his film, and what elevates it as grungy, awfully brutal art, is that he doesn’t back away from showing us these ‘things’ – the house where Leatherface and his meat-eating freak-show of a family live at under the guise of a dad that serves BBQ a town over, is filled with decay and rot and weird skeletons.
There’s one sequence in fact that just has a girl falling into a room in this house where she and a boy wander to – cause it’s one of ‘those’ horror films after all, with supposedly dumb kids wandering where they shouldn’t, only these are at least moderately smarter and nicer, if no less fatalistic, than the kids in 80’s slashers – and Hooper just shows us this room, almost for a good five minutes of screen time. By the time the Wiley Leatherface shows up it is almost, just *almost* a relief… till the hanging on the meat hook comes around.
This is a master’s class in atmosphere; originally Hooper, for some odd reason, wanted to get a PG rating (!) for the film. And while it’s R is not unearned, it doesn’t have nearly as much blood as one might expect, or would think if one sees one of the turgid remakes (I only saw the 2003 film and it left a bad taste not unlike from the Grandpa in this movie’s underwear). He trusts that his audience won’t like everything they see, and that’s the kicker: this is the perpetually “feel-bad” horror film, yet unlike a latter-day movie like Saw, this is one where we do care about what will happen to this girl, her wheelchair-bound brother (annoying as he may be), and there’s even a sliver, just a hint, at some social satire with this van of Texas hippies coming upon the backwoods: the deep-fried Texas cannibal holocaust version of Deliverance.
2) Dawn of the Dead (1979)
MUST HAVE NEW I-PHONE! GRAWR!
When you want brutal, look no further, but when you also want to see perhaps the greatest of all comic-book movies not based on a comic-book, it’s in George Romero’s original take on his continuing mythology. It’s not just one of the towering horror films, or horror comedies (what will a poor dead fellow do when the escalator starts?!) but one of the great sequels, more ambitious and ass-kicking than its predecessor, with a filmmaker more confident and technically proficient with his abilities.
Romero didn’t originally want to do *any* sequel to his original ‘Night’, but after a visit by some friends to a soon-to-open mall nearby his hometown of Pittsburgh, it struck a chord as to who would be coming here – and what so much consumerism in one place would mean. “Why do they come here?” one of the four survivors that happens upon this mall swarming with these flesh-eaters asks another. “This meant something to them. Instinct, maybe. This was an important part of their lives,” he responds.
I don’t think necessarily Romero meant to show the film as any sort of ‘This is what will happen!” type of social horror thing. It’s more about, this is where we are at NOW, and in that sense, though broader and a whole LOT bloodier, it holds a place right next to a film like Network as one of the magnificent satires of its time and place, and as much about what the public is like. Romero acts as both pessimist and optimist in this world though; past all the chopped limbs, exploding heads (oh yeah!), Tom Savini stunt and make-up and intestines ripped apart, what holds up the film for me is seeing these four characters come to grip with the horror they’ve made for themselves, holding up in this “paradise” of a mall.
Balls-to-the-wall horror, social horror, and some genuine paranoid horror stuff (note to self, never try and fire a gun at a single zombie when in a dark room full of electrical wiring and pipes), and plenty of rock and roll attitude, this is a personal favorite and the most entertaining horror film of its time. And the Goblin music soundtrack… yummy.
1) The Shining (1980)
It’s a mad genius director like Stanley Kubrick taking material from a artist-cum-hack writer like Stephen King and casting a somewhat controversial choice in iconoclast Jack Nicholson (well, controversial to King, who wanted Jon Voight for Jack Torrence), and you got yourself a bonafide slow-burn masterpiece or terrors, Lloyd!
This is a film to watch at least every other year or so, different sequences and set-pieces become scarier or a little worn over time, and it’s like revisiting an epic piece of music that chills you to the bone and reminds you that so much more horror can come from inside yourself, or your perception of world around you, and what you do with it, than ghosts and goblins opening up kitchen doors.
It’s also the kind of horror film, like a few others on the list, that if you don’t dig it I can understand. Kubrick isn’t a director to paint in TOO many subtleties (they are there, if you just look for them in a scene, what he can capture in those 10,000 takes he does per scene), and The Shining ultimately is almost more a surrealist nightmare than a traditional ghost-story, and for whatever liberties Kubrick took – for a *cinematic experience*, not a novelistic one, it works wholly. By the time the last reel comes around and that hedge maze gets put to work as a location, if you’re in the grip of this thing, it can still shake you up. I should also mention Shelley Duvall, who amid all of her screams and sobs is so great here, for all of the torture that Kubrick put her through as a director (check out the Making of Shining video on YouYube and you’ll see what I mean, heh, GO CHECK IT OUT!)
And that bathroom scene with the woman in the tub…. ::shrug:::
And now, 10 more: The Descent, Dracula (1931), Bride of Frankenstein, Halloween (1978), From Dusk till Dawn, Suspiria, Rosemary’s Baby, Horror of Dracula, The Cabin in the Woods, and The Birds
