Films

The original, unquestionable, undisputed great grandpappy of possession horror, and one hell of a brutally good time, William Friedkin's The Exorcist is not just one of the scariest films ever made it's also one of the most wellconstructed horror movies of all time. The story of demoninhabited Regan, her distraught mother, and the two priests working their religious mojo to save her life holds up to repeat viewings—partially because the horrific set pieces still hold up resoundingly well, and also because the actors create realistic, believable characters who are worthy of our empathy.

The Exorcist is a bit of a safe pick, but then you wrestle with whether any other film on this list is more disturbing, more influential or just plain scarier than this movie, and there simply isn’t one. The film radiates an aura of dread—it feels somehow unclean and tilted, even before all of the possession scenes begin. Segments like the demon face flash on the screen for an eighth of a second, disorienting the viewer and giving you a sense that you can never, ever let your guard down. It worms its way under your skin and then stays there forever. The film constantly wears down any sense of hope that both the audience and the characters might have, making you feel as if there’s no way that this priest (Jason Miller, not particularly strong in his own faith, is going to be able to save the possessed little girl (Linda Blair. Even his eventual victory is a very hollow thing, as later explored by author William Peter Blatty in The Exorcist III. Watching it is an ordeal, even after having seen it multiple times before. The Exorcist is a great film by any definition.

There are lots of scary movies out there, and then there are movies that drop you headfirst into an actual nightmare. Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre opens with a gruesome sight, slows down just a bit for some mildly creepy setup, then dumps five clueless kids into a cannibalistic nightmare that simply doesn't let up until the final credits. For my money, it's one of the purest examples of horror cinema. The movie still creeps me out to this day.

John Carpenter set the bar high by naming his slasher Halloween. Luckily, it's a film that millions of people want to revisit each and every October. This simple yet aggressively suspenseful tale of a plucky babysitter and a masked murderer has been ripped off and remade more times than one can count, but very few films come close to approaching its devious yet classy style of scariness. The ambiguity of resident boogeyman Michael Myers is part of what makes the original Halloween so damn creepy, and it's Carpenter's nervejangling musical score that amplifies the suspense to almost unbearable levels.

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. 

You don't come across too many horror films that create their very own subgenre, but that's pretty much what George A. Romero's original Night of the Living Dead pulled off. The word zombie was around long before 1968 but that was the film that introduced legions of reanimated corpses who wander around in large groups and devour any living human they can get their hands on. The original film remains one of the most influential horror movies ever made, and the sequel is pretty much the Casablanca of zombie cinema.

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 stilltimely 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.

Conduits, canals and cloaca—Ridley Scott’s ode to claustrophobia leaves little room to breathe, cramming its blue collar archetypes through spaces much too small to sustain any sort of sanity, and much too unforgiving to survive. That Alien can also make Space—capital S—in its vastness feel as suffocating as a coffin is a testament to Scott’s control as a (arguably absent from much of his work to follow, including his insistence on ballooning the mythos of this first nearperfect film, as well as to the purity of horror as a cinematic genre. Alien, after all, is tension as narrative, violation as a matter of fact When the crew of the mining spaceship Nostromo is prematurely awakened from cryogenic sleep to attend to a distress call from a seemingly lifeless planetoid, there is no doubt the small cadre of working class grunts and their posh Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm will discover nothing but mounting, otherworldly doom. Things obviously, iconically, go wrong from there, and as the crew understands both what they’ve brought onto their ship and what their fellow crew members are made of—in one case, literally—a hero emerges from the catastrophe Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, the Platonic ideal of the Final Girl who must battle a viscous, phallic grotesque (care of the master of the phallically grotesque, H.R. Giger and a fellow crew member who’s basically a walking vessel for an upsetting amount of seminal fluid. As Ripley crawls through the ship’s steel organs, between dreams—the film begins with the crew wakening, and ends with a return to sleep—Alien evolves into a psychosexual nightmare, an indictment of the inherently masculine act of colonization and a symbolic treatise on the trauma of assault. In Space, no one can hear you scream—because no one is listening.

Jordan Peele’s a natural behind the camera, but Get Out benefits most from its deceptively trim premise, a simplicity which belies rich thematic depth. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya and Rose (Allison Williams go to spend a weekend with her folks in their lavish upstate New York mansion, where they’re throwing the annual Armitage bash with all their friends in attendance. Chris immediately feels out of place; events escalate from there, taking the narrative in a ghastly direction that ultimately ties back to the unsettling sensation of being the other in a room full of people who aren’t like you—and never let you forget it. Put indelicately, Get Out is about being black and surrounded by whites who squeeze your biceps without asking, who fetishize you to your face, who analyze your blackness as if it’s a fashion trend. At best Chris’s ordeal is bizarre and dizzying, the kind of thing he might bitterly chuckle about in retrospect. At worst it’s a setup for such macabre developments as are found in the domain of horror. That’s the finest of lines Peele and Get Out walk without stumbling. The film doles out scariness in intervals, treating fright as a supplement to the inexplicable or the downright creepy. It’s an exercise in tension, where we can presume what’s happening in the Armitage household without necessarily being on the money, and that’s the fun of the film It spaces its revelations carefully, building on each to undercut any hint of a twist, while still catching us off our guard. When we’re exposed to the whole truth of Get Out’s race dynamic, it feels like a gut punch instead of a bombshell.

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Even if you haven’t watched Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, you’ll know of The Shining. You’ll know Jack Nicholson’s (apparently adlibbed Heeeeeeeere’s Johnny and you might even be aware that if you’re handed the keys to room 237 in a hotel, you might want to switch it for another suite. But what if you haven’t? What if you have been snowed up in a mysterious hotel with only hedge animals for company? Well, The Shining follows a man and his family as he takes on the role of winter caretaker at a resort hotel known as The Overlook. Given that this is a Stephen King adaptation (albeit one that that horror author hates so much that he made his own movie, the winter months don’t go well. The Overlook Hotel, it turns out, doesn’t really like people.

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 nineteen 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.

Most of Alfred Hitchcock's films could be described as suspenseful, but it wasn't until this 1960 classic that the legendary filmmaker began dabbling in fullbore horror. Anthony Perkins' amazing performance as mama's boy Norman Bates is only one of this brilliant thriller's big assets, and that nasty jolt of an ending still packs a punch even if you already know what's coming.

The big one. The biggest one, perhaps, though if not, it’s still pretty goddamn big. 57 years after Alfred Hitchcock unleashed Psycho on an unsuspecting moviegoing culture, finding new things to say about it feels like a fool’s errand, but hey We’re fools. Five decades and change is a long time for a movie’s influence to continue reverberating throughout popular culture, but here we are, watching main characters lose their heads in Game of Thrones, their innards in The Walking Dead, or their lives, in less flowery language, in films like Alien, the Alien ripoff Life, and maybe most importantly Scream, the movie that is to contemporary horror what Psycho was to genre movies (and to the movies in total in its day. That’s pretty much the dictionary definition of impact right there (and all without even a single mention of A&E’s Bates Motel. But now we’re talking about Psycho as a curio rather than as a film, and the truth is that Psycho’s impact is the direct consequence of Hitchcock’s mastery as a filmmaker and as a storyteller. Put another way, it’s a great film, one that’s as effective today as it is authoritative You’ve never met a slasher (protoslasher, really like Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins, and no matter how many times the movies try to replicate his persona on screen, they’ll never get it quite right. He is, like Psycho itself, one of a kind.

Home is where the heart is. It’s also where the worst horror lives, hiding just beneath the surface of the perfect family life. A harrowed Toni Collette leads Ari Aster’s very first (! feature film as the mother of a grieving family. The death of her own mother has sent shockwaves through their home and, to keep this review spoilerfree, the future isn’t looking exactly, errr, bright either. 

No disrespect to the classic Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks version of The Thing From Another World from 1951, but John Carpenter’s 1982 reimagining of that story into The Thing is one of cinema’s greatest acts of modernization. In a manner that was mimicked six years later by the remake of The Blob, Carpenter took a thinly veiled Cold War allegory and cloaked it in his taut, atmospheric style, ratcheting up both suspense and the lurid payoff delivered by groundbreaking FX work, while expanding the mythology and capabilities of the titular monster. Every frame is a visual puzzle, as Carpenter’s camera drifts over empty hallways, open door frames and cloaked figures in the arctic air. Who is The Thing, and more contentiously, when and how did they become The Thing? The theories spiral endlessly into dark corners of the internet, as Carpenter’s visual clues and Bill Laner’s script seem to provide the audience with most—but never quite all—of the information they need to be certain. Rob Bottin delivers what may be the literal zenith of practical effects in the history of horror cinema during The Thing’s several transformation scenes, and particularly in the mindblowing sequence featuring the severed head of Norris (Charles Hallahan sprouting legs to become a crablike creature, which attempts to scuttle away. The Thing has become an artifact of bigbudget ’80s horror purity Nextlevel special effects, a mindexpanding mystery, masterful direction and the awesomeness that is Kurt Russell/R.J. MacReady as the cherry on top

In the face of grotesque sequels, lesser prequels and numerous parodies, The Silence of the Lambs still stands as a cinematic work of art among crime dramas and serial killer movies, winning the five gold rings of Oscardom (Best Picture, , Actor, Actress and Screenplay. Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of the murderous Hannibal Lecter especially proves the worth of surrounding one of cinema’s greatest thespians with a stellar supporting team, though Jonathan Demme deftly wields the brush of that talent to bring audiences into the dark, sadistic world of Dr. Lecter while leaving them gasping at the twists and turns of novelist Thomas Harris’ gruesomely wonderful story. As happens with all great films, second and third viewings fail to diminish the ride, but instead reveal even more subtleties of characterization. And Demme’s own style behind the camera makes the closeup world of Silence of the Lambs an unforgettable visual parlor of grotesqueries. —Tim Basham

The classical zombie film was effectively dead by the time 28 Days Later came along in 2002 and completely reanimated the concept. (And yes, we all know that the infected in this film aren’t technically zombies, so please don’t feel that you have to remind us. The definition of zombies is fluid, and always expanding. Here, they’re living rather than dead, poor souls infected by the rage virus that makes them run amok, tearing through whatever living thing they see. It’s a modernization of the same fears that powered Romero’s ghouls—unthinking assailants who will stop at nothing and are now more dangerous than ever because they move at a fullon sprint. It’s hard to overstate how big a quantum leap that mobility was for the zombie genre—the early scenes of 28 Days Later where Jim (Cillian Murphy tries to navigate a deserted London in hospital scrubs, chased by fastmoving zombies, did for this genre what Scream did for the slasher revival, sans the humor. Indeed, 28 days Later is a deadserious horror film, marking a return to seeing these types of creatures as a legitimate, frightening threat. It’s indicative of another trend of the 2000s, which was to reimagine the classic rules of zombie cinema to fit the needs of the film. The Zack Snyder Dawn of the Dead remake replicated a lot of this film’s DNA when it was released two years later, although it marries the concept with the more traditional Romero ghoul. Together, those two movies gave birth to the concept of the 21stcentury serious zombie film. —Jim Vorel

Selfdescribed as a 'New England folk tale' – although it’s more like a fairy tale from hell Robert Eggers’ terrifying period drama follows a Puritan family after they are ejected from their colony. Screaming 'don’t do it' at the screen just doesn’t work as William (Ralph Ineson takes his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie and his five children into the deep, dark woods to survive alone on a farm. It’s not spoiling anything to say that it doesn’t go particularly well. Following Thomasin, the eldest daughter of the family played by Anya Taylor Joy in her first credited role, we witness the tense unraveling of a dysfunctional family faced with the horrific prospect of an outside force staring out at them from the trees.