Our Eight Favorite Horror Movies

Generating this list was hard. If I were trying to come up with a list of my eight favorite westerns or musicals, I’d be working with genres with which I have little experience. As a result, I could cobble together a set of eight merely by selecting movies that met two criteria: I’d seen it and it didn’t suck too bad.

With horror I have to be a bit more selective. I’ve reviewed hundreds of these things, and I’ve seen a few more in the years before I started writing reviews. With that many to pick from, the selections have to be good. When filling the slots, I also kept an eye out for pictures that actually had some influence on other movies I enjoyed.

When working on the list, I swiftly had to abandon standards that might have made the process easier. For example, in general I don’t care for strident misogyny in movies. But try to make that a standard for selecting good horror movies. Go on, I dare you. The Thing was the only example I could think of that didn’t have a single screaming woman anywhere in the picture (due at least in part to the fact that the cast includes no female characters).

Most other elements that would otherwise make for a good movie-going experience likewise fail in this genre. Smart horror movies often end up dull. Expensive horror movies seem to be in constant danger of turning into clothes horses for their own special effects. Classic horror movies are often too rough around the edges or too stifled by production codes. Newer horror movies tend to rely on sophisticated booga-booga shots rather than plot or character.

So I ended up mostly just going with my gut. The following eight pictures are things I’ve seen dozens of times and could watch dozens more. The only real criteria I used were variety and entertainment value. Oh, and I looked for movies that were at least a little bit genuinely scary.

 

The Thing – John Carpenter’s version of John W. Campbell Jr’s “Who Goes There?” is a darn near perfect horror movie. It blends physical and psychological terror in an even balance unmatched before or since. The script is good and the acting up to the task. And best of all, it features some of the best uses to which mechanical effects have ever been put. This is truly an if-you-see-only-one-horror-movie moment.

Dawn of the Dead – In addition to making this list, this picture is also in the “eight favorite movies” line-up. Working with a medium-sized budget and a cast of unknowns, George Romero produces a picture that is simultaneously thought-provoking and viscerally entertaining. Though it lacks the sophisticated scare tactics employed by later zombie pictures (including the 2004 remake), it has more than enough brains to make up for the technical rough spots. On top of the zombies from Night of the Living Dead we also get the ultimate survivalist fantasy: what if you had the world all to yourself? Setting this scenario in a shopping mall was pure late-70s genius that still stands up decades later.

Creepshow – Speaking of George Romero, here he teams up with Stephen King to movie-ize the kind of scares made famous by EC horror comics. Though I came along after the forces of truth and justice (also known as the forces of ignorance and prudery) did away with Bill Gaines, I still grew up with a considerable affection for the horror comics published by mainstream Marvel and DC. King’s tales lend themselves well to this sub-genre, oddly enough working better than most of the movies based more directly on his novels and short stories. The bracket and transitions also help to preserve the comic book look and feel without making it so intrusive that the “graphic novel” thing takes over the entire movie. Overall this is a solid blend of style and storytelling.

Halloween – The classics never die. If I’m being honest, I have to admit that part of me wishes this movie had never been made. The picture itself is excellent, but it helped spawn so many other dreadful movies (sequels, remakes and legions of rip-off nieces and nephews) that I sometimes think that even for a movie this good the price we paid was too high. Still, now that we’ve got it we might as well watch it. John Carpenter really does make excellent use of the whole Boogeyman thing. It’s easy to see just how good it is by comparing it to the imitators that never come close to pulling it off.

Freaks – Though the so-called “golden age” produced no end of really good horror movies (especially Universal classics such as Dracula and Frankenstein), few are as bone-chilling as this oft-censored offering from Todd Browning. His use of actual side show performers got the picture banned when it came out for being too shocking and slammed in subsequent decades for exploiting people with physical deformities. The latter criticism is unjustified, given that the picture is about how so-called “freaks” are actually people with normal human emotions such as love, sadness and rage. Gripping stuff.

The Exorcist 3 – The original has a moment or two. I’m crazy about the opening sequence in Iraq, and of course “The Face” is a legendary moment in horror cinema. Unfortunately a lot of the rest of the picture is gross mistreatment – sometimes sexual – of a pubescent girl. No such “ick” moments invade the third installment in the series. After the second one turned into such a wretched flop, the studio brass finally just let author William Peter Blatty do what he wanted with number three. The result has a weak spot or two, but it also has some of the most chilling moments ever included in a mainstream horror picture.

Hellraiser – I like Clive Barker’s writing, and this is the picture that first introduced me to his unique brand of horror. The cenobites are innovative both in how they find you and what they do to you once they get their hooks into you. At the time Barker was a newbie director, and his inexperience certainly shows. But the rough patches are more than smoothed over by the creepy blend of fictional theology, imaginative violence and ambiguous sexuality. Too bad most of the sequels sucked eggs.

A Nightmare on Elm Street – Speaking of movies that shouldn’t have had as many sequels as they did, here’s another one that started out creepy and then changed to crappy. One of the big keys that made the original so much better than most of the sequels is that Freddy doesn’t do a lot of talking here. As a result, he’s a scary dream monster in an atmospheric horror picture, not a wise-cracking comic book character in just another teenager-eating slasher flick. Just about everyone involved – from director Wes Craven to actor Robert Englund (though obviously not newcomer Johnny Depp) – hits a career high at just the right moment.