If cinema is like dreaming with our eyes open, then horror movies could rightly be viewed as waking nightmares: an opportunity to confront our unconscious fears directly — most often as entertainment, but sometimes with the express purpose of terrifying ourselves. On-screen frights take every form imaginable, from iconic boogeymen like Frankenstein and Freddy Krueger to real-world threats, be it psychosis, contagion or off-putting in-laws (“Get Out,” anyone?).
In compiling a list of the genre’s highest achievements, we considered it all, from highbrow to lo-fi, pure schlock to Hitchcock (whose “Psycho” topped our “Greatest Films” list, but not this one), reaching back to the advent of cinema. Well, maybe not quite the beginning. According to legend, 1895 audiences recoiled in fear when they saw the train pull into La Ciotat station in the Lumière brothers’ early actuality film. We don’t count that as horror, though it certainly demonstrated the medium’s capacity to startle people.
The question “What is horror?” echoed at the center of every discussion, with long hours spent arguing over where the boundaries lie for a genre that has launched many a career. How often has one of these waking nightmares upset you enough to resurface in your dreams? If we’ve done our job, you’ll want to join the debate.
Repulsion (1965)
Take practically any other horror movie from the 1960s, and a character like Catherine Deneuve’s Carol — absent-minded, blond, a foreign-born manicurist living alone in London — would be dead meat. In Roman Polanski’s second feature, however, she’s not a disposable victim, but the film’s subject and a point of uneasy identification: a woman persecuted by the big city who retreats into a squalid little apartment. But even that space doesn’t feel safe, as the walls crack, ooze and eventually reach out to grope her. The first jolt comes not quite an hour in, as Carol shuts the closet door and, for a split second, sees the shadow of a man reflected in its mirror. Later, she imagines someone assaulting her in bed. If these visions can’t be trusted, then what of the murders she commits? The slow unraveling of her mind set the template for so many hallucinatory imitators, from “The Babadook” to “Black Swan.” Great horror plays with our minds, which is often a scary enough place to be already.
Suspiria (1977)
Dario Argento’s garishly overripe bat-house thriller is an occult head trip whose pleasures are all on the surface. It’s schlock — the giallo film gone grade-Z psychedelic. The story is so threadbare it would have been sent back for a rewrite by Roger Corman, yet that’s part of the film’s aesthetic, because it allows “Suspiria” to be a movie that’s all style, all psychotic-Italian-horror-movie frosting: the sets that still dazzle with their Satan-gone-Liberace decor, the 14-note evil-music-box theme by Goblin that can play in your head for decades. Jessica Harper is the American ballet student who transfers to a German dance academy that turns out to be a front for a coven of witches. In its lurid way, the matriarchal premise was decades ahead of its time.
The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
Guillermo del Toro’s dark supernatural fable about a young boy meeting a ghost at an orphanage at the end of the Spanish Civil War is a prime example of the director’s love of fantasy as a form of escape. Directing in a time of personal turbulence, del Toro paints life at the orphanage as both futile and distressing, represented by the large, undetonated bomb that has half penetrated the ground in the middle of the courtyard. Ultimately, the haunting points to the secret, unfinished business of a sinister chapter of the orphanage’s history. An allegory for the destruction of war, “The Devil’s Backbone” elevates complex material by juxtaposing its harsh realities with a child’s more limited point of view, à la “Come and See,” as the boy can’t comprehend the horrors he’s experiencing.
The Haunting (1963)
If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re holding the right hand in the dark, you might be perennially possessed by Robert Wise’s “The Haunting.” A slow-burn adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel “The Haunting of Hill House,” the goosebump-inducing ghost story brings together a group of strangers participating in a paranormal experiment at a diabolical New England estate of Gothic tinges. In many ways, Wise’s perennial is everything the dreadful 1999 remake is not: sophisticatedly restrained and free of cheap jump scares. It prickles the skin with creaky doors, sinister whispers and a dexterous handle on shadow and light. Led by an unforgettably nervy Julie Harris as the mentally frail Eleanor and ahead of its time in featuring a queer character with Claire Bloom’s Theo (whose rapport with Eleanor has a sensual undercurrent), “The Haunting” is among the pinnacles of supernatural horror.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Philip Kaufman’s ingenious, lushly crafted remake of the 1956 B-movie classic updates the original’s alien-vegetable-from-hell visual effects, but it flips the metaphor of the premise. The setting is now San Francisco in the heady late ’70s — a city of freaks and obsessives. What was once a sci-fi nightmare of ’50s conformity gone amok is now a horrific takeoff on the fruitcake orthodoxy of life in the post-counterculture world. Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams are vibrant as the token normies trying to hold on to their souls. Kaufman stages it all with a resounding tension (you won’t believe the dog with a man’s face), building to one of the most chilling finales in horror-film history: Sutherland holding up his accusatory hand, his mouth agape, as we realize that no one is safe.
Dead Alive (Braindead) (1991)
Building on the cartoonish creativity of Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” movies, Kiwi director Peter Jackson spent much of the ’80s testing just how far he could push the medium from his remote outpost in New Zealand. Alien-takeover satire “Bad Taste” was an acquired taste, while puppet musical “Meet the Feebles” perverted the Muppets. But it was swollen-tongue-in-peeling-cheek splatter movie “Dead Alive” that really proved his potential — even if no one could have predicted he would go on to make anything as massive or mainstream as the “Lord of the Rings” movies. (“The Frighteners” felt much more his speed.) “Dead Alive” is gleefully over-the-top, from the cursed stop-motion Sumatran rat-monkey whose bite sets all the mayhem in motion to the film’s excessive Grand Guignol finale, in which stuttering star Timothy Balme’s newly orphaned wimp heroically lifts a lawn mower and covers the floors and walls with zombie guts.
Event Horizon (1997)
Centered on a rescue team sent to retrieve a possessed spaceship from the brink of what just might be hell, Paul W.S. Anderson’s haunted-house-in-space story delivers more jump scares across its tight 97-minute running time than one might deem medically advisable. Not that the movie is the least bit concerned with actual science, bending physics to the breaking point in favor of delirious oh-no-they-didn’t thrills. Early on, a traumatic recording of the previous crew tearing themselves apart teases the horrors ahead. Anderson draws from a bonanza of influences — including “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Hellraiser” and “Solaris” — to imagine a wickedly designed series of corridors and chambers that grow increasingly hostile as Sam Neill’s once-rational character turns against the others. Even with his eyes ripped out and skin lacerated (a look not unlike Neill covered in crosses for “In the Mouth of Madness”), the demented doctor keeps coming back.
Cat People (1942)
Suggestion, ambiguity and a few artfully designed shadows prove infinitely more effective than showing the title creature in the first of producer Val Lewton’s classy low-budget horror movies for RKO Pictures. Bypassing the relatively tame charms of a co-worker (Jane Randolph), New York bachelor Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) falls for an alluring foreigner, Serbian-born Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), in the film noir-styled spook show. Right from the start, there are warning signs that courting this particular femme fatale might be trickier than Oliver anticipated: Cats freak out in her presence. Come to find, Irena turns into a leopard when aroused. But rather than show the transformation (à la Universal’s “The Wolf Man”), director Jacques Tourneur implies it, resulting in scenes — like a wonderful swimming pool set-piece — where strategic lighting and sound design are what make us squirm. The script introduces an arcane superstition, but our imagination does most of the work.
The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (2011)
In 2009, when the Dutch Guignol prankster Tom Six directed “The Human Centipede (First Sequence),” a movie about a lunatic German physician who kidnaps a trio of tourists and carries out a mad “experiment” to conjoin them, mouth to anus, it felt as if the cinema of sick horror had gone as far as it could go. But that was just the appetizer. The sequel makes the earlier film look restrained, from its seething protagonist — a parking attendant played with mentally damaged sweat-soaked conviction by Laurence R. Harvey — to the now 12 characters he traps in an East London garage so that he can conjoin them and create the ultimate in barf-bag mutilation. At this point you may be asking: Why does “The Human Centipede 2” count as forceful horror rather than unspeakable junk? The answer is that Tom Six very cannily taps not just our disgust but our voyeurism, our desire to see the unseeable.
Dead of Night (1945)
Like Saki’s most satisfying short stories, horror movies are hardest to shake when they pack a “sting in the tail” — a reveal or twist that catches us off guard, scarring our psyche in the process. The work of four directors across five clever episodes, plus a dream-within-a-dream framing device, “Dead of Night” packs more than its share of rug-yanking surprises. In subsequent decades, “The Twilight Zone” and “Tales From the Crypt” would try to do the same on television (while “Creepshow” and the “V/H/S” series extended the tradition in theaters), but this upscale British anthology set the bar with its supernatural conceits and downbeat endings. Imitators are lucky to score one good segment, whereas this film works as a whole, its two most effective chapters involving an antique mirror, possessed by the abusive side of its previous owner, and an unusually powerful ventriloquist’s dummy, who forces his owner’s hand … to murder.
A Page of Madness (1926)
Over the decades, horror subgenres have become codified through repetition, scaring and surprising in the way they bend the rules set by earlier iterations. So what do you do with a total outlier like the asylum-set Japanese silent “A Page of Madness,” which inspired no imitators and follows no formula? Lost for nearly half a century, this jagged black-and-white portrayal of mental illness — specifically, of an ex-sailor trying to reconnect with his wife, who’d been driven insane by his long absences — is an early avant-garde experiment from Teinosuke Kinugasa (“Gate of Hell”). With its delirious lapses into daydream and nightmare, the tricky-to-follow film can feel like watching the cursed tape from “Ringu,” stimulating the subconscious while defying easy interpretation. Decades before “Shock Corridor” or “Titicut Follies,” it puts audiences in the place of its patients, challenging them to lose their minds just a little in the process.
Horror of Dracula (1958)
Of the countless films inspired by Bram Stoker’s novel, few can match the image of Christopher Lee, his fangs flaring, his engorged eyes bulging out of his head, rivulets of blood streaking from his mouth. He’s abominable. The follow-up to Hammer Film Productions’ 1957 “The Curse of Frankenstein,” the second pairing of director Terence Fisher and screenwriter Jimmy Sangster is arguably their finest. The movie takes plentiful liberties with the original text, tweaked to maximize scares (and deaths) while eliminating some of the Count’s most outlandish powers. Peter Cushing is a driven, no-nonsense Dr. Van Helsing, venerable vampire hunter, this time capable of the occasional stunt. The cinematography by Jack Asher (another Hammer stalwart) is lush and colorful, matching the film’s heaving, lurid horror. But it’s Lee’s Dracula who drives the picture’s evil heart, even though he has no dialogue after the first 15 minutes. He’s a feral beast — an elegant, hideous monstrosity.
Blood Feast (1963)
How do you invent the splatter movie? Herschell Gordon Lewis, the deliriously crude schlockmeister who did that very thing, had no real goal but to turn a profit. He made his films for drive-in theaters (you might call them sub-grindhouse), and with the shrewdness of a semi-underground exploitation P.T. Barnum he figured: the more crazy-extreme the better. So he cobbled together this solemnly preposterous no-budget thriller about an Egyptian caterer named Fuad Ramses, who needs bodies for his religious sacrifices, and voilà! — the splatter film was born, and the slasher movie too. What’s remarkable about “Blood Feast” is that as chintzy and artless as it is, you can feel the power of cinematic creation at work in it. Using cut-up mannequin parts, blood that looked like it came out of a ketchup bottle and the cheesiest organ score this side of a daytime soap, Lewis tapped into something that was out there in the collective moviegoing id: a voyeuristic bloodlust that would change popular culture.
The Vanishing (Spoorloos) (1988)
Sometimes, you can’t be entirely sure you’re watching a horror movie until the very last scene. Director George Sluizer’s nonlinear Euro thriller gets progressively darker as it goes along. It opens with a woman (Johanna ter Steege) going missing at a highway rest stop, then skips forward to find her boyfriend Rex (Gene Bervoets) still tormented by her disappearance. Audiences don’t have to wonder long who’s responsible, as the culprit (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) reaches out to Rex and, with sociopathic calm, offers to show him what happened. Only then does Sluizer reveal what the woman went through, as Rex inexorably submits himself to her same fate, while audiences discover all the ways it might have gone differently … and maybe still could. In a perverse twist on the old adage, by wanting to learn about the past, Rex’s character winds up doomed to repeat it.
Village of the Damned (1960)
The 1950s nearly overdid it with alien-invasion hysteria. At the top of the next decade came the most disturbing example yet — a deathly serious adaptation of John Wyndham’s “The Midwich Cuckoos” — since it implicated the children. A cosmic disruption knocks out an entire town, resulting in a dozen unexplained pregnancies. A few years later, the hyperintelligent blond spawn use mind control to manipulate others and protect their own. The film’s signature glowing-eyes effect was judged so intense that director Wolf Rilla was obliged to remove it for the U.K. release. Meanwhile, U.S. audiences watched the frosty, Hitler Youth-like horde stare down one unlucky citizen, forcing him to commit suicide by shotgun. It’s since become a horror movie cliché that kids can’t be trusted, but at the time, they were thought innocent and sacred — an assumption this film shattered, effectively giving birth to the demon-child subgenre.
Re-Animator (1985)
These days, practically all genre cinema is remixing or otherwise reacting to what has come before. That might make it tricky to fully appreciate how gleefully arch Stuart Gordon’s approach to horror was when he made low-cost, “more is more” body-horror pictures “Re-Animator” and “From Beyond” back-to-back in the mid-’80s. Casting Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton and roughly the same ensemble on both projects, Gordon punched up a classic story by pulp legend H. P. Lovecraft for his Frankenstein-esque mad-scientist debut. By that point, Gordon had been goofing around onstage for more than a decade with his Chicago-based Organic Theater Company, whose “Warp” trilogy flopped on Broadway. He intended “Re-Animator” to be more serious, but couldn’t resist his more gore-giastic impulses: serum that glowed green like coolant, a disembodied head (with a mind of its own) and buckets of stage blood.
Dead Ringers (1988)
There’s no doubt that David Cronenberg’s brilliantly executed thriller, starring Jeremy Irons as swanky identical-twin gynecologists who specialize in treating women with fertility problems, taps into a kind of anatomical paranoia. Yet the real horror lies in everything that connects, and disrupts, the minds of these two brothers. Elliot, the lady-killer, will seduce one of his patients, like the actress Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold), then pass her on to his shy brother, Beverly, who she first thinks is Elliot. It’s a recipe for disaster (not to mention an ethics violation worthy of incarceration), and Cronenberg merges a fixation on birth and feminine sexuality, featuring gynecological tools out of a bad acid trip, with an unrelieved sense of the worst things that men can imagine and do.
Source: https://variety.com/lists/best-horror-movies-of-all-time/dead-ringers-1988-2/