100 Greatest Horror Films of All Time ( Slant Magazine)
The common claim of the horror film is that it allows us to vicariously play with our fear of death. Inarguable, really, but that's also too easy, as one doesn't have to look too far into a genre often preoccupied with offering simulations of death to conclude that the genre in question is about death. That's akin to saying that all an apple ever really symbolizes is an apple, and that symbols and subtexts essentially don't exist. A more interesting question: Why do we flock to films that revel in what is, in all likelihood, our greatest fear? And why is death our greatest fear?
A startling commonality emerges if you look over the following films in short succession that's revelatory of the entire horror genre: These works aren't about the fear of dying, but the fear of dying alone, a subtlety that cuts to the bone of our fear of death anyway—of a life unlived. There's an explicit current of self-loathing running through this amazing collection of films. What are Norman Bates and Jack Torrance besides eerily all-too-human monsters? Failures. Success also ultimately eludes Leatherface, as well as the socially stunted lost souls of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse. What is the imposing creature of Nosferatu? He makes for quite the presence, but his hungers ultimately lead him to oblivion.
So many films, particularly American, tell us that we can be whatever we want to be, and that people who don't achieve their desired self-actualization are freaks. The horror film says: Wait Jack, it ain't that easy. This genre resents platitude (you can count the happy endings among these films on one hand), but the good horror film usually isn't cynical, as it insists on the humanity that's inextinguishable even by severe atrocity. Which is to say there's hope, and catharsis, offered by the horror film. It tells us bruised romantics that we're all in this together, thus offering evidence that we may not be as alone as we may think. Chuck Bowen
A startling commonality emerges if you look over the following films in short succession that's revelatory of the entire horror genre: These works aren't about the fear of dying, but the fear of dying alone, a subtlety that cuts to the bone of our fear of death anyway—of a life unlived. There's an explicit current of self-loathing running through this amazing collection of films. What are Norman Bates and Jack Torrance besides eerily all-too-human monsters? Failures. Success also ultimately eludes Leatherface, as well as the socially stunted lost souls of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse. What is the imposing creature of Nosferatu? He makes for quite the presence, but his hungers ultimately lead him to oblivion.
So many films, particularly American, tell us that we can be whatever we want to be, and that people who don't achieve their desired self-actualization are freaks. The horror film says: Wait Jack, it ain't that easy. This genre resents platitude (you can count the happy endings among these films on one hand), but the good horror film usually isn't cynical, as it insists on the humanity that's inextinguishable even by severe atrocity. Which is to say there's hope, and catharsis, offered by the horror film. It tells us bruised romantics that we're all in this together, thus offering evidence that we may not be as alone as we may think. Chuck Bowen
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- DirectorTobe HooperStarsMarilyn BurnsEdwin NealAllen DanzigerFive friends head out to rural Texas to visit the grave of a grandfather. On the way they stumble across what appears to be a deserted house, only to discover something sinister within. Something armed with a chainsaw.Opening in utter darkness illuminated by sudden, dreadful flashes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre begins with a police report describing a violated corpse as "a grisly work of art," a term that also applies perfectly to Tobe Hooper's legendary grindhouse masterpiece. A rough-hewn American Gothic canvas, the film charts the trajectory of a batch of youngsters from a clammy van to the dangling hooks of an abbatoir run by a cannibalistic clan. Materializing in the middle of the horror genre's most transgressive decade, this is a cacophony of piercing shrieks, metallic clanks, and roaring machinery that looks back to Psycho's view of ingrown monsters even as it outdoes the older film in sheer, visceral impact. Snapshot of Vietnam-era outrage? Indictment of all-devouring capitalism? Blood-spattered redneck Theater of Cruelty? Yes to all, plus the screen's most grueling portrait of mushrooming terror. Decades of sequels, remakes, and imitators can't take away its scabrous power. Croce
- DirectorAlfred HitchcockStarsAnthony PerkinsJanet LeighVera MilesA secretary on the run for embezzlement takes refuge at a secluded California motel owned by a repressed man and his overbearing mother.From the moment Marion Crane checks out of the Bates Motel a little earlier than expected, the shock of the new resounds throughout Alfred Hitchcock's genre game-changer. In an era dominated by Technicolor terrors and gothic grotesqueries, Hitchcock shot the film in unvarnished black and white and situated his sanguinary shudders squarely in the present day. But beyond even Hitch's impeccable craftsmanship, what positions Psycho as an ever-renewable resource, a wellspring for academic and amateur discussion whose bottom likely will never be scraped by the rusty buckets of critical inquiry, is the intricate skein of metaphors, both verbal and visual, that runs like a scarlet thread throughout the film. Wilkins
- DirectorRoman PolanskiStarsMia FarrowJohn CassavetesRuth GordonA young couple trying for a baby moves into an aging, ornate apartment building on Central Park West, where they find themselves surrounded by peculiar neighbors."This is no dream!" Mia Farrow's Rosemary screams, while being set upon by the devil, "This is really happening!" It's this permeating sense of plausibility that makes Roman Polanski's 1968 masterpiece so chilling. It's not just the naturalism of the performances (of Farrow, of John Cassavetes, even of Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer as the doddering old Castevets), but of the scenario. Released pre-Roe v. Wade, Rosemary's Baby entered into a culture where the feminine body was tantamount to the maternal body. The film radically disrupts this narrative, depicting a bourgeois upward-mobility that can only be assured through pacts with Lucifer, and offering a stern imagistic reply (in that shot of a tiny claw stretched out toward its mother) to the pro-life line that all children are gifts from God. Semley
- DirectorBrian De PalmaStarsSissy SpacekPiper LaurieAmy IrvingCarrie White, a shy, friendless teenage girl who is sheltered by her domineering, religious mother, unleashes her telekinetic powers after being humiliated by her classmates at her senior prom.The definitive tale of a person who summons the courage to try and engage with the world around her, only to be terribly, terribly rebuffed. One of the most influential of American horror movies, Carrie was also director Brian De Palma's most emotionally direct film up to that point, as it broke through the belabored gimmickry of his earlier work to pave the way for an astonishing career that remains under-heralded. Over 30 years after its release, Carrie still best encapsulates, more than any other movie before or since, one of the prevailing subtexts of nearly every horror film: the fear that your private, most horrible thoughts about yourself are entirely, inescapably true. Bowen
- DirectorDario ArgentoStarsJessica HarperStefania CasiniFlavio BucciAn American newcomer to a prestigious German ballet academy comes to realize that the school is a front for something sinister amid a series of grisly murders.Dario Argento's breathtakingly artificial horror film owes as much to Georges Méliès and German Expressionism as it does to Jean Cocteau and Grimm fairy tales, its opening, Golbin-scored "once upon a time" a giddy anticipation of the plethora of deliriously affected horrors yet to come. Suggesting a Technicolor version of Fritz Lang's Secret Beyond the Door, the film thrusts Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) into the ostentatiously colored confines of a ballet Academy that may as well represent the deepest recesses of her subconscious, from which the once skittish ballerina emerges noticeably freed. Snow White has left the building. Gonzalez
- DirectorStanley KubrickStarsJack NicholsonShelley DuvallDanny LloydA family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter, where a sinister presence influences the father into violence. At the same time, his psychic son sees horrifying forebodings from both the past and the future.By 1980, Stanley Kubrick had made a practice of adopting genres, pushing their perceived limitations, and often perfecting the formula. Despite its base predilections, The Shining proved to be a risky experiment. A formally bold, elliptically structured translation of Stephen King's pop novel, the film revels in horror tropes, raising as many questions as it answers while encoding its text with an added degree of discomfort by playing logic against itself and heightening the primal fear in character and audience alike. Simply one classic, unsettling sequence after another, the film is at once the paradigm of modern horror and the most audacious employment of genre the cinema has ever known. Cronk
- DirectorTod BrowningStarsWallace FordLeila HyamsOlga BaclanovaA circus' beautiful trapeze artist Cleopatra agrees to marry Hans the leader of side-show performers, but Hans' deformed friends discover that she is only marrying him for his inheritance. So they seek revenge.In many ways, Tod Browning's Freaks is the antithesis of the typical horror film, which isn't to suggest that its rain-soaked climax is anything less than scary as hell. A clear-eyed portrait of a traveling circus's community of disabled performers, the film is most famous for effectively ending director Tod Browning's career, an outcome that ironically underscores his film's unflinching humanitarianism. In defense of their own, the film's disfigured characters are capable of great horrors, but it's those who see them as less than human—audiences included—to whom the title of this masterpiece most scathingly refers. Humanick
- DirectorGeorge A. RomeroStarsDuane JonesJudith O'DeaKarl HardmanA ragtag group of Pennsylvanians barricade themselves in an old farmhouse to remain safe from a horde of flesh-eating ghouls that are ravaging the Northeast of the United States.Roger Ebert memorably described the effect George A. Romero's charter zombie film had on a group of Saturday matinee kids, wrote that their accelerating awareness that the film wasn't going to play nice—and was, in fact, going to plunge a garden trowel deep into Mommy's chest cavity—drove them to hysterical tears. Perhaps they subconsciously recognized in the political and social subtext of the film the many ways adults were failing them, how upheavals were destroying all illusions of social stasis, how the arms race was pushing the Doomsday Clock toward midnight, how the nuclear family unit was on its deathbed. Or maybe Romero's pitch-black, impressionistic, gory depiction of the living under siege by the dead simply was and remains among the scariest goddamned movies ever made. Henderson
- DirectorJohn CarpenterStarsKurt RussellWilford BrimleyKeith DavidA research team in Antarctica is hunted by a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of its victims.Infection transfers seamlessly between organisms in John Carpenter's exploration of paranoia, making detection impossible until it's too late. So how does one survive such an onslaught when your body might already be rotting from the inside out? Kurt Russell and company grapple with this mortal question throughout, and their reactions run the gauntlet, from violent to compassionate and beyond. The film's extreme icy setting only forces these roughnecks closer together in confined interiors, where the air is just warm enough for a supernatural host to take root and never let go. It's a perfect cinematic Petri dish for our greatest fears to flourish and evolve. Heath
- DirectorDavid CronenbergStarsJeff GoldblumGeena DavisJohn GetzA brilliant but eccentric scientist begins to transform into a giant man/fly hybrid after one of his experiments goes horribly wrong.A beautifully poignant tale of love and heartbreak cocooned in the outré trappings of its maker's distinctive splatter-punk aesthetic, The Fly represents the apotheosis of David Cronenberg's early obsessions. The story of scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), who, in a fit of drunken jealousy, tests his new teleporter only to find himself fused with a housefly, it's a testament to the elastic properties of genre as metaphor. Cronenberg reappropriates the original's schlocky damsel-in-distress plot as the delivery system for a thoughtful, witty, and literate consideration of his pet preoccupations: sex, death, technology, biology. It's tragedy pitched at an operatic scale, body horror at its most visceral, pop philosophy at its most insightful. Insect politics for a blockbuster age. Das
- DirectorNicolas RoegStarsJulie ChristieDonald SutherlandHilary MasonA married couple grieving the recent death of their young daughter are in Venice when they encounter two elderly sisters, one of whom is psychic and brings a warning from beyond.Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now posits a question asked by many a horror film: Are things what they seem or not what they seem? But this moody tone poem provides a unique, disarmingly paradoxical answer that suggests both and neither are true. In many ways, this film about a husband and wife whose daughter dies in a tragic accident concerns the horror of mourning. A ghost story of sorts, it mines terror from grief and guilt, emotions that hang over the couple's voyage to Italy like a thick fog. Roeg draws us into his characters' anxious headspaces with recurring visual motifs—water, the color red, Christian iconography—and fluid editing techniques, evoking a temporally unencumbered sense of atmosphere that's more nightmare than dream, and from which there feels like there's no escape. Hunt
- DirectorDavid CronenbergStarsJames WoodsDebbie HarrySonja SmitsA programmer at a Toronto TV station that specializes in adult entertainment searches for the producers of a dangerous and bizarre broadcast."Just torture and murder: No character, no plot—I think it's the future." Predicting an entire cottage industry of torture porn, not to mention presaging an untold number of contemporary corporate conspiracies and government-surveillance controversies, David Cronenberg's Videodrome fused a generation's nascent fascination with the entertainment value of the perverse into a hallucinatory hybrid horror-thriller with vast cinematic and social intent. When James Woods's underground television producer stumbles upon a sadistic network transmission, his attempts to co-opt the program leads to a procession of double-crosses and waking nightmares, the implications of which the character can never escape and which cinema has yet to reconcile. Cronk
- DirectorCarl Theodor DreyerStarsJulian WestMaurice SchutzRena MandelA drifter obsessed with the supernatural stumbles upon an inn where a severely ill adolescent girl is slowly becoming a vampire.Even for Carl Theodor Dreyer, a film like Vampyr seems like a miracle, as much a result of a singular vision as happenstance. The disorienting effect of the film's fluctuating perspectives and supernatural imagery is only heightened by a distinct schism rendered between sight and sound, itself common to many productions rooted in the transition from silents to talkies, and an all too appropriate quality for a work in which events unfold in separate, sometimes overlapping realms. Everyman Allan Grey's journey into a nightmarish wonderland is a mesmerizing (and trailblazing) distillation of genre tropes, where shadowy forms permeate deep into the psyche to carry out their ethereal menace. Humanick
- DirectorRoman PolanskiStarsCatherine DeneuveIan HendryJohn FraserA withdrawn manicurist who disapproves of her sister's boyfriend sinks into depression and experiences horrific visions of violence.Repulsion remains a thrilling experiment in sang-Freud, its two-way prism of audio-visual embellishments intuiting a woman's fractured psyche and catching super-cool flashes of the audience's perverse cine-desires. A searing, clockwork synergy, the lucid sights and sounds of Carole's world are conduits and conspirators of madness and pleasure. Roman Polanski's triumph is a weird, tense depolarization of space, a chipping away at psychological walls so that fear and desire become synonymous. The film is like a slyly misanthropic theme-park ride for the sane—a satiric, disturbing approximation of insanity by way of a master-class mosaic of aural detail and visual sleights of hand. Gonzalez
- DirectorWilliam FriedkinStarsEllen BurstynMax von SydowLinda BlairWhen a mysterious entity possesses a young girl, her mother seeks the help of two Catholic priests to save her life.The "demon seed" film cycle, which gained purchase roughly around 1956's The Bad Seed and on through Rosemary's Baby and The Omen in the 1960s and '70s, seemed to represent the repressed anxiety of post-baby boomer America. In The Exorcist, this terror gurgles up at the speed of projectile pea soup. In William Friedkin's proto-blockbuster, the anxiety toward that most parochial duty of reproduction rears its ugly head and spins it around 360 degrees. The slow-burning subtlety of Rosemary's Baby (or even The Omen) explodes in a gnarly spew of abject terror: a dovetailing of simmering suspense and exploitative shock encompassing most of what the horror film—as a genre, as a mode—is capable of accomplishing. Semley
- DirectorF.W. MurnauStarsMax SchreckAlexander GranachGustav von WangenheimVampire Count Orlok expresses interest in a new residence and real estate agent Hutter's wife.There's an ephemeral quality to this classic vampire story's images that haunts the mind, like the disease of Count Orlock's very presence, long after the final credits have rolled: the cargo ship stacked with coffins, a silhouetted Max Schreck climbing a set of stairs, the enigmatic final sequence that blurs the line between heroism and sadism. There are also the striking point-of-view shots that illustrate the experiential qualities of horror cinema, a technique whose influence has been felt in films as disparate as Halloween, Rear Window, and Cloverfield. As F.W. Murnau allows his sense realism to rub eerily against his most ostentatiously expressionistic flourishes, even the most mundane occurrences exude a feeling of the otherworldly. Hunt
- DirectorGeorges FranjuStarsPierre BrasseurAlida ValliJuliette MaynielA surgeon causes an accident which leaves his daughter disfigured and goes to extreme lengths to give her a new face.Robin Wood, that great analyzer of screen frissons, once noted that "terrible buildings" were the recurring theme in the films of Georges Franju, and perhaps none is more terrible than the mansion-clinic presided over by Prof. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) in the French surrealist's masterpiece Eyes Without a Face. As the surgeon operates on captive young women in hopes of restoring the face of his disfigured daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), an unforgettable portrait of subverted normalcy emerges—one where angelic doves and grisly hounds, obsessive love and appalling violence, the gruesome and the poetic, are all perpetually leaking into one another. Croce
- DirectorKiyoshi KurosawaStarsHaruhiko KatôKumiko AsôKoyukiTwo groups of people discover evidence that suggests spirits may be trying to invade the human world through the Internet.Empowered by the rise of the Internet culture, spirits draw humans away from one another, entombing them in a realm of their own private obsessions. Does this even count as a metaphor anymore? Until the recent The Bling Ring, Pulse is the closest a film has come to fully capturing the paradoxical and deceptively empowering trap of online societies that allow you to indulge an illusion of socialization alone in the privacy of your own home. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's ferocious act of despairing protest is also one of cinema's most unnerving and suggestive ghost stories. Bowen
- DirectorDario ArgentoStarsDavid HemmingsDaria NicolodiGabriele LaviaA jazz pianist and a wisecracking journalist are pulled into a complex web of mystery after the former witnesses the brutal murder of a psychic.Seeing is disbelieving in Dario Argento's quintessential giallo, a visually extravagant treatise on the persistent misprision of vision. Focusing once again on an artistically inclined protagonist who has seen too much, but doesn't quite know what he knows, Deep Red limns a world in which the work of art exudes an aura of malevolence, where deviance and psychopathology spring from thwarted inclinations and stifled lives. Alongside Argento's elaborate murder set pieces, staged with all the baroque flair of a Verdi opera, the other innovation here is strictly sonic: Whenever Goblin's propulsive synth-laden score kicks in like a demented lullaby, you know something bloody is about to go down. Wilkins
- DirectorMichael PowellStarsKarlheinz BöhmAnna MasseyMoira ShearerA young man murders women, using a movie camera to film their dying expressions of terror."The great ones feel alone all the time." Serial killer and director Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm) is referring to the isolation felt by legendary actors, but he might as well be talking about the legendary murderers as well. Michael Powell's incredibly frightening film explores the mind of this disturbed voyeur by merging the camera's perspective with that of Mark's. Eventually you can't separate one from the other. It makes for an incredibly twisted exercise in formalism and point of view, where most of the bloody kill shots are left entirely up to the imagination. Heath
- DirectorAndrzej ZulawskiStarsIsabelle AdjaniSam NeillMargit CarstensenA woman starts exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior after asking her husband for a divorce. Suspicions of infidelity soon give way to something much more sinister.The dissolution of a married couple takes on a manically supernatural air in Andrzej Żuławski's Possession, a hypnotic and sickly hysterical monster movie that pathologizes everything from sex and monogamy to identity and subjectivity to biology and the preternatural. Essentially, nothing in the film is sacred, effectively heightening its deliberate descent into madness. Still, as crazy as this fever dream gets, its emotional core remains intact, thanks to unbelievably committed performances by Sam Neil and especially Isabelle Adjani, as well as by Żuławski's persistence of *beep* vision. This may be the most surreal and disturbing relationship drama the movies have ever given us. Hunt
- DirectorTakashi MiikeStarsRyô IshibashiEihi ShiinaTetsu SawakiA widower has his film producer friend organize a fake audition as a means of helping him find a new girlfriend, but the woman he selects is not who she appears to be.For all its reputation as a stomach-churning endurance test awaiting eager new horror fans, it's worth reminding audiences that Takashi Miike's Audition is a masterpiece because the filmmaker brilliantly plumbs the poignant human desperation that often fuels both the romantic comedy and the horror film. Aoyama's (Ryo Ishibashi) ridiculous self-absorbed quest to find a mate isn't merely parodied as a symptom of social objectification, as it might have been in an Eli Roth production. You feel for Aoyama, and you somehow even feel for Asami (Eihi Shiina), the vengeful wraith who must assert her own form of deranged romantic self-actualization, regardless of the collateral damage. Bowen
- DirectorRidley ScottStarsSigourney WeaverTom SkerrittJohn HurtAfter investigating a mysterious transmission of unknown origin, the crew of a commercial spacecraft encounters a deadly lifeform.A film whose shadow looms darkly over subsequent decades of horror and sci-fi, Ridley Scott's Alien is a master class in the evocation of escalating dread. Made forever distinctive by H.R. Giger's visual rendering of psychosexual horror and biomechanical hellscapes, not to mention the unusual foregrounding of working-class and female characters, Alien is still—at its core—a prototypical haunted-house picture. It just happens to be one of the most artful, flawlessly executed examples of that type, the rationed-out shocks underscored by groundbreaking creature effects, jarring sound design, and the talents of a magnificent ensemble. It's the stuff of primordial nightmare, mapping the infinite reaches of human anxiety—about everything from sexuality to technology—into two agonizing hours. Das
- DirectorAlfred HitchcockStarsRod TaylorTippi HedrenJessica TandyA wealthy San Francisco socialite pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people.Every Alfred Hitchcock film could be said to be about the world's fragile appearance of balance, and how complete chaos seems to be just a shot away. And arguably no Hitchcock film expresses that sense of breakdown in as wide and vivid a scale as The Birds, his stunning vision of nature itself turning ferociously against humanity. Startling with peculiarly Antonioniesque scenes of would-be romantic couple Melanie (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch (Rod Taylor) complacently pecking at each other around Bodega Bay, the narrative takes a radical turn and becomes nothing less than the prototype for future zombie apocalypses. Under Hitchcock's mordant gaze, we're all headed toward the precipice with vengeful seagulls tangled in our collective hair. Croce
- DirectorRobin HardyStarsEdward WoodwardChristopher LeeDiane CilentoA puritan police sergeant arrives in a Scottish island village in search of a missing girl, who the pagan locals claim never existed.A film that's become synonymous with British horror, The Wicker Man follows a conservative Christian policeman (Edward Woodward) seeking a missing girl on a Hebridean island inhabited by pagans. The first half has an (intentional) air of the faintly ridiculous about it, embodied equally by Christopher Lee's gloriously campy portrayal of the cult's leader and the life-on-the-island sequences that are Pythonesque in their absurdist look at culture clash. But the film's impish wit and soft, Arcadian glow belie its cruel streak. The gathering clouds of unease building into a shocking third act that's aesthetically and structurally reminiscent of the end of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, possibly the highest praise one can give to the conclusion of a horror film. Das
