Mike's Picks for the Best Horror Films of All Time

This is a very long post, the longest I’ve ever made and probably ever will make as a single event. But Halloween is soon upon us and as a post about what I consider to be the best horror films of all time, it is timely and will no longer be relevant after this weekend. So I’ve been writing this all day determined to publish it tonight since I’ll be writing about the origins of Halloween tomorrow.

They’ve been running horror films on all the cable channels, as they always do, all month long. This used to bug the hell out of Dad. He hated horror films and he hated the fact that so many were on all October, couldn’t wait until Halloween so they would end. I felt pretty much the same way. I’ve never been a particular fan of horror movies, but I do like them when they’re good. But they do have to be really good.
 The trend over the past thirty years for slasher films has not appealed to me at all. Not that I’m against gore. But gore for gore’s sake is not good storytelling. Horrible violence is after all a part of life and, as storytellers, we do have an obligation to be honest with our stories. Violence does not bother me at all when it’s done to serve the drama and show how ugly it is. It bothers me a great deal when it’s done just to be tantalizing.

So I don’t like most horror films. I think they’re typically quite lame but I do make exceptions for excellence no matter the genre, and I do appreciate an outstanding horror film when one comes along. There haven’t been very many in my life but, for what it’s worth and in honor of the spirit of Halloween, I now submit what I consider to be the best horror films of all time, in no particular order.


1. The Girl Who Lives Down the Lane - 1976.

Okay, this probably shouldn’t be on a list of the best horror films of all time, but it’s one I like an awful lot and it just happened to be on TCM last night, which is the first time I’ve seen it since it first came out, and this is what triggered the idea to compile my list of the handful of horror films that have truly impressed me. This is early Jodie Foster, the same year she made huge waves playing the 12 year old prostitute in "Taxi Driver" and, going to the opposite extreme, delighted audiences in the original Disney comedy "Freaky Friday." In this film, she plays a very disturbed 13 year old harboring a deadly secret. Though to all appearances, she appears a very normal and happy child living in this modest suburban home with her parents, the fact is her parents have long since passed away and she is determined that no one will know this, that she will stay in her house and not be sent to an orphanage. But the neighbors start wondering. How come Dad never seems to be home? Her excuses only go so far before they start getting more inquisitive. When they get too inquisitive and stumble upon the graves in the cellar, she dispatches them.

At first they die accidentally and she just adds another grave to the cellar. Then after a while, she starts "helping" the accidents along until finally she’s just outright murdering whoever gets too close. This was a stunningly chilling performance from a 13 year old and between this film and "Taxi Driver," everyone knew a major actress was emerging. Foster had been in the business since she was five but her major breakout came with this triple-header in 1976 and she’s never looked back. I too remember seeing this film right out of film school and being chilled to the bone by this powerful understated portrayal of evil in a young girl.


2. Psycho - 1960

This is the film that belongs #1 on the list and, of course, any list of outstanding horror films must begin with the master of horror and suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. Psycho is my personal favorite Hitchcock. It was a landmark film and changed the way horror films were made forever. Before Psycho, the villians in films were always very apparent. Especially when they were killers, you knew there was something very creepy about them long before it was revealed that they were killers. Hitchcock completely turned this dramatic convention on its head. In Psycho, for the first time we were given a boogeyman who was meek and mild, sweet and innocent looking. In fact, this character could be your neighbor. Psycho did something no other film had ever done. It stripped away the security blanket from the audience and gave us a killer we were unable to recognize until it was too late. He also did something else that was totally revolutionary. Almost all the murders in Psycho take place in broad daylight. Horror films had always used the very frightening cover of night for its murders. With Psycho, Hitchcock not only made the killer impossible to recognize, thereby creating waves of anxiety with the audience, but also took away the security of knowing you’d always be safe as long as the sun was out.

There were other "firsts" in Psycho. It was the first film where the actress (Janet Leigh) whom we’re lead to believe is the star, is killed after just 30 minutes. That was a real shock to audiences in 1960. How can you kill your leading lady off in the first act? The way Janet Leigh was killed was also unprecedented. Though the knife never actually touches Janet Leigh’s body, Hitchcock masterfully employs the editing style known as montage to create 80 images in 40 seconds that produced the absolutely convincing illusion that she was being sliced and diced like crazy. So effective was this scene that it produced still another "first": the whole country was afraid to take showers after seeing this film.

But the most effective "first" was the way Hitchcock deceived the audience into thinking that Tony Perkins' mother was the killer and he sustained this deception all the way up until the last few seconds of the climax when the real secret of the film is finally and quite horrifyingly revealed in a shock so intense that the audience was screaming so loud that you couldn’t even hear Vera Miles scream. This ending is now legendary and known to everyone and has been oft copied by many a horror film since. But I had to wait until they invented video and I could finally see the film on VHS in order to hear how beautifully performed Vera Miles scream was in that final moment.

People today have lost their appreciation for this film. Compared to today’s slasher films, the gore is pretty damned tame. What they don’t realize is that so many of the shocks that are so overused in modern horrors all began with Psycho, and have never been topped since. It was one of the rare horror films that actually got nominated for several Oscars. It is ranked by the American Film Institute (AFI) as the #1 horror film of all time and as the 14th greatest film overall of all time.


3. The Birds - 1963

Hitchcock’s follow-up to Psycho is no less masterful but is my second favorite film of his for the simple reason that it created another "first." Now everyone knows that birds are completely harmless creatures. They are never known to attack people. Quite the opposite, they always keep a very safe distance and if anyone goes nears one, they fly away in a flash. Of all the things to fear on earth, birds are certainly near the bottom of the list. This was the challenge Hitchcock had to tackle. He was making a film in which everyone going to see it would know that everything they’re about to see cannot possibly happen in real life. So how the heck is it going to be scary?

Well, not only is it scary, it’s one of the most horrifying films ever made. The "first" that Hitchcock succeeded brilliantly in pulling off is making the whole country afraid of something that nobody is ever afraid of – sweet, innnocent, harmless little birds. In order to create this stunning illusion, he not only had to manipulate some live birds to do things they would never do naturally, but it was a landmark feat of animation in which thousands upon thousands of "movie" birds were drawn and expertly superimposed over the live action to create the absolutely believable illusion of mass attacks and utter mayhem.

And Hitchcock did another "first," one that at the time infuriated both critics and audiences. He made the unprecedented decision not to reveal the mystery at the end of where the birds came from and what to do about them. Instead, the final shot of the film simply shows Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren driving away from this little coastal town which the birds have taken over, happy to get out with their lives as the birds are left to do whatever they’re going to do. Hitchcock had never done this before and perhaps no other horror film had either. There was always a nice revelation "and the killer is!" at the end of every horror film and the villain was always dispatched. Everyone was left bewildered as to why the master would not supply any answers in the end. That’s because they didn’t understand what the film was really about. This was not the typical "man vanquishing evil" story. Hitchcock’s point was that the human race is awfully arrogant in our belief that we’re the king of the hill in all creation, and that all other species of life on earth are inferior and here to do with as we please. Hitchcock’s theme is that, in the grand scheme of things, humans are really quite puny. His message: if even the tiniest and most harmless part of nature were to turn against us, we wouldn’t stand a chance! Unprecedented!

One more thing before closing. I am particularly sentimental towards this film. I first saw it on television when I was in the 8th grade. For years I had had parakeets that lately Mom had to be caring for since I was falling down on the job. Mom finally made me realize it was time to give them away and I reluctantly agreed to do so, though I felt very bad about it. Shortly thereafter, I saw The Birds. I was never so happy to have those birds out of the house than I was that first night after seeing this film.


4. The Others - 2001

This is one of my favorites from the modern school of filmmaking, a terribly chilling and effective ghost story set in an eerie mansion on a fog-laden island in the English Channel in the closing days of World War II, when the Germans still occupy these islands on the French side of the channel. Nicole Kidman, in one of her softest roles, plays the very loving but extremely overprotective mother of two young children who suffer from an incurable disease that makes it deadly for them to be exposed to sunlight. Therefore, she keeps the house completely closed up, blocked off from any natural light. So she’s maintaining a household that is quite gloomy and dark while she awaits her husband, a soldier, to return from the war.

The story opens with a strange looking elderly couple, housekeeper and groundskeeper, both attired in 19th century garb, approaching the mansion and asking for work in exchange for simple room and board. The war has produced many refugees so Kidman takes pity and allows them in but quickly regrets it. All kinds of strange things begin to happen thereafter and it certainly has all the earmarks of a haunting. These two people have brought something very evil into this house, but they always have quite clever excuses whenever Kidman tries to pin them down. With each passing day, there are more and more strange happenings, bumps in the wall, knocks in the night, footsteps on the upper floor, doors opening and closing. The children begin referring to these phenomena as "the others," and claim that there’s a whole family living secretly in this house and that they’ve actually seen them. Kidman scolds them sternly for this, believing they’re intentionally making up stories just to mischievously scare each other. But then she starts seeing strange things herself. One day she is in the music room where all the instruments are covered up as if for winter storage. She spends a few moments looking out the window, then hears the door close and footsteps running down the hall. When she turns around, she is horrifed to see that all the instruments are uncovered now and the room tidied up as if for a performance.

She cannot help but believe that this is a conspiracy on the part of the mysterious housekeeper and her husband to scare her into leaving the house. She investigates but only continues to find more eerie and ghostly things that she cannot explain. The whole thing builds to a shattering and completely surprising climax in which we find out that nothing in this film was what it appeared to be and I defy anyone (who hasn’t been clued in) to watch this film and see this ending coming.

What I loved so much about this film was how it harkened back to old-school film techniques. Master Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar owes a great debt to Hitchcock. There is zero violence or anything approaching explicit gore in this film. Rather, Amenabar brilliantly builds all the suspense and some very genuine scares strictly with the power of suggestion. It’s all bumps in the nights, footsteps in the hallway, doors opening and closing inexplicably. And it gives you genuine creeps every time it happens.

Here’s a clue for anyone who hasn’t seen it: in the first 30 seconds, Amenabar gives you everything you need to know to solve the puzzle. You won’t catch it, of course. But after the film is over, you’ll remember that it was there.


5. The Exorcist - 1973.

No examination of the horror genre is complete without the film that completely reinvented the genre in the mid-1970s, a time when horror films were considered to be irrelevant. The country had been mired in Vietnam for nearly ten years. The world was perceived as falling apart and audiences wanted serious films about social issues, films like The French Connection, Midnight Cowboy, and In the Heat of the Night were the ones that were winning all the box office and awards. Horror films were passe. Another big change was that the country had gone agnostic, the "God Is Dead" movement being at its height, and young people’s idea of nobility was an outright rejection of materialism and all the values of their parents’ generation, and dropping out of society and joining a commune.

It was into this world that The Exorcist was born, a horror film to top all horror films, based on an actual events account of a young girl who becomes possessed by the devil and the efforts of her family and priests to save her. It was a miracle that the film succeeded at all, but to say that it succeeded beyond the wildest expectations would be an understatement. This film came into an agnostic world and became an instant smash with audiences and critics alike. Literally overnight, this film convinced an entire society that had stopped believing in God that there was indeed a devil. Many people leaving the film became convinced that they were possessed themselves. Of course, with a yin there must be a yang. If you believe in the devil, then you must also believe in God, for where else does the devil come from and where else do you turn to find refuge from the dark side?

That is the power of film and that is why I consider this film to not only be one of the greatest horror films of all time, but also one of the greatest films of all time, period. That is why I personally consider film to be the greatest of all the art forms. That is why I became a filmmaker. That is why I yearn to make great films. Great films have the power to change people. Great films have the power to change the world. This film made a very cynical world once again believe that there are powers greater than themselves.

It was based on a novel by William Peter Blatty, who also wrote the screenplay, which in turn was based on an actual exorcism performed on a 13 year old boy in St. Louis by a Jesuit priest in 1949. Of course, the real-life exorcism had no where near the drama that the fictional account presented. In the real account, there was no 360 degree spinning of heads, no levitation of beds, no spitting up of pea soup, the three main scenes that grossed out the 1973 audiences the most and which remained fodder for late night comics for years. And if the film had been just that, it would not have been nearly as effective. Instead director William Friedkin built his case slowly, starting with rats in the attic and developing tension so powerfully that, well before the end, there was nothing but prolonged screaming.

Considered ultra-controversial and ultra-graphic for its time, there was considerable controvery over the illusion of these horrors that 12 year old actress Linda Blair was being subjected to. Actually, the horrors were the result of masterful editing, special effects, and sound effects, winning an Oscar for the latter. Miss Blair was never subjected to any horror at all. Again, this is the power of film. People are bothered by violence in film, not realizing that it’s all fake. People are bothered by sex in film, not realizing that it’s all fake. This is the power of film. It is capable of creating completely believable illusions, and no other art form can make this claim. The Exorcist is a stellar example of the power of film. The Academy thought so - it received ten major nominations, including Best Picture, and is ranked by the AFI as the #3 horror film of all time.


6. The Omen - 1976

I include The Omen not just because I like it but because it’s quite a good companion piece to The Exorcist. As you might guess, The Exorcist spawned a whole industry for the horror genre with many imitations, most of them bad. The Omen was one such imitation, except that The Omen is good. It may not be great, it may not deserve to be called one of the greatest of all time, but it is certainly very well done and superbly entertaining.

I choose it because it delivered something rather unique that The Exorcist did not. The Exorcist may have been very effective in making a non-believing world believe again in the devil. But if you really don’t believe in the devil, then The Exorcist is nothing more than an elaborately staged science-fiction, entertaining but hardly frightening. If it’s not real to you, then it’s not frightening. The Omen diverged from The Exorcist by centering its frights around very real things. You did not have to believe in the prophesies from Revelations in order to be scared by The Omen. You did not have to believe in the Anti-Christ, let alone that this small boy in the film was the Anti-Christ, in order to be scared by the film. What made this film so damned frightening was that all you had to believe was that there are real people out there who do believe in the anti-Christ, who do believe in Revelations, and are willing to do any number of ghastly things to see their beliefs come alive.

So we have this story of the Ambassador to the Court of St. James (Gregory Peck) whose wife (Lee Remick) gives birth to this child under extraordinarily mysterious circumstances (which they of course are not aware of until later.) When all sorts of strange things start happening, there’s nothing supernatural about it at all. When the nanny hangs herself at the boy’s birthday party, when the attack dogs are set loose on Gregory Peck when he investigates an ancient cemetery, when the photographer who’s about to uncover the whole conspiracy gets beheaded by a plate of falling glass, when the psychotic housekeeper is willing to kill anyone, including Lee Remick, in order to protect the secret that this child is the very incarnation of Satan, none of this is supernatural. These horrors are as real as you can get. These people are as real as they come. They may be motivated by supernatural beliefs, but their actions are real.

This is what made The Omen different from The Exorcist; this is what made it so scary. Director Richard Donner skillfully builds the story to keep it solidly planted in reality. Gregory Peck plays a character who refuses to buy into this nonsense that his son could possibly be the anti-Christ. And we the audience believe what Peck believes. This is all superstitious nonsense. There’s nothing supernatural going on here, just a bunch of dangerous psychotics who do believe the child is Satan and do horrifying things because of this. The story builds with great intensity until Peck - and us! - are finally forced to accept the reality of the story. The child really is Satan. The child must be killed.

This is a unique film because it blends both supernatural and realistic story elements seamlessly. Though I started this by stating that this is not necessarily a great film, there are those who think it is. Besides being a huge box office smash, the AFI has ranked it #81 on the list of best horror films. The Chicago Film Critics liked it even more, ranking it as #31, and the Bravo cable channel even more at #16.


7. Night of the Living Dead - 1968

It is a generally accepted rule in the film industry that there are certain kinds of films that need not be well done in order to make money, as there is a built-in audience for these kinds of films. These are all those sophomoric sexploitation comedies and, of course, horror films. These are genres that appeal to people viscerally. For the most part, if a comedy is funny, audiences don’t care about production value. The same for horror films – if they make you scream, they don’t care about lousy performances, bad scripts, or cheesy effects. That is why so many comedies and horror films are made on the super cheap. The formula is well established. Keep the budget low enough and there’s no way they can’t make money. That is also why so many beginning directors get their earliest jobs making these super low budget, super tacky comedies and horror films.

But every now and then, one of these super low budget horror films are made by exceptional new talents and turn out spectacularly well. I have chosen the original 1968 production of Night of the Living Dead as an example of what is probably the best of all the super low budget horror films that turned out to be great.

Made on a shoestring in director George Romero’s neighborhood in rural Pittsburg, there is no question that the then 26 year filmmaker already had all the right instincts for pushing the primal buttons. The story begins with a couple visiting a graveyard and the young man is not showing the respect he should be, much to the young lady’s chagrin. When a very sickly looking man comes into their midst, the girl comes to his aid, only to be attacked. The boy tries to defend her but is killed by the goon. She runs off and takes refuge in an abandoned farmhouse where she finds others who have done the same. They inform her of the day’s developments. Some strange phenomenon is taking place in which the newly dead are being reanimated and seeking out living hosts that they can kill and feed off.

There seem to be only three weapons that work against these creatures: fire, speed, and a gunshot to the head. But there are thousands of them and since each person a zombie kills instantly becomes a zombie him or herself, the army is growing by the minute. Many of them, few of us. Yes we can light fires and burn torches to momentarily fend them off. Yes we can outrun them as they move quite slowly. And we can shoot them in the head and burn their bodies and that will stop them for good.

But it only takes a short time for the refugees in the farmhouse to understand the truly mortal danger they’re in. They can make fires but it’s only a matter of time before the fires burn out. You can run, but eventually you must stop and rest and when you do, they will quickly catch up with you. And you can shoot them in the head except for one little technicality -- you’re going to to run out of bullets long before you run out of zombies.

That was the extraordinarily frightening premise of Night of the Living Dead, a monster that really could not be defeated and, worse, had the power to create more monsters. The entire film centered around how the inhabitants of this abandoned farmhouse that is surrounded by these zombies are in a state of denial about the fix they’re in. They don’t get the fact that the zombies have this one gigantic advantage over the living people. They will never ever stop coming. Ever! Still, the people resist valiantly spending a very long night setting fires, running ahead of the zombies and shooting the ones they can. But there’s no stopping the advantage. They keep coming and, one by one, the people in the farmhouse finally get trapped, killed and eaten. Then turn into zombies themselves.

The film builds and builds and finally climaxes in what is not so much a surprise ending as an ironic one. That is Romero’s genius, that his films are so chock full of all this delicious irony as well as a pretty healthy dose of subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) social commentary. This is all pretty unique for horror, and very unique for the standard shoestring horror that so many young filmmakers cut their teeth on.

Needless to say, the film was a smash that spawned many sequels and copies. AFI has ranked it as the #93 best horror film of all time, the Chicago Critics as the #5 best horror film of all time. The New York Times even placed it on their list of the 1,000 Best Movies Ever.


8. The Blair Witch Project - 1999.

I choose Blair Witch because it was a tiny little film that achieved something very difficult that often eludes even very big budget films. It very successfully creates the illusion of being a documentary when it is in fact a totally staged drama.

Blair Witch was a school project of a couple of film students down in Florida who came up to the real life town of Burkittsville, Maryland and, in the tiny woods there, created a very effective story about college students being lost in the woods and hunted by a legendary witch. The story centers around three film students who have heard of the legend of the Blair Witch and have come to Burkittsville to see for themselves. They take cameras into the woods and document what happens.

Naturally, they don’t believe there’s anything to this, just that it might make a good film for their class assignment. Naturally, they slowly discover that not only is there a real witch lurking in these woods, but the witch is now after them. And they’re lost! They have no idea how to escape.

The film is unique because the two directors took a rather novel approach to telling the story. After they cast their actors, they simply told them to go into the woods with their camcorders and record themselves ad libbing the general story line. They were warned that some very strange things might indeed happen but that under no circumstances were they ever to break character. What they did not tell the actors was that they had hired a Green Beret to stalk them and lay all kinds of spooky traps for them so that their reactions could be recorded on video. It was their hope that this strategy would make the actors genuinely frightened and thus produce much more believable video than if they were "acting."

They were right. The kids all got the crap scared out of them, as they fell upon one trap after another, none of which were in the script, and began to wonder if maybe this witch really was out there, or at least that was the very strong impression they made on the video.

Now the reality is this. The directors made the whole legend up. As the residents of Burkittsville later attested, it’s ludicrous that anyone would get lost in those woods because you can walk five minutes in any direction and hit a main road. So it’s highly unlikely that these kids actually got lost. No, they were acting all right and a pretty good job of it too. That’s why I like this film - it was a style of storytelling that had never been tried before and it worked beautifully.

But Blair Witch also makes my list for the exceptionally clever way it was marketed. These kids made up the whole legend, put it up on a web site, and documented it with a whole coterie of phony newspaper articles, photographs and the like. It premiered at Sundance to great acclaim in January ‘99. By the time it premiered in theaters in June, everyone in the country had bought into the gimmick. As the opening titles explain, "There is a legend of a witch that inhabits the woods outside Burkittsville, Maryland. A group of film students went into the woods one day to check out the legend. They were never heard from again. When the police investigated, they found an abandoned shack and in the shack was a pile of video cassettes. What you are about to see are those cassettes, unedited."

Everyone believed that they were watching actual video of real college students being hunted by an unseen evil entity. For those who bought into this, it was the scariest film they’d ever seen. In July, when the now smash hit was exposed in a cover story in Time Magazine, people still believed it was a documentary. When I saw the film in August, I heard many people in the audience still gasping, "Wow, that really happened, eh?" This despite the fact that the film was now running end credits that clearly spelled out, Written and Directed by, Starring, ... It was clearly now known to be a staged drama, not a documentary, but so powerful was the illusion that there were still many people who bought into it completely.

Of course, there were others who, knowing the film’s secret beforehand, watched it and thought it was just stupid. I don’t understand people who want to ruin the magic by finding out the secrets beforehand. Without fail, everyone who thought the film was stupid had known the secret before seeing it. Without fail, everyone who had the crap scared out of them did not know the film’s secret before seeing it.

As a filmmaker, I knew the film’s secret and was able to appreciate the immense talent it took to create so poweful an illusion. Like The Exorcist, it is a brilliant example of the power of film, the power to create totally believable illusions, something no other art form can do. The film cost $27,000 to make, and grossed $250 million worldwide.


9. Paranormal Activity - 2009

I choose Paranormal Activity not only because it is a good companion piece to Blair Witch but also because it’s the only film I’ve seen in the last few years that genuinely scared me. The premise is a young couple living in a house where it has become apparent, at least to the girl, that an evil force has inhabited their domicile. The guy doesn’t buy it but, to pacify his girl, he decides to prove that she’s wrong by running a camcorder in their bedroom all night every night to prove that nothing’s happening.

So this differs from Blair Witch in that in this case instead of a traveling camcorder, it is a static camcorder on their dresser top. And the frights build very slowly. At first, it’s just a hall light that goes on and off while they’re sleeping. But when it shows up on the tape, they have to begin to believe that something very odd might be up.

The suspense builds as, after a couple more strange occurences, the girl insists on calling in an expert on paranormal activity. The expert steps one foot inside the house and gets very bad vibes. He tells them they’re playing a very dangerous game as the evil force that’s in the house is getting very pissed that they’re recording it. He’s getting the hell out of there right now but strongly advises them for their own safety to stop using the camcorder. If the worst thing that is happening is that the young lady is having nightmares, be thankful that’s all it is and live with it. Any attempt to solve this mystery will only anger the evil spirit and lead to disaster.

The girl wants to obey but her nightmares have been so terrible that she decides she’d rather take her chances and vanquish this thing rather than live with it. So the tapings continue and, each night, the ante goes up. What is so masterful about this little film is that it builds so slowly, it could almost be called boring, except that if you pay attention, there are several genuine frights that come out right out of the blue and come and go so fast that if you blink you’ll miss them. And if you’re not paying attention you will miss them. The tension builds beautifully as the odd little happenings that are recorded on the tape become increasingly menacing. It is obvious the expert was quite right. This evil spirit is very angry that they’re investigating. But now this young couple is just becoming increasingly determined to find the evil spirit and send it back to hell. There are more shocks. And there is such a strong shock in the last five seconds that everyone in the theatre screamed and jumped a mile. There was even a guy in the front who jumped so hard that his contacts popped out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film do that to someone before.

Again, a $15,000 budget, $200 million in grosses. Another great example of the power of film. The critics loved it too, many giving it three stars or higher. It won a nomination for Best First Feature at last year’s Independent Spirit Awards and the sequel opened in theaters this weekend. However, this is a film that I cannot imagine working as well in your living room as it did in the theaters. If you watch it on DVD, you must watch on a large screen, in a totally dark room, and from beginning to end without interruption. Otherwise, you won’t get it so don’t even bother.


10. An American Werewolf In London - 1981

This hilarious classic from director John Landis makes the list because it is one of those rare films that combines horror with comedy and does both with complete success. It has been the trend with horror the last twenty years, especially slasher films, to have a lot of inside jokes in the script that you will catch if you have a pretty intimate knowledge of classic horror films. But these films are either funny (if you get the joke) or scary (if you don’t.) It’s pretty rare that a film will be both genuinely funny and genuinely scary at the same time and work beautifully on both levels.

American Werewolf is just such a film as American college students David Naughton and Griffin Dunne are backpacking crosscountry in the notorious Yorkshire moors, in which the locals at the town pub warn them not to stray, that "there’s something evil out there." But they stray anyway and lo and behold are attacked by a vicious wolf-like beast that tears Griffin Dunne to shreds while Naugton is injured and just barely escapes. When he returns the next morning with the law, there is no sign of anything.

Naughton is hospitalized in London where he befriends his nurse (Jenny Agutter.) His first night out of the hospital, he is painfully transformed (with spectacular special effects and make up by Rick Baker) into a werewolf and goes out on the prowl, viciously tearing apart the first vulnerable person he finds. He awakes the next morning, naked in a zoo, with no memory of the night. However, Dunne’s corpse, who cannot pass into the next world until the werewolf is killed, pays Naughton a visit and tells him that he was bitten and is now a werewolf. He must commit suicide else night after night he will continue to kill and there’s no way he can control it. Naugton, of course, resists this suggestion, and remains in denial about his predicament though slowly coming to realize that his friend is quite right. As the undead corpses of all his many victims now begin visiting him, he realizes he must find a way to end it. Meanwhile, an inspector from Scotland Yard investigating these murders is quickly closing in on him. It all builds to a very intense dramatic climax, one that might even surprise a few people.

The film goes from one very funny scene such as when his victims visit him, to one very horrifying scene as he once again is transformed and goes looking for victims. Landis pulls no punches on the werewolf mythology. It is extremely convincing and graphic. Baker’s outstanding tranformational effects won an Oscar and, in fact, it was this film that established the Makeup category as a permanent one for the Oscars. (You’d have thought The Exorcist would have done that but, no, it was American Werewolf.) But it’s hard enough to make a good comedy. And it’s hard enough to make a good horror film. It’s a rare talent that can do both at the same time so when it happens, it deserves recognition.


11. Halloween - 1978

Please! The original only. This is yet another example of a very low budget first film (this time from director John Carpenter) that went through the roof because the very talented young man who made it knew exactly how to push all those primitive buttons we have wired into our DNA. This is the story of a very sweet-faced but very psychotic six year old Michael Myers who one Halloween night massacres his entire family. Due to his age, he is sent to a mental institution for life, feigning being a mental vegetable. His pychiatrist, Donald Pleasance, is convinced it’s all a brilliant facade to gain an early release and constantly warns the governing board that, despite appearances, this young man is extremely dangerous. One night, 15 years later, an electic storm knocks out the security grid and he is able to escape. Pleasance is immediately on his tail, following him back to Haddonfield, the scene of the original crime.

It is Halloween again and Jamie Lee Curtis must babysit for a family that lives directly across the street from the long abandoned Myers house, now a favorite make-out spot for the area teenagers. Little does everyone know that Michael Myers has come home to roost again and he methodically begins dispatching of each teenager coming to the house to have sex, invading his space. When her girlfriend goes over to the Myer house and does not return, Curtis suspects that something is afoot and goes over to investigate. When she discovers all her friends dead in the house, she then has an uphill battle on her hands getting away from Michael and saving herself and her two charges.

In Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock does such a masterful job of building the suspense that, when Vera Miles starts up the steps to enter "the house," people in the audience actually stood up and screamed, "Don’t go in that house!" Carpenter achieves the same masterful results. He hits everyone at a primal level. I was fortunate enough to see this one in the theater and when Curtis walks up the steps to the Myers' front porch, people in the audience got out of their seats and screamed, "Don’t you go in that house, honey!" This happened at the preview too and when John Carpenter witnessed this, he later said he knew at that moment that he had a hit on his hands. And he did. $300,000 budget, at that time the lowest budget film in history (but that’s when films were still actually being made with film, which is much more expensive than digital video), $60 million in grosses.

This film was the feature debut of a then totally unknown Jamie Lee Curtis and established her as the first of what would be known in the 1980s as the "Scream Queens." Hugely successful with both audiences and critics, the Village Voice compared it to Night of the Living Dead, Roger Ebert put it on his Ten Best list for 1978, and after all these years, it still holds a rating of 8.4 out of 10 on Rotten Tomatoes. The AFI has ranked it as the #68 best horror film of all time, the Chicago Critics have ranked it the #3 horror film of all time, and the Library of Congress has placed it on the National Film Registry for preservation. And I say that any film that pushes the primal buttons so effectively and on so low a budget very much deserves to be preserved.


12. The Lady In White - 1988

Okay, this is an obscure little title that never did much business and never got much recognition. I’m not even sure it qualifies as horror. It’s really more of a drama, even though it is a genuine ghost story, but it’s such a genteel ghost story that it almost qualifies as a family film. And I loved it! I first discovered it on video in 1989 just before I left California and was totally enamored of it. It is at the same time both a very sweet and very disturbing little film.

Written and directed by Frank LaLoggia, it opens with the main character as an adult visiting the grave of the woman he calls "The Lady In White." He’s a famous horror novelist, akin to Stephen King, and proceeds to tell the story of the incident that happened to him one Halloween night in 1962 when he was nine, an incident that brought him into the company of the Lady In White and changed his life forever. It is the incident that inspired his career as a horror writer.

Flash back to 1962 and little Frankie (Lukas Haas) attending a Halloween party at school. After the party, he is accidentally locked in the cloak room and spends a very frightening night there. During the night, two very scary things happen. First, he observes a little girl his age playing. Upon closer examination, he realizes she’s a ghost and becomes very frightened. He lunges behind the coats just as a strange man enters the room, unscrews the heating grate, and removes an object that’s hidden under there. Frankie is so scared that he gasps and the man sees him, grabs him and tries to strangle him. Frankie struggles and soon the man just throws him to the floor, knocking him cold, and leaves.

There is a town legend about the Lady In White, the mother of a little girl who was murdered on Halloween night 10 years ago. Upon hearing the news of her daughter’s death, the mother becomes so distraught that she throws herself off the cliff overlooking the sea. The legend has it that every Halloween, her ghost can still be seen up on the bluff overlooking that cliff. Every Halloween, all the kids have gone up there to spook each other and see if they can have a peek. This Halloween, Frankie can’t go when he gets locked in the closet.

He is rescued the next morning and after he gets out of the hospital, he goes to the library to do some research, discovering that the little girl he saw last night was the same who was murdered, the daughter of the Lady In White. Then he discovers that she was only the first of 11 other children who have also been murdered in the last ten years. The police have been unable to get any leads. His curiosity leads him back to the cloak room the next night and the ghost of the little girl once again appears, but this time she knows he’s there and communicates with him. She cannot pass into the next life until her murder is solved. Neither can her mother. She wants Frankie to help her find her killer.

The rest of the film becomes a very charming and somewhat chilling sleuth story as the two children pair up and start doing detective work. It’s a regular Sherlock Holmes mystery crossed with Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys only this time Nancy Drew is a ghost. But this is no kids story. It has genuine adult twists as one clue after another thickens the plot and Frankie ultimately finds himself too late in the clutches of the killer, who is the last person on earth he would have suspected. He is about to become the 12th victim when he realizes that he has otherworldly allies. The Lady In White has other plans.

I love this film for how it so seamlessly melds its charms and chills, something you very rarely see in a horror film. It never went anywhere but I would surely love to share it and have other people see it too.


13. Candyman - 1992

This is another one that I found genuinely chilling but never went anywhere so I want to share it in the hopes that more people want to see it. Virginia Madsen stars as a graduate psychology student who is doing her thesis on the legendary serial killer known as Candyman. Candyman is only an urban legend, nobody really believes he exists, let alone this psychologist. Needless to say, as she proceeds with her research, she soon discovers that he is indeed real and finds herself in a whole lot of jeopardy that she never bargained for.

I haven’t seen it since it came out but remember it as being intensely frightening as this student battles both the killer and a disbelieving mental health profession in her quest to save both herself and future victims. I’ve always been enamored of Virginia Madsen, an actress I’ve been following since her days doing teen films in the 1980s and consider her the most underrated actress of our time. I was so happy when she finally made her big splash in the independent hit Sideways a few years ago.


14. Diabolique - 1955

This French classic by director Henri-Georges Clouzot is a film that must be seen, not read about, so intricate are its twists and turns that it simply must be experienced, one of the very best horror films ever to come out of France. I’ll just say that it all takes place in a very spooky private school and involves three school teachers, one man, two women. The man is having an affair with one woman while he’s married to the other. The plot revolves around a conspiracy hatched by the two adulterers to kill the wife by literally scaring her to death so that they can be free of her and marry. I seem to recall there’s also a substantial fortune they will inherit once she is dead. The plot is so devious, so cunning, that I dare not give any of it away. Let’s just say that part of it involves the fact that the wife has a weak heart; but that’s only the beginning.

It has one of the most shocking and famous surprise endings in all of French cinema. To just give a hint of how great this film is, Hitchcock was going to make it first but Clouzot managed to snatch the rights before Hitchcock could, literally within hours of each other. That’s how much the story appealed to both of them. But Hitchcock thought Clouzot did a stellar job and credits the film with inspiring him to make Psycho. The author of Psycho has also named Diabolique as his favorite horror film. The finale of the film has been ranked as the 49th scariest film moment in history.

They did a very tepid remake with Sharon Stone in 1996.  Please see this one instead.


15. The Bedroom Window - 1987

This little film, the first major success by now legendary director Curtis Hanson, shows just what can be done on a very small budget in a very limited space. Most of the action takes place in a bedroom. Steve Guttenberg is having an affair with his boss’s wife, Isabelle Huppert. One night after a party, relaxing in his apartment, Huppert witnesses a near rape outside the bedroom window. It is stopped only by the fact that rapist notices her watching and takes off like a shot. She feels a moral duty to stop the rapist and prevent the young woman (Elizabeth McGovern) from being attacked again but cannot afford to let it get out that she was in this man’s apartment. So they cook up what at the time seems like a foolproof plan. She’ll describe exactly what she saw to Guttenberg and Guttenberg will go to the police and claim to be the witness.

Complications ensue almost immediately and though the police don’t get it, McGovern catches on very quickly that Guttenberg isn’t the real witness. It turns out this rapist is a killer too. The more he tries to cover up and protect Huppert, the more things spiral out of control until the rapist/killer himelf figures out what’s going on and now he has to shut Huppert up. Then things really get complicated - and scary!

This was such a cool suspense thriller, which drew criticism for its parallels to Hitchcock’s Rear Window but I didn’t see it that way at all. Rear Window was about a photographer being a peeping tom. This film was a morality tale about the value of civic responsibility and every citizen’s duty to the truth, and how badly things go askew when the truth is messed with. This is another film that was only a modest success and never went anywhere but I thought it was terribly effective and want to spread the word. See this!


16. The Silence of the Lambs - 1991

This now legendary film was not only a box office smash but won every Academy Award in the book in 1991 including the five big ones – Best Picture, Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster), Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Foster plays FBI trainee Clarice Starling who, because of her extensive credentials in psychological profiling, is drafted for a "simple five minute" assignment. There is a serial killer on the loose whom the press has given the moniker Buffalo Bill because he skins his victims. The FBI suspects that another famous serial killer and former legendary psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), now behind bars for life, may have knowledge of Buffalo Bill’s identity. She is to go to Lecter’s cell, spend no more than five minutes (as he is known to get inside your head in very bad ways if you spend longer) and make him a phony offer of a nicer prison if he shares what he knows about Buffalo Bill.

This five minute meeting sets off a whole unsavory chain of events and Starling and her FBI superiors become convinced that he does know something. However, he’s a brilliant psychiatrist and not about to fall for their amateur theatrics. So a game of cat-and-mouse ensues between Foster and Hopkins as they do psychological quid pro quo and he feeds her one crumb of a clue at a time leading her on the trail to Buffalo Bill. Meanwhile, Bill abducts the daughter of a U.S. Senator which suddenly makes it a high profile case and lots of pressure to get results. The one thing they know is they have some time. He has to starve his victims for a while so that he can skin them more easily after he kills them. So they’re confident the young lady is not dead yet. But time is running out.

The film is a triple horror story as, on the one hand, Foster pursues Buffalo Bill, on the other hand we can see what Bill is preparing to do to the girl, and on the third hand Hopkins is manipulating everyone in a master plot to escape. Lecter is known as Hannibal the Cannibal because he ate his victims. Even in prison he has succeeded in attacking prison officials and taking a bite out of them, which is why he is always in isolation and put in restraints before anyone will go near him. But there seems to be an odd respect developing between him and Foster as they cleverly mine each other for information and he gives her clues he won’t give anyone else.

The film builds to one of the most frightening climaxes I’ve ever seen on film as Foster finds herself in the finale, trapped in a room with Bill – and then suddenly the lights go out! My only regret is that I was never able to see this in the theaters. I can only imagine how badly the audience must have been screaming when those lights went off and Foster is alone in pitch darkness with this killer, who can see her because he’s wearing night vision.

The film is not only a superb shocker but also one of the best psychological thrillers ever made as Lecter psychoanalyzes Starling trying to help her make the slaughtered lambs of a haunting childhood memory stop screaming. It features one of the best closing lines in movie history. Starling is graduating from the FBI Academy and is surprised at the ceremony by a phone call from Lecter, who has now escaped and is hiding in the Carribean. Now that Buffalo Bill is dead, Lecter wants to know:

"Have the lambs stopped screaming, Clarice?"
"Dr. Lecter, where are you?"
"Now Clarice, you know I can’t tell you that. And don’t bother with a trace, I’ll not be on that long."
(a beat, a note of concern from Starling)
"I have no plans to call on you, Clarice. The world is more interesting with you in it."
We now see Lecter in the Carribean spying the prison psychiatrist who betrayed him getting off a plane.
This is why he went to the Carribean.
"I have to go now Clarice. I’m having a friend for dinner."

Yes, one of the most famous closing lines in history. The film was of course a huge success and has been ranked by the AFI as the #5 greatest horror and #65 greatest film overall. Those closing lines are the #21 most famous lines in all of movie history.