DizzyMoo3
07-15-2001, 06:29 PM
This list was compiled by Entertainment Weekly (great entertainment magazine who I've been a subscriber for a few years now.) It was back in July 1999 right before "The Haunting" came out that they made it. It's # 25 and down with their descriptions. What do you think of it?
25 THE VANISHING (1988) Directed by George Sluizer
Subtitles, understandably, don't top the list of horror-movie musts, but this Dutch film is so devastatingly tense, it's not bad to have to catch your breath and read a line or two occasionally. When a young woman is kidnapped from a gas station, her boyfriend begins a search that leads to a most unsettling discovery about the potential for evil in apparently ordinary men. Such was the status of The Vanishing among aficionados that five years later, Sluizer was in the director's chair for an American remake with Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, and Kiefer Sutherland, but the terror--and a jaw-dropping ending--got lost in translation.
24 FREAKS (1932) Directed by Tod Browning
A baroque, exploitive masterpiece of unease that feels not entirely unlike bad pornography, Freaks follows a little man who marries a "normal" trapeze artist named Cleopatra. She betrays and humiliates him, only to suffer a gruesome fate at the hands of his fellow sideshow performers. At the time, The New York Times remarked that it should have opened at a medical center, in large part because from Martha the Armless Wonder to Koo Koo the Bird Girl, all the performers used by Browning (Dracula) were 100 percent bona fide. Killer moment: the "freaks" armed and slithering through the mud after Cleopatra for their revenge.
23 LOST HIGHWAY (1997) Directed by David Lynch
Can we hear a shout-out for a third-anniversary Lost Highway rerelease next February? A living-room viewing doesn't do justice to the terrifying, part Angelo Badalamenti/part Trent Reznor soundtrack in Lynch's noirish head trip about a hip L.A. couple (Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette) who discover that someone is videotaping them as they sleep. In the film's creepiest scene, a man with no eyebrows, hauntingly played by Robert Blake (!), introduces himself to Pullman at a party and announces that he's also standing miles away in Pullman's house at that very moment. When our disbelieving hero places a cell-phone call and realizes the guy's not kidding, you've got to chuckle to keep from losing your mind.
22 THE STEPFATHER (1987) Directed by Joseph Ruben
And you thought the stepparent in Cinderella was on the nasty side? Terry O'Quinn, in a justifiably revered, unnervingly even-keeled performance, plays an all-American guy who loves marrying into ready-made families almost as much as he loves hacking 'em up when things go wrong. Shelley Hack also puts in a fine turn as a woman who loses patience with both her psychopath husband and wayward daughter. Check out the scene where she smacks her teen across the face and shrieks, "He's your father now and you'll respect him!" You know the drill--falls down cellar stairs, unaware chicks in showers--but hey, it does the trick.
21 NEAR DARK (1987) Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
It's hard to find a vampire movie that's scary rather than silly (note the absence of the name Dracula from this list), but the solo debut of Bigelow (Strange Days) fills the bill--it features Bill Paxton as a badass vampire, roaming America's heartland with a crew of bloodthirsty, carnage-creating friends who aren't at their best come sunrise. The point of the film, cowritten by Bigelow and Hitcher scribe Eric Red, is summed up when Paxton says to a new recruit (Adrian Pasdar), "It's comin' off. Your face. Clean off." These are not your father's bloodsuckers--or Anne Rice's.
20 DEAD RINGERS (1988) Directed by David Cronenberg
Some people find The Exorcist more traumatizing for little Regan's battery of invasive hospital procedures than anything else. If that's you, consider this study of malpracticing twin gynecologists--loosely inspired by a real-life pair of physicians--the ultimate medical mettle tester. Cronenberg had been turned down by 30 or so actors before Brit Jeremy Irons signed on to play both the introverted Beverly Mantle, who's creepily enamored of wombs, and his womanizing big brother Elliot. Their journey to heavily self-medicated self-destruction after Bev falls in love with a barren film star (Genevieve Bujold) is enough to make you swear off anything stronger than aspirin.
19 THE HITCHER (1986) Directed by Robert Harmon
"My mother told me never to do this," says the young driver (C. Thomas Howell), stopping to pick up a handsome hitchhiker (Rutger Hauer). Once again, Mother knows best: Hauer's seductive psychopath spends the next 90 minutes terrorizing the boy and his sidekick, played by the deliciously blond Jennifer Jason Leigh. "People [say] it's a violent movie, but I don't know what they mean," says Hauer, apparently forgetting his finely delivered line "Wanna know what happens to an eyeball when it gets punctured?" The Hitcher will make you rethink those vacation plans to travel across country.
18 SUSPIRIA (1977) Directed by Dario Argento
Survive the first 10 minutes and you're home free. The opening act of Italian horror maestro Argento's ultra-stylized screamer--about a ballet student (Pennies From Heaven's Jessica Harper) who suspects that her dance academy is actually a witches' coven--contains what gets our vote for the most vicious murder scene ever filmed, complete with a close-up of the knife puncturing the victim's beating heart. Fortunately, Harper fared considerably better. "When those maggots were crawling around in my hair, they were actually grains of rice," she recalls. "They were the stunt doubles for the maggots."
17 PHANTASM (1979) Directed by Don Coscarelli
The production values are about as elaborate as a skit on Sesame Street, and the Partridge-esque haircuts are so ridiculous they're actually distracting. But two ingredients of this mortuary thriller--the strangely presidential crypt keeper called the Tall Man, and a flying metal sphere that doubles as a blood-spurting brain drill--are still shiver inducing 20 years later, despite the low tech. "We tried a bunch of really elaborate rigs with piano wire and fishing line to get that sphere to fly," says Coscarelli. "None of it worked at all. So we got a junior college baseball pitcher at Cal State Northridge to throw the thing from behind the camera."
16 HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (1990) Directed by John McNaughton
One of those horror movies where the low budget actually helps--lending a rough, documentary look to the proceedings--Henry follows the titular character and his hee-haw partner in homicide, Otis, on a spree that includes one nightmarish scene in which the two murder a helpless family, then sit back to watch a videotape of the crime. "Once I was late for a screening and bumped into a lady running away from the movie," laughs Michael Rooker (Henry), "and she ran smack into me and just screamed and screamed!" Little-known fact: McNaughton based Henry (in part) on both real-life killer Henry Lee Lucas and Thomas Harris' fictional Francis Dolarhyde from Red Dragon.
15 CARRIE (1976) Directed by Brian De Palma
De Palma's adaptation of Stephen King's first novel is set in the lurid, oversexed world of high school, where persecuted telekinetic Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) transcends catty rivals and a psychotically religious mother (Piper Laurie) to become prom queen--only to be doused in pig's blood, go on a murderous rampage, and kill just about everyone. "I got tricked into doing [Carrie]," remembers Laurie, who, like Spacek, won an Oscar nomination. "It seemed so over-the-top, I thought it was going to be a satire. When De Palma stopped me in rehearsals, my heart just dropped. Whoops!" Pioneering moment: the best final scare ever. Period.
14 THE OMEN (1976) Directed by Richard Donner
Someday, an enterprising film student will write a master's thesis on why the Nixon-Ford era spawned the cinematic unholy trinity of Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen. Until then, let's just picture the last of those demon seeds, Damien (Harvey Stephens)--the tiny Antichrist with the 666 devil sign on his scalp--maniacally pedaling his tricycle and knocking Lee Remick over the second-floor railing to the menacing strains of "Ave Satani." "That boy was putty to direct...just a dream," says Donner, who adds, "A lot of people were afraid to see The Omen because The Exorcist scared the s--- out of them so much." It's their loss, because when we picture Damien's nanny hanging herself while screaming "Damien, it's all for you!!!" we still get freaked out.
13 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) Directed by George A. Romero
The horror movie whose zombie escapades inspired a thousand more, Dead was filmed in black and white for about $100,000, some of which was reportedly contributed by lead actor Russell Streiner. Although the film, about radiation-poisoned corpses on the hunt for fresh meat, was made on the cheap (any flub in the sound was covered with the chirping of crickets), some estimates put the total gross at around $50 million. Due to legal problems with the original distributor, the filmmakers saw only a fraction of the grosses, inspiring a remake in 1990. Stick with the original--the Blair Witch Project of its day.
12 THE THING (1982) Directed by John Carpenter
A loose remake of Howard Hawks' 1951 sci-fi anti-Cold War allegory, Carpenter's Thing isn't concerned with messages; it's just a terrifying meditation on paranoia and subzero dread as a group of scientists at the South Pole (led by Kurt Russell) is infiltrated by an alien that assumes the bodies of its victims in very messy ways. And despite its many gross-out F/X, no moment in the movie is more unsettling than watching cuddly Quaker Oatmeal pitchman Wilford Brimley go insane. With The Thing and Halloween, Carpenter becomes the only director to appear on this list twice, and frankly, no one's more shocked than he is. "When The Thing was released," he says, "it was one of the most hated movies of all time." Time to set the record straight.
11 A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) Directed by Wes Craven
The screen debut of the character who gave striped sweaters a bad name, Nightmare introduces a suburban monster who stalks teens while they sleep. Craven makes the most banal aspects of adolescence hellish, whether it's turning the sanctity of childhood bedrooms into murder zones or a phone into a demonic tongue. (And "One, two, Freddy's coming for you..." irrevocably changed the way we feel about playground chants.) Freddy eventually turned into an all-too-jokey shadow of himself--but there's nothing funny about him in this first installment. Bonus: A young Johnny Depp gets eaten alive by a bed.
10 ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968) Directed by Roman Polanski
More conspiracy thriller than horror movie, Baby nurses a mother lode of phobias. As Rosemary (Mia Farrow) slowly intuits she's been raped by Satan, she wrestles a myriad of believable demons: uncaring doctors, intrusive neighbors (primarily Ruth Gordon, who copped an Oscar), and a monstrously self-centered husband (John Cassavetes). Farrow's alarming enactment of emaciated desperation got a spur from then husband Frank Sinatra's offscreen behavior: She was devastated when he initiated a divorce in mid-production. Meanwhile, Charles Grodin's turn as a chilly obstetrician made him an unpopular dinner guest. "When I sat, women moved," he recalls. "I had to go on Johnny Carson to show people I'm a nice guy."
9 THE SHINING (1980) Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's novel about the Torrance family's headlong plunge into insanity during a secluded Colorado winter remains better known for its T-shirt quotables ("Heeeere's Johnny!"/ "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy") than as a beautiful and pleasing horror film. It's a shame. With a haunting score, luscious, near-eternal Steadicam shots, and Jack Nicholson's grand pirouette into murderous madness at its heart, it's one of the most artful horror films in history. Not everyone, of course, thinks so. King was famously put off by the adaptation, remarking "I think [Kubrick] wants to hurt people with this movie." (He made his own six-hour TV version in 1997.)
8 SEVEN (1995) Directed by David Fincher
From the jittery, scratched celluloid of its opening credits onward, Seven oozes more apocalyptic doom and deranged creativity than any Brad Pitt movie has a right to. Before this film came out, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, pride, and lust were just intangible words uttered in Sunday school. But by Seven's closing credits, the deadly sins have become the gruesome MO of a revelations-spouting serial killer so out of his gourd that he shaves off the tips of his fingers to avoid leaving prints. From its bleak, rainy setting to an unshakably grim finale, Seven is so nihilistic and disturbing it's hard to fathom how it ever got greenlit. We mean that as a compliment.
7 PSYCHO (1960) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
The mother of all scary movies (and don't even think of judging Psycho based on Gus Van Sant's remake). Many of its most renowned features are readily apparent: those startling cuts (more than 50 in the shower sequence alone), Anthony Perkins' neurotic mama's boy, Bernard Herrmann's shrieking-violins score. But Psycho's sneakiest tricks manifest themselves more subtlely. Take Hitchcock's decision to use a handful of different stabbers in Janet Leigh's slice-and-dice sequence: "He kept changing it so the audience wouldn't be able to get a fix on Mother," says Leigh, who spent seven days in that shower. "At one point it was Tony's stand-in, at one point it was a woman. Never Tony." Bottom line: It still works.
6 JAWS (1975) Directed by Steven Spielberg
"Is it true that most people get attacked by sharks in about three feet of water?" When this doom-drenched gem--the highest-grossing film on our list--hit theaters, it gave new meaning to the phrase red tide. Weeks over schedule and dizzyingly over budget, Jaws caused Spielberg more than his share of headaches--especially due to his temperamental star. No, not Richard Dreyfuss, but Bruce, the 24-foot-long malfunctioning animatronic great white named after Spielberg's lawyer. "The fact that the shark didn't work was an artistic blessing in disguise," says Spielberg. "It forced me to be Hitchcockian." It's true--Jaws is terrifying not for the few times we see the shark treating Amity's vacationers like a Red Lobster smorgasbord, but for those sharkless moments of fear and trembling as we wait for Bruce to feed again.
5 HALLOWEEN (1978) Directed by John Carpenter
Forget the string of half-baked, nonsensical sequels. Disregard the slew of cruddy, uninspired slasher imitators like Friday the 13th. The original Halloween is, was, and ever shall be the alpha and omega of bogeyman flicks. It also remains one of the most profitable indie films of all time--costing a mere $300,000 and pulling in more than $55 million. The influence of Psycho ("It's the granddaddy of all horror movies," says Carpenter) is everywhere--from the tiniest details (Donald Pleasence's Dr. Sam Loomis is named after Janet Leigh's boyfriend in Psycho) to the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis as Halloween's shrieking heroine/babysitter in peril. "It didn't hurt that Janet Leigh was her mom," admits Carpenter, "because everyone's a fan of Psycho." And Halloween.
4 THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) Directed by Jonathan Demme
"A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti...fpt-fpt-fpt." Released only one year into the '90s, Silence remains this decade's scariest vision of pure sociopathic evil. As Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Anthony Hopkins is a waking nightmare of seductive depravity--the sick, twisted serial killer America hates to love. Even with Hannibal the Cannibal safely locked away in his maximum-security cell, Jodie Foster's FBI trainee Clarice Starling is as helpless as a lamb. "Great villains are subversive--audiences go and see them because they feel uncomfortably attracted to them," says Scott Glenn, who plays Starling's seen-it-all FBI mentor in Silence. "To this day I still have nightmares about it." Join the club.
3 ALIEN (1979) Directed by Ridley Scott
Grimy, claustrophobic, and more haunted-house thriller than space-bound sci-fi, Alien follows a group of interstellar truckers rendered lunch meat by an acid-dripping, H.R. Giger-designed nemesis. Contrary to popular rumor, the alien-out-of-the-stomach shot was not a surprise to the actors, but Veronica Cartwright (Lambert) says that Scott amped up the tension by keeping the cast waiting and filling the set with retch-inducing buckets of formaldehyde and fake blood. "It's a shame that they don't have outtakes," she laughs. "I got hit with a jet of blood, repelled backwards, and flipped over the couch behind me. All you could see were my cowboy boots sticking up!"
2 THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) Directed by Tobe Hooper
Truth is stranger than fiction...and it's a hell of a lot scarier, too. Based (like much of Psycho) on the horrific ritual murders committed by Ed Gein, Chainsaw looks, feels, and smells so much like a grainy, low-budget documentary that it borders on snuff. It opens with a sober-voiced narrator (a young John Larroquette) detailing a heinous killing spree. Then we see the split-second flashbulb pops of crime scene carnage before finally meeting Leatherface--a deranged homicidal lunatic wearing a butcher's apron and a mask stitched out of human skin. Hooper (Poltergeist) says that when he settled on the film's title, "I lost several friends. But I thought, they're putting so much energy into hating the title, maybe there's something there." Indeed there is; a copy of Chainsaw resides in the Museum of Modern Art.
1 THE EXORCIST (1973) Directed by William Friedkin
A cat unexpectedly jumping from off camera is scary. But The Exorcist is so disturbing it will mess you up for months. Controversial and profane, The Exorcist remains the most viscerally harrowing movie ever made not only because it dares to question the existence of God but because it has the cojones to put Satan in the body of a 12-year-old girl. Moviegoers literally fainted as Linda Blair vomited pea soup on a priest. And after a series of mishaps, Friedkin asked a clergyman to perform an exorcism of the set. "A lot of people definitely thought something weird was happening," says Blair, "but I was so young they tried to keep me in the dark." Consider yourself blessed, Linda.
Okay, what do all think of it?
25 THE VANISHING (1988) Directed by George Sluizer
Subtitles, understandably, don't top the list of horror-movie musts, but this Dutch film is so devastatingly tense, it's not bad to have to catch your breath and read a line or two occasionally. When a young woman is kidnapped from a gas station, her boyfriend begins a search that leads to a most unsettling discovery about the potential for evil in apparently ordinary men. Such was the status of The Vanishing among aficionados that five years later, Sluizer was in the director's chair for an American remake with Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, and Kiefer Sutherland, but the terror--and a jaw-dropping ending--got lost in translation.
24 FREAKS (1932) Directed by Tod Browning
A baroque, exploitive masterpiece of unease that feels not entirely unlike bad pornography, Freaks follows a little man who marries a "normal" trapeze artist named Cleopatra. She betrays and humiliates him, only to suffer a gruesome fate at the hands of his fellow sideshow performers. At the time, The New York Times remarked that it should have opened at a medical center, in large part because from Martha the Armless Wonder to Koo Koo the Bird Girl, all the performers used by Browning (Dracula) were 100 percent bona fide. Killer moment: the "freaks" armed and slithering through the mud after Cleopatra for their revenge.
23 LOST HIGHWAY (1997) Directed by David Lynch
Can we hear a shout-out for a third-anniversary Lost Highway rerelease next February? A living-room viewing doesn't do justice to the terrifying, part Angelo Badalamenti/part Trent Reznor soundtrack in Lynch's noirish head trip about a hip L.A. couple (Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette) who discover that someone is videotaping them as they sleep. In the film's creepiest scene, a man with no eyebrows, hauntingly played by Robert Blake (!), introduces himself to Pullman at a party and announces that he's also standing miles away in Pullman's house at that very moment. When our disbelieving hero places a cell-phone call and realizes the guy's not kidding, you've got to chuckle to keep from losing your mind.
22 THE STEPFATHER (1987) Directed by Joseph Ruben
And you thought the stepparent in Cinderella was on the nasty side? Terry O'Quinn, in a justifiably revered, unnervingly even-keeled performance, plays an all-American guy who loves marrying into ready-made families almost as much as he loves hacking 'em up when things go wrong. Shelley Hack also puts in a fine turn as a woman who loses patience with both her psychopath husband and wayward daughter. Check out the scene where she smacks her teen across the face and shrieks, "He's your father now and you'll respect him!" You know the drill--falls down cellar stairs, unaware chicks in showers--but hey, it does the trick.
21 NEAR DARK (1987) Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
It's hard to find a vampire movie that's scary rather than silly (note the absence of the name Dracula from this list), but the solo debut of Bigelow (Strange Days) fills the bill--it features Bill Paxton as a badass vampire, roaming America's heartland with a crew of bloodthirsty, carnage-creating friends who aren't at their best come sunrise. The point of the film, cowritten by Bigelow and Hitcher scribe Eric Red, is summed up when Paxton says to a new recruit (Adrian Pasdar), "It's comin' off. Your face. Clean off." These are not your father's bloodsuckers--or Anne Rice's.
20 DEAD RINGERS (1988) Directed by David Cronenberg
Some people find The Exorcist more traumatizing for little Regan's battery of invasive hospital procedures than anything else. If that's you, consider this study of malpracticing twin gynecologists--loosely inspired by a real-life pair of physicians--the ultimate medical mettle tester. Cronenberg had been turned down by 30 or so actors before Brit Jeremy Irons signed on to play both the introverted Beverly Mantle, who's creepily enamored of wombs, and his womanizing big brother Elliot. Their journey to heavily self-medicated self-destruction after Bev falls in love with a barren film star (Genevieve Bujold) is enough to make you swear off anything stronger than aspirin.
19 THE HITCHER (1986) Directed by Robert Harmon
"My mother told me never to do this," says the young driver (C. Thomas Howell), stopping to pick up a handsome hitchhiker (Rutger Hauer). Once again, Mother knows best: Hauer's seductive psychopath spends the next 90 minutes terrorizing the boy and his sidekick, played by the deliciously blond Jennifer Jason Leigh. "People [say] it's a violent movie, but I don't know what they mean," says Hauer, apparently forgetting his finely delivered line "Wanna know what happens to an eyeball when it gets punctured?" The Hitcher will make you rethink those vacation plans to travel across country.
18 SUSPIRIA (1977) Directed by Dario Argento
Survive the first 10 minutes and you're home free. The opening act of Italian horror maestro Argento's ultra-stylized screamer--about a ballet student (Pennies From Heaven's Jessica Harper) who suspects that her dance academy is actually a witches' coven--contains what gets our vote for the most vicious murder scene ever filmed, complete with a close-up of the knife puncturing the victim's beating heart. Fortunately, Harper fared considerably better. "When those maggots were crawling around in my hair, they were actually grains of rice," she recalls. "They were the stunt doubles for the maggots."
17 PHANTASM (1979) Directed by Don Coscarelli
The production values are about as elaborate as a skit on Sesame Street, and the Partridge-esque haircuts are so ridiculous they're actually distracting. But two ingredients of this mortuary thriller--the strangely presidential crypt keeper called the Tall Man, and a flying metal sphere that doubles as a blood-spurting brain drill--are still shiver inducing 20 years later, despite the low tech. "We tried a bunch of really elaborate rigs with piano wire and fishing line to get that sphere to fly," says Coscarelli. "None of it worked at all. So we got a junior college baseball pitcher at Cal State Northridge to throw the thing from behind the camera."
16 HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (1990) Directed by John McNaughton
One of those horror movies where the low budget actually helps--lending a rough, documentary look to the proceedings--Henry follows the titular character and his hee-haw partner in homicide, Otis, on a spree that includes one nightmarish scene in which the two murder a helpless family, then sit back to watch a videotape of the crime. "Once I was late for a screening and bumped into a lady running away from the movie," laughs Michael Rooker (Henry), "and she ran smack into me and just screamed and screamed!" Little-known fact: McNaughton based Henry (in part) on both real-life killer Henry Lee Lucas and Thomas Harris' fictional Francis Dolarhyde from Red Dragon.
15 CARRIE (1976) Directed by Brian De Palma
De Palma's adaptation of Stephen King's first novel is set in the lurid, oversexed world of high school, where persecuted telekinetic Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) transcends catty rivals and a psychotically religious mother (Piper Laurie) to become prom queen--only to be doused in pig's blood, go on a murderous rampage, and kill just about everyone. "I got tricked into doing [Carrie]," remembers Laurie, who, like Spacek, won an Oscar nomination. "It seemed so over-the-top, I thought it was going to be a satire. When De Palma stopped me in rehearsals, my heart just dropped. Whoops!" Pioneering moment: the best final scare ever. Period.
14 THE OMEN (1976) Directed by Richard Donner
Someday, an enterprising film student will write a master's thesis on why the Nixon-Ford era spawned the cinematic unholy trinity of Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen. Until then, let's just picture the last of those demon seeds, Damien (Harvey Stephens)--the tiny Antichrist with the 666 devil sign on his scalp--maniacally pedaling his tricycle and knocking Lee Remick over the second-floor railing to the menacing strains of "Ave Satani." "That boy was putty to direct...just a dream," says Donner, who adds, "A lot of people were afraid to see The Omen because The Exorcist scared the s--- out of them so much." It's their loss, because when we picture Damien's nanny hanging herself while screaming "Damien, it's all for you!!!" we still get freaked out.
13 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) Directed by George A. Romero
The horror movie whose zombie escapades inspired a thousand more, Dead was filmed in black and white for about $100,000, some of which was reportedly contributed by lead actor Russell Streiner. Although the film, about radiation-poisoned corpses on the hunt for fresh meat, was made on the cheap (any flub in the sound was covered with the chirping of crickets), some estimates put the total gross at around $50 million. Due to legal problems with the original distributor, the filmmakers saw only a fraction of the grosses, inspiring a remake in 1990. Stick with the original--the Blair Witch Project of its day.
12 THE THING (1982) Directed by John Carpenter
A loose remake of Howard Hawks' 1951 sci-fi anti-Cold War allegory, Carpenter's Thing isn't concerned with messages; it's just a terrifying meditation on paranoia and subzero dread as a group of scientists at the South Pole (led by Kurt Russell) is infiltrated by an alien that assumes the bodies of its victims in very messy ways. And despite its many gross-out F/X, no moment in the movie is more unsettling than watching cuddly Quaker Oatmeal pitchman Wilford Brimley go insane. With The Thing and Halloween, Carpenter becomes the only director to appear on this list twice, and frankly, no one's more shocked than he is. "When The Thing was released," he says, "it was one of the most hated movies of all time." Time to set the record straight.
11 A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) Directed by Wes Craven
The screen debut of the character who gave striped sweaters a bad name, Nightmare introduces a suburban monster who stalks teens while they sleep. Craven makes the most banal aspects of adolescence hellish, whether it's turning the sanctity of childhood bedrooms into murder zones or a phone into a demonic tongue. (And "One, two, Freddy's coming for you..." irrevocably changed the way we feel about playground chants.) Freddy eventually turned into an all-too-jokey shadow of himself--but there's nothing funny about him in this first installment. Bonus: A young Johnny Depp gets eaten alive by a bed.
10 ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968) Directed by Roman Polanski
More conspiracy thriller than horror movie, Baby nurses a mother lode of phobias. As Rosemary (Mia Farrow) slowly intuits she's been raped by Satan, she wrestles a myriad of believable demons: uncaring doctors, intrusive neighbors (primarily Ruth Gordon, who copped an Oscar), and a monstrously self-centered husband (John Cassavetes). Farrow's alarming enactment of emaciated desperation got a spur from then husband Frank Sinatra's offscreen behavior: She was devastated when he initiated a divorce in mid-production. Meanwhile, Charles Grodin's turn as a chilly obstetrician made him an unpopular dinner guest. "When I sat, women moved," he recalls. "I had to go on Johnny Carson to show people I'm a nice guy."
9 THE SHINING (1980) Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's novel about the Torrance family's headlong plunge into insanity during a secluded Colorado winter remains better known for its T-shirt quotables ("Heeeere's Johnny!"/ "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy") than as a beautiful and pleasing horror film. It's a shame. With a haunting score, luscious, near-eternal Steadicam shots, and Jack Nicholson's grand pirouette into murderous madness at its heart, it's one of the most artful horror films in history. Not everyone, of course, thinks so. King was famously put off by the adaptation, remarking "I think [Kubrick] wants to hurt people with this movie." (He made his own six-hour TV version in 1997.)
8 SEVEN (1995) Directed by David Fincher
From the jittery, scratched celluloid of its opening credits onward, Seven oozes more apocalyptic doom and deranged creativity than any Brad Pitt movie has a right to. Before this film came out, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, pride, and lust were just intangible words uttered in Sunday school. But by Seven's closing credits, the deadly sins have become the gruesome MO of a revelations-spouting serial killer so out of his gourd that he shaves off the tips of his fingers to avoid leaving prints. From its bleak, rainy setting to an unshakably grim finale, Seven is so nihilistic and disturbing it's hard to fathom how it ever got greenlit. We mean that as a compliment.
7 PSYCHO (1960) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
The mother of all scary movies (and don't even think of judging Psycho based on Gus Van Sant's remake). Many of its most renowned features are readily apparent: those startling cuts (more than 50 in the shower sequence alone), Anthony Perkins' neurotic mama's boy, Bernard Herrmann's shrieking-violins score. But Psycho's sneakiest tricks manifest themselves more subtlely. Take Hitchcock's decision to use a handful of different stabbers in Janet Leigh's slice-and-dice sequence: "He kept changing it so the audience wouldn't be able to get a fix on Mother," says Leigh, who spent seven days in that shower. "At one point it was Tony's stand-in, at one point it was a woman. Never Tony." Bottom line: It still works.
6 JAWS (1975) Directed by Steven Spielberg
"Is it true that most people get attacked by sharks in about three feet of water?" When this doom-drenched gem--the highest-grossing film on our list--hit theaters, it gave new meaning to the phrase red tide. Weeks over schedule and dizzyingly over budget, Jaws caused Spielberg more than his share of headaches--especially due to his temperamental star. No, not Richard Dreyfuss, but Bruce, the 24-foot-long malfunctioning animatronic great white named after Spielberg's lawyer. "The fact that the shark didn't work was an artistic blessing in disguise," says Spielberg. "It forced me to be Hitchcockian." It's true--Jaws is terrifying not for the few times we see the shark treating Amity's vacationers like a Red Lobster smorgasbord, but for those sharkless moments of fear and trembling as we wait for Bruce to feed again.
5 HALLOWEEN (1978) Directed by John Carpenter
Forget the string of half-baked, nonsensical sequels. Disregard the slew of cruddy, uninspired slasher imitators like Friday the 13th. The original Halloween is, was, and ever shall be the alpha and omega of bogeyman flicks. It also remains one of the most profitable indie films of all time--costing a mere $300,000 and pulling in more than $55 million. The influence of Psycho ("It's the granddaddy of all horror movies," says Carpenter) is everywhere--from the tiniest details (Donald Pleasence's Dr. Sam Loomis is named after Janet Leigh's boyfriend in Psycho) to the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis as Halloween's shrieking heroine/babysitter in peril. "It didn't hurt that Janet Leigh was her mom," admits Carpenter, "because everyone's a fan of Psycho." And Halloween.
4 THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) Directed by Jonathan Demme
"A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti...fpt-fpt-fpt." Released only one year into the '90s, Silence remains this decade's scariest vision of pure sociopathic evil. As Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Anthony Hopkins is a waking nightmare of seductive depravity--the sick, twisted serial killer America hates to love. Even with Hannibal the Cannibal safely locked away in his maximum-security cell, Jodie Foster's FBI trainee Clarice Starling is as helpless as a lamb. "Great villains are subversive--audiences go and see them because they feel uncomfortably attracted to them," says Scott Glenn, who plays Starling's seen-it-all FBI mentor in Silence. "To this day I still have nightmares about it." Join the club.
3 ALIEN (1979) Directed by Ridley Scott
Grimy, claustrophobic, and more haunted-house thriller than space-bound sci-fi, Alien follows a group of interstellar truckers rendered lunch meat by an acid-dripping, H.R. Giger-designed nemesis. Contrary to popular rumor, the alien-out-of-the-stomach shot was not a surprise to the actors, but Veronica Cartwright (Lambert) says that Scott amped up the tension by keeping the cast waiting and filling the set with retch-inducing buckets of formaldehyde and fake blood. "It's a shame that they don't have outtakes," she laughs. "I got hit with a jet of blood, repelled backwards, and flipped over the couch behind me. All you could see were my cowboy boots sticking up!"
2 THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) Directed by Tobe Hooper
Truth is stranger than fiction...and it's a hell of a lot scarier, too. Based (like much of Psycho) on the horrific ritual murders committed by Ed Gein, Chainsaw looks, feels, and smells so much like a grainy, low-budget documentary that it borders on snuff. It opens with a sober-voiced narrator (a young John Larroquette) detailing a heinous killing spree. Then we see the split-second flashbulb pops of crime scene carnage before finally meeting Leatherface--a deranged homicidal lunatic wearing a butcher's apron and a mask stitched out of human skin. Hooper (Poltergeist) says that when he settled on the film's title, "I lost several friends. But I thought, they're putting so much energy into hating the title, maybe there's something there." Indeed there is; a copy of Chainsaw resides in the Museum of Modern Art.
1 THE EXORCIST (1973) Directed by William Friedkin
A cat unexpectedly jumping from off camera is scary. But The Exorcist is so disturbing it will mess you up for months. Controversial and profane, The Exorcist remains the most viscerally harrowing movie ever made not only because it dares to question the existence of God but because it has the cojones to put Satan in the body of a 12-year-old girl. Moviegoers literally fainted as Linda Blair vomited pea soup on a priest. And after a series of mishaps, Friedkin asked a clergyman to perform an exorcism of the set. "A lot of people definitely thought something weird was happening," says Blair, "but I was so young they tried to keep me in the dark." Consider yourself blessed, Linda.
Okay, what do all think of it?