H.P. Lovecraft is hard to get right on film. His horrible, unstoppable abominations are locked away, lest their coming unmake the multiverse, meaning that they spend most of the stories they are featured in off-screen; his protagonists are either complete ciphers or avatars of himself and parts of his work are so jaw-droppingly racist that they are impossible to read without feeling intense revulsion.
But despite all that, Lovecraft’s central thesis, that there are things out there that humanity cannot comprehend or defend against that can unmake civilization with the faintest hint of a whim, is a really smart, really scary idea. John Carpenter took that idea and ran with it in 1995’s In The Mouth of Madness, and in so doing brought the unknowable horror of Lovecraft to the screen without actually having to adapt Lovecraft.
Sam Neill plays John Trent, an insurance investigator hired to track down the famed and missing horror author Sutter Cane, or at the very least the manuscript of Cane’s latest book. A dream and a map hidden in the covers of Cane’s books points Trent toward a town that should not exist, but does. Trent travels to the town alongside Cane’s editor, and as the two hunt for the missing author, reality begins to unravel.
Carpenter balances the implications of the story he is telling with some excellent practical effects, gets solid performances out of Neill and his peers and does not back down from an endgame that makes The Thing seem bright and cheerful. It is a terrifying, memorable picture that brings Lovecraft at his best to film, in spirit if not in word.
[h2]69) They Live[/h2]
A few years after John Carpenter delivered us The Thing and before he devolved into making tripe like Ghosts of Mars and Vampires, he created They Live. Mashing together horror and sci-fi, the tale centres around “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, playing a nameless drifter, who stumbles across a bizarre plot wherein the moneyed masses of the elite….are actually aliens. Trying to control humans through brainwashing.
The sheer horror of the premise is handled in a slow unravelling as the Drifter realises the sunglasses he retrieved from a conspiracy-rigged church explosion (see?! Don’t you want to see this film now?!) are more than mere accessory. They enable the wearer to see the aliens for what they are: scary as buggery skeletal faced bastards! Terror resounds across every billboard and point of consumerism, as the alien totalitarian regime for obedience has effect on every unwitting human.
If there’s one thing They Live addresses better than any other horror on this list it is how insistent the Drifter is for his friend to believe him. In a genre known for people shrugging off character’s claims of something unusual happening, Drifter perseveres. He asks simply: try on the sunglasses. What follows is a five-and-a-half-minute fight that sells the Drifter’s sheer will to survive the predicament he is in.
There are few directors who are able to balance horror and pathos like Guillermo del Toro does. A perfect example of this is The Devil’s Backbone, which seems like a warm-up for Pan’s Labyrinth, with its haunted children and abusive adults.
Set during the Spanish Civil War, The Devil’s Backbone focuses on ghostly happenings at an orphanage in a remote part of Spain. The war surrounds the children – an unexploded bomb lies in the courtyard, and Franco’s troops routinely attack. Underlying it, though, is a ghost story: a boy named Santi disappeared at the same time the bomb dropped in the courtyard and things have begun going bump in the night ever since.
As the new boy, Carlos (Fernando Tielve) investigates the strange happenings at the orphanage as childhood terror combines with the cruelty of the world outside. Bullies abound, both within the orphanage and outside of it, adults and children alike, Carlos is faced with being largely alone in a very violent world.
Like The Orphanage (which del Toro produced), the film mixes the terror of the supernatural with the terror of the real world that these children are forced to navigate through, often without the help of the adults who should be protecting them. It’s a haunting film and the conclusion is moving and terrifying – leaving me haunted for days.
While in some ways less iconic than its little brother Dracula, F.W. Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu has the distinction of being the first adaptation of Bram Stoker’s tale of terror … and actually one of the more loyal adaptations of the source material.
You all know the story: young lawyer Hutter (not Harker, this is a German film after all) heads to Transylvania to negotiate a deal with Count Orlok for purchasing a house in his hometown of Wisbourg. Said Count is most definitely not of this world, as anyone with could see at a single glance. But Hutter sees nothing wrong, not even when Orlok becomes apparently obsessed with a picture of Hutter’s young wife Ellen. Or when the villagers warn Hutter that Orlok is a nosferatu. Or the whole phantom carriage thing. Or his obsession with blood. Or … you get the picture.
Nosferatu does still possess some serious creep factor, especially at the first sight of Max Schrek’s Orlok – changed from Dracula due to objections from the Stoker estate. More disturbing than Lugosi’s later urbane Count, Orlok is practically a rat, with pointed teeth, a bald head and long curving fingernails. He brings plague and pestilence to Wisbourg, only defeated by the self-sacrifice of Ellen, who gives herself to him as the sun rises. The scenes of Orlok rising from his coffin or his shadow creeping up the stairs are beautiful and chilling.
Murnau was a master of German expressionism and Nosferatu might very well be considered his masterpiece.
[h2]66) The Omen[/h2]
Forget about the remake, the 1976 original stands as one of the greatest, and most chilling horror films of all time. Coming out after genre classics like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, The Omen had a lot to live up to. In my books, it more than succeeded.
Gregory Peck and Lee Remick star as a couple who give birth to a still-born child. Hoping to comfort his wife and make her feel better, Peck’s character, Robert, takes up a cleric on his offer when he tells him that he can give him a newborn orphan in his dead child’s place, without his wife knowing any better. Of course, this “newborn orphan” is not all that he seems. Damien, as he is named, exhibits some weird behaviour and pretty soon, death and tragedy surround him.
Smart writing, an excellent score and a truly haunting atmosphere make this Satanic-themed horror film a real winner. There’s the iconic scene where the family’s nanny goes to extremes on Damien’s sixth birthday – I won’t spoil it here but it’s an absolutely chilling moment – and the film was also said to be one of the first mainstream efforts in the genre to really amp up the gore.
Harvey Stephens’ performance as Damien must also be mentioned, as it is very effective. The kid is inherently creepy and no matter what he’s doing or saying, you always feel on edge when he’s on screen. Most of all though, the film is actually extremely scary. While audiences of today may not feel its effect, for 1976, the film was downright terrifying. And even today, I personally think it holds up pretty well and on all counts is an very well put together horror film that gets everything right.
It’s a shame that more people don’t talk about Drag Me To Hell when Sam Raimi’s name comes up. I know his Evil Dead films are classics and all, but I fell in love with Drag Me To Hell instantaneously and thought it a rather strong return to horror form after churning out three Spider-Man movies.
Seamlessly transitioning from jokey superhero films to jokey horror films, I caught a huge whiff of Evil Dead inspiration, be it the talking goat or violently disgusting outbursts, showing Raimi could still throw down with the best 2009 had to offer. Well, actually, I’d say he proved he could still hang with the best ever still, putting many films to shame with Drag Me To Hell. There’s an undeniable fun factor that makes large group viewings a thing of communal beauty, but watching alone proves just as satisfying.
Widely considered one of the best British horror movies ever made, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man is what I call a slow-burner. Conservatively Christian police Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) heads to the remote island of Summerisle to invesigate the vanishing of a young girl. There he discovers that no one will even own up to the girl existing, much less missing. He’s tempted by a local girl (Britt Ekland, eye-candy) and slightly disturbed by Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee, being very Christopher Lee-ish), not to mention the odd – but not terribly sinister – May-time rituals that go on on the island.
The Wicker Man starts out as not much more than a mystery with slightly sinister overtones. Sgt. Howie is an unlikable protagonist, treating everyone around him with contempt bordering on pathological hatred. The crux of the film doesn’t come until about the last ten or fifteen minutes, when the viewer’s sympathies are strongly skewed to the cause of the villagers and not our hero. But the ending is one of the best in horror. Avoid the Nicolas Cage remake; rent the original and watch it to the end. It does not fail to terrify.
So often a horror film will post poor box office numbers and draw zero crowds, yet suddenly after a few years attracts a random cult following and becomes an overnight hit we all regretted missing in theaters. James Gunn’s Slither is a perfect example of that scenario, finding success after a disappointing theatrical run.
Gunn’s country fried creature feature is a wonderful mix of horror and comedy, bursting with Troma-influenced fun that Gunn learned from working closely with the production company as a younger professional. Actors Nathan Fillion and Elizabeth Banks join Gunn’s party and must fight a spreading “infestation” of creepy crawly aliens from eradicating humanity, and do an excellent job fitting into Slither’s B-Movie atmosphere. Genre fans will find more fun than chills here, but not every horror film can be a serious scare-fest. It’s better to lighten up sometimes, and Gunn has created some of the best escapism cinema just for that.
The Italians can shock you, the British creep you out, and the Americans know what’s gross. But the Japanese, man, they know their ghost stories. And their ghost stories will scare the crap out of you.
Ju-On (The Grudge) tells us six intertwining vignettes, all of them connected to one evil house. The horror begins with Rika (Megumi Okina), a social worker caring for an elderly woman in a quiet suburban home. Of course, it isn’t a quiet suburban home, is it? It’s haunted by the angry ghost of Toshio, a little boy, and … other things as well.
Death rattles, a black cat in a boarded up closet, and ghosts hovering around the edges of the frame, and you know that Rika isn’t getting out of this one. The terror only increases as the stories go on, building the tension and the narrative as the viewer puts together the pieces of what happened in that house. And it isn’t pretty.
It’s difficult not to compare Ju-On with the American remake that starred Sarah Michelle Gellar, which was actually not half bad. The Japanese film wins for the scares, though, because it does not tell a distinct chronological story with a main character and plot arc, but rather allows the viewer to slowly understand what’s happening through different eyes. It’s all very unfair too, because none of the victims really deserve what happens to them. They’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. By the end of the film, I wanted to board up my closet door too. Just in case
Kim Jee-woon makes one of two appearances on this list with I Saw The Devil, one of the greatest depictions of revenge I’ve seen in the last decade, but also one of the greatest “horror” movies to come out of South Korea, ever. Gritty, brutal, unrelenting, unsettling, violent, and evil are just some of the words that describe Kim’s masterpiece, but it’s also undeniably tantalizing, visually addictive, thematically brilliant, and deliciously vengeful. Forget the over two hour run time, this one is worth the ride.
Lee Byung-hun plays the role of a police officer whose soon-to-be wife becomes the latest victim of a cannibalistic serial killer (played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-Sik), which causes Lee’s character to never stop hunting until revenge is achieved. A noble and heartfelt attempt at wronging rights, the question remains if Lee’s protagonist is ready to dive into the dark depths that Choi’s killer already displays, having to turn himself into a monster in order to properly find one.
Well without giving anything away, I Saw The Devil is every bit worth Lee’s understandable transformation, making us question if he’s actually becoming a true monster himself.
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