A-List: Top Five Horror Films of All-Time
By J. Don Birnam
September 3, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
After a few weeks of easily defined A-List columns, we are back in amorphous land. Is, for example, a suspenseful movie a la Hitchcock a horror movie? Are alien-invasion movies strictly speaking horror movies? Even within the horror genre, subtypes are plenty. Some movies, such as those in the so-called “slasher” genre (more on that in a second), feature guts galore and increasingly sadistic deaths. I suppose that a modern day criterion for spotting a horror movie is that it’s supposed to gross the audience out (think: The Final Destination and Saw series). But, in more classic times, the genre tilted more towards suspenseful, eerie, and bone-chilling sequences. These movies tended to have fewer deaths than slasher films, but were just as disturbing, if not more, in their ultimate denouements.
Still yet another subgenre within this group is the exploitation/indie film—these movies tend to be outside the mainstream as they disgust critics and most audiences alike, but achieve cult-like status in the coming years if the material is considered showy or original enough. Today, I will delve little into this subgenre, mostly because I’m ignorant of it. Dawn of the Dead, The Evil Dead, the Japanese Audition, and Don’t Look Now are movies that one sees frequently listed as all-time horror classics. Alas, I’ve seen few of these.
So, today I will limit myself to movies that are meant to cause fear, screams, and chills in audiences, however that terms is defined. And, to make it somewhat easier, I will leave monster movies out of it. To be sure, many horror movies include quasi-supernatural characters (think Jason in the Friday the 13th series). But, at least in theory, these killers take some human form. Not so in films featuring monsters/animals as the main antagonists - today, movies like Jaws, The Birds, and Aliens, all worthy of the number one spot, are ineligible.
Even then, the list of honorable mentions could go on forever. The American movie The Ring is utterly traumatizing, both because of the simple gimmick of death at the hands of a seemingly innocent videotape and because of the gruesome expressions in the faces of the victims to that creepy crawling girl out of the well/television. A gaping hole in my movie knowledge is the fact that I’ve never seen the original Japanese version, which is supposed to be 10 times scarier.
Or who can forget the classic lines spurred by the chilling adaption of Stephen King’s The Shining? Indeed, Stephen King adaptations could fill a whole A-List on their own and then some. And let’s not forget the all-time classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with its gruesome, unforgiving deaths and its positively terrifying killer.
Dishonorably I will only mention one movie in the genre that really bothers me (another controversial pick, no doubt): The Blair Witch Project. I simply never bought the found-footage gimmick, and without it the movie sort of makes no sense. Kudos to it, of course, for the amazing success it achieved on its budget, but I’m not sure that we needed the entire found-footage genre, which is another subset of horror movies itself, to continue to pollute our screens 16 years after its debut.
As for Wes Craven himself, I will give him the last two honorable mentions. Scream is one of my personal favorites of all-time, and the Nightmare on Elm Street series gave us an iconic, unforgettable, and utterly terrifying villain in Freddy Krueger. Scream was particularly brilliant because it essentially meant the rebirth of the horror/slasher genre. Looking introspectively at past movies and distilling from them the “rules” that had come to define the medium, Craven brilliantly wove these “rules” into the plot, both overtly and subtly, and gave us the first truly original horror movies in decades, and one of its most successful entrants. He also was arguably responsible for a trend that exists to this day and has spilled over into all other types of entertainment from reality TV to novels - offing a recognizable face and main characters in key sequences was, to my knowledge, largely a novel concept until Drew Barrymore was gutted in the opening minutes of Scream. Decades later, we still have TV shows that spin their cliffhangers around which main character will go next.
Craven was truly a master filmmaker and a genius at this particular craft. He will be sorely missed.
The biggest surprise in the main event is that most of the movies I picked are over 40 years old. I suppose I’m not much for the more modern blood-and-gore-are-better type of horror movies.
5. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Now considered Roman Polanski’s all-time classic, Rosemary’s Baby is, to be sure, not your typical horror movie. Few things happen other than in Mia Farrow’s (Rosemary) paranoid existence, and most of the movie consists of Rosemary wavering between being convinced and then disbelieving that her neighbors are part of a satanic cult intent on taking the child she’s carrying for sinister purposes.
Polanski does not give a definitive hint as to the ultimate truth until the very end, by which point Rosemary’s fate is sealed by her own mistakes. What’s most creepy about the movie is the slow crescendo with which the fear and horror grow into the viewer, and how they relate to something that seems real and simply possible or even likely as close as here and as soon as tomorrow.
The movie has inspired many a plot-device based on this “are my neighbors crazy and trying to kill me” trick, both in the horror genre and also in lighter fare from Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery to Tom Hanks’ campy The ‘Burbs.
4. Carrie (1976)
It turns out that the Master of Horror himself, Stephen King, will make an appearance of sorts in this list after all. The adaption of his first novel, Carrie, is truly one of the most upsetting and bone-chilling movies of all time.
Again, the fear lies mostly in the realism of the plot next to the surreal but horrifyingly possible climax. Carrie is a bullied teenager (many of which we read about in the news today) who, unbeknownst to her abusive mother and colleagues, has also extra-sensory powers. The plot is by now well known: she is eventually fed-up and exacts sweet, venomous revenge on them during prom night. But the scene, played with masterful and terrifying aplomb by a young Sissy Spacek, is really more disturbing that you think. The flying (really, dropping) blood, the fire, the revenge in her eyes… one reads of these stories today in sad clips about real-life rampages, and it is perhaps why this movie hits so close to home. No fictional monsters are needed, the scares here come from what we know is a dark human soul.
The movie became an instant teenage classic and, like so many other movies in this genre, has spanned a long list of forgettable and regrettable remakes, sequels, and spinoffs.
3. Psycho (1960)
Label my list suspense more than horror if you will, but the master of suspense deserves and earns at least one spot on today’s list. Perhaps now his most recognized movie of all time, Hitchcock’s Psycho contains a list of severable notables: one of the most recognizable villains of all time (Norman Bates), one of the most iconic shots in movie history (the famous shower scene), and one of the most surprising twist endings of all time (I won’t spoil it, in case for some ungodly reason you haven’t seen it).
As I said, all of the movies on today’s A-List will have a common thread: a steady crescendo of horror, growing suspense, and a less-is-more mentality that doesn’t quench any thirst for gore and blood from moment one, but that leaves a long-lasting impact with its tragic and horrifying conclusions.
But Psycho has much more than that. It turns out that decades before Craven revived the killing-off of the main character ploy in Scream, Hitchcock introduced it to the utter shock of audiences by killing off Marion Crane in the shower in that fateful scene (rightfully, Craven plays homage to Hitchcock with explicit references to Psycho in Scream).
And, in another twist of events, the shower scene may never had been were it not for the fetid Production Code, which still kept a stranglehold on creativity in 1959 and 1960 when Hitchcock was working. The Code did not permit him to show the knife piercing Janet Leigh’s skin, nor did it permit human blood or a breast shot. Brilliant as he is, Hitchcock worked around that - he incorporated quick moving shots into his by-then-trademarked intense close-ups of faces at the moment of highest danger, and combined it with the eerily simplistic “eeek, eeek, eeek” sound that is now used ubiquitously to mean danger. All that, combined with the thinner blood of pigs, which looked darker and flowed easier, created what is arguably the most perfect take in the history of cinema.
Perhaps because Psycho does not feature (many) more deaths, I have left it a tad lower on the list of all-time horror movies. Still, it is without a doubt one of the best movies of all-time. And in this space, I didn’t even have a chance to get into the interesting psychoanalytical theories that abound about the movie - mostly regarding how the three levels of the Bates Motel are symbolic to the three levels of consciousness/ego in the human mind. To this add mirrors, water, and shadows as reflections, yet again, of the dark human soul, and it is clear that this movie is brilliant beyond its years.
2. The Exorcist (1973)
Fresh off his stunning success for creating one of the first car chase scenes in the Best Picture winner The French Connection, director William Friedkin decided to try his hand at another marginalized genre, the horror movie, and gave us one of the all-time best. The Exorcist, one of few horror movies to be nominated for Best Picture (of course, a movie I’ve neglected to mention, The Silence of the Lambs, did win it all), is again chilling because of the way it inches into its climax.
Little Linda Blair’s condition begins as a simple illness. But Friedkin smartly instills the fear of God itself into us from the beginning, speaking of demons in the Middle East, and slowly showing eerie occurrences surrounding the child that point to only one explanation - the devil himself. Ellen Burstyn brilliantly portrays the child’s disturbed mother, who is helpless to stop what’s coming.
Some of the scenes in this movie are simply unforgettable and the stuff of nightmares. The crucifix scene, the scene where she crawls down the stairs, and, of course, the classic scene were her faced is full of green pustules and she has her final encounter with the priest, a stoic Max Von Sydow. I simply cannot think of a movie that disturbed me more and kept me restless as night as this one (and didn’t do so with cheap scares or a high body count).
And I won’t even reprint all the rumors that abound regarding the mysterious and grizzly fates that some of the people involved with the film encountered (and Linda Blair’s own inability to ever watch this film again, and mental problems as a result of it are well recounted) because then the nightmares will really begin.
1. Halloween (1978)
But there was no doubt in my mind when I began this list that John Carpenter’s Halloween is my favorite horror flick of all time. I guess it all comes back full circle: Halloween stars Jamie Lee Curtis who is, of course, Janet Leigh’s (Psycho) daughter; it was, in its day, the most profitable movie of all time considering it was made for pennies, until Blair Witch overtook it; and, more than any other movie, it almost singlehandedly drives the climatic moments of Wes Craven’s Scream. I have to believe, in fact, that this was Craven’s favorite horror flick too.
And the movie has it all: slow crescendo into horrifying denouement; shadows and reflective motifs about our own human nature; the rules that started it all (don’t say I’ll be right back, don’t run up the stairs, and don’t have sex or smoke pot, or you’ll die); the methodic, sneaking exposition of the killer instead of oversaturation; and the murder of main characters. Halloween is, in my view, the mother of all modern slasher movies, a mantel carried on by Jason and Freddy Krueger in the 1980s and rediscovered by Ghostface in Scream.
Michael Myers is one of the most methodic, disturbing and terrifying villains of all time, and Jamie Lee one of the best scream queens to top it. The eerie intro music and piercing screams are the cherry on top.
It’s all simply to die for.