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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.

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