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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.

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