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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.

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