Friends came over this weekend and wanted to see a horror movie. Something contemporary, something without many jump scares, something with a bit of intellectual content. That should be easy for me to provide — after all, I own literally hundreds of horror DVDs and Blu-rays, and I subscribe to Shudder. Yet I found the assignment difficult, not just because my friends have somewhat different taste from each other, so locating a movie that would please them both was hard, but also … how to choose? (We went with His House, which I hadn’t seen in a while and had been a recent favorite. Good choice! They both loved it.) But my struggle to locate one movie for us to watch made me wish I had a handy little list of personal favorites to pull from when asked for such a thing.
Last year, I wrote a piece for Third Man Books / Third Man Records that offered a “playlist” of 13 horror movies for Halloween. These were films that were all available on streaming platforms at the time, and they were not necessary my own personal favorite 13 — though each is in its own way a favorite — but rather 13 that I thought played well together and offered a wide range of experiences.
I’m fond of every movie on that list, but that’s not a list of my own absolute favorites. A favorites list is much harder to do than creating a playlist of currently-streaming films that work well together is. Horror is my favorite film genre, the one I return to most frequently, so there is a lot to choose from. And “favorite” is a loaded category — what actually determines that something is “a favorite”? What if, for instance, it used to be a favorite, and had a big influence on you, but now it doesn’t do much for you? What if it’s only a favorite on days when it rains? What if it’s not in any way a favorite in and of itself, but it is attached to a favorite time of life, a particular event, a certain mood of nostalgia?
Without going too deep into any of those weeds, here I’m going to try to make such a list — though of 25, not 13, because 13 proved completely impossible. “Favorite” can be for any reason, and is not at all a testament to quality, just whether I think of it as “one of my favorite movies”.
I will put one limit on the list: no more than one film by any director. (That’s actually a challenging limit for me with directors like Alfred Hitchcock, George Romero, David Cronenberg, Rob Zombie, David Lynch… With some of these films, I give myself permission to discuss my other favorites of theirs.)
The list is alphabetical by title because ranking is too difficult when what I’m trying to do is whittle down a list of maybe 75 favorite horror movies to a brutal 25. (Obligatory note: Were I to make this list a few days from now, it might be different.) Release dates are via IMDB. Links are to any writing I have done on the film, or, in the absence of that, to IMDB.
Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)
One of the 3 “unholy trinity” of British folk horror films, with the others being Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man. I go back and forth as to whether Witchfinder General or Blood on Satan’s Claw is my favorite, but today I’m feeling that Blood is more of a horror movie than Witchfinder, so is especially appropriate to this list, even if on the whole Witchfinder is the better film. (Wicker Man is good, and I’ve seen it in its various releases, but a lot of it seems rather silly to me.) Blood on Satan’s Claw is a strange, disturbing, violent, raw, merciless … some of my favorite ways to describe great movies!
Blue Velvet (1986)
Putting only one David Lynch movie on this list feels terribly wrong, but them’s the rules. At any other moment I could go with Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me or even the whole of Twin Peaks: The Return. But I’m choosing Blue Velvet because it’s the David Lynch film that continues to haunt me the most. I saw it at too young an age and it completely bewildered and disturbed me, and it’s never let go. Every time I watch it, I’m surprised it’s not a supernatural horror film — its surrealist presentation of suburbia certainly feels supernatural. I’ve seen it more times than I have most other films, and it continues to challenge and beguile.
A Dark Song (2016)
Most — dare I say all? — other films about occultism don’t show much knowledge of occultism. Liam Gavin, the writer and director of A Dark Song, did his research. (For more on what the film is drawing from, check out this post by John Coulthart or this video from the excellent Esoterica YouTube channel.) But accurate occultism doesn’t necessarily make for good cinema. A Dark Song is very good cinema indeed, and that’s primarily because of Liam Gavin’s clear vision and commitment. For all intents and purposes, it’s a two-person movie with a single setting. (It could easily be adapted into a play.) The key to its success is the clarity of the characters, who are both mysterious and compelling, truly great performances by Catherine Walker and Steve Oram. It’s a film about ritual, about secrets, about grief. A film that understands loss and pain. The things I go to horror for.
Dead Ringers (1988)
Most of David Cronenberg’s films are favorites, especially his films of the ’70s and ’80s. The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, any of them could be on this list. But I go with Dead Ringers simply because it’s the one I return to the most and the one that gets most deeply under my skin. The other films are in some ways more entertaining, more fun — Dead Ringers is not fun. And I suppose that’s why I hold it in such high esteem. I believe horror should be unsettling, disturbing, soul-scarring but also compelling and thought-provoking. Fun … can be had elsewhere.
Il Demonio (1963)
An astonishing witch-hunt movie. (It would pair well with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s great Day of Wrath and Witchfinder General.) The genius here is to put us, the audience, in the position of wanting the village to kill the witch. She seems obnoxious, impossible to deal with, horrible. And then slowly we begin to see how wrong we are, how easily we can join the mob. The filming and performances are excellent, and this is a film that uses the conventions and expectations of horror to make a powerful, but not at all preachy, point about how we treat each other. It leaves me more sad than horrified, but often that is the truest ending.
The Eyes of My Mother (2016)
Recent horror films rarely feel truly original to me, the conventions of the genre being so well established that the effect often feels like endless variations on a theme. The Eyes of My Mother is more original than most, more surprising and, consequently, more disturbing. It is not a film that offers anything like comfort. But it is beautiful.
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)
Choosing any one Hammer Studio horror movie is difficult, and in many ways the best Hammer films sort of blend in with each other, so the appreciation is not so much for any one title as for the overall Hammer experience. They are most famous for their Dracula and Frankenstein movies, and I love most of them to some extent or another (we won’t talk about Dracula A.D. 1972), but of the series, the Frankenstein movies are my favorites, and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed seems to me the height: it has all the virtues of the other films and fewer of the weaknesses. It’s Peter Cushing at his best, a compelling plot, great Gothic sets and costumes. I could watch it once a week and be perfectly content.
Hellraiser (1987)
It is hard now to recapture the sense of absolute transgression Hellraiser represented in the first five or even ten years of its release. The world has changed, the technology of special effects got supercharged by CGI, and, despite creating the most interesting monster characters of the 1980s, the following films in the franchise quickly devolved into drivel. (Hellbound: Hellraiser II is still pretty good as a horror film, but its low budget and lack of direct involvement by Clive Barker limited its visionary potential. After that, the films get actively bad, even embarrassing. Even the recent reboot, which made the brilliant decision to cast Jamie Clayton as Pinhead, was, sadly, a waste of time.) But that first film still holds up, still disturbs, still reminds us that once upon a time Clive Barker really was the future of horror, and that future seemed secure and magnificent and queer and astonishing. I revisit Hellraiser once every year or two to remember what might have been.
I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
Produced by Val Lewton, directed by Jacques Tourneur (whose Night of the Demon could have also been on this list), I Walked with a Zombie is a work of eerie poetry, a film that hides a subtly anti-colonialist vision within a classically gothic, Jane Eyre sort of story. With a ridiculous title foisted on them, and barely any budget, Lewton and Tourneur produced a film of great meaning and great beauty.
The Innocents (1961)
The definitive adaptation of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw”, an elegant and unsettling film. The script was by Truman Capote, who seems perfectly matched to bringing out some of the weirdness of Henry James, and director Jack Clayton and director of photography Freddie Francis found what feel to me like cinematic equivalents to James’s winding prose. The acting is top rate, the editing powerful and creative, and the sound design absolutely masterful — this is a film that belongs alongside some of the Val Lewton films and The Haunting (1963) in discussions of how to make sound itself create atmosphere and terror.
The Invisible Man (1933)
Much as I love most of the Universal monster movies, it is The Invisible Man that I return to most frequently and that continues to amaze me with its very existence. This is a dark, cynical, bitter film. Director James Whale was known for slipping queer subtext into his movies, and in The Invisible Man it’s a subtext that leads to an exploration of the perils of embracing the role of the outsider — the thrill but also the loneliness that can follow, and, finally, the self-destruction. For me, The Invisible Man is something like a loose adaptation of Willa Cather’s great tragic gay story “Paul’s Case”.
Let the Right One In (2008)
I first saw Let the Right One In when it came out — I was living in New Jersey and a friend and I met up in Manhattan at the Angelika Film Center to see it. It was his suggestion, and I knew nothing about the film, which is actually a great way to go into it. We both enjoyed it, but it wasn’t until later that I realized how much this movie had lodged in my mind and imagination, haunting me. It’s a perfect blend of atmosphere and incident, of tenderness and violence, of horror and transcendence. And it’s about vampires, my favorite monsters.
Lords of Salem (2012)
For me, Rob Zombie is one of the greatest of all horror filmmakers. While his oeuvre is scattered in quality, I could put a bunch of his films on this list: The Devil’s Rejects, Halloween, and Halloween II are films I hold in as high esteem as Lords of Salem. But Lords is the one I watch most frequently, the film that feels like a dreamscape and a nightmare. It grapples with ideas of addiction in oneiric ways rather than the obvious and moralizing ways of so many other movies, particularly horror movies, where clonking people over the head with A Message is so often a temptation writers and directors can’t resist. I wish Zombie had gotten the budget he originally planned on and had been able to expand the film in the ways he wanted, but even in the lower-budget, more minimal form it ended up taking, it is, for me, a wonder.
M (1931)
One of the first and best serial killer movies. (It pairs well with Hitchcock’s 1927 The Lodger, which was influenced by Fritz Lang and German Expressionism.) Lang was one of the great directors, a titan who rose to the greatest heights of German cinema and came crashing down with the financial disaster of Metropolis (one of my favorite movies; but then, many things I love were financial disasters!). M is pretty much perfect: astonishing filming, genius sound design (despite being one of the earliest German talkies), and Peter Lorre in his first great film role. It’s more than 90 years old and it’s still deeply disturbing.
Martin (1977)
Many of George Romero’s movies could be on this list: Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead. All great films. But Martin is the one that obsesses me, a film I feel great fondness for and even something like tenderness toward. It helps that it’s about vampires and not zombies. (Despite having played the title character in a movie called Zombie Boy, I don’t find zombies particularly interesting unto themselves, whereas vampires seem to offer endless possibilities of implication, allegory, and terror. But then, my first book was called Blood!) I’m hoping to do some writing on Martin in the next few years, hoping to get to the Romero archives at the University of Pittsburgh to do some digging into the script’s history and also to explore the areas of Pennsylvania that served so well as the film’s setting. Truly, it’s an obsession.
Nosferatu (1922)
Another vampire movie. This might be saying something about me… I think it’s not coincidental that director F.W. Murnau was gay, as vampires have held an attraction for queer folks for a long time — indeed, there’s a good argument to be made that Dracula is something of a love letter from Bram Stoker to Walt Whitman. And Nosferatu, famously, is an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula — so unauthorized that most prints were destroyed after Stoker’s heirs sued for copyright infringement. It’s something of a miracle the film still exists. And it is astonishing, still. I’ve watched it in a theatre with live piano accompaniment and my companions all found the film legitimately unsettling and creepy, despite (or maybe in part because of) its age and primitive technology. I’m excited to see what (New Hampshire’s own) Robert Eggers does with it in his upcoming adaptation — I love Werner Herzog’s 1979 adaptation as well (Klaus Kinski, a completely horrible human being, was born to play Nosferatu). Still, there’s nothing like the original, nor will there — can there — ever be.
Psycho (1960)
Choosing just one Alfred Hitchcock movie is truly impossible, and The Birds should certainly be here as well, and Vertigo, and Shadow of a Doubt, and The Lodger, and… But Psycho is just such a deep part of my being that if I can only have one Hitchcock, this is it. Despite the clunky psychiatric explanation at the end, it’s an otherwise perfect movie, a truly scary and horrifying vision of human depravity, but also in some ways a compassionate portrait of a terribly troubled man. Technically, it is full of wonders. But technical wonder can only go so far. Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins in particular raise this film from being a compelling shocker to something like a modern tragedy.
Pulse (2001)
Choosing between Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror movies is tough — I could easily have gone with Cure or Charisma here — but Pulse is the one I think about most often, a story that still feels contemporary in its exploration of the ways machines create ghostly life. It’s strange, atmospheric, almost associational in its editing and structure. A fitting form for a story of delusions and ethereal threats.
Santa Sangre (1989)
Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the few true surrealists and mystics to build up a body of work in cinema (and theatre, literature, and comics as well). Interesting as most of his other films are, Santa Sangre feels like his magnum opus, his most mature film. It’s perhaps the strangest serial killer movie ever made, especially since it isn’t until late in the film that we realize it’s a serial killer movie. There’s really nothing like it — bloody, repulsive, hilarious, touching. A film about art, dreams, magic, power, and murder. Truly wild and unique.
The Shining (1980)
No matter what Stephen King says, this is a brilliant adaptation of a pretty good book, and easily in my Top 5 for horror movies, often my Top 2. I suppose I am more Kubrickian in my sensibilities than Kingish, so the changes Kubrick and co-screenwriter Diane Johnson made in the adaptation all feel like improvements to me. King sometimes steps back from the abyss by resorting to silly monsteriness; Kubrick never saw an abyss he didn’t want to step to the edge of and stare down at for hours. The Shining is all about the abyss, and it’s a perfect, soul-destroying movie because of it.
Suspiria (1977)
I struggle to get on Dario Argento’s wavelength, but Suspiria, Deep Red, and to somewhat lesser extent Inferno are films that capture my imagination. I feel a bit guilty that it is Suspiria, Argento’s most famous film, that is the one that stands out in my mind, the one I most happily return to. Maybe I am just a philistine. (Definitely not a hipster!) But Suspiria is such a gloriously demented assemblage of color and sound that I can’t resist its siren song. If a horror film is to be little more than its surfaces, then Suspiria makes the case that that’s just fine, and even perhaps more than enough, if the surfaces are all evocative and beguiling.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
This month marks the 50th anniversary of Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s general release in U.S. theatres, and I plan to write something soon in its honor. Forced to choose one favorite horror film, this would be it for me. No question, no pause even to think about it. Everything I want horror to do, TCM does. It seems at times like a grimy bit of realism, but it’s actually a story of apocalypse, a nightmare evocation of the pain of existence, a banshee screech against the coldness of fate and chance, a testament to nothing. (Pay attention to the astrology book the victims are reading in the van! I’m so obsessed with this movie that I actually tracked down the exact edition of that book and now proudly display it on my shelves. “I didn’t realize you are into astrology,” visitors say. “I’m not,” I reply. “I’m into Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Then I serve them food.) Though I don’t think Tobe Hooper is a director of genius or even much interest, he did take an interesting approach to the sequel, realizing that the 1980s didn’t need the same grindhouse aesthetic as the original film, so Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is tonally quite different, something of a romp. It lacks the bottled lightning perfection of the original, but it’s a good film nonetheless, and has some of Tom Savini’s best gore effects, which I always appreciate.
Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017)
A beautiful, heartbreaking movie that is for me the ideal of how to weave an exploration of social problems into a horror story. We feel our way through the lives of some of the most oppressed people in Mexico, but we also get the dark pleasures of weirdness. This is not just one of the great horror movies of recent years, it is one of the great movies of any type or genre. Writer-director Issa López has gained fame recently for her season of True Detective, which was, indeed, quite good, but Tigers Are Not Afraid is a true masterpiece, a work of clear-eyed sensitivity and astonishing skill.
Vampyr (1932)
While Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr is, yes, a vampire story, it’s unlike any other vampire story I know, despite partly being drawn from J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (a source for quite a few vampire movies). Dreyer was one of the singular experimenters of 20th century cinema, creator of multiple masterpieces, a man devoted to his own singular vision and aesthetic. Vampyr is as close to a nightmare as cinema gets until David Lynch arrives with Eraserhead. I don’t know how many times I have watched it over the years, but each viewing has yielded different feelings, different confusions, different pleasures. It is a film to live with and to dream with.
You Won’t Be Alone (2022)
Today, I am calling this a horror movie. But it presses up against the borders of the genre with quiet ferocity, creating a tale of dark magic, witches, rituals, and superstition that feels like a lost folktale while also feeling like an exploration of identity, community, compassion. That all makes it sound less astonishing than it is. This is a film that hired cast members from around the world and required them to learn to speak a Macedonian dialect known by few people alive. It’s a movie that draws influence as much from Dreyer and Terrence Malick as from any sort of horror tradition. And yet it is also deeply satisfying as something of a monster movie. It is a work of rare beauty and wonder.
***
There’s the list. Without setting out to do so, it has, I see now, covered a century: 1922 (Nosferatu) to 2022 (You Won’t Be Alone). Seven of the films are from the 20th century, which makes sense, since we’re only a few decades into the 21st. However, the 21st has been pretty good for horror, and perhaps in the future I should make a list of favorite 21st century horror movies, letting me include some that came very close to getting on this list (Lake Mungo! Session 9! Ichi the Killer!) The decade with the most films (5) is the 1980s, but it’s only one ahead of the 1970s and two ahead of the 1930s and 1960s. Ten of the films were originally in a language other than English (and this doesn’t count Suspiria, an Italian film which I’ve only ever watched in English). Four of the films are directly about vampires, and a few others might be able to be called vampiric. Clearly, I like vampires. (Near Dark almost made the list, and might on a different day. And Only Lovers Left Alive. And…)
