Horror: The best and worst

Stay out of the shower this Halloween.

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Monday, 29, Oct 2007 03:34

As the days grow darker, supermarkets fill with bulging bags of bitesize chocolate bars and a larger than normal preponderance of fanged people seem to be wandering the streets, it can mean only one thing - Halloween's here again.

In honour of this once venerable institution long bastardised as an excuse for small children armed with eggs and flour to terrorise frightened pensioners while teenage girls grab their opportunity to dress as salaciously as possible without fear of reproach, we take a look at the highs and lows in onscreen chills and spills as we rundown the best and worst horror movies ever made.

The Best

The Exorcist

Banned until 1999, William Friedkin's peerless chiller made religion, subliminal imagery and projectile vomiting horror staples, with little Lynda Blair's terrifying performance as possessed Regan raising the bar for child actors as well as, presumably, leading to some extensive therapy sessions. With something to scare everyone, an ending that continues to shock and some of the filthiest language to have ever escaped from such a young girl's mouth, it remains unmatchable as an exercise in pure, probing terror.

It

The central reason for thousands of twentysomethings' deep-seated fear of clowns, this 1990 Stephen King adaptation (though strictly a TV movie) succeeds on a level of primal fear, doing little more than using a character who's just very, very scary, but breaking the fourth wall and leaving us with nightmares for years. Tim Curry excels as the demonic clown Pennywise terrorising the small Maine town of Derry.

Poltergeist

Okay, so it's got a clown and technically it's cheating to have more than one clown movie in the list, but 25 years on, Tobe Hooper's possession tale still carries an impressive ability to startle the most jaded of viewers. Working from a classic Stephen Spielberg script - covering his favourite topics of suburban family life, comic relief and rollercoaster thrills and spills - one can only imagine just how frightening the film would be with modern SFX. And as bloodcurdling horror dialogue goes, few scripts can hold a handle to the despairing "They're here".

Psycho

While it might not be Alfred Hitchcock's greatest - a moniker deserving of Vertigo - it remains one of the most unsettling, sinister films ever produced and due to the infamous (yet less-than-two-minutes-long) shower scene, forever imprinted in public memory. Featuring the director's most daring piece of misdirection - the $40,000 carried by Marion Crane carries no weight at all - Psycho stands unparalleled as a wholly enthralling, wonderfully evocative masterpiece of the power of the unseen.

Nosferatu

Though now impossible to view without thinking of the Fast Show's rendition of slimy football agent Eric Hall as the lengthily-clawed monster, Max Schreck's work as Count Orlok set the tone for decades of vampire chillers, with director FW Murnau using light to traumatising effect and managing to create sympathy for its rodent-like villain without a single line of dialogue. Though it's a straightforward Bram Stoker adaptation, a rights dispute forced Murnau to change the principals' names. Yet despite no mention of Dracula, Nosferatu - originating from the old Slavic word for "plague bringer" - stands as a byword for vampiric mastery.

The Shining

Though Jack Nicholson's irrepressible performance as the steadily-unravelling writer remains unmatched in the horror canon, it's the handiwork of Stanley Kubrick that deserves the highest praise, transforming a top-notch Stephen King haunted house novel into something truly genre-defining, with masterful jump cuts and suspense management creating a movie burned indelibly into modern moviegoers' brains. Whether from the unnamed terror of room 237, the subtle flashes of the dead twins, or the literally bloody elevator, it's an unrelenting, unforgettable horror classic.

Saw

A rarity in modern horror, with a genuinely innovative concept, this 2004 movie sneaks into the list ahead of other 'classics' because of its bravery in challenging genre conventions, satisfying structure and a very real challenge to our own perceptions of onscreen violence. And in Jigsaw, writer/director James Wan has created an antihero for all ages. Though Wan's now stepped away from the series - currently using the tagline "If it's Halloween, it must be Saw" - it's a franchise steadfastly dedicated to intricate, intriguing, insistently terrifying horror.

Evil Dead II

Ostensibly a re-treading of the first movie's plot with a bigger budget, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell cemented their place in cinema history with one of the funniest, most frightening (sort of) films ever made. Featuring endlessly quotable lines, Raimi's always-innovative direction - how can simply putting a camera on a motorbike's handlebars look so professional? - and an unfailingly awesome hero, there's only one word for this most sublime of sequels: "Groovy."

Scream

Sadly let down by worsening sequels and the crime-against-cinema of the Scary Movie franchise, Wes Craven's 1997 film changed the horror landscape, with its decidedly post-modern take on slasher conventions, a creepy conceit (the distorted phone voice has since been ripped off to laughable levels), a pleasing dose of comedy to offset the genuine fear and a pretty young cast, ready and waiting to be cut to ribbons.

Night of the Living Dead

George A Romero's 1968 classic changed the face of the horror genre, as well as being entirely responsible for modern perceptions of zombies. With a fantastically grainy, low-budget feel, first-time viewers might feel pangs of disappointment in comparison to the glossy sheen of modern horror, yet without Romero's seminal, subversive work, the likes of Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and John Carpenter would have made vastly different movies. Its influence cannot be overstated.

To see InTheNews' ten worst ever horror films click here.

Lewis Bazley