John Carpenter, 1995
Objectively, this is a weaker movie than a lot of the runners-up, but there’s just something about it. It may be a personal thing – 1995 was right smack in the middle of my formative years, and when you’re in that frame of mind and hear a character say something like “sane and insane could easily trade places if the insane were to become the majority,” it’s a little bit mind-blowing. Now, a lot of the metatextual commentary comes off as a tad obnoxiously smug, but even so, In the Mouth of Madness remains a fairly clever movie. It also gets bonus points for rooting its horror in a sort of creeping, almost existentialist dread, rather than the more concrete rubber monsters and crazy killers – and yet, not entirely eschewing said monsters and killers. It’s the best of both worlds.
49. Below
David Twohy, 2002
Criminally underseen, Below takes the trappings of the haunted house movie and transposes them to a novel setting – a US submarine during World War II. Ghosts are frightening enough, and submarines doubly so – which means the combination is tremendously effective. It’s not all about the high concept, however – the characters remain front and center, thanks in part to the efforts of a strong cast led by Olivia Williams and Bruce Greenwood. For those of you, unlike me, prefer your horror “realistic,” know that the movie spends most of its running time (maybe the entire time – I won’t give away which it is) playing up the ambiguity of whether there really are ghosts, or whether the things we see are the result of stress and chemical imbalances on the part of the intrepid sailors.
Robert Wise, 1945
One of many movies based loosely on the Burke and Hare scandal (by way of a Robert Louis Stevensen short story that was based on them), The Body Snatcher condenses the two graverobbers into a single character, John Gray, played by the great Boris Karloff. Most of the movie plays as a sort of sinister drama, until the chilling end that cements its genre status. Watch for the outstanding mid-movie confrontation between Karloff and his fellow legend, Bela Lugosi.
47. The Signal
David Bruckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry, 2008
The Signal is an odd hybrid between a straightforward narrative and an anthology, with a story that follows the same three principal characters, trapped in a city where a mysterious signal turns people into psychopaths, but which is broken into three chapters, each directed by a different director and each with a markedly different tone. The most notable of these is the second segment, which is largely a pitch-black comedy. This would seem extremely out of place next to the straightforwardly brutal first segment and the surreal, more intellectual third segment, but it is presented in such a way that it can be read as coming from the perspective of one of the infected crazy people. This interpretation gives another interesting level of meaning to all three segments, and helps to elevate it to the status of modern classic.
46. Hellraiser
Clive Barker, 1987
Unlike most horror icons of the era, Pinhead is not a particularly significant part of his debut movie. He may have roughly the same amount of screen time as, say, Jason Voorhees (and a lot more dialogue), but whereas Friday the 13th is all about Jason killing teenagers (okay, okay, Friday the 13th Part 2, technically), Hellraiser actually has very little to do with Pinhead and his machinations. At its core, it’s a simple story about a woman and the lengths she would go to in order to have her lover back, and the havoc (in monster form) that it wreaks on her family (hey, did someone say metaphor?). That central conflict alone could make for a strong film, but when you throw in the monsters and creatures and gooey, gooey effects, it’s magic.
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