Part 1 – The Masterpieces
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
The films at the top of this list almost all withhold. Cat People builds its monster from sound and shadow because it couldn’t afford one, Jaws keeps the shark off screen for eighty minutes because the shark didn’t work, and Alien shows its creature for four minutes of a hundred and seventeen.
The other pattern is horror as a vehicle for something else. Hereditary is about grief, Let the Right One In is about a friendship, and Pan’s Labyrinth is about a child under fascism, and each is more frightening for having a subject underneath the monster.
Horror is the genre I’m hardest on, because it’s the easiest one to fake. Any studio can buy a loud noise and a quick cut. What I want is a film with the nerve to make me wait and trust me to fill the dark myself, and that nerve is rarer than the box office suggests.
Every picture in this tier has it. Most of what gets released each October doesn’t, and I resent paying to be startled when I came to be frightened.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the first of nine parts.
Cat People builds a monster from light on water, Jaws shows four minutes of shark in two hours, and both are worse for it. Withhold properly in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
1. The Prophecy (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Prophecy (1995)
RLR: 10+ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"An angel who has been at war so long he has forgotten what it was about."
Gregory Widen wrote and directed it after writing Highlander, and the film’s confidence comes from refusing to explain any of its cosmology. A second war in heaven with humanity as the disputed territory, treated as a genuine theological position instead of as a device. Elias Koteas plays the former priest who ends up in the middle of it.
Christopher Walken plays Gabriel as an angel who has been fighting so long he’s forgotten what the fight was about. He eats wrongly, he moves wrongly, he raises the dead as assistants because he can’t drive, and the film never once remarks on any of it.
Viggo Mortensen appears as Lucifer for about six minutes and is doing something entirely different from everybody else in the picture. He’s calm, he never raises his voice, and he’s the only character who treats the situation as beneath his attention. Amanda Plummer appears as a woman possessed in the second act.
Eric Stoltz has the best entrance in the film as an angel arriving at a Native American school with a soul in his chest. The human characters are given exactly the amount of understanding their position would allow and no more than that. David Goyer did uncredited work before writing Blade three years later.
It cost around eight million dollars and went to video almost immediately, so the reputation was built entirely by people finding it later. The theology is the reason it survives while better-funded films in the same register don’t. Dimension Films released it in September 1995.
Yes, I put a direct-to-video angel picture above Psycho. Walken’s Gabriel is the reason: petty and bored, and still the most dangerous thing in every room he enters.
It galls me that the studio dumped the film the way it did. That decade was full of well-funded theology-flavored junk, and the one picture that took the idea seriously went to video almost before anyone noticed it existed.
2. The Prophecy Franchise (1995-2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Prophecy Franchise (1995-2005)
RLR: 10+ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.8/10
"Each sequel explains more of the war and each one is less frightening."
Five films across a decade, with Walken appearing in the first three and the mythology becoming steadily more literal with each entry. The first two are the ones worth having and the third is where the budget and the ideas run out at the same time.
The progression is the clearest demonstration in the genre that a theological premise loses force every time somebody explains it further. Later entries introduce hierarchies, named ranks and stated rules, converting a war nobody understands into an organizational chart. Greg Spence directed the second and Patrick Lussier the third.
Uprising and Forsaken in 2005 were shot back to back in Romania with no connection to the earlier films beyond the title. Walken had left, the cosmology is treated as settled, and neither picture has any interest in what made the original work. Brittany Murphy appears in the first film early in her career.
The Ashes of Eden material in the second film is the last good idea in the sequence. Russell Crowe plays Michael, the stakes remain unexplained, and the picture still trusts an audience to accept something it hasn’t been told. Kari Wuhrer leads the fourth and fifth entries.
3. Dracula (1931 / 1992 / 2000 / 2014), Contrast [full review]
► Read the full review of Dracula (1931 / 1992 / 2000 / 2014), Contrast
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Two versions sixty years apart, one afraid to name its subject and one naming it outright."
Tod Browning’s 1931 version with Lugosi establishes the image the character has carried for ninety years and is visibly afraid of the thing it’s about. The foreignness, the sexuality and the appetite are all present and none of them can be named. Karl Freund shot the 1931 version after photographing Metropolis.
It’s also a filmed play and shows it.
Long static takes, an abandoned score, and a climax that happens offscreen because the production couldn’t stage it. The Spanish version shot at night on the same sets is technically the better picture. James V. Hart wrote the 1992 screenplay and Eiko Ishioka won for the costumes.
Coppola’s 1992 version is explicitly about blood-borne disease and desire, made during the AIDS crisis and unembarrassed about the connection. Every effect in it is in-camera, achieved with mirrors, forced perspective and reversed film instead of optical work. Wojciech Kilar scored the Coppola film. Winona Ryder brought the script to Coppola.
Gary Oldman plays four distinct physical characterizations across one performance and the old man in the castle is the most frightening thing in any version. Keanu Reeves is the element everybody names and the film survives him. Dracula Untold was intended to launch Universal’s shared monster universe.
The 2000 and 2014 versions are the demonstration of what happens when the subject is removed. Dracula 2000 supplies an origin involving Judas Iscariot and Untold turns him into a defensive warrior, and neither has any interest in appetite. Gerard Butler plays the lead in the 2000 version.
4. Cat People (1942 / 1982), Contrast [full review]
► Read the full review of Cat People (1942 / 1982), Contrast
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"A monster built from light on water because the budget could not buy one."
Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton made the 1942 film for around one hundred and forty thousand dollars and built the monster entirely from sound and shadow because they couldn’t afford one. The constraint produced the most influential horror technique of the decade. Simone Simon plays Irena and Kent Smith the husband who doesn’t believe her.
The swimming pool sequence is the reason. A woman alone in a basement pool, light moving on tile, an animal sound with no source, and the film shows nothing at any point. RKO expected a cheap monster picture and received a study in suggestion. DeWitt Bodeen wrote the 1942 screenplay from a Lewton outline.
The bus stop is the other one and it named the technique. A build to a shriek that turns out to be air brakes, now called a Lewton bus, and almost every horror film since has used it without most of them knowing where it came from.
Paul Schrader’s 1982 version is the opposite approach in every respect. It shows the transformation, the sexuality is explicit, the violence is graphic, and Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell play siblings whose problem the film states in the first act. Nicholas Musuraca shot it and went on to Out of the Past.
Both work and the comparison is the useful part. One film derives everything from what it can’t show and the other from what it insists on showing, and neither approach is available to a picture that hasn’t decided which one it’s doing. David Bowie wrote and performed the song for the 1982 version.
Psycho spends forty minutes on a protagonist it intends to discard, and the stolen money is never resolved. Build a decoy that works, using the Plot Handbook.
5. Psycho (1960) [full review]
► Read the full review of Psycho (1960)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Forty minutes establishing a protagonist, then a bathroom."
Hitchcock financed it himself after Paramount refused, shot it with his television crew in black and white for around eight hundred thousand dollars, and it took over fifty million. He also bought up copies of Robert Bloch’s novel to protect the ending. Joseph Stefano adapted Bloch’s novel and Saul Bass designed the titles.
The structural trick is the one nobody had attempted. The film spends forty minutes establishing a protagonist, her theft, her flight and her decision to return the money, and then kills her in a bathroom. It builds every expectation the audience holds so it can remove it.
The shower sequence runs about forty-five seconds from seventy-eight camera setups, and the knife never touches the body in any frame. Bernard Herrmann’s strings are the reason it works and Hitchcock had wanted the scene silent. Janet Leigh and Vera Miles play the sisters and John Gavin the boyfriend.
Anthony Perkins plays Norman as sympathetic for most of the running time, the decision that makes the rest possible. He’s polite, he’s trapped, he’s funny in places, and the audience is on his side while he cleans a bathroom. Perkins was thirty-six during the shoot.
Perkins is the reason this gets a perfect ten from me. Hitchcock gets the credit for the shower, and he’s earned it, but Perkins is the one who makes me root for Norman while he mops up after a murder. Being on his side is the trap, and it still fools me.
The psychiatrist’s explanation at the end is the film’s one weakness and Hitchcock knew it. Five minutes of exposition tidying away everything the picture achieved by not explaining, before a final shot that undoes the tidying completely. Paramount refused to finance it and Hitchcock used his own money.
6. The Birds (1963) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Birds (1963)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"No score, no explanation, and no ending in any conventional sense."
Hitchcock adapted a Daphne du Maurier story and made the only major horror film with no score at all. Bernard Herrmann supervised an electronic soundtrack of bird noise built on a Trautonium, and the silence between attacks is the most uncomfortable thing in it. Evan Hunter wrote the screenplay and Rod Taylor plays the lawyer.
The film refuses to explain and that refusal is the entire design. There’s no reason given, no scientist with a theory, no resolution and no ending in any conventional sense. The last shot is a car driving away through birds that have simply stopped.
The schoolhouse sequence is the best-constructed scene Hitchcock ever built. A woman smoking on a bench, a climbing frame behind her filling one bird at a time, and the audience watching it happen for close to two minutes before she turns around. Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette appear in supporting parts.
Tippi Hedren was attacked with live birds for five days for the attic sequence after being told mechanical ones would be used. She was injured and the treatment she’s described since is part of the record of the production. Robert Burks shot it and had photographed six previous Hitchcock films.
7. Young Frankenstein (1974) [full review]
► Read the full review of Young Frankenstein (1974)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"A parody built on genuine craft. That is why the jokes land."
Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder shot it in black and white on the actual laboratory equipment from the 1931 film, kept by Kenneth Strickfaden in his garage for forty years. Columbia refused to fund black and white and Fox agreed. Gerald Hirschfeld shot it and John Morris scored it.
As parody it works because it works as horror first. The camera moves, the lighting is genuine expressionist work, the sets are period accurate, and the transitions use iris wipes the original would have used. Fox financed it after Columbia refused the black and white requirement.
Wilder co-wrote it and his performance is the reason the emotional material lands. The scene where he locks himself in with the creature and talks to him is played entirely straight and is the best scene in any Frankenstein film. It took over eighty-six million dollars against a budget near three.
That locked-room scene with Wilder is my favorite. He’s terrified the whole way through and plays it without a single wink, and I can’t name another comedy that trusts its star that far. People dismiss this as parody and move on, and they’re shortchanging a film that does horror better than most horror does.
The Puttin on the Ritz sequence is the film’s structural argument. A monster performing for an audience, applauded, then panicking at a flashbulb, and the comedy and the tragedy of the original are delivered in the same ninety seconds. Brooks and Wilder were both nominated for the adapted screenplay.
Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr and Madeline Kahn are each given one running joke and none of them wears out. The blind hermit sequence with Gene Hackman was improvised into its final shape on set. Wilder has said the original idea was entirely his.
8. Jaws (1975) [full review]
► Read the full review of Jaws (1975)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"The shark did not work. That is the reason the film does."
The mechanical shark failed almost continuously in salt water and the production ran more than a hundred days over schedule, the reason the film works. Spielberg shot around the absent creature and invented the approach that made his career. Peter Benchley wrote the novel and shares the screenplay credit with Carl Gottlieb.
The shark appears for roughly four minutes across two hours and five. Barrels on the surface, a point of view shot from below, a dock pulled into the water, and Williams’s two notes supplying the menace the creature couldn’t. Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw lead the cast.
The Indianapolis monologue is the best-written scene in the picture and its authorship is still argued about. Robert Shaw rewrote a longer draft down himself, delivers it in one take, and the film stops entirely for four minutes to let him. Verna Fields won the Academy Award for editing and John Williams for the score.
The Indianapolis speech is my favorite scene in any Spielberg film. A man at a table with a story, and the picture has the nerve to stop dead for four minutes and let him tell it. Modern studio horror would cut away after thirty seconds to show the monster, and that impatience is what’s wrong with so much of it.
The structure is two films joined at the midpoint. A town under economic pressure refusing to close a beach, then three men on a boat, and the shift from civic thriller to survival picture happens the moment the Orca leaves the harbor. It was the first film to take over one hundred million dollars in North America.
The Alex Kintner sequence is the technical achievement. A dolly zoom on Brody’s face, children in the water, a yellow float, and Spielberg uses the crowd as the obstacle so the audience can’t see the thing they already know is happening. Bill Butler shot it and the water-level rig was built for the production.
9. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
"Demme puts the camera where you would be standing."
Jonathan Demme made the third film to sweep the five major Academy Awards and the only horror picture ever to win Best Picture. Anthony Hopkins is on screen for about sixteen minutes and won Best Actor for it. Ted Tally adapted Thomas Harris’s novel and won the Academy Award for it.
The lens work is the technique nobody notices. Demme shoots almost every conversation with the actors looking directly into the camera, so the audience occupies the position of whoever is being spoken to, and the Lecter scenes become unbearable for that reason alone. Scott Glenn plays Crawford and Anthony Heald the hospital administrator.
Jodie Foster’s Clarice is the film’s subject and the casting makes it work. She’s small, she’s junior, she’s surrounded by men who look at her in every scene, and the film makes the ordinary condescension as constant as the murders.
The Memphis escape is the best-constructed sequence in the picture and it depends entirely on the audience tracking two locations that turn out to be one. Demme cuts between a SWAT team and a doorbell and the reveal is a single reverse shot. Howard Shore scored it and Tak Fujimoto shot it.
Ted Levine’s Buffalo Bill is more disturbing than Lecter and gets less attention because he’s not charming. The basement sequence in darkness with night vision is the only part of the film that is plain horror. It cost around nineteen million dollars and took over two hundred and seventy.
Vidal has no supernatural element and is the most frightening thing in Pan’s Labyrinth. Test your human against your monster in the Antagonist Handbook.
10. The Blade Trilogy (1998-2004) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Blade Trilogy (1998-2004)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"A blood rave and no explanation of who this man is."
Stephen Norrington’s 1998 film is the picture that made the modern superhero film possible, two years before X-Men and a decade before Iron Man. New Line took it at a budget around forty-five million and it took over one hundred and thirty. David Goyer wrote all three films and directed the third.
The blood rave opening is one of the great introductions in the genre. A club, sprinklers delivering blood instead of water, and Wesley Snipes arriving in silhouette without a word of explanation about who he is or what he does. Kris Kristofferson plays Whistler across the sequence.
Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II in 2002 is the best of the three and the Reapers are the reason. A predator that feeds on vampires, a jaw that opens vertically, and a design philosophy that treats the creature as an evolutionary problem. Stephen Dorff plays Deacon Frost and Ron Perlman appears in the second.
Snipes trained in capoeira and kenpo and performs most of the choreography himself. The physical performance is what holds three films together, and the character works because he’s contemptuous of everybody including the people he protects. Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan created the character for Marvel in 1973.
Blade: Trinity in 2004 is the collapse and the production was difficult enough that the cast have discussed it publicly for twenty years. Ryan Reynolds is funny and belongs in a different film. Norrington and Snipes clashed throughout the first production. Jessica Biel and Parker Posey appear in it.
Blade II is the one I’d hand anybody who thinks a comic book film can’t be frightening, and Snipes playing contempt for the whole world never stops being fun for me. Trinity is the blemish, and I’m happy to leave it out of the conversation. Worse is how rarely the first film gets credit for the genre it opened up.
11. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) [full review]
► Read the full review of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"The most frightening thing in it has no supernatural element at all."
Guillermo del Toro spent his own money on the production and has described refusing a larger American budget to keep the ending. It cost around nineteen million dollars and won three Academy Awards. Ivana Baquero was eleven during the shoot and Sergi Lopez plays Vidal. Its setting is 1944 in the Spanish Maquis resistance, and the fascism is the actual subject. Captain Vidal is the most frightening thing in it by a wide margin, and nothing he does requires any supernatural explanation at all. Doug Jones plays both the Faun and the Pale Man.
Vidal scares me more than anything del Toro ever built in a workshop, and he’s the reason this film sits this high for me. The Pale Man is a wonderful design. A man with a rank and a watch is worse, and I’ll always respect a fantasy picture brave enough to let its real monster be ordinary.
Navarro photographs the two worlds differently and deliberately. The fascist half is cold, blue and rectilinear, the fantasy half is warm, gold and curved, and the visual grammar tells the audience where they’re without a word. Javier Navarrete scored it and Guillermo Navarro won for the cinematography.
The Pale Man sequence is the most-cited scene and Doug Jones performed it with the eyes in the palms requiring him to move without seeing. The banquet, the paintings on the wall and the pile of shoes are all doing the same political work. It took over eighty-three million dollars worldwide.
The ending refuses to resolve which reading is correct, and del Toro has been explicit that both are true at once. Ofelia is a princess returning home, and Ofelia is a girl dying in a labyrinth, and the film gives equal weight to each. Maribel Verdu plays the housekeeper working with the resistance.
12. Let the Right One In (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of Let the Right One In (2008)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"A friendship with vampirism applied to it as pressure."
Tomas Alfredson adapted John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel and shot it in a Stockholm suburb in genuine winter, with snow, sodium lighting and long static compositions. The horror arrives inside a film about two twelve-year-olds. Lindqvist adapted his own novel for the screen. It won the Tribeca narrative prize in 2008.
The friendship is the subject and the vampirism is the pressure applied to it. Oskar is being bullied badly enough that he carries a knife, Eli arrives, and the relationship develops through a wall, a Rubik’s cube and morse code. Kare Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson play the two children.
Hakan is the film’s most uncomfortable idea and the one most viewers miss. He’s an adult who procures blood for Eli, the novel is explicit about what that relationship is, and the film shows the audience Oskar’s probable future without stating it. Hoyte van Hoytema shot it before working with Nolan.
The swimming pool ending is one of the great final sequences in the genre. The camera stays underwater with Oskar, the violence happens above the surface out of frame, and body parts enter the water while the audience watches his face. An American remake arrived in 2010 as Let Me In.
13. Coraline (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of Coraline (2009)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"The trap is assembled entirely from what the child asked for."
Henry Selick adapted Neil Gaiman using stop motion, a process that took over three years and roughly one hundred and thirty thousand individual facial expressions produced on a 3D printer. The Laika production is still the most technically ambitious of its kind. Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher provide the principal voices.
The button eyes are the single best horror idea in children’s cinema. A perfect mother who wants only one thing, and the offer is made kindly across a dinner table with the sewing kit already on it. Bruno Coulais scored it and They Might Be Giants contributed a song.
The Other Mother’s design degrades across the film in stages nobody remarks on. She grows taller, thinner and more angular, the hands become needles, and the final form has been prepared visually for an hour before it arrives. Gaiman published the novella in 2002. Selick had directed The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Adults find it frightening, and it works because it takes a child’s actual grievance seriously. Coraline is ignored, her parents are working, and the Other World is an accurate rendering of what she’s been asking for. It was the first stop motion feature shot in stereoscopic 3D.
The hand sequence at the end is the detail that stays with people. A severed hand pursuing her across snow, scuttling, and Selick shoots it small and fast against a wide white frame with no score for most of the chase. Laika has produced five features since.
The Thing ends on two men who can’t verify each other, because the subject was never the creature. Match the ending to the theme in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
14. Hereditary (2018) [full review]
► Read the full review of Hereditary (2018)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"The worst scene in it is a mother talking at a dinner table."
Ari Aster made his first feature for around ten million dollars and the film is about grief with a cult underneath it. The framing treats the house as a dollhouse throughout, opening on a model and moving into a real room without a cut. A24 released it and Pawel Pogorzelski shot it.
Toni Collette’s performance is the best in horror this century and the Academy ignored it. The dinner table scene is four minutes of a mother saying the unsayable to her son, and nothing supernatural happens in it. Gabriel Byrne plays the father and Milly Shapiro the daughter.
The Academy’s silence on Collette is still a disgrace. That dinner table scene is four minutes of acting that belongs beside anything from any genre, and the Academy passed it over because it happened in a horror picture. Awards snobbery has buried plenty of good work over the years, and I can’t think of a clearer case.
The telephone pole is the most discussed sequence and its construction makes it work. The film gives the audience no music, no cut away and no relief, and holds on a boy’s face in a car for close to a minute afterward. Colin Stetson scored it using saxophone and clarinet processing.
The final act reframes everything as a plan that was complete before the film started. Every element treated as grief turns out to be logistics, and the reveal works because the picture spent two hours building the emotional reading first. It took over eighty-two million dollars worldwide.
Alex Wolff carries the second half and the physical performance is unusual. Peter is dissociating, he’s not sleeping, and Aster shoots him in long static takes that give the audience nowhere to look except at a boy coming apart. Ann Dowd plays the woman from the support group.
15. The Thing (1982) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Thing (1982)
RLR: 9.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"Two men in the snow who cannot verify each other."
Carpenter’s film opened against E.T. and was a commercial and critical failure that took a decade to be reconsidered. It now sits on most lists of the best horror films ever made and the effects work is the reason. Bill Lancaster adapted the John W. Campbell novella Who Goes There.
Rob Bottin was twenty-two and lived at the studio for a year, working himself into hospital. Nothing in the transformations resembles a previous design because the brief was that the creature imitates without understanding what it’s imitating. Kurt Russell leads and Keith David, Wilford Brimley and Richard Dysart appear.
The structure is paranoia instead of monster. Twelve men, no women, no contact with anybody, and any one of them might already be something else. The blood test sequence is the best-constructed scene of its kind ever filmed. Ennio Morricone scored it and Dean Cundey shot it.
The blood test is the scene I’d show anybody who thinks horror can’t be built like a machine. Twelve men who can’t trust each other and one test to settle it, and I feel as tense as they do. My one small quibble is that a few of the crew blur together, and in a film about telling men apart that costs a little.
The dog kennel sequence is where the film establishes its rules and it arrives early enough to poison everything afterward. An animal splitting open, other dogs pressing against the far wall, and nobody in the room understanding what they’re seeing. Universal released it in June 1982 and it lost money.
Carpenter’s ending is the argument, and he has refused to settle it for forty years. Two men in the snow, a fire going out, and neither able to establish what the other is. The film ends on the situation instead of a resolution. A prequel arrived in 2011 using the same title.
16. Nosferatu (1922) [full review]
► Read the full review of Nosferatu (1922)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Repellent instead of seductive, and nobody has improved on it since."
Murnau made an unauthorized Dracula adaptation, Bram Stoker’s widow sued, and a court ordered every print destroyed. The film survives because copies had already been distributed abroad, the only reason anybody has seen it. Henrik Galeen wrote the screenplay and changed every name from the novel.
Max Schreck’s Orlok is the opposite of every vampire that followed. He’s rat-like, bald, long-fingered and entirely without charm or seduction, and the design has never been improved on by anybody attempting to frighten instead of entice. Fritz Arno Wagner shot it and Albin Grau designed the production.
The shadow on the staircase is the most reproduced image in horror and it’s an expressionist solution to a technical problem. Murnau couldn’t stage what he wanted, so he staged its shadow, and the shot has been copied for a century. Werner Herzog remade it in 1979 with Klaus Kinski.
The plague material is the film’s actual subject. Orlok brings rats and disease, the town boards its doors, and a German audience three years after the 1918 influenza pandemic understood exactly what they were watching. Robert Eggers made a further version in 2024. Prana Film went bankrupt over the judgment.
17. Frankenstein (1931) [full review]
► Read the full review of Frankenstein (1931)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"The most upsetting moment has no malice in it at all."
James Whale directed and Boris Karloff was uncredited on the original release, billed only as a question mark. Jack Pierce designed the flat head, the neck bolts and the heavy lids across weeks of testing, and the makeup took four hours daily. Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh adapted a stage version of the Shelley novel.
The creature doesn’t speak and Karloff’s entire performance is in the eyes and the hands. The entrance is staged backward through a door and then cut in three progressively closer shots, the moment the horror film found its grammar. Mae Clarke plays Elizabeth and Dwight Frye plays Fritz.
The Maria sequence was cut by censors in most territories for decades. A child throwing flowers into a lake, the creature copying her, and the film’s most upsetting moment is one where nothing malicious happens at all. Arthur Edeson shot it and Universal released it in November 1931. Colin Clive plays Henry Frankenstein as unwell and the film has no interest in defending him. The creature is the sympathetic figure throughout, the source material’s actual position and something most adaptations reverse. Bela Lugosi turned the part down because the creature has no dialogue.
The Prophecy refuses to explain its cosmology and the sequels supply it one rank at a time. Know what not to codify, using the World Builder’s Handbook.
18. King Kong (1933) [full review]
► Read the full review of King Kong (1933)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"An animal instead of a threat. That is why the ending costs something."
Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack built the film on Willis O’Brien’s stop motion, with an eighteen-inch armature animated frame by frame against rear-projected live action. It took around ten million dollars during the Depression and saved RKO. Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong and Bruce Cabot lead the cast.
The Skull Island sequences are considerably stranger than the reputation allows. A brontosaurus attacking a raft, a pterodactyl, a log rolled into a ravine with men falling into a pit, and a spider sequence cut before release that was never recovered. Edgar Wallace received a story credit and died before production began.
O’Brien gives the animal a performance instead of motion. Kong scratches, he’s curious, he examines Ann with something closer to bewilderment than appetite, and the expressiveness separates the film from every imitation. The film was reissued four times across the following twenty years.
Max Steiner wrote the first full original orchestral score for a sound film and effectively invented the form. Leitmotifs for characters, music carrying emotional information the images don’t, and the entire practice of film scoring proceeds from it. Peter Jackson remade it in 2005 and has restored the spider sequence in description.
The Empire State Building sequence works because the film has spent an hour making the animal a character. The biplanes are doing their jobs, Kong doesn’t understand what’s happening, and the last shot is a body on a street. RKO was close to bankruptcy when it was released.
Kong’s death on that street moves me more than most human deaths in films of the period, and O’Brien earned all of it with an eighteen-inch puppet. My only reservation is the Skull Island stretch, which piles on dinosaurs a bit past the point where wonder turns into a checklist. The Empire State Building finale makes up for it in full.
19. Bride of Frankenstein (1935) [full review]
► Read the full review of Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"The creature makes the only moral decision anybody in it makes."
Whale returned under pressure and made a better film than the original by treating the material as tragedy with a streak of camp running underneath it. The framing device with Mary Shelley is the film announcing that it knows exactly what it’s doing. William Hurlbut wrote the screenplay and Franz Waxman scored it.
The creature speaks in this one and the decision divides people permanently. Karloff objected and has said so, and the film uses the speech to give him friendship, wine and a cigar in a blind hermit’s cottage. Colin Clive returns as Frankenstein and Valerie Hobson replaces Mae Clarke.
Ernest Thesiger’s Doctor Pretorius is the best character in either film. He’s amused, he keeps homunculi in jars, he’s unmistakably coded in ways the Code couldn’t touch, and every scene he’s in operates at a different pitch. John J. Mescall shot it and Jack Pierce designed the Bride.
Elsa Lanchester appears as the Bride for about three minutes and the design has outlasted the film. The hair, the movement, the hiss, and a character whose entire function is to refuse, and the picture treats that as the tragedy it is. Universal released it in April 1935.
The creature owns the ending. He tells them to go, he says he belongs dead, and he pulls the lever himself. A monster film that closes on its monster making the only moral decision anybody in the picture makes. O. P. Heggie plays the blind hermit.
20. The Mummy Trilogy (1999-2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Mummy Trilogy (1999-2008)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Fraser plays it amused. That single choice holds the whole tone together."
Stephen Sommers made an adventure film wearing a horror property and the 1999 picture is the reason it worked. Universal wanted a straight remake of the Karloff film and Sommers delivered something closer to Raiders with rotting priests in it. Rachel Weisz plays Evelyn and John Hannah her brother.
The film depends entirely on Brendan Fraser. He plays Rick O’Connell as competent and permanently amused, and the performance is the reason the film survives tonal shifts that would sink a picture with a serious lead. Jerry Goldsmith scored the first film and Alan Silvestri the second.
Arnold Vosloo’s Imhotep is a real antagonist instead of a monster. He’s grieving, he has a plan, he gets more sympathetic as the film proceeds, and the regeneration design work still holds up better than the sequels do. Rob Cohen directed the third and Maria Bello replaced Weisz.
The Mummy Returns in 2001 doubles everything and loses the balance. More effects, more plot, a child, and a digital Scorpion King in the last act that was already a joke on release. Rachel Weisz is still excellent in it. It took over four hundred and fifteen million dollars worldwide.
Tomb of the Dragon Emperor in 2008 removes Weisz, moves to China and has no idea what the series was. Jet Li is wasted, the tone is gone, and the film is the clearest demonstration that Fraser was carrying more than anybody credited. Two Scorpion King spinoffs followed with Dwayne Johnson.
Fraser is the reason this trilogy makes me so happy, and the third film proves it by stripping away everything around him and still leaning on him to hold the thing up. That entry is my one real complaint. The first two are about as much fun as a monster movie has any right to be, and that kind of fun is harder to make than the people who sneer at it will admit.
Honorable Mentions: Horror Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or close to it and each is on the list.
Kwaidan (1964)
Masaki Kobayashi filmed four Lafcadio Hearn ghost stories on enormous painted sets inside an aircraft hangar, with skies rendered as eyes. It runs three hours and won the Cannes jury prize.
Onibaba (1964)
Kaneto Shindo set a film in a susuki grass field where two women murder samurai for their armour, and the mask sequence is among the most frightening images in Japanese cinema. The grass itself does most of the work.
Kuroneko (1968)
Shindo again, with two murdered women returning as cats bound by an oath to kill samurai. The wire work is deliberately unnatural and the film never explains the terms of the bargain.
Ugetsu (1953)
Kenji Mizoguchi built a ghost story around a potter who abandons his family during a civil war, and the boat sequence through mist is among the most beautiful things ever filmed. The horror arrives without a single effect.
Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Georges Franju made a film about a surgeon harvesting faces for his disfigured daughter, and the mask Edith Scob wears does more than any effect. The surgery sequence caused walkouts at Edinburgh.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Painted shadows on the sets, angles that don’t resolve, and a frame narrative that reverses everything in the last minutes. German expressionism begins here and the influence has never stopped.
Carnival of Souls (1962)
Herk Harvey made one feature, shot in Kansas and Utah for around thirty thousand dollars, and Lynch and Romero have both borrowed the pavilion sequences. Candace Hilligoss holds the film together.
Repulsion (1965)
Polanski put a woman alone in a London flat and let the walls begin to yield. The hands coming through plaster and the corridor stretching are both achieved practically and neither has dated.
The Wicker Man (1973)
A policeman investigating a missing child on a Scottish island where the community is polite, cheerful and entirely coherent. The ending is the most complete horror reversal in British cinema.
Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)
Lucio Fulci made a giallo about child murders in a southern Italian village and aimed it squarely at the church and at superstition. It’s considerably angrier than his reputation allows.
Deep Red (1975)
Argento built his best film around a witness who saw something and can’t place what changed in a room. Goblin scored it and the puzzle is constructed well enough to solve on a rewatch.
Possession (1981)
Andrzej Zulawski made a divorce film that becomes something else entirely, and Isabelle Adjani won at Cannes for a subway sequence she’s said took years to recover from. It was banned in Britain for a decade.
Dishonorable Mentions: Horror Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had the premise, the cast or the source material and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit. Nothing in this genre is worse than the lazy remake. Somebody finds a film that worked because it withheld, buys the title, and then explains everything in the first act so nobody at a test screening gets confused. Each of these had something worth keeping and threw it away.
House of Wax (2005)
A remake in name only of the Vincent Price film, with a town made of wax and a marketing campaign built entirely on which cast member dies first. The set design is better than anything the script does with it.
The Wicker Man (2006)
Neil LaBute remade a film whose power comes from a community that makes internal sense, and replaced it with a matriarchy the picture treats as self-evidently absurd. The bee sequence is famous for the wrong reasons.
Jacob’s Ladder (2019)
This one remakes a film whose entire structure is a man unable to trust his own perception, rebuilt with an explanation delivered early. It went to video on demand with no theatrical run.
Pulse (2006)
An American remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film about loneliness and the internet, with the isolation replaced by jump scares and the ghosts given a stated method.
The Grudge (2020)
The fourth English-language entry in a sequence that had already been remade twice, with a nonlinear structure that removes the one thing the original had, the sense of a house working steadily through its occupants.
Cabin Fever (2016)
It remakes a film from 2002 using substantially the same screenplay, made with the original director producing. Nobody has offered a persuasive account of why it exists.
What Do You Think?
The films at the top of this page almost all withhold something. Cat People, Jaws and The Thing are all worse for what they don’t show. I wish more studios would learn that before they greenlight another jump-scare factory, because audiences can tell when a film is afraid to trust them. Tell me which one you think gets closest to showing too much.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
