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 could not afford one, Jaws keeps the shark off screen for eighty minutes because the shark did not 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.
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 has forgotten what the fight was about. He eats wrongly, he moves wrongly, he raises the dead as assistants because he cannot 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 is calm, he never raises his voice, and he is 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 do not. Dimension Films released it in September 1995.
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 genuinely good idea in the sequence. Russell Crowe plays Michael, the stakes remain unexplained, and the picture still trusts an audience to sit with something it has not 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 is 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 is also a filmed play and shows it. Long static takes, an abandoned score, and a climax that happens offscreen because the production could not 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 could not afford one. The constraint produced the most influential horror technique of the decade. Simone Simon plays Irena and Kent Smith the husband who does not 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 has been used by almost every horror film since without most of them knowing where it came from.
Paul Schrader’s 1982 version is the opposite approach in every respect. The transformation is shown, the sexuality is explicit, the violence is graphic, and Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell play siblings whose problem is stated 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 cannot show and the other from what it insists on showing, and neither approach is available to a picture that has not decided which one it is 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. Every expectation the audience holds is built to be removed.
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 genuinely sympathetic for most of the running time, the decision that makes the rest possible. He is polite, he is trapped, he is funny in places, and the audience is on his side while he cleans a bathroom. Perkins was thirty-six during the shoot.
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 is 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 has 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.
The film works as parody 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.
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 doing the work the creature could not. 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 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 harbour. 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 cannot 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 actual subject and the casting is what makes it work. She is small, she is junior, she is 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 is not charming. The basement sequence in darkness with night vision is the only part of the film that operates as 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 is 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 genuinely funny and belongs in a different film. Norrington and Snipes clashed throughout the first production. Jessica Biel and Parker Posey appear in it.
11. The Mummy Trilogy (1999-2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Mummy Trilogy (1999-2008)
RLR: 10 / 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.
Brendan Fraser is the entire load-bearing element. 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 genuine antagonist instead of a monster. He is 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.
12. 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.
The film is set in 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.
The two worlds are photographed 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 are 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.
13. 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 is 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.
The Thing ends on two men who cannot verify each other, because the subject was never the creature. Match the ending to the theme in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
14. 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.
The film is genuinely frightening for adults and 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 has 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.
15. 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 telephone pole is the most discussed sequence and its construction is what 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 earning 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 is 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.
16. 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 is 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 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 are seeing. Universal released it in June 1982 and it lost money.
The ending is the argument and Carpenter 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.
17. 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 is 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 is an expressionist solution to a technical problem. Murnau could not 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.
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. 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 does not 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 genuinely 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.
19. 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 genuine performance instead of motion. Kong scratches, he is curious, he examines Ann with something closer to bewilderment than appetite, and the expressiveness is what 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 do not, 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 does not understand what is happening, and the last shot is a body on a street. RKO was close to bankruptcy when it was released.
20. 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 is 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 is amused, he keeps homunculi in jars, he is unmistakably coded in ways the Code could not touch, and every scene he is 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 ending belongs to the creature. 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.
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 one of 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 do not 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 the pavilion sequences have been borrowed by Lynch and Romero both. Candace Hilligoss carries the whole thing.
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 is considerably angrier than his reputation allows.
Deep Red (1975)
Argento built his best film around a witness who saw something and cannot 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 has 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.
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)
A remake of 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)
A remake of 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 do not show. 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