Part 2 – The Near Perfect
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
This is the tier that built the conventions. Black Christmas established the entire slasher grammar four years before Halloween, Night of the Living Dead created a subgenre without ever using the word zombie, and Them! put an investigation in front of the creature.
The other pattern is refusal. The Haunting shows nothing at all, The Innocents supports two readings equally and endorses neither, and Halloween never explains its killer or gives him a motive of any kind.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the second of nine parts.
The Haunting shows nothing at all and Them! spends forty minutes on an investigation before an ant appears. Delay and withhold, using the Showing and Telling Handbook.
1. War of the Worlds (1953 & 2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of War of the Worlds (1953 & 2005)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"One film gives you the war room and the other never leaves the family."
Byron Haskin’s 1953 version moved Wells from Victorian England to California and replaced the tripods with manta-shaped machines on invisible legs, because the leg rig never worked and the wires kept showing. The design won the visual effects Academy Award anyway. Gene Barry and Ann Robinson lead the 1953 version.
The 1953 film is about the atomic age and says so directly. A bomb is dropped on the machines and does nothing, in 1953 the most frightening thing an American audience could be shown, and the picture ends in a church instead of a laboratory.
Spielberg’s 2005 version is explicitly about September 11 and the imagery is not accidental. Ash falling on a street, a wall of missing persons flyers, a man checking himself for blood that belongs to somebody else, and a ferry crossing that goes wrong. Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning lead the 2005 one.
The two films take opposite structural approaches to the same novel. Haskin shows the global war with scientists, generals and newsreel footage. Spielberg locks the camera to one family and never once cuts to anybody in authority explaining anything. Barre Lyndon wrote the earlier screenplay and David Koepp the later.
Both keep the bacteria ending, disliked in both decades and the whole point of the book. Humanity does not win, it survives on an accident, and the machines are defeated by something nobody in the story understood or planned. Wells published the novel in 1898.
2. Them! (1954) [full review]
► Read the full review of Them! (1954)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Forty minutes of investigation before anybody sees an ant."
Gordon Douglas made the first of the atomic mutation cycle and it is by some distance the best of them. Warner Bros. shot it intending Technicolor and 3D, cancelled both during production, and the black and white it fell back on is why the film still works.
The structure is a police procedural for the first forty minutes and the ants are withheld completely. A girl found walking in the desert unable to speak, a wrecked store with the sugar taken and the money left, and a footprint nobody can identify. Ted Sherdeman wrote the screenplay from a George Worthing Yates story.
The sound arrives before the creature does. A high pulsing chirp over the desert wind, heard three times before anybody sees anything, and the audience is trained to fear a noise before the film has shown them what makes it. James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn and James Arness lead the cast.
The ants themselves are full-size articulated puppets and they hold up because Douglas shoots them in fragments. A leg, an antenna moving past a doorway, a head in a storm drain, and never a clean wide shot of a whole one standing still. Sid Hickox shot it and Bronislau Kaper scored it.
The film’s politics are unusually direct for 1954. The cause is atomic testing, the scientists say so plainly, and the last line is a warning that this is the first year of a new world and nobody knows what else is coming. It was Warner Bros.’s highest-grossing film of that year.
3. The Innocents (1961) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Innocents (1961)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"Two readings held in perfect balance, and neither one endorsed."
Jack Clayton adapted The Turn of the Screw with Truman Capote on the screenplay, and the film maintains both readings with complete discipline. Either the children are possessed or the governess is deteriorating, and nothing in it settles the question. William Archibald and John Mortimer worked on the screenplay alongside Capote.
Freddie Francis shot it in CinemaScope with candles and deep focus, using filters that let the frame edges fall into black. Figures appear in the corners of shots where the audience is not looking, and several are never acknowledged by anybody on screen. Michael Redgrave plays the uncle and Megs Jenkins the housekeeper.
Deborah Kerr plays Miss Giddens as sincere throughout, the decision that keeps the ambiguity alive. She is not concealing anything and she believes every word she says, so her account cannot be dismissed and cannot be trusted. Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin play the children.
The sound design was extraordinary for 1961. Whispers with no source, a music box, birdsong cut abruptly to silence, and Georges Auric’s score withheld for long stretches so the house is heard instead of scored. Fox released it in December 1961. Deborah Kerr called it her best work.
The final scene is the one nobody forgets and it works either way. A boy dies in her arms, she kisses him, and the film ends without establishing whether she saved him from something or frightened him to death herself. James published the novella in 1898.
4. The Haunting (1963) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Haunting (1963)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Nothing supernatural is shown at any point in the film."
Robert Wise adapted Shirley Jackson and showed nothing at all. No apparition, no effect, no creature, and the most frightening sequence in the film is a camera on a closed door while something on the other side breathes. Nelson Gidding adapted The Haunting of Hill House.
The house was built as a set with deliberately wrong geometry. Nothing is square, doors close by themselves because the frames are off plumb, and the statuary was designed so that faces appear where the audience does not expect them. Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson and Russ Tamblyn complete the cast.
Julie Harris plays Eleanor with her interior monologue on the soundtrack, a risky device that pays completely. The audience is inside a woman who has never been wanted anywhere, and the house is the first thing that has ever asked for her. Davis Boulton shot it in Panavision and Humphrey Searle scored it.
The bulging door is achieved with a wooden panel pressed from behind by crew members, and it remains the best practical effect in a haunted house film because the audience is given no explanation of what is doing it. It was shot largely in England on MGM’s British stages.
The 1999 remake is the clearest demonstration of what the original understood. It shows the ghost, animates the house digitally, resolves every ambiguity, and is frightening at no point in its running time. Jackson published the novel in 1959. Wise had edited Citizen Kane twenty years earlier.
Night of the Living Dead builds a cellar argument with no correct answer, and Carrie shows you the bucket twenty minutes early. Dread over surprise in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
5. Night of the Living Dead (1968) [full review]
► Read the full review of Night of the Living Dead (1968)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"The cellar argument has no correct answer and never gets one."
Romero shot it in Pittsburgh for around one hundred and fourteen thousand dollars with friends and local investors, and a title change after release left the copyright notice off the print. The film has been public domain ever since, so everybody has seen it. Duane Jones died in 1988.
The word zombie is never used. The creatures are ghouls, the cause is never established beyond a radio mention of a returning Venus probe, and the film’s refusal to explain is why an entire subgenre grew out of it. John Russo wrote the screenplay with Romero.
Duane Jones was cast because he was the best actor who auditioned, and Romero has always said the part was not written for a Black man. The film was released months after the King assassination and the ending could not be read any other way.
The farmhouse structure is the template every siege film since has used. A defensible space, a group who disagree about the plan, boards and nails, and an argument about the cellar that turns out to have no correct answer. Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman fill out the farmhouse.
The ending is the most brutal in American horror and it is delivered in stills. Ben survives the night, is shot by a posse from a distance, and the film closes on newsprint photographs of a body on a hook. Romero shot and edited it himself.
6. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) [full review]
► Read the full review of Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"Everybody conspiring against her is kind to her face."
Polanski adapted Ira Levin almost line for line and shot it in the Dakota, and the film’s horror is entirely social. A young wife in a new apartment is patronized, advised, fed and managed by neighbours who are unfailingly kind to her. John Cassavetes plays Guy and Sidney Blackmer plays Roman Castevet.
Mia Farrow’s performance is the film and the physical deterioration is real. She lost considerable weight during production, the haircut happens mid-film, and the last act has her thin, pale and in pain while everybody around her is concerned and helpful. Christopher Komeda scored it and William A. Fraker shot it.
The pregnancy is the horror and the film is direct about it. She is in constant pain, she is told it is normal, her doctor dismisses her, her husband sides with the neighbours, and every piece of this is recognizable to anybody who has been disbelieved by professionals.
Ruth Gordon won the Academy Award for Minnie Castevet and the performance is why the film works. She is nosy, loud, generous with food and completely impossible to accuse of anything, and she is running the whole operation. Paramount released it in June 1968. She had played comedy for most of her career.
The ending refuses the confrontation the structure promises. Rosemary finds the cradle, screams once, and then rocks it. The film stops without telling the audience what she decided or what happens next. Levin published the novel a year earlier. Levin wrote a sequel novel in 1997.
7. The Exorcist (1973) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Exorcist (1973)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"An hour of hospitals before anybody says the word."
Friedkin adapted William Peter Blatty’s novel and made the highest-grossing horror film ever released to that point. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won two, and it is still the only horror picture nominated for Best Picture in that era. Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow and Jason Miller lead the cast.
The first hour is a medical film and the structure is the reason it works. Every test is run, every specialist is consulted, the arteriogram sequence is filmed in clinical detail, and exorcism arrives only after science has been exhausted on screen. Linda Blair was fourteen and was nominated for a supporting Academy Award.
Mercedes McCambridge voiced the demon by swallowing raw eggs, chain smoking and being tied to a chair, and had to sue to receive credit for it. The vocal performance is the single most effective element in the film. Owen Roizman shot it and Blatty won for the adapted screenplay.
The film’s actual subject is Karras instead of Regan. A priest who has lost his faith and whose mother has died alone, and the exorcism is his problem being worked out through somebody else’s daughter. Warner Bros. released it in December 1973. Blatty based it on a 1949 case in Maryland.
Dick Smith’s makeup and the practical effects still hold because the film shoots them cold. The room was refrigerated so the breath is real, the bed rig was mechanical, and the camera treats all of it as documentary instead of spectacle. A version with additional footage was released in 2000.
8. Don’t Look Now (1973) [full review]
► Read the full review of Don’t Look Now (1973)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Every premonition is accurate and he reads all of them wrong."
Nicolas Roeg adapted a Daphne du Maurier story and built the film out of editing instead of plot. Images repeat, colours rhyme across scenes, and the picture cuts forward and backward without signalling which it is doing at any point. Allan Scott and Chris Bryant wrote the screenplay.
The red coat is the film’s organizing device. A child drowns wearing one in the opening, and the color then appears in Venice on a jacket, a scarf, a smear of paint and a figure glimpsed across water, and the audience is trained to chase it.
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play grief with more accuracy than the genre usually permits. They are polite to each other, they are not coping, and the famous sequence is intercut with them dressing afterward in a way that makes it about intimacy instead of sex.
Venice in winter is the other character. Empty, cold, scaffolded, with canals that are working spaces instead of scenery, and a church restoration that puts the protagonist on rigging above stone floors. Anthony Richmond shot it and Pino Donaggio scored it. Roeg had shot Petulia before turning to directing.
The ending is the most discussed in British horror and the film has planted it from the opening shot. Everything Baxter has seen was accurate and he read all of it wrong, the point of the story and the reason the structure is built the way it is.
9. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"A house furnished in bone, and nobody explains the family."
Tobe Hooper shot it in Texas heat for around one hundred and forty thousand dollars over a brutal production the cast have described at length since. The film is far less graphic than its reputation and shows almost no blood at any point. Kim Henkel wrote it with Hooper and the two also produced.
The dinner sequence ran for over twenty-four hours in a room full of rotting animal matter in summer heat, and Marilyn Burns’s distress in it is not performance. The sequence is the most genuinely upsetting thing in seventies horror. Gunnar Hansen plays Leatherface and Edwin Neal the hitchhiker.
The house is the horror and the production design is why. Furniture built from bone, a feather-covered room, a chicken in a cage hung from the ceiling, and every object in it implying a domestic routine the audience does not want to work out. Daniel Pearl shot it and Hooper composed the sound design with Wayne Bell.
Leatherface is not the frightening element and the film knows it. He is panicked, he screams, he is clearly the least powerful person in the family, and the hitchhiker and the cook are both considerably more disturbing. It was banned outright in several countries for years.
The ending is a girl escaping in the back of a truck, laughing and covered in blood, and the film holds on a man with a chainsaw turning in the road. Nothing is resolved and nobody is caught. Marilyn Burns died in 2014 and Hansen in 2015.
Black Christmas gives its killer no face, no name and no motive, and every film that followed supplied one and lost the fear. Keep it unknowable, using the Antagonist Handbook.
10. Black Christmas (1974) [full review]
► Read the full review of Black Christmas (1974)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"The whole slasher grammar, four years before Halloween."
Bob Clark made the film that established the entire slasher grammar four years before Halloween and nobody credits it. Point of view camera from the killer, a holiday setting, the calls coming from inside the house, and a final girl left alive. Roy Moore wrote the screenplay and Clark directed.
The phone calls are the most disturbing element and they have not been matched. Multiple voices layered over each other, screaming, pleading and obscene in turn, performed by several actors recorded separately and mixed into one call. John Saxon plays the detective and Keir Dullea the boyfriend.
Billy is never seen, never named and never explained. The audience gets an eye through a gap in a door and a pair of hands, and the film declines to supply a face, a motive or a backstory at any point. Reg Morris shot it and Carl Zittrer scored it.
Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder and Andrea Martin play the sorority as adults with opinions and a drinking problem between them, a considerably better group than the form ever managed again. Clark went on to make A Christmas Story nine years later. Clark cast largely out of Toronto theatre.
The ending leaves the killer in the house with the phone ringing and the camera pulling back. No resolution, no capture and no explanation, and Clark refused every sequel proposal on the grounds that the film had already said everything. Two remakes followed, in 2006 and 2019.
11. Carrie (1976) [full review]
► Read the full review of Carrie (1976)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"You see the bucket twenty minutes before the prom starts."
De Palma adapted Stephen King’s first novel and cast it from an audition process he ran jointly with George Lucas for Star Wars. Both Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie were nominated for Academy Awards, an outcome horror almost never got. Lawrence D. Cohen adapted the novel and Pino Donaggio scored it.
The film is about humiliation instead of telekinesis and the opening establishes it. A girl who has not been told what menstruation is, in a locker room, having objects thrown at her by girls who find her distress funny. Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, William Katt and John Travolta appear.
Piper Laurie plays Margaret White as sincere instead of a monster, the reason she works. She believes every word, she is frightened for her daughter, and the performance was pitched as comedy by Laurie until De Palma told her the film was serious. Laurie had not made a film in fifteen years.
The prom sequence uses split screen, slow motion and a sustained silence before the bucket that runs longer than is comfortable. De Palma shows the audience the rope and the bucket twenty minutes early and then makes them wait. Mario Tosi shot it and United Artists released it in November 1976.
The hand from the grave is the first jump scare of its kind and it was shot backward with the film reversed, so the movement has a wrongness the audience registers without being able to name. King published the novel in 1974 as his first.
12. Eraserhead (1977) [full review]
► Read the full review of Eraserhead (1977)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Lynch has refused to explain the baby for fifty years."
David Lynch shot it over five years on an American Film Institute grant, working nights and delivering newspapers to fund it, and the film was assembled in fragments as money appeared. It is his first feature and almost nothing in it resembles a narrative. Jack Nance plays Henry and Charlotte Stewart plays Mary.
The sound design is the achievement and Alan Splet spent a year on it. A constant industrial hum under every scene, radiators, wind, machinery in another room, and long stretches with no dialogue at all. Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell shot it. Splet worked with Lynch for two decades afterward.
The baby is the thing nobody discusses and Lynch has refused to explain it for fifty years. It is not a puppet anybody has identified, it moves, it breathes, and the crew agreed never to describe how it was made. It ran as a midnight film for years and built its audience that way.
The film is about the terror of fatherhood and the premise is stated plainly. A man is handed a child he did not want, in an apartment he cannot leave, in a city that is entirely machinery, and everybody around him treats the arrangement as normal.
13. Suspiria (1977) [full review]
► Read the full review of Suspiria (1977)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Color on stock nobody can print any more, and a plot that barely matters."
Argento shot it on the last available stock of Technicolor imbibition printing, so the reds are impossible and why no restoration has reproduced them. The process was discontinued during production. Daria Nicolodi wrote it with Argento and Jessica Harper leads. Technicolor Rome closed the line shortly after.
The plot is close to irrelevant and Argento has said so. A dance academy, a coven, a missing girl, and the film is a delivery system for color, geometry and Goblin’s score played at a volume that was a problem in cinemas. Luciano Tovoli shot it and Joan Bennett appears as the directress.
The opening double murder is the most elaborate sequence in the genre. A girl through a stained glass ceiling, a rope, a knife, and Argento stages roughly seven minutes of escalation with no dialogue and no explanation. Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis supplied the title.
The sets are built from primary colours with no naturalism attempted anywhere. Corridors lit red from no visible source, wallpaper in impossible patterns, and an architecture that operates on the logic of a nightmare instead of a building. Two further films completed the Three Mothers trilogy.
The maggot sequence and the razor wire room are both practical and both work because the film has spent an hour establishing that its world does not obey ordinary rules. Nothing needs justifying once that is agreed. Luca Guadagnino remade it in 2018. Argento has said the plot was always secondary.
The Shining builds a hotel that cannot be mapped and Suspiria breaks physical logic in the first ten minutes. Set the terms early in the World Builder’s Handbook.
14. Halloween (1978) [full review]
► Read the full review of Halloween (1978)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"The shape stands in backgrounds nobody checks."
Carpenter made it for around three hundred thousand dollars in twenty days and it took over seventy million, making it the most profitable independent film of its time. He wrote the score himself in three days. Debra Hill wrote it with Carpenter and produced. Irwin Yablans produced it.
The Panaglide work is what nobody notices and everybody feels. Long gliding takes at the height of a walking person, following characters through houses and along streets, and the audience is placed in a position they cannot identify as a viewpoint. Jamie Lee Curtis was nineteen and it was her first film.
Michael Myers has no motive, no dialogue and no explanation. Loomis calls him evil and the film supplies nothing further, and the mask is a William Shatner likeness bought for less than two dollars and painted white. Donald Pleasence plays Loomis and Dean Cundey shot it.
The film is considerably less violent than its reputation. There is almost no blood, the killings are brief, and the horror is entirely in composition, with the shape standing in backgrounds the characters do not check. Twelve further films have followed across four decades. Nick Castle wore the mask for most of the film.
The closing sequence is the argument. Loomis fires six rounds, Michael falls off a balcony, and the body is gone. Carpenter then cuts through every empty room in the film while the breathing continues on the soundtrack. It was shot in Pasadena in spring using painted leaves.
15. Dawn of the Dead (1978) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dawn of the Dead (1978)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"The dead are the setting. The bikers are the antagonists."
Romero shot it at night in a Pennsylvania shopping mall over four months, working after closing and clearing out before opening. Dario Argento part-financed it in exchange for the European cut, scored by Goblin and running shorter and faster. David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger and Gaylen Ross lead the group.
The mall is the argument and the film states it out loud. The dead return there because it was important to them in life, and the survivors take the building, fill it with goods and become progressively less interesting as people. The Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania stood in for the setting.
Tom Savini’s effects made his reputation and the bright arterial red has been criticized for decades. It reads as unreal on purpose, and the film pairs it with a comic tone that makes the last act’s genuine violence land harder. Zack Snyder remade it in 2004 as his first feature.
The four-person group is the best written in the sequence. A pregnant woman who is a television professional, two SWAT officers with different reasons for leaving, and a helicopter pilot, and the film gives each of them a distinct relationship to the plan. It was released unrated in America to avoid an X.
The bikers are the real antagonists and the structure is deliberate. The dead are a condition, the living are the threat, and the film’s position is that people who have something will always be attacked by people who want it. Romero wrote it in Argento’s apartment in Rome.
16. The Shining (1980) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Shining (1980)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.4/10
"A hotel whose geography cannot be mapped, on purpose."
Kubrick shot for over a year with take counts that have become part of the record, and Shelley Duvall’s treatment during the production has been discussed for four decades. The Steadicam work by Garrett Brown is the film’s technical foundation. Diane Johnson wrote the screenplay with Kubrick.
The geography of the hotel does not work and that is deliberate. Windows appear in interior rooms, corridors connect to places they cannot reach, and the audience cannot build a map no matter how carefully they watch. Scatman Crothers plays Hallorann and Danny Lloyd plays Danny.
Stephen King has objected publicly for forty years and his objection is coherent. His novel is about an alcoholic losing a fight he is genuinely trying to win, and Kubrick’s Jack is unpleasant from the first scene and never had anywhere to fall from. John Alcott shot it and Wendy Carlos contributed to the score.
The Grady twins, the elevator, room 237 and the hedge maze have all become common property, and the film supplies no explanation for any of them. The hotel is never accounted for and the photograph at the end makes things less clear instead of more.
Duvall’s performance is the one that has been reassessed most. She is playing genuine terror for most of the running time, the baseball bat sequence took over a hundred takes, and the exhaustion visible on screen is not acting. King wrote his own television version in 1997.
17. Poltergeist 1 & 2 (1982, 1986) [full review]
► Read the full review of Poltergeist 1 & 2 (1982, 1986)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"It arrives through a television left on in a house with a mortgage."
Tobe Hooper is credited as director and Spielberg produced, and the argument about who actually directed the 1982 film has run for forty years. The Directors Guild investigated and Spielberg issued a public statement about it. Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams play the parents.
The premise is suburban and that is the whole idea. A development built on a relocated cemetery where only the headstones were moved, a family with a mortgage, and a haunting that arrives through a television set left on after broadcast ends. Heather O’Rourke was five when the first film was shot.
The effects are almost entirely practical and Industrial Light and Magic built them. The chairs stacking themselves in a single take, the tree, the closet, and the swimming pool sequence shot with real skeletons because they were cheaper than props. Jerry Goldsmith scored it and was nominated for the Academy Award.
Zelda Rubinstein arrives forty minutes in and reorganizes the film. Tangina is small, certain and entirely businesslike about the supernatural, and the performance treats the haunting as a job with a procedure. Michael Grais and Mark Victor wrote both films with Spielberg. Rubinstein appeared in all three films.
Poltergeist II in 1986 is weaker and has one genuinely great element. Julian Beck plays Kane, a preacher who led his congregation into the ground, and the performance is more frightening than anything in the first film. A third film followed in 1988 and a remake in 2015.
The Exorcist spends an hour exhausting the medical explanation, and Don’t Look Now lets its man misread every accurate warning. Structure it in the Plot Handbook.
18. Gremlins (1984) [full review]
► Read the full review of Gremlins (1984)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Three rules, broken in order, with the cost stated in advance."
Joe Dante directed from a Chris Columbus script with Spielberg producing, and the film’s tonal instability is deliberate instead of accidental. It contributed directly to the creation of the PG-13 rating alongside Temple of Doom. Zach Galligan plays Billy and Hoyt Axton his father. The MPAA introduced the new rating that summer.
The rules are the structure and the film is disciplined about them. No light, no water, no food after midnight, and every rule is broken in order with consequences that escalate exactly as stated. Jerry Goldsmith scored it and the main theme became the series signature.
Chris Walas built the creatures as puppets and the physical presence is why they work. Gizmo required several operators, the gremlins were built to be destroyed, and the kitchen sequence uses practical gags that a digital version could not match. Warner Bros. released it in June 1984 against Ghostbusters.
Phoebe Cates’s Christmas monologue is the moment the film shows what it actually is. A story about a father dying in a chimney, delivered straight, in the middle of a creature comedy, and Dante fought the studio to keep it. It took over one hundred and fifty million dollars.
The cinema sequence is the film’s best joke and its clearest statement. Gremlins watching Snow White, singing along, delighted, before being burned alive, and the picture asks the audience to hold both responses at once. A sequel followed in 1990 with Dante returning. Dante has called it the film’s thesis statement.
19. The Fly (1986) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Fly (1986)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"Seven documented stages, so you can plot the curve."
Cronenberg remade the 1958 film and turned it into the most upsetting body horror ever made, and it won the Academy Award for makeup. Chris Walas designed seven progressive stages of deterioration across the running time. Charles Edward Pogue wrote an earlier draft and shares the credit.
The structure is a disease film and Cronenberg has been open about it. Brundle’s decline is physical, gradual and documented, his partner watches, and the picture is about what it is like to be present while somebody comes apart. John Getz plays Stathis and Cronenberg appears as a gynecologist.
Jeff Goldblum’s performance holds the first half together and the change is written into it. He is charming, manic and delighted with himself early, and the same energy becomes frightening once the audience knows what is producing it. Mark Irwin shot it and Howard Shore scored it.
Geena Davis is doing the heavier work and gets less attention for it. Veronica is the audience’s position, she is pregnant, she is the only person who could stop him, and the film puts the entire moral weight on her. Fox released it in August 1986 and it took over sixty million dollars.
The last twenty minutes are close to unwatchable and the film has earned every second. The telepod fusion, the plea, and a final gesture that is entirely clear without a word of dialogue being spoken. A sequel followed in 1989 with Walas directing. Cronenberg cut a longer ending before release.
20. Evil Dead II (1987) [full review]
► Read the full review of Evil Dead II (1987)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Nothing in it is a joke about horror. That is why it is funny."
Raimi remade his own first film as a comedy on a larger budget, and the picture is a sequel and a retelling at once. The opening compresses the 1981 film into about seven minutes and proceeds as though the audience needs nothing else. Scott Spiegel wrote it with Raimi and Sarah Berry plays Annie.
The camera is the lead performer. The shaky cam rig mounted on a plank carried by two runners, the forest point of view shots, and a sustained inventiveness that Raimi has never matched in any later picture. Peter Deming shot it and Joseph LoDuca scored it.
Bruce Campbell’s physical performance is the best slapstick work in horror. The possessed hand sequence runs several minutes with Campbell fighting himself, smashing plates over his own head and pinning the hand with a book by Hemingway. Dino De Laurentiis financed it after the first film’s video success.
The tone holds because the film commits entirely. Nothing in it is played as a joke about horror, everything is played as horror performed at a pitch that becomes funny, and the difference is the entire reason it works. Army of Darkness followed in 1992.
The cabin set was built in a Michigan high school gymnasium and the deer head that laughs is the moment the film announces itself. Every object in the room joins in, the sound design goes with them, and Ash starts laughing too. A stage musical adaptation has run since 2003.
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.
The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
Del Toro set a ghost story in an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War, with an unexploded bomb standing upright in the courtyard. He has called it the companion piece to Pan’s Labyrinth and the better film of the two.
Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)
Narciso Ibanez Serrador stranded a couple on a Spanish island where the children have killed every adult and are entirely cheerful about it. The film opens with documentary footage that makes its argument before the plot starts.
Peeping Tom (1960)
Michael Powell made a film about a man who films women as he kills them and it destroyed his career overnight. It is now taught as the most honest film ever made about the act of watching.
The Devils (1971)
Ken Russell built a film about a French possession trial with Derek Jarman designing white tiled sets. It has never been released uncut in Britain and Warner Bros. still holds the removed footage.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Peter Weir made a horror film with no monster and no resolution, in daylight, about girls who walk into a rock formation and do not come back. Nothing is explained and the novel’s final chapter was withheld from publication.
Videodrome (1983)
Cronenberg predicted a great deal about media and the body, with Rick Baker building a chest cavity that accepts a videocassette. James Woods has never been better used.
Angel Heart (1987)
Alan Parker put a private detective story in 1955 Louisiana and let it curdle into something else. The ending is planted from the first scene and almost nobody catches it on a first viewing.
Session 9 (2001)
Brad Anderson shot in the genuine abandoned Danvers State Hospital with a small crew and a digital camera. The recorded therapy tapes running under the film are the most effective thing in it.
Marebito (2004)
Takashi Shimizu shot a film in eight days about a cameraman who descends beneath Tokyo and brings something back. It is the strangest thing in the Japanese cycle and almost nobody has seen it.
Kairo (2001)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa made a film about loneliness and the internet where the ghosts are a symptom instead of a threat. The rooftop sequence is one of the most upsetting images in Japanese horror.
A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
Kim Jee-woon adapted a Korean folk tale into a domestic ghost story where the structure itself is the reveal. It was the highest-grossing Korean horror film ever released.
Lake Mungo (2008)
An Australian mockumentary about a drowned girl, built entirely from interviews and family footage. The phone video near the end is one of the few genuinely frightening images the found-footage form has produced.
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.
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
John Boorman disliked the original and made a sequel that explains the demon, names it, and sends a priest to Africa with a hypnosis machine. Audiences threw things at the screen.
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
A druidic cult, a rune and a bloodline supply Michael with the motive the 1978 film was careful never to give him. Two entirely different cuts exist and neither solves it.
The Wolfman (2010)
Rick Baker won an Academy Award for the makeup on a production that changed directors, composers and editors mid-flight. Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins appear to be in different films.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)
A sequel to a film built entirely on found footage, made as a conventional picture about fans of the first one, then recut by the studio into something the director disowned.
The Mummy Returns (2001)
Doubles everything the 1999 film balanced and loses the tone. The digital Scorpion King in the last act was already a joke on release and Rachel Weisz is still good in it.
Dracula 2000 (2000)
Supplies Dracula with an origin as Judas Iscariot, answering a question nobody had and removes the appetite that made the character work for a century.
What Do You Think?
This tier is where the conventions were built, and the best films in it refuse to explain. Black Christmas gives its killer nothing and Halloween followed. Tell me whether any film has ever gained from supplying the motive.
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