Part 4 – The Very Good
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 tier is where the rationing happens. Alien shows its creature for four minutes of a hundred and seventeen, Vampyr shoots through gauze so nothing is ever quite in focus, and The Blob works because something can’t be shot, stabbed or outrun.
The other pattern is invented tradition. The Wolf Man’s silver, pentagram and wolfbane verse were all written in 1941 and are now cited as European folklore, the highest outcome any piece of writing can reach.
I prefer a director who makes me wait over one who shows me everything in the first reel, and this tier is packed with the first kind.
Plenty of modern horror shows its monster in the opening minutes and wonders why nobody is scared later. These films hold back, and that takes nerve when a studio is paying for the creature and wants its money on screen. Nearly every one of them also has a flaw that kept it out of the top three parts, and I care about those flaws.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the fourth of nine parts.
Alien shows four minutes of creature in a hundred and seventeen, and Squeeze never films the extraction at all. Ration the best material in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
1. The X-Files – “Squeeze” (S1E3, 1993) [full review]
► Read the full review of The X-Files – “Squeeze” (S1E3, 1993)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Hutchison plays him entirely still, and the stillness is the whole performance."
Glen Morgan and James Wong wrote the third episode of the first season and effectively invented the monster-of-the-week format that kept the series going for nine years. It aired in September 1993 to an audience that had no idea what the show was yet. Harry Longstreet and Michael Katleman directed.
Doug Hutchison plays Eugene Victor Tooms as entirely still. He barely moves, he holds eye contact past the point of comfort, and the performance is built on an absence of the twitching mannerisms the part invites. Tooms returned in a later first-season episode. Chris Carter created the series.
The premise is a mutant who hibernates for thirty years between feeding cycles, giving the episode an investigation with dated evidence. Fingerprints from 1903, a case file nobody will take seriously, and a pattern that only reads as a pattern across a century. Mark Snow scored the series.
The liver extraction is never shown and the episode is better for it. Bile on a floor, a ventilation grate, an elongated shadow, and the audience assembles the mechanism without being handed a single frame of it. Donal Logue appears as an agent. Duchovny and Anderson had shot two episodes before it.
The last shot is the one people remember thirty years later. Tooms in a cell, watching a food slot, and the camera pushes in as he smiles. The episode ends without resolving anything about what he is or how he was made. It was shot in Vancouver.
Squeeze is the episode I point to when somebody asks why The X-Files mattered.
A man who fits through a ventilation grate should be silly, and Hutchison’s stillness makes him the most unnerving thing the show put on screen that first season. My only complaint is that they brought Tooms back later on. That smile at the food slot was the right place to leave him, and anything after it was always going to be less.
2. Sinners (2025) [full review]
► Read the full review of Sinners (2025)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"An hour on the juke joint before anything threatens it."
Ryan Coogler wrote and directed an original horror film in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, shot on large format film, and Warner Bros. gave him final cut and eventual ownership of the negative, close to unheard of. Hailee Steinfeld and Delroy Lindo appear in the cast.
The first hour isn’t a horror film at all. Two brothers return from Chicago to open a juke joint in a single day, and the picture spends its time on hiring, sourcing, debts and the sharecropping economy the building sits inside. Ludwig Goransson scored it.
Michael B. Jordan plays both twins and the film never makes a spectacle of it. Jordan distinguishes Smoke and Stack by posture, tempo and the color of a cap, and the split screen work is invisible enough that the performance carries the distinction. Autumn Durald Arkapaw shot it on IMAX film.
The music sequence at the center is the most ambitious thing in the film. A performance in the juke joint pulls in players from across a century, past and future arriving in the same room, and it’s staged as a single continuous move. Miles Caton plays the young guitarist.
The vampires are Irish and the film’s argument runs through them. They offer community without hierarchy, a genuine offer in 1932 Mississippi, and the picture takes the temptation seriously instead of treating it as a trick. Warner Bros. released it in April 2025. Jack O’Connell leads them.
Sinners is the film I’d hand anybody who claims the big studios have given up on original horror. Coogler spends an hour building a business before a single vampire walks in, and I didn’t want him to hurry any of it. My complaint is a small one. The juke joint sequence is so big that nothing after it can top it, and the last stretch feels like the film working its way down from that peak.
3. Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) [full review]
► Read the full review of Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
RLR: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Herzog asks you to pity the thing that is killing everybody."
Herzog remade Murnau as an act of homage to what he called the greatest German film, and shot it in German and English at once, with every scene performed twice. The rights had lapsed so he could use Stoker’s names. Bruno Ganz plays Jonathan Harker. Fox distributed it internationally. Klaus Kinski’s Orlok is closer to pitiable than to frightening. He’s lonely, he’s exhausted by centuries, he says that time is an abyss, and the makeup took four hours daily for a performance built on stillness and slow speech. Popol Vuh scored it.
The rat sequence used eleven thousand laboratory rats shipped from Hungary, dyed grey, and released into Delft. The town council objected, the production moved to Schiedam, and the footage is still the most unsettling image in the film. Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein shot it. Herzog shot both language versions back to back.
Isabelle Adjani plays Lucy as the only person who understands what’s happening, and the film gives her the active role. She researches it, she plans it, and she makes the decision that ends it while every man around her fails to act. It was shot in Delft and the Tatra mountains.
The plague material is the film’s actual subject and Herzog stages it as carnival. Coffins carried through streets, a banquet held among rats by people who have accepted they’re dying, and the town’s collapse treated as a release. Roland Topor plays Renfield. The rats were dyed in batches.
Kinski’s Orlok disturbs me in a way no dashing Dracula ever has, because I end up feeling sorry for the thing.
That’s a hard trick and Herzog pulls it off. My reservation is the pace. The film moves at the speed of its vampire, and there are stretches in the middle where the patience tips over into drag and I catch myself waiting for the rats.
4. Predator (1987) [full review]
► Read the full review of Predator (1987)
RLR: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"Several hundred rounds into a treeline, and nothing is hit."
John McTiernan made a film that spends forty minutes as a Central American action picture before revealing what it is. The original creature design by Boss Films was scrapped entirely after shooting began and Stan Winston rebuilt it from nothing. Jim and John Thomas wrote the screenplay.
The structure is a monster film where the monster is hunting the most dangerous men available, the reason the reversal works. The squad are established as capable, they win their first engagement, and then the film takes them apart one at a time. Dutch is the only one who adapts.
The thermal vision is the best point of view device in the genre. The audience sees what the creature sees, understands its limits, and the mud sequence pays off a rule established forty minutes earlier without anybody explaining it. Carl Weathers, Bill Duke and Jesse Ventura fill out the squad.
The minigun sequence is the moment the film states its own premise. Several hundred rounds into a treeline, everything destroyed, nothing hit, and a squad of professionals standing in silence realizing that their entire method doesn’t apply. Alan Silvestri scored it. Joel Silver produced it.
Kevin Peter Hall was seven feet two and performed the creature blind for most of the shoot, since the helmet had no usable sightlines. Jean-Claude Van Damme was originally cast and left during the first design. Fox released it in June 1987. The jungle material was shot in Palenque.
The Wolf Man invented silver, the pentagram and the verse in 1941, and they’re cited as folklore now. Write invention as inheritance in the World Builder’s Handbook.
5. Near Dark (1987) [full review]
► Read the full review of Near Dark (1987)
RLR: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"The word vampire is never used once in the entire film."
Kathryn Bigelow made a vampire western and never uses the word vampire once. The film was a commercial failure against The Lost Boys the same year and has been steadily reassessed since as the better picture. Lance Henriksen and Jenette Goldstein complete the family. Bigelow had made The Loveless in 1981.
The bar sequence is the most sustained piece of menace in eighties horror. A roadhouse, a group who take their time, a boot spur used on a throat, and Bill Paxton enjoying himself more than anything else in his career. Eric Red co-wrote it with Bigelow.
The family are itinerant, filthy and poor, the decision that separates the film from everything around it. They live in stolen cars with the windows painted over, they have no glamour of any kind, and they smell. Adam Greenberg shot it. De Laurentiis financed it.
Adrian Pasdar’s Caleb is turned in the first fifteen minutes and the film is about him refusing to feed. Pasdar plays the hunger as physical illness, and the transfusion resolution is unusual enough that it’s been argued about for decades. It took under three and a half million dollars.
Tangerine Dream’s score and the Texas locations give the film an atmosphere nothing else has. Motels, oil pumps, long roads at dusk, and a sunrise treated as the most dangerous thing in the world. Joshua John Miller plays Homer. Tim Thomerson plays Caleb’s father.
Near Dark is the film in this tier I’d push hardest on anybody who hasn’t found it, and it was unfair that The Lost Boys buried it at the box office.
That family is filthy and believable in a way no other screen vampires are. The transfusion ending is a weak spot. After an hour and a half of dirt and hunger, a medical cure feels too tidy for the film that came before it.
6. What We Do in the Shadows (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
RLR: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"A dish rota five years unhonored, argued over by immortals."
Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement built the film from years of improvisation and shot far more footage than anybody could use. The final cut came out of roughly one hundred and twenty-five hours of material. Jonny Brugh and Ben Fransham complete the household. It premiered at Sundance in 2014.
The documentary premise does the structural work. A crew with crucifixes filming flatmates for a festival, justifying the direct address, the domestic subject matter and the absence of any plot in the conventional sense. It cost around one and a half million New Zealand dollars. The flatmate arguments are the film’s real subject. A rota for washing dishes that hasn’t been honored in five years, bloodstains on furniture, and a vampire who’s eight thousand years old refusing to take the bins out. A television series followed in 2019. The werewolf material supplies the best running joke and it’s entirely character-based. Rhys Darby’s pack leader insisting on anger management language while his men transform against their will is funnier than anything in the vampire half. Rhys Darby leads the werewolves. Waititi plays Viago. The film keeps its horror intact, something almost no comedy in the genre manages. The feeding is unpleasant, Petyr is frightening in every scene, and the Nosferatu design is played straight against everything around it. Stu Rutherford plays the human friend. Clement plays Vladislav.
7. Vampyr (1932) [full review]
► Read the full review of Vampyr (1932)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Shot through gauze, so nothing is ever quite in focus."
Carl Theodor Dreyer made his first sound film and shot almost all of it through a gauze held in front of the lens, producing a permanent haze that nobody has convincingly reproduced since. Its lead actor financed the film. Julian West financed it and played the lead under a pseudonym.
There’s almost no plot and Dreyer wasn’t attempting one. A young man arrives at an inn, shadows move independently of bodies, a doctor keeps a skull on a desk, and the film proceeds according to dream logic instead of causation. Rudolph Mate shot it.
The burial sequence is shot from inside the coffin, with the glass panel above the face and the ceiling of the mortuary moving past as the box is carried. It remains among the most unsettling point of view shots ever filmed. Wolfgang Zeller scored it. The sound is sparse enough to be its own effect. The film was shot silent and dubbed afterward, the dialogue is minimal, and long passages carry only wind, footsteps and a mill wheel turning. Dreyer adapted Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly. It ran seventy-three minutes.
8. The Wolf Man (1941) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Wolf Man (1941)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"The silver and the pentagram were invented in 1941 and are now folklore."
Curt Siodmak wrote the screenplay and invented almost everything the audience now takes for werewolf folklore. Silver as a weakness, the pentagram in the palm, the transformation at full moon and the wolfbane verse are all 1941 and all his. Claude Rains plays Sir John Talbot. Larry Talbot is a man first, and the film is unusually clear about it. He’s come home after his brother’s death, he’s the second son nobody expected to inherit, and he’s killed by his own father with a silver-headed cane. Lon Chaney Jr. plays him as bewildered throughout, the reason the tragedy works. He asks for help repeatedly, he’s not believed, he tries to have himself restrained, and every adult in the film assures him he’s imagining it. Evelyn Ankers plays Gwen. Chaney was thirty-five.
Jack Pierce’s makeup took six hours and the transformation was achieved with progressive lap dissolves, with Chaney holding position for long periods between shots while Pierce applied yak hair a layer at a time. Joseph Valentine shot it. George Waggner directed it. The cane is in the Universal archive.
Maria Ouspenskaya’s Maleva delivers the verse and gives the film its weight. She’s the only character who believes him, she’s treated as a superstitious foreigner by everybody else, and she’s correct about every single thing. Universal released it in December 1941. Chaney played the part four more times.
I’m fond of Chaney’s Larry Talbot, a big sad man begging people to lock him up while everybody pats him on the head. That’s a real tragedy and it still moves me.
My reservation is the transformation. The lap dissolves were a feat in 1941 and they still look like one, so I’m admiring the technique at the exact moment I ought to be scared.
9. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978, 1993, 2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978, 1993, 2007)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Both political readings hold, and neither is contradicted anywhere."
Don Siegel’s 1956 film was made in nineteen days for around four hundred thousand dollars and the studio added the framing device against his wishes. His cut ended with Miles screaming at traffic and nobody stopping. Jack Finney published the novel in 1955. Siegel appears as a taxi driver in the 1978 film.
Both political readings have claimed the 1956 version for seventy years. It’s either about communist infiltration or about McCarthyite conformity, and Siegel and Mainwaring both declined to settle it, the reason it still works. Kevin McCarthy leads the 1956 version and appears in the 1978 one.
Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake is the best of the four and moves the setting to San Francisco. The paranoia works in a city because anonymity was already normal, and the final shot with Donald Sutherland is the bleakest ending in the sequence. Leonard Rosenman scored the Kaufman film.
The 1993 Abel Ferrara version sets it on a military base, the smartest premise of the four. Conformity is already mandatory, uniforms are identical, and the invasion has almost nothing to change. Meg Tilly and Gabrielle Anwar lead the 1993 version. Oliver Hirschbiegel directed the 2007 version. The Invasion in 2007 is the failure and the reason is instructive. The Wachowskis rewrote it, the studio reshot substantially, and the pods became a virus with a cure, turning a film about identity into a medical thriller. Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig lead the 2007 one.
The Blob can’t be shot, stabbed, reasoned with or outrun, and Lee’s Dracula speaks about thirteen lines. Two ways to build a threat, in the Antagonist Handbook.
10. The Blob (1958 and 1988) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Blob (1958 and 1988)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"It cannot be shot, stabbed, reasoned with or outrun."
Irvin Yeaworth’s 1958 film was made in Pennsylvania by a company that mostly produced religious shorts, with a twenty-seven-year-old Steve McQueen playing a teenager in his first leading role. He took a flat fee over a percentage. Kate Phillips and Theodore Simonson wrote the 1958 screenplay. The creature is the best idea in fifties horror and almost nobody credits it. It can’t be shot, stabbed, reasoned with or outrun, it grows with every person it absorbs, and the only thing that works on it is discovered by accident. Burt Bacharach co-wrote the title song.
The 1958 effects were achieved with colored silicone on a miniature set tilted to make the mass move, and the cinema sequence with the audience running into the street still holds up as a piece of practical staging. Kevin Dillon and Shawnee Smith lead the 1988 version. Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake is considerably nastier and the better film. It kills a child, the phone box sequence is upsetting, and the reveal that the thing is an American biological weapon instead of a meteorite gives it a subject. Frank Darabont co-wrote the remake. Both versions understand that the horror is dissolution instead of attack. The creature absorbs the victims while they’re conscious, the effects show faces still recognizable inside the mass, and nothing about it is quick. Larry Hagman directed a 1972 sequel. Russell had written Dreamscape before directing.
11. Dracula (1958) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dracula (1958)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Lee has about thirteen lines and dominates every scene he is in."
Terence Fisher made the first color Dracula for Hammer and the red is the entire point. Blood had been grey for twenty-seven years, this film made it Eastmancolor scarlet, and the British reviews at the time were close to outraged. Jimmy Sangster wrote the screenplay.
Christopher Lee plays the count as physically powerful and sexually direct, unavailable to the part before then. He’s tall, he moves quickly, he speaks about thirteen lines, and the performance is built almost entirely on presence. Michael Gough plays Arthur Holmwood. Hammer had made The Curse of Frankenstein the year before.
Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing is the better of the two performances and the film knows it. He’s a working scientist with a recorder and notes, he treats vampirism as a condition with properties, and he’s physically capable in a way the part had never been.
The ending is the best staged in any Dracula film. Cushing runs the length of a table, tears down a curtain, and forces Lee into sunlight with two candlesticks held as a cross. The whole sequence runs about ninety seconds. James Bernard scored it. Fisher directed most of the sequence.
The budget was small enough that the castle has about four rooms, and Fisher uses the constraint. The geography is absolutely clear, every location is established early, and nothing in the film depends on an audience accepting a space they haven’t seen. It was released in America as Horror of Dracula.
Cushing’s run down that table is the best ninety seconds Hammer ever put on film, and I’d happily watch it on a loop. Lee is my reservation, oddly enough. Thirteen lines leaves the count as a presence without much of a character, and every time he leaves the screen I want him back and the film won’t give him to me.
12. Black Sunday (1960) [full review]
► Read the full review of Black Sunday (1960)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"The worst image is in the first three minutes, on purpose."
Mario Bava shot his first credited feature in black and white with a photographer’s eye, and the film established the visual language Italian horror used for the following twenty years. It was banned in Britain for eight years. Bava adapted a Gogol story called Viy.
The opening is the most violent thing in European cinema of its decade. A spiked mask hammered onto a woman’s face in close-up, with the sound doing most of the work, and the film spends its remaining running time on what she does about it. Barbara Steele plays both the witch and her descendant and became a genre figure on the strength of it. She distinguishes the two performances entirely by tempo, and Bava photographs her eyes in a way that’s been imitated ever since. John Richardson plays the doctor.
The lighting is the achievement. Fog lit from below, faces half in shadow with no naturalistic source, and a crypt sequence where the darkness has visible depth instead of simply being black. Roberto Nicolosi scored the Italian version. Steele made several further Italian horror films.
Its American release, as Black Sunday, came recut, rescored and redubbed, with about three minutes removed and a new score. The Italian version under its own title is a different and better picture. Bava had completed several films uncredited before it. It ran eighty-seven minutes.
13. Phantom of the Paradise (1974) [full review]
► Read the full review of Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Three musical acts, the same four performers, and no comment."
De Palma combined Phantom of the Opera, Faust and Dorian Gray into a rock musical, and Paul Williams wrote the songs and played the villain. It failed everywhere except Winnipeg, where it ran for four months. Jessica Harper plays Phoenix. De Palma wrote it himself.
The Swan character is the film’s real idea. A producer who has traded his reflection for youth, who records every contract on videotape, and whose entire archive is a room of monitors showing people at their worst. Gerrit Graham plays Beef. Williams plays Swan himself. William Finley’s Winslow is pitiable and the film doesn’t soften it. His teeth are destroyed in a record press, his voice is gone, and the mask and the electronic larynx are the only things that let him work at all. Larry Pizer shot it.
The split screen sequence during the bomb-in-the-car number is De Palma at his most technically confident. Two spaces, one countdown, and the audience tracking both without the film ever cutting to explain the relationship. Fox released it in October 1974. Sissy Spacek worked on set dressing.
The Juicy Fruits appear in three different musical styles across the film as the industry changes around them, a joke nobody sets up and the picture never explains. The same four performers, three genres, no comment. Williams was nominated for an Academy Award for the score.
Phantom of the Paradise is the strangest film on this page and that’s exactly why it’s a favorite of mine. Paul Williams as a producer who keeps every contract on videotape is the best joke about the record business I know of. It never frightens me once, though, and it sits on a horror list more for its nerve than for its scares.
The Omen keeps a mundane explanation available for every death, and Martin never lets either reading win. Hold the ambiguity in the Plot Handbook.
14. The Omen (1976) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Omen (1976)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"Every death has a mundane reading available if you want one."
Richard Donner made the most commercially successful of the seventies satanic cycle and insisted throughout that every supernatural event have a plausible mundane reading. Nothing in the film can’t be explained as coincidence, his condition for taking it. David Seltzer wrote the screenplay. Fox financed it quickly. Jerry Goldsmith won his only Academy Award for the score, and Ave Satani is the reason the film works. A Latin choral piece written to sound liturgical and inverted, arriving before each death and tells the audience what’s coming. Lee Remick plays Katherine Thorn. The deaths are the film’s structure and each is engineered instead of supernatural. A hanging at a birthday party, a pane of glass, a lightning rod, and each one is a physical accident the audience watches assemble itself in advance. Billie Whitelaw plays Mrs Baylock.
Gregory Peck gives the film its weight and took the part for a reduced fee against a percentage, making it the most profitable decision of his career. He plays a diplomat reasoning his way toward something he can’t accept. Gilbert Taylor shot it. Harvey Stephens plays Damien.
The graveyard sequence is the moment the film stops being deniable. Two graves, a jackal and an infant with a broken skull, and the dogs arriving is the only overtly supernatural event Donner allowed into the picture. Three sequels and a remake followed. Fox released it in June 1976.
15. Martin (1977) [full review]
► Read the full review of Martin (1977)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Eighty-four years old, or a disturbed young man, and nothing decides it."
Romero made it between Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead for around one hundred thousand dollars, in a dying Pittsburgh steel town, and has always called it his favorite of his own films. John Amplas plays Martin. Romero edited it himself. This premise refuses to confirm itself. Martin says he’s eighty-four, his cousin treats him as a vampire and uses crucifixes and garlic against him, and the film shows both a modern young man and black-and-white sequences that may be memory or fantasy. Lincoln Maazel plays the cousin.
He uses razor blades and syringes because none of the folklore works. There are no fangs, no strength and no transformation, and the film stages the feeding as a clumsy, upsetting assault that takes far longer than it should. Tom Savini did the effects and plays Arthur. The town is the other subject. Braddock is closing, the mills are gone, the population is leaving, and Romero shoots the empty streets and shuttered shops as a place where an old superstition can survive because nothing else has. Donald Rubinstein scored it. It premiered at Cannes.
The radio show sequences are the film’s saddest idea. Martin phones a late-night program to talk about what he is, the host treats him as an act, and the audience laughing is the only relationship he has. It ran ninety-five minutes. The station was a real Pittsburgh broadcaster.
16. Alien (1979) [full review]
► Read the full review of Alien (1979)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Four minutes of creature across a hundred and seventeen."
Ridley Scott shot it in Britain on a budget around eleven million dollars, with the Nostromo built as three connected sets and the crew treated as working people on a haulage contract instead of explorers. Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett wrote it. Fox released it in May 1979.
H. R. Giger’s design is why the film is still unmatched. The creature is biomechanical, sexual in ways nobody could name in 1979, and the derelict ship and the eggs come from the same visual vocabulary instead of being designed separately. Derek Vanlint shot it and Jerry Goldsmith scored it.
The creature appears for about four minutes of a hundred and seventeen. Scott shot more and cut it out, a seven-foot Nigerian design student wore the suit, and almost every appearance is partial, shadowed or moving out of frame. Bolaji Badejo wore the suit.
The chestburster was staged with the cast not knowing what was coming. The plates and the blood came from a butcher, the reactions are genuine, and Veronica Cartwright’s response wasn’t directed in any way. It won the Academy Award for visual effects. Giger won alongside the effects team.
The commercial subtext is the film’s hard edge. The company knew, the crew are expendable, and the phrase about crew expendability arrives in a film made for an audience that recognized the employment relationship immediately. Tom Skerritt, John Hurt and Ian Holm complete the crew.
I respect Alien more than I warm to it. Giger’s design still disturbs me, and the company treating its crew as expendable is the part that has aged best, because anybody who has worked for a big employer recognizes it. My reservation is the chill. The film keeps every character at a distance, and when they die I’m impressed by the staging more than I’m sorry to lose them.
17. An American Werewolf in London (1981) [full review]
► Read the full review of An American Werewolf in London (1981)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"Two minutes of transformation in bright light, with no shadow to hide in."
John Landis wrote it in 1969 and spent twelve years failing to finance it, because every studio told him it was too funny for a horror film and too frightening for a comedy. Rick Baker won the first Academy Award for makeup ever given. Jenny Agutter plays the nurse. The transformation runs close to two minutes in bright light and is still the best in the form. Baker built it from prosthetic pieces that extend on cue, the sequence is scored to Blue Moon, and Landis refused to shoot any of it in shadow. Landis handles the tonal shifts without any transition and trusts an audience to keep up. It plays Jack’s progressive decomposition across his appearances as comedy while his advice is entirely sincere. Griffin Dunne plays Jack. Landis had made The Blues Brothers. Baker was twenty-nine at the time.
David Naughton plays it straight throughout and the performance is what holds the tone. He’s frightened, he’s in love, he’s trying to be reasonable about something unreasonable, and he never once acknowledges the absurdity. Robert Paynter shot it. The pub was built at Twickenham. The Piccadilly Circus sequence is the film’s collapse and it’s deliberate. The comedy stops entirely, the pile-up is staged with real vehicles, and the ending arrives abruptly over a closing song with no resolution offered. Universal released it in August 1981. Landis cut the ending deliberately short.
Predator proves its squad is capable before taking them apart, and Elm Street closes the escape with biology. Build the pressure in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
18. The Evil Dead (1981) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Evil Dead (1981)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"A camera on a plank, and the audience is the one being chased."
Raimi made it for around three hundred and fifty thousand dollars raised from Michigan dentists and local investors, shot in an abandoned cabin in Tennessee over a winter that the cast have described as the worst experience of their lives. Ellen Sandweiss plays Cheryl.
The camera is the film’s only resource and Raimi uses it as an entity. The shakycam rig on a plank, the low forest runs, the doorway crashes, and the audience spends the film being chased instead of watching somebody being chased. Tim Philo shot it. Raimi’s film is nasty in a way the sequels aren’t. There’s no comedy anywhere in it, the film plays the possession as assault, and it sustains the material with Cheryl in the cellar past any point of comfort. Joseph LoDuca scored it. Raimi was twenty-one when he shot it.
Crude as the effects are, that’s why they work. Claymation, latex, gallons of colored corn syrup and a substantial amount of milk, and the dissolution sequence at the end runs for minutes with no cut away. Stephen King’s review is the reason it found a distributor. Bruce Campbell isn’t yet a comic performer here. Ash is frightened, passive for most of the running time, and the last-reel competence he becomes famous for doesn’t exist in this film at all. It was banned in several countries as a video nasty.
The Evil Dead makes me want to shake every filmmaker who says they can’t start without a budget. Raimi strapped a camera to a plank and got a damn film made.
My reservation is Cheryl. Raimi plays the possession as assault and holds it past any comfort, and after a while the cruelty stops telling me anything new about the picture or the people in it.
19. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Freddy vs. Jason (2003) [full review]
► Read the full review of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Every other killer can be escaped by leaving. This one needs you awake."
Wes Craven built the 1984 film on newspaper reports of Hmong refugees dying in their sleep after describing nightmares, and New Line was close to bankruptcy when it was released. The film’s success is the reason the studio existed for the next twenty years. Heather Langenkamp plays Nancy.
No premise in the slasher form beats this one, because it removes the defense. You can escape every other killer by leaving, and this one requires the victims to stay awake, giving the film a countdown built into human biology. John Saxon plays her father. Robert Englund’s Freddy is barely verbal in the first film and that’s the version that works. He’s a few lines, he’s mostly silhouette and glove, and the wisecracking figure the sequels produced is a different character entirely. Charles Bernstein scored the 1984 film. The practical effects are the reason it endures. The rotating bedroom corridor, Johnny Depp’s bed geyser achieved by building the room upside down, and Tina dragged up a wall by an operator walking the same rig from the other side. Eight further Elm Street films followed.
Freddy vs. Jason in 2003 delivers exactly what it promises and nothing else. Ronny Yu directed, the cornfield and the Camp Crystal Lake material are well staged, and the film is honest that it exists to stage a fight the audience had already imagined. Ken Kirzinger plays Jason in the 2003 film.
20. Re-Animator (1985) [full review]
► Read the full review of Re-Animator (1985)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"Combs plays it with total certainty. That is why it is funny."
Stuart Gordon adapted Lovecraft’s serial and made a film with no cosmic horror in it at all, the correct decision. The result is a black comedy about academic rivalry with an extraordinary amount of viscera in it. Bruce Abbott and Barbara Crampton lead alongside Combs.
Jeffrey Combs plays Herbert West as a man with no social awareness and complete certainty, and the performance is why the film works. He’s rude, he’s right, and he treats every objection to his work as a failure of imagination on somebody else’s part.
The dean’s cat sequence is the film’s method in miniature. A scientific problem, a reasonable-sounding explanation, and an escalation that arrives faster than anybody in the scene can manage, played entirely for comedy and unpleasantness at once. Richard Band scored it. Gordon came from Chicago theater.
John Naulin and Anthony Doublin’s effects are relentless and the film was released unrated instead of cut. The reanimation sequences are practical, the intestine material is sustained, and none of it is aged into looking fake. Mac Ahlberg shot it. Empire Pictures released it. David Gale’s Doctor Hill is the film’s most disturbing element and Gale plays him straight. He’s a plagiarist, a predator, and he continues both after being decapitated, and the film treats that as characterization instead of a gag. Two sequels followed with Combs returning.
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 Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
It’s the film that made Hammer, with Cushing playing the Baron as the actual monster and Lee under a design built to avoid the Universal copyright. It was made for under seventy thousand pounds.
The Devil Rides Out (1968)
Richard Matheson adapted Dennis Wheatley and Fisher directed, with Lee cast as the hero for once. The chalk circle sequence sustains one location for twenty minutes and never loses tension.
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Nigel Kneale put an ancient Martian craft under a London tube station and made the origin of human violence the subject. It’s the best science fiction horror Britain has produced.
Witchfinder General (1968)
Michael Reeves made a film about Matthew Hopkins with Vincent Price stripped of every theatrical habit he had. Reeves died at twenty-five the following year and it’s the only evidence of what he could do.
The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)
Piers Haggard built a folk horror around a ploughed-up skull and a village of children turning, filmed in English fields. The furrow in the opening is the whole film in one image.
Theatre of Blood (1973)
Price plays an actor murdering critics using methods drawn from Shakespeare, and it’s the performance he was always capable of giving. Diana Rigg is extraordinary alongside him.
Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)
Amando de Ossorio built Spanish horror around blind Templar corpses who hunt by sound, moving in slow motion on horseback. The sound rule makes the pursuits tense.
Lisa and the Devil (1973)
Bava made a film with almost no plot and a lollipop-carrying Telly Savalas as the devil, then watched the producer recut it with added exorcism footage. The original cut is the one worth finding.
The Beyond (1981)
Fulci abandoned causation entirely for a hotel built over a gate, and the film runs on dream logic throughout. The hospital sequence and the final shot have both outlasted the plot that connects them.
Cemetery Man (1994)
Michele Soavi made a film about a cemetery caretaker whose dead won’t stay down, and it becomes closer to philosophy than to horror. Rupert Everett is perfectly cast in it.
The Company of Wolves (1984)
Neil Jordan adapted Angela Carter into nested fairy tales with practical transformations that come out through the mouth. It’s the strangest British horror film of its decade.
Kill, Baby, Kill (1966)
Bava built a ghost child who appears as a white ball before she appears herself, and Fellini and Scorsese have both cited the spiral staircase sequence. The color work predates Suspiria by 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.
Alien 3 (1992)
Fincher disowned it and has never discussed it at length since. It opens by killing the two characters the previous film spent two hours saving, removing the reason anybody was invested.
Halloween II (2009)
Rob Zombie supplied Michael with a white horse, a vision of his mother and a psychological account of his compulsion, everything the 1978 film was careful to withhold.
An American Werewolf in Paris (1997)
A sequel in name to a film built on practical transformation, made with digital wolves that have no weight and a comic register the original earned and this one assumes.
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
Supplies Freddy with a father, a son and a demonic origin, converting a figure who worked as an unexplained presence into a character with a family tree. The 3D finale requires glasses nobody has.
Beyond Re-Animator (2003)
Combs returns and the film is shot in Spain on a fraction of the budget, with the prison setting removing the academic rivalry that made the original work.
Dracula 3000 (2004)
A salvage crew boards a derelict ship named the Demeter in the twenty-first century, a workable premise executed with a cast who appear to have received the script that morning.
What Do You Think?
This tier rations, and I wish the people green-lighting horror today would study it. Alien shows four minutes of creature, Squeeze never films the extraction, and Vampyr won’t even let you focus. A studio that spends its whole effects budget on a monster in plain view has wasted the money, and these films prove it every time a shadow does more than a close-up could. Tell me which one you think holds back the most and whether any of them holds back 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
