Part 6 – The Dependable
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 strongest films in this tier withhold the explanation instead of the monster. Under the Skin never says what she is or who sent her, The Babadook refuses to destroy its creature at the end, and Dead Set keeps its cameras running after everybody watching is already dead.
The other pattern is a setting that does the structural work. A train gives Train to Busan one dimension of movement and doors as its only barriers, the Big Brother house seals its occupants off from the news, and A Quiet Place turns a nail in a stair into an hour of waiting.
The Dependable tier is the one I’d hand to anybody who wants a good night of horror and doesn’t care about pedigree. Every film here has a flaw I can put my finger on, a set piece that overreaches or an ending that answers one question too many. I’d still pick any of them over the glossy franchise product that gets the marketing money, and studios sold several of them so poorly that the audience never found them on release.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the sixth of nine parts.
Under the Skin never states who sent her, and Salem’s Lot built its best scene under network rules that forbade anything graphic. Work the constraint in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
1. Dead Set (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dead Set (2008)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"The feed is still broadcasting at the end, to nobody at all."
Charlie Brooker wrote five parts set inside the Big Brother house during an outbreak, and E4 broadcast them across a single week in 2008. Davina McCall appears as herself and is the first recognizable face the series kills. Yann Demange directed all five episodes, years before he made ’71, and the series was shot on a replica of the set.
The premise is the best joke in British television and it works because the house was already built for it. Contestants sealed off from news, cameras running without pause, a gallery of monitors nobody is watching any more. People who volunteered to be observed survive because the outside world has lost every means of reaching them.
The contestants are written as unpleasant and the series refuses to soften a single one of them. They’re vain, bored and performing constantly for an audience that no longer exists, and Brooker never treats any of that as a reason they deserve what arrives. The refusal separates this from the satire it could have settled for.
Andy Nyman’s Patrick is one of the great television monsters and the best thing in it. The producer is contemptuous of everybody, entirely self-interested, funnier than anybody else on screen, and correct about the situation more often than the people trying to survive it. Nyman came from stage magic and plays him without a trace of charm.
The ending is the bleakest the form has produced. The survivors fail, the house is breached, and the last shot holds on a live feed still transmitting to an empty country while the infected wander a set built for a game. Nothing is resolved and nobody remains to watch a broadcast that’s no reason left to continue going out.
Patrick belongs in any hall of fame for television villains, and the premise still delights me every time I think about it. My one complaint is the company. By the fourth episode I’d had about enough of contestants this vain, and even knowing Brooker means every ounce of it, I wanted somebody in that house I could root for. The ending pays for the wait, though it’s a long stretch of unpleasant people to sit through first.
2. Jennifer’s Body (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of Jennifer’s Body (2009)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"Stylized past realism, with the horror underneath played completely straight."
Diablo Cody wrote it after winning an Academy Award for Juno, Karyn Kusama directed, and Fox marketed it as a Megan Fox vehicle aimed squarely at teenage boys. It failed on release and has been thoroughly reassessed across the fifteen years since, driven almost entirely by the audience it was made for and never sold to.
The subject is a friendship between two girls and what a sexual assault does to it. An indie band sacrifices Jennifer believing she’s a virgin, the ritual fails because she’s not, and the film is direct that the sacrifice is itself the violence. Everything supernatural afterward proceeds from a group of men in a van with a knife.
Amanda Seyfried’s Needy is the protagonist and the picture belongs to her entirely. Jennifer is the title, the poster and the marketing campaign, and the film underneath all of that is about a girl watching somebody she loves turn into something while every adult near her declines to listen to a word she says about it.
The tone is why it failed in 2009 and why it works now. The dialogue is stylized well past realism, the jokes are constant, and the horror sitting underneath every one of them is completely sincere and never played for a laugh. Cody keeps the voice and the wound in separate compartments across the entire running time.
Kusama has been open about the marketing and about what the studio wanted from her. The poster sold a body, the trailer sold a body, and the film is a story about consent made by two women who were handed a budget on the understanding that they were building something considerably less complicated than what they delivered.
Fox botched the way it sold this film.
Two women made a story about consent, the studio packaged it as the very thing it was criticizing, and the picture paid for that mismatch at the box office. I admit the dialogue is a lot, and there are stretches where Cody’s voice gets so arch it wears on me. The sincerity underneath saves it anyway, and anybody who wrote it off in 2009 owes it a second look.
3. Thirst (2009) [full review]
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RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"Zola underneath, with the vampirism applied as pressure."
Park Chan-wook adapted Zola’s Therese Raquin and turned a priest into a vampire through a failed medical trial, one of the strangest adaptation decisions anybody has made. It won the jury prize at Cannes, Song Kang-ho plays the priest, and Chung Chung-hoon shot it six years after the two of them had finished Oldboy together.
The infection arrives as a medical accident instead of a curse, and the film treats it as a condition with symptoms and a course. Sang-hyun volunteers for a vaccine trial, survives when every other subject dies, and the priesthood he returns to becomes the problem he can’t solve. Nothing about the transformation is ever presented as damnation.
The subject is the Zola plot running underneath all of it. A woman trapped in a marriage to a childish man and his mother, an affair conducted in the same house, a murder, and two people who afterward can’t occupy a room together without the thing they did occupying it alongside them. The vampirism is pressure applied to that.
Kim Ok-vin’s Tae-ju drives the film and the performance escalates considerably further than anybody expects. She’s oppressed, then liberated, then substantially worse than the man who turned her, and Park neither punishes the shift nor endorses it. The film follows somebody discovering the full extent of what she’s capable of wanting.
The closing sequence is among the most beautiful endings the genre has managed. Two people on a cliff at dawn, a parked car, a stolen pair of shoes, and a sunrise they have both decided to sit and wait for together. No dialogue explains the decision and the camera holds on them until there’s nothing left to hold.
4. Let Me In (2010) [full review]
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RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"It keeps everything and closes the one question the original left open."
Matt Reeves remade Let the Right One In two years after the original and the result is considerably better than remakes of this kind usually manage. Lindqvist gave it his blessing, Hammer produced under a revived name, and Reeves adapted the screenplay himself before going on to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and The Batman.
The setting moves to Los Alamos in 1983 and the film makes full use of the period. Reagan is on every television talking about evil in the abstract, the town exists to serve a weapons laboratory, and the boy at the center has a mother drinking through a divorce while the news supplies a vocabulary nobody in that house can use.
The car crash is the addition that justifies the remake existing at all. A single locked-off shot from the back seat as the vehicle leaves the road and rolls down an embankment, the camera never once moving, the driver attacked inside the frame throughout. Greig Fraser shot it and the whole sequence runs unbroken.
Chloe Grace Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee were both thirteen and the performances make it. The relationship plays as a real friendship between two isolated children, something the Swedish film understood and this one preserves intact. The film writes neither child as precocious and asks neither to play irony they’re too young to hold.
What it loses is the ambiguity around Hakan. The original leaves the nature of that arrangement open and this version shows him as a former Owen, supplying an answer the audience didn’t need. The gap in the Swedish film was doing real work, and closing it removes the reading that made the relationship disturbing to watch.
Train to Busan gets its geography free from a train, and Byzantium throws out every inherited vampire rule and writes new ones. Build the frame in the World Builder’s Handbook.
5. Under the Skin (2013) [full review]
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RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"No organization, no briefing, no stated purpose. Only behavior."
Jonathan Glazer spent close to nine years developing it and shot substantial portions with concealed cameras in Glasgow, using non-actors who didn’t know they were in a film and were asked for consent afterward. Several declined and were cut. Michel Faber published the novel in 2000 and almost none of its plot survives into the picture.
Scarlett Johansson drives a van through Scottish cities picking up men, and the film supplies no account of what she is, who she works for, or what the harvest serves. The motorcyclist who cleans up after her is never named. There’s no briefing scene, no organization and no moment where anybody states the operation aloud.
The black void sequences are the best images in recent science fiction horror. Men walk into a liquid surface without understanding that they’re walking, hang suspended in it, and a later shot showing what remains of one of them is among the most upsetting things the genre has produced. Daniel Landin shot it with almost no light.
Mica Levi’s score does an enormous amount of the work and was nominated for nearly every award available that year. Strings pitched a shade wrong, a recurring figure that arrives before the van does, and long passages where sound is the only information the audience is given about what is happening or about to happen next.
Most viewers miss the turn on a first watch. She begins by observing humans and ends by experiencing something, and the cake, the mirror and the encounter with the disfigured man are stages in a process the film never names. Adam Pearson plays that scene and it’s the hinge the entire second half swings on.
The void sequences frighten me more than anything else on this page, and I think Glazer’s refusal to explain a single thing is the bravest decision in the tier.
My reservation is the pace. Long passages ask for more patience than I always have on hand, and a film this withholding can leave a viewer outside the glass for a long while before the turn arrives. The second half pays that debt back, and I’ll take the slow stretches over one briefing scene any day.
6. The Conjuring (2013) [full review]
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RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"They cannot leave because every penny they have is in the house."
James Wan made the most commercially successful horror property of the last fifteen years and the first film remains by some distance the best thing in it. Made for around twenty million dollars, it took over three hundred and twenty, and nine further pictures have followed across the decade since it was released.
The craft is the reason it works instead of the content, and the content is standard haunted house material. Wan moves the camera almost continuously, holds shots past the point of comfort, uses the full width of the frame for things the characters haven’t noticed, and almost never cuts to a jump the audience was already braced for.
The hide and clap sequence is the best-constructed scene in modern mainstream horror. A blindfolded game, a clap from inside a wardrobe nobody is standing in, and Wan stages the sequence in a wide so the audience can search the room themselves and find what the mother hasn’t. Nothing in it is hurried for effect.
The Warrens supply the structure and are also the part the historical record disputes. Ed and Lorraine existed, the Perron case is documented from 1971, and almost every claim either of them made across a long career has been challenged by investigators since. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga play them without a trace of scepticism.
Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston play the parents as exhausted people with five daughters and no money left, and the haunting therefore has somewhere to land. They can’t leave the house because everything they have is already inside it, a fact the film establishes early and never needs to return to again.
7. Hannibal – “Apéritif” (S1E1, 2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Hannibal – “Apéritif” (S1E1, 2013)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Every meal shot to look appetizing, and you know exactly what it is."
Bryan Fuller built a network procedural around Thomas Harris’s characters and produced the most visually extreme thing broadcast television has carried. NBC ran it at ten o’clock for three seasons, and Fuller has described the standards conversations as a weekly negotiation over what could be shown and for exactly how long.
The pilot establishes Will Graham’s method before anything else about him. He stands alone in a crime scene, a pendulum swings across the frame, the evidence runs backward into place, and he narrates the killing in the first person as though he’d done it himself. David Slade directed it and the sequence is unhurried throughout.
Mads Mikkelsen plays Lecter as somebody nobody suspects because he never performs menace. He’s courteous, interested in other people, and he cooks. The audience knowing exactly what he is while everybody on screen doesn’t is what drives the series across thirty-nine episodes without ever wearing out.
The food photography is the signature and the decision behind it is deliberate. Every meal is lit, composed and plated as though for a magazine, and the audience is invited to find it appetizing while knowing exactly what’s on the plate. Brian Reitzell’s sound design works the same trick from the opposite direction.
Hugh Dancy’s Graham is the actual subject underneath the procedural. A man whose empathy works like a medical condition, who can’t stop occupying other people once he’s begun, and the series is about somebody being taken apart slowly by the doctor assigned to keep him intact and reporting on his progress.
8. The Babadook (2014) [full review]
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RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"The creature is not destroyed. It is moved to the basement and fed."
Jennifer Kent made her first feature in Adelaide from her own short film Monster, and Alex Juhasz built the pop-up book at the center of it by hand over several months. The production was partly crowdfunded, cost around two million dollars, and Radek Ladczuk shot almost all of it inside a single house.
The film is about grief and the mother is its subject. Amelia’s husband died driving her to hospital to give birth, the son is exactly the age of the loss, and every year the boy’s birthday and the anniversary of the death arrive on the same morning. Nothing supernatural is required to make any of that unbearable.
Essie Davis gives the best performance in horror this century and it’s exhausting to watch. She’s not sleeping, not coping and not pretending to, and Kent lets her be unpleasant to her own child in ways almost any other film would have softened into something an audience could forgive more comfortably.
Noah Wiseman’s Samuel is written to be difficult and the casting is a brave decision. He’s loud, constantly demanding, building weapons in the shed and screaming in supermarkets, and the film places the audience squarely in the mother’s position of finding her own son hard to be in a room with for any length of time.
The ending refuses the exorcism the form promises and that refusal is the entire film. The creature is moved into the basement and fed, daily, by a woman who has worked out that this is now a permanent part of her life and will be for the rest of it.
Essie Davis devastates me in this film, and the basement ending is the most honest thing I’ve seen a monster movie do with grief. The reservation is Samuel.
Kent means him to be hard to be around and she succeeds so well that the middle of the film turns into an endurance test I don’t always want to take. I respect that decision more than I enjoy it, and the ending makes the endurance worth it.
9. The Final Girls (2015) [full review]
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RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"Flashbacks are rooms you can walk into, and the film builds everything on that."
Todd Strauss-Schulson made a film in which teenagers are pulled inside an eighties slasher, and the unexpected part is that it’s moving. It was released to almost no attention in 2015, carries a rating for a wide audience, and has built its following slowly through streaming across the decade since.
At its center is a daughter who lost her mother and finds herself inside the film her mother made. Taissa Farmiga’s Max can talk to Malin Akerman’s Nancy, who’s a character instead of a person and doesn’t know it. Every conversation between them is a woman meeting a version of her mother who has no way to know her.
The rules material is the best comedy in it and all of it comes from one idea. The group work out that flashbacks are physical spaces they can walk into, that the killer arrives on cue whether anybody is ready, and surviving means somebody has to occupy the role the structure has been demanding since the opening credits.
The near-total absence of gore was a commercial decision and turns out to be correct. The horror is never the point, any of it would have damaged the film, and Gregory Middleton shoots the slasher sequences with the flat bright look of the decade being parodied instead of the one the film was made in.
The last act is about a daughter having to let her mother die properly this time, a considerably heavier idea than the premise advertises. The structure requires a final girl and the film makes that a role somebody has to volunteer for, knowing what volunteering costs and what it means for everybody who declines to.
A Quiet Place plants a nail in a stair and leaves it for an hour, and The Conjuring traps a family with a mortgage. Apply pressure in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
10. Train to Busan (2016) [full review]
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RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"A train gives you one direction of movement and doors as the only barriers."
Yeon Sang-ho made his first live-action feature after two animated films and it became the highest-grossing Korean picture of its year. The premise is an outbreak aboard a KTX service running from Seoul, and the carriages give the infection a direction it’s to travel in. It premiered at Cannes and a sequel followed four years later.
The train is the best structural decision any zombie film has made. Movement is one-dimensional, doors are the only barriers available, stations are the only exits, and every tactical problem the survivors face reads clearly without a line of explanation. The geography teaches itself inside ten minutes and never needs revisiting afterward.
Gong Yoo plays a fund manager who’s a bad father and the film is hard on him. His work at the company caused part of the outbreak, his daughter has already worked out what he is, and the redemption he eventually reaches is neither quick nor free nor comfortable to watch him earn across two hours.
Ma Dong-seok’s Sang-hwa is the heart of it and the reason people cry at the ending. A large man protecting a pregnant wife, funny in almost every scene he appears in, and the corridor sequence where three men fight forward through carriage after carriage is the best sustained action the form has produced anywhere.
The tunnel sequence is the smartest use of the film’s own rule. The infected can’t see in darkness and hunt by sound alone, so the survivors move through an unlit carriage in complete silence while the audience watches them pass within inches of something that’s no idea at all that they’re there.
I think the train is the smartest setting any zombie picture has chosen, and Sang-hwa fighting forward through those carriages is the stretch I’d show anybody who says zombie films have nothing left. It loses a point with me because of the father. A fund manager who neglects his daughter and learns better under fire is an arc disaster movies have run into the ground, and I could see each step of his redemption coming a carriage ahead. The rest is good enough that I forgive it.
11. It (2017) [full review]
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RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Every child has a home situation worse than the creature."
Andy Muschietti adapted the first half of King’s novel after Cary Fukunaga left the production, and it became the highest-grossing horror film ever released at over seven hundred million dollars. The children’s half moves forward from the novel’s 1950s into the 1980s, pushing the adult sequel into something close to the present day.
The Losers are the reason it works and the casting is unusually good throughout. Seven children who behave like children, argue continuously about nothing, and the film gives each of them a home situation the audience sees clearly enough to understand why the sewers aren’t obviously the worst place any of them could be.
Bill Skarsgard plays Pennywise with a drifting eye and a voice that changes register mid-sentence, and the design is built on wrongness instead of menace. The Georgie sequence in the storm drain is the best opening in mainstream horror this century, and all of it is a man talking to a child about a paper boat.
The adult world is the actual subject, in the film and in King. Beverly’s father, Eddie’s mother manufacturing his illnesses, Henry Bowers and the man who made him one, and the picture is clear throughout that the creature feeds on a town already doing most of the work on its own behalf without any supernatural help.
The Neibolt house is where the film overreaches and the failure is a familiar one. The set pieces grow, the digital work takes over from the staging, and the picture is considerably more frightening when Pennywise is simply a man in a drain talking pleasantly to a boy who would like his paper boat back.
The Georgie scene is as good as mainstream horror gets, and I’d put the Losers up against the adult casts of most King adaptations. The film slips for me at the Neibolt house. Every time the digital work swells up and takes over, the film trades the most frightening thing it owns, a man in a drain being pleasant to a child, for a noisy ride I’ve forgotten by the time the credits roll. Big-budget horror keeps making that trade, and it’s the wrong one every time.
12. A Quiet Place (2018) [full review]
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RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"A nail in a stair, seen early, and then left alone for an hour."
John Krasinski directed and starred opposite Emily Blunt, and the film carries about ninety lines of spoken dialogue across ninety minutes. Made for around seventeen million dollars, it took over three hundred and forty, and Scott Beck and Bryan Woods wrote the original screenplay before Krasinski reworked it for production.
The rule is absolute and the film states it inside five minutes. Make a noise and you die, and the picture demonstrates that immediately by killing a child in the opening sequence over a battery-operated toy his father had already taken away from him once. Nothing afterward needs any further explaining to anybody.
The sound design is the film and it was nominated for the Academy Award. Silence with small sounds inside it, sand paths laid down to muffle footsteps, and the cochlear implant feedback that becomes the solution in the last act is planted in the first twenty minutes and never once pointed at by anybody.
Millicent Simmonds is deaf and the casting changes what the film can do. When the camera is with the daughter the track drops to complete silence, and the relationship between a girl who can’t hear and a father who can’t forgive himself is the subject underneath all of the creature material.
The nail on the stair is the most effective single object in modern horror. The audience sees it early, nobody in the film ever does, and the picture then makes them wait close to an hour before anybody has a reason to come down those steps in the dark without shoes on their feet.
The nail on the stair is the kind of setup I wish every thriller writer would study, and the silence around the daughter’s scenes frightens me more than any creature does. My complaint is with the creatures themselves. Whenever the film shows them in full view it shrinks, and the dread that a sand path and a bare foot built up turns into a monster movie with a clear target. Part II made that mistake its centerpiece, and it’s no accident that it sits on the dishonorable list.
13. Nosferatu (2024) [full review]
► Read the full review of Nosferatu (2024)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Built from Romanian folklore instead of from the film he is remaking."
Robert Eggers spent close to a decade trying to make it and shot in Prague with almost every scene lit by candle, oil lamp or moonlight. It took over one hundred and eighty million dollars, an outcome nobody expected from a period film in this register, and Jarin Blaschke shot it as he’d The Lighthouse and The Witch before.
Bill Skarsgard’s Orlok is a Transylvanian nobleman with a moustache and a decaying body instead of the rodent silhouette everybody expects to see. Eggers built the design from Romanian folklore and period accounts of revenants instead of from Murnau, and the result resembles almost nothing in a hundred years of vampire imagery.
Lily-Rose Depp owns the film and the performance is physical to a degree that’s difficult to watch across long stretches. Ellen’s seizures, the trance sequences and the whole of the final act are played without any protective framing, and the camera stays on her through material most directors would have cut away from.
The argument is about desire and shame, what the 1922 version could only gesture toward from a distance. Ellen summoned him as a girl out of loneliness, the film is explicit about it, and the plague that follows her home is presented as the consequence of something she once wanted and has never been able to unwant.
Willem Dafoe plays the occultist, a direct reference to Shadow of the Vampire twenty-four years earlier. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Nicholas Hoult and Ralph Ineson fill out a cast of men who are confidently wrong about everything happening around them and who keep explaining it at length to the one person who already knows.
Eggers going back past Murnau to the folklore is exactly the nerve I want from a remake, and Depp’s performance is the reason the film hurts. The men are my problem. A cast of confident fools explaining the situation to the one woman who understands it makes its point in the first act, and the film keeps making it long after I’d got it. Trim the lectures and I think this climbs a tier.
Shadow of the Vampire makes the director the monster, and A Girl Walks Home Alone gets its worst scene from a threat nobody carries out. Two approaches in the Antagonist Handbook.
14. The Brides of Dracula (1960) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Brides of Dracula (1960)
RLR: 7.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"A Dracula sequel with no Dracula, and one of Hammer’s best."
Terence Fisher made a Dracula sequel with no Dracula in it, because Christopher Lee declined to return, and the result is among the best films Hammer produced. Cushing returns as Van Helsing and carries the whole picture, Jack Asher shot it, and Jimmy Sangster worked the screenplay alongside Peter Bryan.
David Peel plays Baron Meinster as young, blond and charming, a deliberate inversion of everything the studio had established three years earlier. The vampire is beautiful, his mother keeps him chained in an upstairs bedroom, and the horror underneath is a wealthy family concealing what their only son has become.
Martita Hunt’s Baroness is the most interesting figure in the film by a distance. She’s been feeding her son victims for years and is ashamed of every one of them, and Fisher gives her a confession scene that’s painful to sit through and that nobody in the picture offers her any absolution for afterward.
The windmill finale is a superb piece of staging and entirely practical. Van Helsing brands his own bite with a hot iron and douses it with holy water to arrest the infection, then climbs and turns the sails of a burning mill so the shadow falls across the vampire below in the shape of a cross.
15. Salem’s Lot (1979) [full review]
► Read the full review of Salem’s Lot (1979)
RLR: 7.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Network rules forbade the graphic option, so Hooper found the other one."
Tobe Hooper directed a two-part CBS miniseries from King’s 1975 novel, and the network restrictions are the reason it works as well as it does. The network permitted nothing graphic at that hour, so Hooper had to build the fear entirely out of staging and suggestion. Paul Monash wrote the teleplay and it ran across two nights.
Reggie Nalder’s Barlow is a Nosferatu design instead of a Lugosi one, blue-skinned and entirely silent, and he appears for a very short time across three hours of television. Making him non-verbal was Hooper’s decision and King has praised it repeatedly across the four decades since the original broadcast.
The window sequence is the most frightening thing broadcast television produced in that decade. A boy floating outside a first-floor window in fog, scratching gently at the glass, asking to be let in, and Hooper holds the scene an uncomfortable length while his brother lies in bed listening to him ask again.
The town is the subject and King’s novel is about a place rotting before anything arrives to feed on it. Affairs, a school bus driver watching children, a man beating his wife, and the vampirism spreads through a community that had stopped looking directly at each other some years before the first coffin was delivered.
David Soul and James Mason lead, and Mason’s Straker is the best performance in it by some margin. He’s polite, precise and running an antiques business as a front, and he never raises his voice or explains himself to anybody across the entire three hours of the production he appears in.
The boy at the window is the scene I’d use to prove that network censors did horror a favor, and James Mason is so good that I wanted more of Straker than the story had room for. Three hours is the problem. Between the big scares the miniseries sags into small-town business, and a lot of that business is a long wait for a vampire who barely turns up. The window scene alone justifies the evening, even so.
16. Shadow of the Vampire (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
RLR: 7.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"The vampire is sympathetic and the director is the monster."
E. Elias Merhige made a film about the production of Nosferatu in which Max Schreck is an actual vampire Murnau has hired, a premise that could have been a sketch and is instead about what directors are willing to spend. Steven Katz wrote it and Nicolas Cage was among the producers who financed it.
Willem Dafoe was nominated for an Academy Award and the performance is extraordinary. He plays Schreck playing a man playing a vampire, he’s pitiable throughout, and the scene where he discusses Dracula as a book about loneliness instead of appetite is the best thing in the picture by a considerable margin.
John Malkovich’s Murnau is the actual monster and the film is direct about it from early on. He’s promised his leading actress to the creature, he keeps the camera running while people around him die, and the only real emotion he displays across the whole film is about the light beginning to fail on him.
The last sequence is the argument stated plainly. The camera keeps turning through the deaths, Murnau won’t call cut, and the film’s position is that the finished work being a masterpiece settles nothing whatsoever about what it cost the people standing in front of the lens on the day it was made.
Dafoe’s speech about loneliness is the scene I’d watch the whole film again for.
My reservation is that the argument arrives early and never changes shape. Once Murnau has promised his leading actress to the creature, I knew where the story would go, and the last act lands with less force than it would if the film had kept one card hidden. It’s still the sharpest film I know about directors who treat people as film stock.
17. Byzantium (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Byzantium (2012)
RLR: 7.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Jordan throws out every inherited rule and writes a new set."
Neil Jordan returned to vampires eighteen years after Interview and made a considerably better film that almost nobody saw. Moira Buffini adapted her own play A Vampire Story, Sean Bobbitt shot it in Hastings, and the two timelines it runs on sit two hundred years apart from one another throughout.
The mythology is entirely new and delivered sparingly across the running time. No fangs, a thumbnail that extends into a blade, a shrine on a nameless island that produces the change, and a brotherhood that’s never once permitted a woman to be created and is now hunting the two who exist in spite of them.
Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan play a mother and daughter who have been thirty-something and sixteen for two centuries, the film’s real subject. The daughter keeps starting school again in new towns and the mother keeps returning to the same trade, and neither arrangement has ever been open to revision by either of them.
The argument about class and gender is unusually direct for the genre. Clara was trafficked as a girl, she took the gift instead of being offered it as every man in the brotherhood was, and their objection to her existence is entirely about a woman having reached out and taken something nobody intended to give her.
The waterfall turning to blood is the best image in the film and the change is staged as geography instead of an effect. Somebody walks into a cave mouth, a single bird flies out of it, and the water running down the cliff face turns red while the camera holds at a distance and simply waits.
The Babadook refuses to kill its creature because the thing it stands for doesn’t go away either. Match the ending to the subject in the Theme and Meaning Handbook.
18. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
RLR: 7.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"The most frightening scene has no violence in it at all."
Ana Lily Amirpour made the first Iranian vampire western, shot in black and white in Taft, California standing in for a fictional Iranian city, and financed it partly through crowdfunding with Elijah Wood among the producers. Lyle Vincent shot it and the film premiered at Sundance in early 2014.
The Girl is a vampire in a chador who rides a skateboard, and the image does the film’s political work without a single line of dialogue supporting it. The garment reads as modesty, as menace and as a cape depending entirely on the shot, and Amirpour never once has a character remark on any of that.
Long stretches are almost silent, and the soundtrack carries those passages alone. Iranian underground rock, spaghetti western cues, and a slow-motion sequence set to a White Lies track that runs several minutes with no dialogue while two people stand in a room together and decline to touch each other.
She hunts men who mistreat women and the film isn’t subtle about the criterion. The scene where she warns a small boy about what he might grow into is the most frightening thing in the picture, and nothing happens in it. She asks whether he’s going to be a good boy, and then she lets him go.
Bad City, as the film draws it, is a place with an oil field, a drainage ditch full of bodies and nobody who remarks on either of them. It presents the setting as broken long before it introduces anything supernatural into it, and the vampire is the only figure who reliably punishes anybody for anything at all.
19. The Raven (1935 / 1963 / 2012), Contrast [full review]
► Read the full review of The Raven (1935 / 1963 / 2012), Contrast
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Three films, one title, and a poem with no plot in it."
Three films share the title and almost nothing else, so the comparison is unusually clean. Poe supplies a poem with no plot in it whatsoever, and each of three decades borrowed the name for something entirely unrelated to what he wrote or to what the others had already built out of it.
Lew Landers’s 1935 version pairs Karloff and Lugosi, with Lugosi as a surgeon obsessed with Poe who has built working replicas of the torture devices from the stories in his own basement. It was banned in Britain and contributed directly to a temporary production ban on horror films across the industry.
Roger Corman’s 1963 version is a comedy and the best of the three by a distance. Price, Karloff and Lorre play duelling magicians, Jack Nicholson appears as Lorre’s son, and the wizard’s duel at the end is staged entirely for laughs with effects Corman could barely afford and went ahead and used anyway.
James McTeigue’s 2012 version makes Poe himself a detective pursuing a killer who stages murders drawn from the stories. The premise is serviceable, John Cusack commits to it completely, and the film has no particular reason to exist beyond a title somebody had already cleared the rights to use.
20. The Day of the Triffids (1962) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Day of the Triffids (1962)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"Two harmless facts that become lethal in combination."
Steve Sekely directed the adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel and the production was troubled enough that Freddie Francis shot an entirely separate lighthouse subplot to bring it to releasable length. The two halves never meet, share no characters, and different units filmed them months apart from each other.
No premise in British science fiction beats it. A meteor shower blinds almost everybody who stops to watch it, and the walking plants already being farmed commercially for oil become the dominant species overnight, for no reason except that nobody left alive can see them approaching across an open field.
The blindness is the actual horror and Wyndham is clearer about it than the film manages to be. A city full of people who can’t see, entirely dependent on the few who can, and the moral arithmetic of deciding who gets helped and who gets left is where the novel spends the bulk of its attention.
The triffids on screen are men in suits and they don’t survive close inspection. Francis shoots them in fragments, in darkness and at the edges of the frame wherever he can, and the handful of sequences showing one clearly in daylight are the weakest material anywhere in the entire picture.
The lighthouse half is the better film and it was shot separately to pad the running time. A married couple, a siege, a great deal of alcohol and a discovery about what seawater does to the plants, and it’s almost nothing to do with the story it was eventually attached to.
I still enjoy this one, mostly for Wyndham’s premise, which I’d put at the top of British science fiction, and for the lighthouse siege. The rest does the source a disservice. Men in suits lurking at the edges of the frame can’t carry the threat, and a separately shot subplot bolted on to reach a running time is a patch job. I think the producers handled the main story far worse than the padding they shot to rescue it.
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.
Sleepaway Camp (1983)
A summer camp slasher with an ending so abrupt that it’s defined the film for forty years. Everything before it’s ordinary and the last four seconds aren’t.
Pumpkinhead (1988)
Stan Winston directed his first film and built a creature that arrives because a father summoned it and can’t stop it. The design is among the best practical monsters of the decade.
The Phantom Carriage (1921)
Victor Sjostrom made a Swedish ghost story with double-exposure effects that took months to achieve. Bergman watched it annually and the axe through the door predates The Shining by sixty years.
Haxan (1922)
Benjamin Christensen made a documentary about witchcraft that becomes a dramatization of it, with a budget larger than any Scandinavian film had used. It was banned across much of Europe.
Antichrist (2009)
Von Trier made a grief film in a forest with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and the prologue is among the most beautiful sequences he’s shot. What follows divided Cannes completely.
The Eyes of My Mother (2016)
Nicolas Pesce shot in black and white on a Portuguese farm, with a surgeon’s daughter who keeps people the way her mother taught her to keep animals. It runs seventy-six minutes.
Revenge (2017)
Coralie Fargeat built a rape-revenge film in a desert with a color palette closer to advertising than horror, and the glass sequence at the end is staged with spatial precision.
Goodnight Mommy (2014)
Two Austrian boys become convinced the bandaged woman who came home isn’t their mother. The film withholds which reading is correct for most of its length and then commits completely.
Raw (2016)
Julia Ducournau put a vegetarian veterinary student through a hazing ritual and let the appetite that follows be about family instead of horror. Garance Marillier owns it entirely.
Talk to Me (2022)
The Philippou brothers built a possession film around an embalmed hand and a ninety-second rule that teenagers treat as a party game. The rules are stated once and obeyed throughout.
Speak No Evil (2022)
Christian Tafdrup built a film entirely on politeness, where a Danish family won’t leave a Dutch one because leaving would be rude. The ending is the bleakest of its decade.
The Hallow (2015)
Corin Hardy set an Irish folk horror around a conservationist surveying woodland that’s already occupied. The creature work is practical and the film is far better than its release suggested.
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.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)
Wan left the director chair and the film abandons the haunted house structure for a road trip and a courtroom. The Warrens drive between locations solving a case and almost nothing in it is frightening.
The Nun (2018)
A spinoff built around an image that worked as a two-second cutaway, extended to ninety-six minutes in a Romanian abbey. The figure appears so often that it stops registering by the midpoint.
Annabelle (2014)
A prequel to a doll that was effective in the first Conjuring because nobody explained it. The film supplies a cult, a murder and an origin, and the doll never moves on screen.
It Chapter Two (2019)
Runs one hundred and sixty-nine minutes and sends each adult Loser to collect a token in sequence, converting the second half of King’s novel into a list of errands.
A Quiet Place Part II (2020)
Opens by showing the invasion the first film had wisely left offscreen, replacing a world the audience had assembled with one the picture now has to defend.
Pet Sematary Two (1992)
Mary Lambert returned for a sequel that repeats the burial ground premise with a new family and adds a resurrected bully and a dog. The tonal control of the first film is entirely absent.
What Do You Think?
Every film on this page that scared me did it by keeping its mouth shut, and every note demanding an origin story makes horror smaller. Under the Skin never says what she is, and Let Me In loses something the moment it answers the one question the Swedish film left alone. I suspect studios keep asking for the explanation because it’s easier to pitch, and audiences keep paying for it with films they’ve forgotten by the weekend. Tell me where the line sits for you.
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
