10
Dawn of the Dead (1974)
Dir George A Romero (Ken Foree, Gaylen Ross, David Emge)
Supermarket sweep.
Now that’s he’s become a one-man zombie factory (with steeply diminishing returns), it’s hard to remember that George Romero was, at first, dubious about the idea of making a sequel to his 1969 game-changer ‘Night of the Living Dead’. But with his most personal project (and, perhaps, his masterpiece), ‘Martin’ (see No. 87), failing miserably at the box office, Romero decided to bite the bullet – and reinvigorated his career in the process. Though ‘Night’ changed the face of horror, this is the film he’ll be remembered for: the wildest, most deliriously exciting zombie flick of them all, and the movie which pretty much defines the concept of socially aware, politically astute horror cinema. Its influence has been felt in every zombie film since (and even on TV in ‘The Walking Dead’), and it remains a near-flawless piece of fist-pumping ultraviolence.
9
Suspiria (1976)
Dir Dario Argento (Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci)
An elegantly choreographed dance of death
From his stylish, atmosphere-laden opening - young American ballet student arriving in Europe during a storm - Argento relentlessly assaults his audience: his own rock score (all dissonance and heavy-breathing) blasts out in stereo, while Jessica Harper gets threatened by location, cast, weather and camera. Thunderstorms and extraordinarily grotesque murders pile up as Argento happily abandons plot mechanics to provide a bravura display of his technical skill. With his sharp eye for the bizarre and for vulgar over-decoration, it's always fascinating to watch; the thrills and spills are so classy and fast that the movie becomes in effect what horror movies seemed like when you were too young to get in to see them. Don't think, just panic
8
Halloween (1978)
Dir John Carpenter (Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis)
Is that a carving knife in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?
John Carpenter doesn’t put a foot wrong in this seminal hack ’n’ slasher. From the opening scene of young psycho-in-the-making Michael Myers greeting his parents with bloodied knife in hand to his inevitable return to wreak more havoc a decade later, ‘Halloween’ ticks every box. The opening sequence is a masterclass in how to unsettle nerves. Utilising the then new Steadycam system, Carpenter was able to give us a perspective from the killer’s point of view. To say it ups the creepiness to new heights is an understatement – it’s watch-from-behind-the-sofa terrifying. But Carpenter didn’t stop there: making full use of his musical talents, he also wrote the main theme, an ‘Exorcist’-style piano ditty that sets the teeth on edge. For me, this is unquestionably the most visceral, terrifying and tense film in this poll.
7
The Third Man
Dir Carol Reed (Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alide Valli)
'Join the dots.'
It swooped in at number one on the BFI’s 1999 British cinema poll, but here, Carol Reed’s The Third Man’ will have to settle for second spot. But, hey: it’s still a masterpiece. The genius at the core of this superlative, bible-black Euro noir is the way it teases you in to thinking that you’re watching a disposable pulp yarn about an honest schlub who touches down in a crumbling, post-war Vienna and won’t rest until he uncovers a conspiracy concerning the death of an old pal.
Our hero, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), is a writer of dimestore westerns. His pal is Harry Lime (Orson Welles), a bootlegger whose latest grift has landed him in an early grave, or so it seems. The further down the rabbit hole Holly ventures, the more it becomes clear that Reed’s glibness is mere cover for a bleak lament to a world tainted by corruption and evil. Replace Vienna with Los Angeles, and it’s basically ‘Chinatown’.
Inventive and exhilarating though the story is, its beauty lies in its flawlessly judged and occasionally eccentric construction: Robert Krasker’s high-contrast cinematography; Anton Karas’s eerily chipper zither score; and the depiction of a world so divided by politics, religion, gender and language, that you begin to understand why compassion would loose its appeal to these characters. ‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?’ asks Harry Lime. It’s a chilling conundrum that rings with truth and despair, and one of which politicians, businessmen and, well, everyone, should continually be wary
Our hero, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), is a writer of dimestore westerns. His pal is Harry Lime (Orson Welles), a bootlegger whose latest grift has landed him in an early grave, or so it seems. The further down the rabbit hole Holly ventures, the more it becomes clear that Reed’s glibness is mere cover for a bleak lament to a world tainted by corruption and evil. Replace Vienna with Los Angeles, and it’s basically ‘Chinatown’.
Inventive and exhilarating though the story is, its beauty lies in its flawlessly judged and occasionally eccentric construction: Robert Krasker’s high-contrast cinematography; Anton Karas’s eerily chipper zither score; and the depiction of a world so divided by politics, religion, gender and language, that you begin to understand why compassion would loose its appeal to these characters. ‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?’ asks Harry Lime. It’s a chilling conundrum that rings with truth and despair, and one of which politicians, businessmen and, well, everyone, should continually be wary
6
The Thing
Dirs Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (David Niven, Kim Hunter, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey)
'It’s a wonderful afterlife.'
This is one of Powell and Pressburger’s most imaginative and thoroughly enjoyable films, but it's also one of Britain’s most substantial fantasy films, in that for all its visual invention, wit, romantic flair and sense of fun, it is most definitely about something.
Actually, of course, it’s about a number of things: the improbable love affair between a British pilot forced to bale out of his plane and the American girl who takes his mayday call; the long-tricky ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US, strained during the later years of World War Two when the Americans were ‘over here’; and it’s perhaps even to some degree about the likewise uneasy relations between the practitioners of Britain’s documentary-realist tradition and those of the rather more flamboyantly ‘arty’ strand of filmmaking as perpetrated by Powell & Pressburger. (It may not be accidental that our quotidian earthly existence is shown in colour while the fanciful realm of the hereafter is consigned to the monochrome favoured by Grierson et al.)
Perhaps most importantly, however, it’s about exactly what it claims to be: the inevitably symbiotic relationship between life and death, which are in the end all part and parcel of the same thing. The heaven in the film not only reflects the need of many to believe in an afterlife where justice might finally prevail; it is also made quite explicit that it’s a dreamworld, the construct of the poet-pilot’s brain, in traumatic shock after he unexpectedly survives the plunge from his flaming cockpit. Quite dazzling.
Actually, of course, it’s about a number of things: the improbable love affair between a British pilot forced to bale out of his plane and the American girl who takes his mayday call; the long-tricky ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US, strained during the later years of World War Two when the Americans were ‘over here’; and it’s perhaps even to some degree about the likewise uneasy relations between the practitioners of Britain’s documentary-realist tradition and those of the rather more flamboyantly ‘arty’ strand of filmmaking as perpetrated by Powell & Pressburger. (It may not be accidental that our quotidian earthly existence is shown in colour while the fanciful realm of the hereafter is consigned to the monochrome favoured by Grierson et al.)
Perhaps most importantly, however, it’s about exactly what it claims to be: the inevitably symbiotic relationship between life and death, which are in the end all part and parcel of the same thing. The heaven in the film not only reflects the need of many to believe in an afterlife where justice might finally prevail; it is also made quite explicit that it’s a dreamworld, the construct of the poet-pilot’s brain, in traumatic shock after he unexpectedly survives the plunge from his flaming cockpit. Quite dazzling.
5
Alien
Dir Ridley Scott (Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm)
'The miracle of birth.'
In the wake of the huge commercial success of Alien, almost all attention has perversely focused on the provenance of the script (was it a rip-off of It, the Terror from Beyond Space? Of Van Vogt's fiction? Was former John Carpenter collaborator Dan O'Bannon sold out by producers Walter Hill and David Giler's rewrites?). But the limited strengths of its staple sci-fi horrors - crew of commercial spacecraft menaced by stowaway monster - always derived from either the offhand organic/ Freudian resonances of its design or the purely (brilliantly) manipulative editing and pacing of its above-average shock quota. Intimations of a big-budget Dark Star fade early, and notions of Weaver as a Hawksian woman rarely develop beyond her resourceful reaction to jeopardy. At least Scott has no time to dawdle over redundant futuristic effects in the fashion that scuttles his later Blade Runner.
4
Psycho
Dir Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh)
'What would mother think?'
Where would we be without ‘Psycho’? Fifty years on and Hitch’s delicious cod-Freudian nightmare about a platinum-blonde embezzler (Janet Leigh) who neglected to consult a guide before selecting her motel still has much to answer for. It blazed a bloody trail for the much-loved slasher cycle, but it also assured us that a B-movie could be A-grade in quality and innovation. It dared to suggest that your star didn’t need to surface from an ordeal smelling of roses (or, indeed, at all). It combined a knife, a scream, a melon, some chocolate sauce, Bernard Herrmann’s greatest score and more than 70 edits to push the envelope of screen violence. It lent ‘The Simpsons’ some of its best gags: (Seymour Skinner: ‘Oh there’s Mother now, watching me. What’s that, Mother? That sailor suit doesn’t fit any more!’). It offers perfect case studies of suspense, paranoia and montage for lazy film-studies tutors. And, of course, it was the first movie to show a toilet flushing, so we might also credit it with spawning the entire gross-out genre. ‘Psycho’: we salute you
3
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Dir Tobe Hooper (Gunnar Hansen, Marilyn Burns)
'Sounds like the neighbours are doing DIY again.'
Scriptwriter Kosar's pitch for the remake of Tobe Hooper's 1974 horror movie featured a job-clinching opening switch. The hitchhiker picked up by the five hippy college kids, now en route to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, is not one of Leatherface's mutant kin but a dazed female survivor of his rampage. Just when you're wondering, however, if this might be Sally Hardesty, the 'final girl' from the original, the film splatters our seductive sense of familiarity all over the back of the camper van. Perhaps, hoping against hope, we're going to be treated not to a slavish re-tread of Hooper's meaty Southern Gothic but an inspired riff on its disturbing, ghoulish themes. There's no denying the technical skill displayed by Nispel (a 'contemporary commercial visualist' here directing his first feature), but he has no feel for narrative rhythm, cumulative tension or raw terror. The best one can say is that his version is not slavishly in thrall to Hooper's: boring, fright-free and pointless, maybe, but not craven. Most damagingly, the beefing up of the local sheriff's role - with some demented gallows humour and intimidating eyeballing from R Lee Ermey (the sergeant in Full Metal Jacket) - divides our attention. Stranded between the kids menaced by him and those being terrorised in the feral family's crazy house, we lose the remorseless intensity of a nightmare from which we cannot wake.
2
The Shining
Dir Stanley Kubrick (Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall)
'Do not disturb.'
All of Stanley Kubrick’s films – be it ‘The Killing’ or ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ – demand to be seen on a big screen. They’re about people trapped in huge, indifferent machines gone wrong, from a heist plot to a spaceship, and only the huge indifference of the cinema does them justice. In ‘The Shining’, the machine is a haunted house: the Overlook Hotel, created by Stephen King and turned by Kubrick into an awry environment in which mental stability, supernatural malignance and the sense of space and time shimmer and warp to terrible effect.The story sees Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) drag his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and psychic son Danny (Danny Lloyd) up a mountain to be the hotel’s winter caretaker. Things go badly. This is the original 1980 US version, 24 minutes longer than the one familiar to UK audiences. On the upside, it fleshes out the family’s city life and includes an intriguing TV-watching motif; on the downside, there are some daft scare shots and it didn’t ever exactly feel short at two hours. Still, a masterpiece.
1
The Exorcist
Dir William Friedkin (Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow)
'Forty years of sucking cocks in hell.'
By the ’70s, horror had divided into two camps: on one hand, there were the ‘real life’ terrors of ‘Psycho’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead’, films that brought horror into the realm of the everyday, making it all the more shocking. On the other, there were the more outrageous dream-horrors popular in Europe, the work of Hammer Studios in the UK and Mario Bava and Dario Argento in Italy, films that prized artistry, oddity and explicit gore over narrative logic. The first film to attempt to bring the two together was ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, but Polanski’s heart clearly belonged to the surreal. The first to achieve that blend with absolute certainty was ‘The Exorcist’ – which perhaps explains its position as the unassailable winner of this poll. In cutting from the clanging bazaars of Iraq to the quiet streets of Georgetown, in blending dizzying dream sequences with starkly believable human drama, Friedkin created a horror movie like no other – both brutal and beautiful, artful and exploitative, exploring wacked-out religious concepts with the clinical precision of an agnostic scientist. And make no mistake: whatever its creator may say, ‘The Exorcist’ is most definitely a horror film: though it may be filled with rigorously examined ideas and wonderfully observed character moments, its primary concern is with shocking, scaring and, yes, horrifying its audience out of their wits – does mainstream cinema contain a more upsetting image than the crucifix scene? That it still succeeds, almost four decades later, is testament to Friedkin’s remarkable vision.
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