Here’s 9 classic horror films because Halloween

Image: courtesy Falcon International Productions (Halloween)

Our colleagues at Time Out London polled over 100 horror enthusiasts, including Stephen King, Simon Pegg, Alice Cooper and Clive Barker, to come up with a definitive top 100 horror films. Here we share their top picks, for the full list, extract the QR code below.

Disagree with the list? Tough! Just, kidding. Let us know which favourite horror flick should have made the cut in the comments below. 

Jaws (1975)

Image: courtesy Zanuck/Brown Company

Director Steven Spielberg.

Cast Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss.

It starts like any other let’s-get-it-on teen movie, at a late night beach party. Boy meets girl. They slink off to skinny dip. She runs ahead, throwing off her clothes, splashing into the water... only to be pulled under screaming. Welcome to the tourist island of Amity. Jaws broke box office records, but the production had been such a disaster the crew renamed it Flaws. The shark looked fake, the effects were terrible. Spielberg made a virtue out of necessity in the edit, switching the focus to the actors’ reactions: most chillingly after the shark strikes on a crowded beach. Parents have scooped up their children, all but one mother, a look of blind terror on her face. For some cinema lovers, the biggest horror story of all is that with his game-changing big hit, Spielberg inadvertently invented the popcorn blockbuster.

Dawn of the Dead (1974)

Image: courtesy Laurel Group Inc.

Director George A Romero.

Cast Ken Foree, Gaylen Ross, David Emge.

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 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.

Halloween (1978)

Image: courtesy Falcon International Productions

Director John Carpenter.

Cast Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis.

Movie snobs always have to point out that Bob Clark’s Black Christmas actually birthed the slasher subgenre, but it was the astonishing success of John Carpenter’s breakthrough indie (70 million USD worldwide on a 300,000 USD budget) that really set things in motion. But forget all the masked wannabes and knife-wielding suburban loonies that came after, and marvel at the streamlined power of Carpenter’s film: the gliding camera, the concealing shadows, the single-minded presence of masked villain Michael Myers, as perfect a killer as the shark in Jaws. Almost four decades later, it’s still close to flawless. 

The Thing (1982)

Image: courtesy Universal Pictures

Director John Carpenter.

Cast Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley.

Time travel has many enticing possibilities, but one of the most enjoyable would be to travel back to 1982 and tell John Carpenter that his new movie would someday score sixth place in a list of the 100 best horror movies – even beating his own iconic Halloween. Like many future horror classics, The Thing was hated on first release, dismissed as an Alien clone more interested in pushing the boundaries of SFX than in character or tension. It was a disastrous flop, and threatened Carpenter’s once unassailable reputation as the king of the new horror. It’s hard to imagine now: with the benefit of hindsight (and, more importantly, repeat viewings), The Thing has emerged as one of our most potent modern terrors, combining the icy-cold chill of suspicion and uncertainty with those magnificently imaginative, pre-CG effects blowouts.

Psycho (1960)

Image: courtesy Shamley Productions

Director Alfred Hitchcock.

Cast Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh.

A few years back, David Thomson’s book The Moment of Psycho argued that Alfred Hitchcock’s blackly comic serial killer masterpiece didn’t just change cinema, but society itself. By confronting audiences with everyday horrors; by knowingly manipulating them into sympathising with a murderer; by offering an amoral, adulterous heroine then bumping her off so savagely; by mocking Freudian psychology and the pompous stuffed-shirts who practice it; by pushing an image of America as a trap-laden labyrinth populated by creepy cops and nice-as-pie psychopaths; and by implying that women (brace yourself now) actually use the toilet sometimes, Hitch helped pave the way for all the cultural earthquakes and moral rebalancing acts that the coming decade had to offer. And he did it all with a wink and a smile. Now that’s show business.

Alien (1979)

Image: courtesy 20th Century Fox

Director Ridley Scott.

Cast Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm.

Talk about above and beyond: Ridley Scott was hired by Twentieth Century Fox to make ‘Jaws in space’, and came back with one of the most stylish, subversive, downright beautiful films in either the horror or sci-fi genre. The masterstroke, of course, was hiring Swiss madman HR Giger as the film’s chief designer – his work brings a slippery, organic grotesquerie to what could’ve been a straight-up bug hunt (© Aliens). But let’s not overlook Dan O’Bannon’s script, which builds character without assigning age, race or even gender – plus one of the finest casts ever assembled.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Image: courtesy Vortex

Director Tobe Hooper.

Cast Gunnar Hansen, Marilyn Burns.

‘Who will survive… and what will be left of them?’ It’s a question that applies as much to the audience for Tobe Hooper’s relentless stalk-and-saw shocker as to its doomed, hapless characters. Horror had never been this raw before, and it could be argued that it hasn’t since, the sheer grimy ugliness of the piece leading some to walk out, others to cry sadism and many more to acclaim the film as a modern masterpiece; horror in its purest, most unforgiving form. Sequels and remakes have come thick and fast, but nothing will ever match your first encounter with the original and its brutal, hammer-over-the-head power.

The Shining (1980)

Image: courtesy The Producer Circle Company

Director Stanley Kubrick.

Cast Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall. 

The scariest moments in The Shining are so iconic they’ve become in-jokes: Jack Nicholson leering psychotically from posters on the walls of student bedrooms everywhere...'Here’s Johnny'. Even so, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of execution and claustrophobia still retains the power to frighten audiences out of their wits. Nicholson is Jack Torrance, a writer working as a caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains over winter. Stephen King, on whose novel the film was based, was famously unimpressed. The problem, he said, was that ghost-sceptic Kubrick was ‘a man who thinks too much and feels too little’. He resented Kubrick for stripping out the supernatural elements of his story. Torrance is not tortured by ghosts but by inadequacy and alcoholism. And for many, it’s as a study of insanity and failure that The Shining is so chilling.

The Exorcist (1973)

Image: courtesy Hoya Productions

Director William Friedkin.

Cast Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow.

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 every day, 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 Roman 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: 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.

More from Time Out Shanghai

Click below for more from Time Out Shanghai