JAWS (1975)
There was some back-and-forth among the writers here at The Screengrab over whether Steven Spielberg’s first blockbuster should be included on a list of classic horror movies. But ultimately, it made the cut because, whether or not it qualifies as a horror movie, the truth is that it’s seriously scary. A far cry from the long-standing King of Hollywood Filmmakers who has become semi-notorious for his inability to satisfactorily end his movies, the Spielberg who made Jaws did so with one thing on his mind -- to scare the ever-loving shit out of the audience. And oh man, did he ever succeed. Much has been made of the technical issues with the animatronic shark “Bruce” forcing Spielberg to find clever ways to make the shark’s presence felt onscreen (who can forget that moment when the dock slowly turns around?). However, the withholding of actual shots of the shark actually makes him more frightening, given all the buildup he’s had up to that point. Along with being Spielberg’s most frightening movie, it’s also his most perfectly structured, divided almost evenly between the attacks on the townspeople and the mission by Brody, Quint, and Hooper to bring down the toothy killer. The first half has plenty of good scares to be sure -- the head popping out of the boat, for one -- but it’s the second hour that makes Jaws a classic. The setup is little more than three men on an old boat, and as the makeshift crew hunts down, then fends off, the shark, Spielberg never once cuts back to the mainland. The claustrophobia that results causes the tension to skyrocket, so that every time the shark returns to take another shot at bringing down the boat, the film becomes ever more Hooksexup-wracking. But for all the brutal attacks we see, nothing in Jaws burrows under your skin quite like Quint’s immortal monologue about his experiences aboard the Indianapolis, in which he shares his first-hand knowledge of just how much damage sharks can do.
BLACK SUNDAY (1960)
The Italian director Mario Bava, whose other credits include the 1971 Bay of Blood (AKA Twitch of the Death Hooksexup), regarded by some as the first slasher/splatter movie, is that rare horror specialist who has earned a reputation as a major filmmaker on the basis of his stylish and atmospheric approach to such genre eternals as cobweb-strewn dungeons and gore-stained torture instruments. He made his name largely on the basis of this Saturday-matinee classic, in which a beautiful young woman visiting her ancestral home is menaced by her long-dead but now-back ancestor, a Moldavian witch who was burned at the stake in 1630. The English actress Barbara Steele played both parts, popping her eyes ever so slightly to indicate when she was supposed to be the murderous, unearthly one. Neither Steele's youthful amateurishness as an actress nor the fact that, by her own account, she was never too clear on what the funny man with whom she shared no common language and who kept waving and jabbering at her from behind the camera was going on about, were enough to get in the way of the fact that, with her stunning features set off by her long black hair, she was both a striking image of virginal innocence imperiled and rampaging evil at its sexiest; the movie turned her into one of the best-loved scream queens of the '60s and '70s.
BRAIN DAMAGE (1988)
This deeply unwholesome film is perhaps the best work by boundary-pushing splatter director Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case, Frankenhooker), who can be heard on the DVD director commentary reminiscing that he always managed to include one scene in each of his films that he enjoyed the pleasure of staging and shooting by himself, because at that point the crew invariably walked out shaking their heads and muttering, "Oh, you sick bastard..." This one, Henenlotter's version of an anti-drug addiction film, is about a fool (Rick Herbst) who strikes up a partnership with a parasitic creature called Aylmer (pronounced "Elmer") who injects him with an addictive, hallucinogenic substance in exchange for the man's help in keeping the monster well fed on his preferred diet of human brains. Elmer also talks, in a voice provided by John Zacherle, beloved in cult circles as New York's most celebrated TV horror show host.
FIDO (2006)
It's a measure of how influential George Romero's conception of zombiedom has been that people who adopt his ideas of shambling, flesh-eating corpses that can only be finished off with a crushing blow to their brains aren't seen as rip-off artists, but rather as traditionalists working with what, since 1969, have been the established rules. Another measure is the way that Romero's imagery has been spoofed in comedies whose makers are confident that the audience will immediately recognize what it is they're making fun of. The British comedian Simon Pegg and his collaborators had a major success making fun of zombies in Shaun of the Dead, but this Canadian film, directed and co-written by Andrew Currie, honors Romero's attempts to use his undead hordes to satirize American society, only with a steadier and subtler hand than the master has sometimes maintained himself. Set in a Blue Velvet-style suburbia where it'll always be the 1950s, Fido features perhaps the best ever performance by an actor as a zombie by Scottish comic Billy Connolly, in the title role of the hungry but strangely winning pet of little Timmy (K'Sun Ray), who soon realizes that his grunting, growling pal is trying to tell him something.
GINGER SNAPS (2000)
This Canadian film does for werewolves what Carrie and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series did for high school misfits in their respective supernatural target groups. The word "snaps" in the title is a verb: Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and her little sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins) have a close knit "you and me against the world" relationship, which manifests itself in the form of a deep (and, to the minds of their school instructors, inappropriate) fascination with death, but after Ginger experience her first period and begins to have confusing feelings about boys, Brigitte senses the beginning of a wedge coming between them that presages the conflict to come when Ginger is bloodied by a werewolf-like creature and begins to literally transform into a different, and dangerous, species. The movie almost didn't happen because of real life adults' concern about teenagers' "inappropriate" obsessions with death and violence: the project's funding was threatened by adverse publicity after the Columbine high school shooting took place during pre-production.
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Contributors: Paul Clark of the Living Dead, Phil Nugent Is People!!!!