15. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)
Yes, I know you never actually see the witch. Yes, my wife and my father and countless other people got motion sickness from all the whip-pan video camera shots, and many others felt ripped off when the scariest thing in the much-hyped “new horror classic” was a bundle of sticks. And, true, the sequel was a jaw-dropping fiasco. And yet, I defend The Blair Witch Project on many levels. First, it did its job and creeped the bejesus outta me. Now, maybe that’s because I grew up (and later got stoned) in the dark woods of New England, where we used to actually burn witches, and so I’m the ideal audience for a flick about the paranoid possibilities of a forest at night. I also saw the movie on the big screen, after watching the brilliant small screen promotional faux-documentary Curse of the Blair Witch, so I was up-to-speed on all the Elly Kedward/Rustin Parr mythology and ready to be seduced by the film's tone of ominous forboding (rather than waiting to be impressed by gory special effects or whatever the haters didn’t find in the film). Plus, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez turned a $22,000 budget into a $200 million dollar indie smash and then disappeared without a trace, kinda like the actors from the movie...so maybe there really is a curse.
14. CARRIE (1976)
Brian De Palma's purest and best horror movie is also the most potent of the horror genre's many essays on just how close high school is to hell on Earth. Sissy Spacek, at 26, turns in a phenomenal performance as the outcast who has to contend with mean girls at school and a mean mother of a Jesus freak (Piper Laurie) at home. Given the chance to shine for the first time in her life, she winds up onstage dripping with pig's blood in front of her jeering adolescent tormentors, who don't know that she's telekinetic and is about to stick the local tacky-jewelry manufacturer with a whole lot of unclaimed class ring. If you can watch the ensuing carnage without rooting for her, you must have been a cheerleader.
13. AUDITION (1999)
Ringu, a.k.a. The Ring, kicked off an American hunger for the weird eyes and dark, stringy hair of the ghosts of Japanese horror, but even more scary than a ghoul that crawls out of your TV set (a highly frightening but fairly uncommon occurrence) is an actual living woman who wants to do terrible, terrible things to you with needles. Sure, Sadako’s victims in The Ring may have a bad week and die, but the victims of shy, pretty, bat-shit crazy Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) wind up with no feet or tongue in a burlap sack for a much longer time. And then die. What makes the film even more disturbing is that it starts out like a carefree romantic comedy, until suddenly...not so much, kinda like Sleepless In Seattle with torture.
12. THE EVIL DEAD (1981)
Shot in the woods of Tennessee over the course of almost a year and half on a budget of less than $400,000, and slowly released to the public over an even longer span of time, Sam Raimi's gore-drenched take on the lost-out-here-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-with-weird-shit-going-on genre looks like the work of some enthusiastic kids who'd stayed up late watching junk like Equinox on TV and went a little crazy making their own home-movie version of it -- except that these kids had talent, as well as the rare determination to see their little art therapy project/get rich quick scheme through to the end. Some connoisseurs see this early, primitive effort as just a stepping-stone to the slapstick wonders of the openly parodic Evil Dead II, but the raw energy of this thing, which is often funny and just as often genuinely scary, is a testament to how well primitivism can work in the horror genre.
11. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978)
Jack Finney’s classic novel of (literal) social alienation was first brought to the screen in 1956, and since then it’s been officially remade three times (not counting rip-offs and “homages"). And, while the original Don Siegel adaptation has its rightful defenders, I’ve always been partial to the 1978 version starring Jeff Goldblum, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Leonard Nimoy and, of course, the incomparable Donald Sutherland. Naturally, I’m biased: I saw this version on the big screen at an impressionable age, and it was the first movie I’d ever experienced where the good guys didn’t win...making me wonder if I could really trust the other people in the theater with me (or even my parents) and giving me an early taste of the existential angst I would become a lot more familiar with in my adolescent and adult life. Best of all, the movie inspired a game in my neighborhood where one pod person would go around infecting everyone else until there was only one “human” left. Trust me, you don’t know terror until you’re the last survivor on your street, waiting for the end as a dozen weirdly screaming pre-teen aliens slowly surround your hiding place.
Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six & Seven
Contributors: Andrew Unborn; The Vengeful Ghost of Phil Nugent