Top 10 Horror Movies
by James Rambo, GGR Contributor I am a cinephile. I’ve loved movies for as long as I can remember and I see no signs of that letting up. I say this to say that limiting myself to a Top 5 is tantamount to low-level torture. And horror movies are some of my favorites.
My initial plan was to list as many of my favorites as possible and whittle that down to 5 but once I hit 15 total I stopped. On the advice of our illustrious and charismatic leader Lumberin’ Mike Lunsford (seriously, everybody calls him that), I present to you The Top 10 Horror Movies That I Love And Could Think Of, Presented In No Particular Order.
Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Freddy Krueger is one of my favorite characters in all of film history and, really, fiction overall. He’s funny and snarky and an absolute ass and the fact that an unrepentant child murderer can be seen as the lead in all of those movies is a testament to the performances of Robert Englund. I could easily have made a Top 10 list of favorite horror movies and it could have been all the Nightmare movies and, like, 3 randos.
“You ever see Creepshow? That’s real good. Anyway, remember that time Freddy killed a girl by putting her head through a TV and just beforehand said ‘Welcome to primetime, bitch!’? That sure was great.”
The 4th installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street series is The Dream Master. This movie holds a special place in my heart but it’s not for the reason that I like the other movies. The kills are decent but not great (one of them is downright crappy due to budgetary concerns) and Freddy isn’t particularly special in the movie. It’s the lead character, Alice, that I really love.
When we’re first introduced to Alice she’s a mousey little high school girl surrounded by much more interesting characters. But as her friends and family die over the course of the film she begins to adopt their character traits and skills, slowly becoming a richer and more interesting character in her own right and defeating Freddy in the climax of the film, one on one.
Alice is one of the first Final Girls I remember seeing and she’s especially badass because of her friends. There’s a great metaphor in cherishing the memories of loved ones and drawing from their strength to overcome hardship. It just so happens to be sandwiched inside a movie about a demonic, ethereal murderer with a Christmas sweater.
Ravenous
A horror movie about cannibalism set during the Mexican-American War, Ravenous is a film that is fairly unique. Guy Pearce is an officer that’s recently been sent out to The Outpost of Misfit American Military, Fort Spencer, following a successful siege that resulted from some cowardice on Pearce’s part. Soon after his arrival, a Scotsman is found in the mountains surrounding the fort. The man, played by Robert Carlyle, proceeds to begin killing and eating the other people in the camp and it falls to Pearce to stop him. Wackiness ensues.
It’s dirty and grungy and rugged in that way that rough hewn wood looks, which is a great setting for a horror movie. Highly recommended.
Robert Carlyle and Guy Pearce chewing scenery in Ravenous. Get it? chewing? A movie about cannibals? I’ll see myself out
Fright Night (2011)
(This is the first of a couple remakes on this list so if you’re a person that stands firm on “The original is the best!” you might want to skip any entry on this article that has a year behind the title.)
I remember going into this movie with moderate to low expectations and leaving the theater blown away by not just how well it was executed and stood on its own but by how successful it is as a remake. Recently my lovely lady celebrated a birthday and we watched this immediately after we watched the original and there are SO MANY visuals allusions to the first that only a hardcore fan or someone that’s seen them both in short succession would catch.
Fright Night does a couple things really well. The first is that the cast is wonderful. Anton Yelchin’s Charlie has real and genuine chemistry with Imogen Poots’ (*tee-hee*) Amy. Toni Collette as Charlie’s Mom is, well, Toni Collette so she came to set and did her job, so she nails the role. But the standouts are a 2-way tie between David Tennant’s Peter Vincent and Colin Farrell’s Jerry.
Her name is also a statement!
In the remake, Vincent is updated from a former Hammer Films-style horror icon turned creature feature host to a Las Vegas stage magician (he’s basically playing Criss Angel if he were more into the occult.) Any Doctor WHo fans will recognize Tennant as the 10th Doctor (my personal favorite) and to get to see him as this scenery chewing douchenozzle is so much fun. He’s a sleazy, gross, drunk (on Midori, no less) jackass and he’s clearly having a great time.
As for our villain, Farrell as Jerry is a predator at all times. He’s either going to eat, fuck, or both every person he comes in contact with. He’s incredibly charismatic and oozes sexuality and, well, he looks like Colin Farrell. There’s one detail in particular that I really love about him. He wears a leather cuff on his wrist. It’s the perfect cherry on his whole look, that of a blue-collar
vampire. Where the original Jerry, played by Chris Sarandon, was a wealthy yuppie, the current Jerry is an immortal but he isn’t brilliant or rich. He’s just a working stiff.
That leads me to the second thing that this movie does really well. It makes a lot of practical decisions. The original takes place in the Midwest -- this one is set in Las Vegas. By doing that it allows for all kinds of updates and adjustments. Jerry works night construction on the Strip. Peter is a stage magician. It’s not weird that people are disappearing because Vegas is a transient city. It lends credibility to Charlie’s dismissal of Ed (his former best friend played by Chrisotpher Mintz-Plasse) beyond the obvious absurdity of there being a vampire in the neighborhood.
The last thing that it does wonderfully is the subtext of the film. I only recently caught this on my last viewing. Jerry has a monologue that is incredibly squicky and gross. Charlie has just figured out that Jerry is a vampire but neither one is saying it. Jerry starts talking about the women in Charlie’s life, referring to Amy as “ripe. You can’t tell but she is.” It’s Jerry telling Charlie to keep his distance and he won’t hurt him via the women he loves.
And I started thinking about other scenes: how Charlie has moved on from his nerdy former best friend, how his new friends are dicks and he’s been acting more like them. And how there’s a subplot about Amy being more sexually experienced than Charlie. And it hit me that Jerry represents toxic masculinity and that Charlie’s arc is about not becoming an asshole. Horror as a genre has a great ability to be insidious with it’s messaging and that’s a great example of really positive storytelling.
The Cabin in the Woods
What I most enjoy about this movie is the fact that it justifies the existence of every other horror movie. No matter how corny, cheesy, overwrought, or underproduced, The Cabin in the Woods tells us that this was America doing its level best to stall the awakening of the Old Gods and that is enough. It adds a metatextual appreciation for the entire genre. And the fact that the concept is so deftly executed and with such humor? It’s a solid horror flick about horror flicks. And that’s really fun.
BUT I SURE DO WISH THE OPENING CREDITS DIDN’T GIVE AWAY THE PLOT.
The Ring
Hey, another remake, albeit this time it’s an American remake of a Japanese film and not a modern remake of an older American film.
The Ring is one of those movies that is polarizing. I don’t know many that have mild feelings about it. I love it. It’s a weird, subtle-until-it-isn’t film with an awfully strange premise and I think that’s a major contributing factor to the reactions from folks. If you can’t buy the premise immediately or even eventually come around to it you’re going to be left frustrated or angry.
And I get it. Honestly, think about it:
“A little girl with psychic powers that was killed by her mother somehow made a videotape of seemingly disparate weird images and if you watch it you get a phone call afterward from her ghost telling you that you’ll die in 7 days.”
That’s a wacky-ass concept, folks. But goddamn did Gore Verbinski pull it off. There are shots in that movie that are just an image of a tube tv and a VCR and that shit is ominous. It also features one of my favorite moments in Naomi Watt’s son telling her “You weren’t supposed to help her!” I legit got a chill writing that, folks.
Frailty
Bill Paxton made a movie about an auto mechanic single dad raising two sons. And then one day an angel appears to him and tells him the Truth: demons exist on Earth and him and his family have been chosen to rid the world of them. The catch? It’s only when he lays his hands upon them that he’ll see their true natures. Otherwise they look just like regular people.
The story is told in 2 parts. The present follows Matthew McConaughey as Fenton Meeks, the eldest son who’s come to confess to FBI Agent Doyle (Powers Boothe) that his little brother, Adam, is a serial killer. The rest of the film is told in flashback, as Fenton relates the story of his father turning his and his brother’s lives upside down with this “revelation.”
As children Adam believes his father absolutely. But Fenton has a few years on him so he sees that this is all insanity. Right? Watch the movie.
With this film Paxton plays with our perception of a child’s duty to their parent, the ethical duty of being a young person that is coming into adulthood, and the bonds of family. This was one of two feature films he made before his death and his not making more is truly our loss.
The Fly (1986)
“Ugh remakes are the worst!”
Nah, son.
Brundle’s slow descent into madness is chilling and disturbing but his clinical recording of his transformation adds a layer of humanity to the entire process. It’s important to him that science benefit from his mistake. And who better to document that metamorphosis? LITERALLY ANYONE ELSE! WHO TAUGHT YOU ETHICS?!
Gregor Samsa can kiss the hairiest part of my ass.
You know those moments where you’re discussing something and you realize a thing about the thing you’re discussing? I love those. I just had one.
The moment that Brundle decides to attempt the teleporter on himself is when Ronnie leaves to go see her ex/editor, Stathis. He does this incredibly dangerous thing because he’s jealous of her spending her time with another man. This jealousy gains physical manifestation as the transformation into Brundlefly. It eats away at him and causes him to destroy his relationship with her, to the extent that she warns another woman to be afraid of him. It’s only after he’s gone too far and destroyed her relationship with Stathis that he realizes his wrongdoing and asks her to end things, permanently. With a shotgun.
Green Room
This is more of a thriller than a straight horror movie but I defy you to find a film that is more suspenseful and puts its characters in greater imminent danger. There’s even some great gore and visual effects.
Reuniting on the silver screen in Jeremy Saulnier’s second film (his first is called Blue Ruin, a revenger flick of a high caliber that I can’t recommend enough), Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots (*tee-hee*) star in a story about a NoVA-area punk band on tour that have a venue fall through. A booker pulls some strings and gets them a new gig -- at a skinhead club. The band being broke as fuck, they decide to do the show if only so they can get the money to get them back home to DC. Following the show, a band member heads back to the titular green room and ends up witnessing a murder. This is maybe 30 minutes into the movie.
The whole rest of the film is the band and a handful of other witnesses trying to escape. Alia Shawkat features as another bandmate of Yelchin’s and the club’s owner is played by Captain Jean-Luc Picard himself, Patrick Stewart, as an aging White supremacist. And he is terrifying.
This movie is brutal in every sense of the word but it’s also got some great moments of levity that are sorely needed throughout. But if you can’t handle stressful situations, this is not the film for you.
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
George Romero is a wonderful filmmaker and movies and the horror genre in particular are forever indebted to him for his contributions. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t improve upon a previous work of his.
Zach Snyder, directing from a script by a then relative unknown James Gunn, puts more of a human face on the zombie outbreak. Maintaining the original setting of a shopping mall, the theme of mass consumerism is still present as sequences of our still-living group ransack the stores for weapons, supplies, and entertainment but this movie has a greater story to tell. The best example of this is during a dinner scene with all our survivors. As a get-to-know-you bit of conversation they go around talking about what their jobs were. One’s a nurse, one’s a security guard at the mall, another is a cop. And then Michael (Jake Weber) mentions the job he was best at. Ana (Sarah Polley) asks what. Michael says, “Being a dad.”
It’s a moment that hits hard as the realization that everyone they care about is gone. It’s not a new concept, this kind of scene, but the particulars of it set you up and knock you down.
Oculus
As I mentioned in discussing The Ring, the key to any fiction, but especially with more fantastical fiction like horror, is that you have to buy the premise. It is the duty of the audience to accept the reality laid before them. It is the duty of the filmmakers to adhere to the rules they establish and maintain cohesion throughout their story (or break those rules in such a way that it might still serve the story.) If this symbiosis isn’t maintained by either side the whole thing fails. Why am I telling you this?
Oculus is about a haunted mirror.
Now it’s not really necessary that I harp on the creator/viewer relationship like I did but I do it so that you understand just how easily this concept could go sideways. A haunted mirror could go down some silly paths but this film does a masterful job of taking it completely seriously and serving the narrative because of it.
It’s Tim Russell’s (Brenton Thwaites) 21st birthday and that means he’s being released from the mental health institution where he’s spent the better part of a decade for the murder of his father. You see when Tim was just a boy, his Dad (Rory Cochran) flipped his lid and tortured and then killed his wife, Tim and his older sister Kaylie’s (Karen Gillan) Mom (Katie Sackhoff) before trying to kill his two kids. Tim killed Dad in self-defense and was immediately put into a psychiatric facility.
But now he’s getting out! And he’s feeling good, feeling healthy, mentally and physically! And his sister picks him up, takes him to lunch, and tells him about the plan to destroy the mirror that drove their Dad crazy and led to their Mom’s death. You know, family stuff.
Exsqueeze me? A baking powder?
From this point we see the story play out both in the past and the present. In the past, the newly moved in family dissolves as Dad loses it and takes the rest of the family with him. In the present, Kaylie is trying to not just destroy the mirror but also get definitive proof that it is in fact possessed of some supernatural entity so as to exonerate her dad while Tim is doing his absolute best to keep hold on the sanity he has worked half his life to rebuild and maintain.
At its core the movie is about how time can color perception and even siblings in the same home can have wildly different takes on the same events for a variety of reasons. Kaylie knows what happened and has internalized it. Tim has had a whole faculty of mental health professionals to help him accept and make peace with the horrible things he did and experienced. She’s only had her anger and pending revenge. So each is left trying to sell the other on what “really” happened.
Mike Flanagan (who’s newly made The Haunting of Hill House is getting rave reviews on Netflix) creates a monster that feeds off of living things but has no physical ability to eat. It needs you to die but it can’t exactly stab or shoot you. So the mirror distorts time and space to destroy living things around it and it does this by breaking down your mental faculties. It might make you lose track of time for a week or two and starve to death. Or get confused and kill someone else in the room. But best believe, it’s going to be fed.
I won’t say anything else about this movie other than it was a hell of a pleasant surprise and that it has one of the most gut-wrenching endings I’ve seen in a long time.
Honorable Mentions
Evil Dead (2013)
This is better than the original. YEAH, I FUCKIN’ SAID IT.
I firmly believe this is the movie Sam Raimi wanted to make but he has too great a difficulty not being funny. This is also why Evil Dead 2 is essentially a funnier remake of the first movie -- he seemed to realize where his strength lay and leaned in. Hell, Raimi helped produce this!
Watch this with that in mind and tell me you didn’t enjoy it plenty.
The Witch
The VVitch (I promise I won’t keep doing that) is a period piece set just before the Salem witch trials. The dialogue is all in an Old English pastiche and even the aspect ratio of the film was chosen specifically to evoke an old-timey sensibility and feel less cinematic.
Following unseen events, a family of Puritans is cast out from their Puritan community. THEY WERE TOO PIOUS FOR THE PURITANS. They find a plot of land just outside the woods and setup farm, as it were. There they’re terrorized by a witch from the woods.
One of my favorite things about the movie is the degree to which the Witch is just doing very practical things in order to achieve her goals. How do witches fly? Oh you just need an infant and a mortar and pestle! And without saying too much, about ⅔ of the way through the movie I realized that the title of the film isn’t necessarily about what you think it is and it completely made the experience for me.
Everyone in this is great but Anya Taylor-Joy is particularly good as the lead in her first big role. She has a really engaging arc and the minimal effects of the film overall keep the tension high.
The Thing
I’m sure I don’t have to justify this movie’s presence on this list. If anything I have to justify why it’s so low on the list. That really comes down to my having seen it so late in life. Don’t get me wrong -- nothing about this disappointed me. But I don’t have the same relationship with it that I do with a lot of the other movies on here.
That and having this movie on a Best Horror list is a given. It’s like pizza being your favorite food (It’s mine.)
The Invitation
Another of the more psychological horror movies on the list, The Invitation is a great lesson in building and maintaining tension from director Karyn Kusama. A man gets an invitation to a party from some old friends that he hasn’t seen for years and is immediately suspicious. Because he’s our entry into this world, so are we. There’s obviously more to that but saying too much more would give away a great film and a hell of an exploration of paranoia, co-dependency, and friendship.
Darkness Falls
Ok, this is not a terribly good movie. The acting is only ok and it features one of my least favorite tropes which is heroes calling the female villains of horror movies bitches during the climax (you sure showed her!) Even most of the kills are typically bludgeoning so that’s not particularly creative. There are two reasons it’s getting an honorable mention.
1) The opening sequence of this movie is one of my favorite shot horror sequences, period. The use of lighting in the film overall is pretty well-handled (considering it’s a plot point it better be) but nowhere better than in the beginning of the movie.
2) The monster has stayed with me for years. She’s really spooky and tragic and up until the full reveal at the end (an unnecessary reveal, I would add) she’s a constant presence throughout the movie.
That’s all I’ve got for now. And the best thing about this list is it can change dramatically based on my mood. I’m mercurial! What do you think? Are these great movies? Garbage cinema, but not in the fun way? Just how many angry comments will we get from angry Raimi fans? Only time will tell!
James Rambo is a talented artist, a wonderful cook, has a beautiful singing voice and grows his own free-range basil. In the 60s he created Jeet Kune Do or “way of the fist.” Make sure you follow his instagram @rambozus.