15. “Cronos” (1993)
Guillermo del Toro‘s debut directorial feature showcases his love of monsters, insects, clockwork machinery, Ron Perlman, Federico Luppi, vampires, and a deep appreciation for special effects as a key storytelling tool. As such, it’s a perfect introduction to his wonderfully imaginative and inventive breed of cinema, and is a genuinely compelling horror film imbued with an atmosphere of romance and mythology. As soon as the prologue in “Cronos” opens up, regarding the 16th century alchemist who discovers the key to eternal life via the Cronos device, we feel like we’re about to watch something underlined by a dark sort of splendor. Centuries later, antique dealer Jesu Gris (Luppi) finds the device and starts to feel its effects once it stings him, namely an unquenchable thirst for blood. A sickly aristocrat called Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook) commissions his nephew Angel (Perlman) to find Gris and obtain the device at all costs. The horror is distilled through visually arresting makeup and VFX (marble skins and the harrowing interiors of the device itself), fervent Catholic symbolism and jet-black humor coalescing in one puddle of blood in a public bathroom. The ’90s would see del Toro turn up the grossness factor tenfold with his horror follow-up “Mimic,” but “Cronos” replaces jump-out-of-your-seat scares with a unique, distressingly charming vampiric embrace.
14. “The Sixth Sense” (1999)
M. Night Shyamalan’s career has all but vanished into a foggy haze of trick endings, atrocious acting and shoddy FX (as anyone who has dared to sit through “Lady in the Water” and “The Last Airbender” can attest), with only last year’s slight but enjoyable “The Visit” as a respite from the unrelenting shittiness (early word suggests next year’s “Split” my be worthwhile). So it’s easy to forget what a promising horror director Shyamalan was at the outset: like many a creepshow maestro before him, he once displayed a fine understanding of patience in scene-building, creating tension and letting a given plot build to its own horrifying conclusion. His second film, “Unbreakable,” is a cheeky and creepy deconstruction of superhero mythology, and even the flawed “Signs” contains moments of undeniable terror (that basement scene, anyone?). But “The Sixth Sense” remains his finest hour —it’s a tender and understated ghost story interrupted with moments of shocking gruesomeness. Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment nicely underplay their roles as a haunted psychologist and a child plagued by spectral visitors, but it’s the moment of insanity that remains indelible —the ghost of a young boy wandering down a hallway with a gunshot wound gaping through his skull, or the opening, a truly disturbing home invasion featuring a shirtless, scowling Donnie Wahlberg. It’s doubtful that Shyamalan will ever make something this good again, but hey, horror nerds can still dream.
13. “The Reflecting Skin” (1990)
The directorial debut of British playwright Philip Ridley (whose sole major movie credit before this was writing “The Krays,” which tells the same story as “Legend,” but with the Kemp twins from Spandau Ballet playing the sibling criminals instead of Tom Hardy) is a deeply disturbing, unnerving and distinctive coming-of-age story that never got its due in its time, but is finally now getting a reevaluation (a new restoration of the movie hits Blu-ray in the U.K. next month). Set in Idaho in the 1950s, the film follows Seth Dove (the impressive young Jeremy Cooper), an eight-year-old boy who starts to believe that Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan), the British woman his older brother (Viggo Mortensen) is having an affair with, is a vampire. Ridley keeps the question of whether there’s anything supernatural going on ambiguous until late in the game, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. The unforgettable mood he evokes, like Norman Rockwell if Norman Rockwell went murderously crazy, and the searing images he conjures —a frog exploding in Dolphin’s face, a man setting himself on fire, a decaying baby, a photo of a child whose skin turned silver from the H-bomb— make it almost impossible to shake for some time after. It’s a novelistically rich picture that’s more than ripe for rediscovery.
12. ”Jacob’s Ladder” (1990)
Not exactly a filmmaker noted for subtlety or restraint, Adrian Lyne‘s best film is also the one least involved with his regular themes of erotic obsession and sexual infidelity (“Fatal Attraction,” “9 ½ Weeks,” “Flashdance,” “Indecent Proposal,” “Lolita,” and “Unfaithful” being his other major features). Instead, “Jacob’s Ladder” delivers a thoroughly eviscerating and frightening evocation of a kind of heightened, hallucinatory PTSD, as mild-mannered postman and Vietnam vet Jacob (Tim Robbins) finds his sanity giving way to unaccountable, horrific visions and dreams. But whether the demons he sees are actually there, and whether the surgery he dimly remembers (in a scene that made our list of 40 Scariest Movie Moments Ever) actually occurred, are questions that take a back seat to an overpowering sense of grief and guilt, which is what gives this film such deep-rooted power. Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote the similarly themed but much sweeter “Ghost,” makes grief over the death of Jacob’s son (an angelic Macaulay Culkin) the prime mover of a lot of the horror, and so the film turns out to be as bleak as it is momentarily beatific, and as sad as it is scary.
11. ”The Addiction” (1995)
If the vampire style du jour in the early-to-mid-’90s was dominated by bloated, star-driven period epics “Interview with the Vampire” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” it was a small-scale, intimate, oddly cerebral allegory from Abel Ferrara that restored some measure of actual scariness. Trading the velvety jewel tones of those films for lo-fi black and white, Ferrara honed the focus down, beyond even the metaphor of vampirism as drug addiction, to a sharp point that pierces right to the heart of the fabled creature’s nature: its loss of soul. Lili Taylor plays innocent NYU student Kathleen, who is inducted into bloodlust by a bite from a scornful, worldly Annabella Sciorra, while Christopher Walken plays a vampire who has nearly mastered his need for human blood and tries to help Kathleen do the same in a last-ditch effort to save her soul. This being Ferrara’s work, twisted but highly Catholic ideas of damnation thrum through “The Addiction,” infected with a kind of doom-laden fatalism about the ineluctable lure of evil. For Ferrara, to be good is a constant battle, an effort of conscious will against one’s natural impulses, and the truly frightening thing about the philosophy of “The Addiction” is that it suggests that capitulation to our basest instincts is inevitable, even if it condemns us to hell.