October is dispiritingly thin on horror movies this year (“Ouija: Origin Of Evil” is as good as it gets, depending on how afraid you are of Ewan McGregor’s “American Pastoral”), but the month always makes us think of the genre as it builds towards Halloween. Last week, we tackled the best foreign-language horrors (and we’ve previously done the best of the 21st century to date), but with the lack of good new films in theaters as such, it seemed like a good time to look back —in this case, specifically to the 1970s.
READ MORE: The 25 Best Horror Films Of the 1980s
The horror film is virtually as old as cinema itself, but it turned into the genre that we know today in the 1970s. Vietnam and Watergate had a powerful, darkening effect on the American psyche, and the collapse of the Hays Code and the rise of independent and exploitation cinema helped elements that would have once been taboo to reach the screen.
READ MORE: The 15 Best Found Footage Horror Movies
The 1970s brought the beginning of the slasher movie, the emergence of a number of directors and actors who remain active today, the birth of franchises that are still going and, in one particular case, one of the most successful movies ever made. So there’s some rich territory here, and it proved hard to pick out the 25 best. But we did so, and you can read it below. Take a look, let us know your favorites, and stay tuned for plenty more horror features between now and October 31st.
For more, don’t forget our lists of the Best Horror Movies of the 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s.
25. “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” (Dario Argento, 1970)
Italian horror maestro Dario Argento would peak later in the 1970s (see two entries below), but he certainly set out his stall nicely with his directorial debut “The Bird With The Crystal Plumage,” in which an American writer (Tony Musante) attempts to track down a raincoat-wearing killer. The director’s trademark style is still formative here: it’s a little tamer, more traditional and conventional than some of his later work. But in some ways, it’s more satisfying, in terms of its narrative (with a degree of sympathy for its twist-reveal killer), while also beginning to add the fascination for objects and textures that would later help him define the giallo genre. It’s less actively terrifying than some of his later work, but remains a deeply stylish and pleasingly suspenseful thriller/horror, and an impressive directorial debut too.
24. “The Hills Have Eyes” (1977)
Some of the horror hardcore might be up in arms that Wes Craven’s breakthrough “The Last House In The Left” isn’t on this list, but we feel fairly happy in its absence, given that it’s 1) unpleasant even by genre standards, and 2) is not a very good film. But Craven came on leaps and bounds in the five years between that film and his follow-up “The Hills Have Eyes,” which is worthy of a place in the canon, even if it’s not much more of a pleasant watch. This low-budget, semi-pioneering picture sees a family on an RV vacation crashing in the middle of nowhere, and being subsequently tormented by a family of cannibals. Craven’s sadism is still firmly in place from its predecessor (there is, of course, some gratuitous sexual violence), but the film benefits in part because the director’s craft has improved significantly, and in part because its clean survival narrative and the unexpected texture given to the murderous hillbillies make it a much more interesting story. It’s still much lesser than its obvious inspiration “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (see below), but it stands up on its own.
23. “The Omen” (1976)
It might seem incongruous that it was Richard Donner who made childhood-TV-terror-staple “The Omen” (two years before “Superman“), but actually it makes a lot of sense. While “The Omen” has its unnerving moments, it’s really a highly entertaining slice of pulpy horror classed up by its aging A-list cast, as was common practice in the 1970s. So while it delivers some pretty classic scares, it also walks a line very close to the out-and-out silly at times in its ludicrously lurid tale of U.S. Ambassador Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck, dignified throughout), while initially deflected by evil nanny Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw, stealing the show), suspecting that his son Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) may have been swapped at birth with the Antichrist, the child of Satan, the very Devil himself, and turning out to be right. Cue the sound of a 100,000 frazzled parents relating so hard.
22. “The Shout” (1978)
An enigmatic film based on a short story by Robert Graves, Jerzy Skolimowski’s “The Shout” is one of the more obscure titles on this list and certainly one that might leave more genre-leaning horror fans scratching their heads. But building an air of surreal menace in the way only ’70s British horrors could, it details in flashbacks unreliable narrator Crossley (Alan Bates) terrorizing a young couple (Susannah York and John Hurt). He does this with the magical powers he’d learned from Aboriginal Australians, including the titular shout —so dreadful that all who hear it instantly die. As silly as it sounds, it’s deeply unheimlich: primitivist voodoo knitting itself into a banal English village setting. But the cleverest flourish is its ambivalence: the mad Crossley may be a charlatan, and the horror he embodies may not be due to the threat of supernatural possession, but to the suspicion that you might be more suggestible and weaker-minded than you care to believe.
21. ”Shivers” (1975)
Not David Cronenberg’s first film, but certainly his first great one, “Shivers” (produced somewhat surprisingly by Ivan Reitman) sees a scientist accidentally unleash a plague of sexually-appetite-increasing parasites on Montreal, with only doctor Roger St. Luc (Paul Hampton) able to stop it. You could dismiss it on the surface as another zombie/body snatchers riff, but this is Cronenberg we’re talking about, and so we have some particularly splattery violence, body horror, some decidedly phallic creature work (it’s an acknowledged influence on “Alien”), and a mood that disturbs beyond a surface level and actually burrows into your skin. Poorly received on release (to the extent that Cronenberg was evicted from his apartment because of the film), it’s stood the test of time beautifully despite rough edges, its creepy social satire has aged particularly well, and the film stands as the first real glimpse of Cronenberg’s mad genius.
