15. “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 to) with only this year’s slight but enjoyable “The Visit” as a respite from the shittiness. It’s easy to forget what a promising horror director Shyamalan was at the outset: like many a creep maestro before him, he at one point once displayed a fine understanding of patience in scene-building, creating tension and letting it 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 real, undeniable terror (that basement scene, anyone?). Still, “The Sixth Sense” remains his finest hour — 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 we remember — the ghost of a young boy wandering down a hallway with a gunshot wound gaping through his skull, for instance, 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, us horror nerds can still dream.
14. “The Reflecting Skin” (1990)
The directorial debut of British playwright Philip Ridley (whose sole major movie credit before this was writing “The Krays,” telling the same story as “Legend,” but with the twins from Spandau Ballet 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, it follows Seth Dove (the impressive young Jeremy Cooper), an eight-year-old boy who starts to believe 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, 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 more than ripe for rediscovery.
13. ”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, evisceratingly 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 “Jacob’s Ladder” 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.
12. ”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 to them some measure of actual scariness. Even trading the velvety jewel tones of those films for lo-fi black and white, Ferrara honed the focus right 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, worldlyAnnabella Sciorra, while Christopher Walken plays a vampire who has nearly mastered his need for human blood and tries to help Kathleen do the same: a last-ditch effort to save her soul. This being Ferrara, 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. To be good, for Ferrara, is a constant battle, a constant 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.
11. “Ringu” (1998)
Even among the most terrifying horror films, few of them actually go as far as to alter the genre in major, game-shifting ways. One of the small number to manage that in the 1990s was “Ringu,” which virtually invented the J-horror subgenre, and was copied, reflected, or ripped-off for the next decade, if not longer. The international breakthrough of director Hideo Nakata, and based on Kôji Suzuki’s novel, the film sees reporter Reiko (Nanako Matsushima) stumble upon, and eventually become subject to, a mysterious video tape full of disturbing images that causes the viewer, seven days after watching, to die horrifically. Culiminating one of the most iconic horror images to emerge in this decade — the soaking wet ghost of a young girl, hair pulled over her face, crawling out of a television — the film is both a deeply smart reinvention of Japanese folk myths and a canny comment on the technological world in which we now live. In fact, the film was probably more prescient even than Nakata and Suzuki intended — the film’s haunting coda, as Reiko finds a way to save her child from the curse, pre-empts the dawning of the viral internet age. Gore Verbinski’s 2002 “The Ring” is one of the few remakes that comes close to surpassing the original, but the original has a pure power all of its own.