5. “The Kingdom” (1994)
Yes, “The Kingdom” was originally created as a miniseries for Danish television by enfant terrible Lars Von Trier (who co-directed with Morten Arnfred). But it got a theatrical release in the U.S. in epic five-hour form, and so we couldn’t resist putting it in its rightful place, given that it was one of the true horrormasterpieces of the decade, and possibly Von Trier’s finest hour to date. Titled “Riget” at home, “The Kingdom” is set in the Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, built on “bleaching ponds” and seemingly a hub for paranormal activity, from a ghost girl in the elevator to an abnormally-fast-developing ghost fathered by a dead man. So far, so “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace,” but the unique mix of tones that Von Trier sums up here, as provocatively funny as his best but with a deeply weird, often horribly unsettling mood that comes across like David Lynch doing “The Shining” at the local emergency room. A second season followed, as did a reasonably poor Stephen King-created U.S. remake starringAndrew McCarthy, but neither lived up to the original’s utterly distinctive brilliance.
4. “Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer” (1990)
Serial killers became big news in the 1990s, thanks to the enormous success of some of the other movies on this list (and the capture of Jeffrey Dahmer, and similar real-life cases), but “Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer” was ahead of the curve in more ways than one. Shot in 1985 but unable to find distribution for a further five years due to its controversial nature and bloody violence, John McNaughton’s film, based loosely on real-life killer Henry Lee Lucas, is a low-key movie following the titular murderer (Michael Rooker) on a Chicago killing spree with his prison friend Otis (Tom Towles), and beginning a faltering romance with Otis’ sister Becky (Tracy Arnold). So stripped down and brutal that it comes close to being unwatchable in places (aside from its ratings problems in the U.S., it was heavily cut in the U.K., and banned entirely in New Zealand), the film finds its power by stripping every hint of glamor or romance from both the serial killer picture or the lovers-on-the-run movie. Henry, as embodied by the utterly chilling Rooker, is a totally authentic psychopath, a world away from the urbane Dr. Lecter or the star-crossed Mickey & Mallory that followed in his bloody wake, and he’s all the more terrifying as a result.
3. ”Funny Games” (1997)
Let’s face it, nobody does domestic disturbance better than Austrian auteurMichael Haneke. There’s a palpable air of horror in all of his films, particularly in his earliest output and his masterful glaciation trilogy (“The Seventh Continent,” “Benny’s Video,” and “71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance“). But the follow-up to those is an altogether more disturbing beast, one that makes us frightfully conscious of our own roles when registering violence on screen. “Funny Games” focuses on George (Ulrich Muhe), his wife Anna (Susanne Lothar), their son Georg (Stefan Clapczynski), and their German Shepherd Rolfi. They’ve come to vacation in their lavish lake house, but two young boys, white gloved and very polite, have different plans. Peter (Frank Giering) and Paul (Arno Frisch, a.k.a. “Benny’s Video’s” Benny) imprison the family and begin a series of tortuous humiliations, with Paul breaking the fourth wall and forcing us to be accomplices. This disturbing meta-didactic incision on the nature of violence and the boundaries of reality in fictitious horror is one of Haneke’s most provocative and chilling films. Boldly unconventional, fundamentally dexterous, and anti-gratuitous with its horror — a slasher film with most of the slashing occurring off-screen, one particularly excruciating long take, that rewind,etc. — “Funny Games” was remade for U.S. audiences by the director himself in 2007, but it’s the sadism of the original that sticks most indelibly in the mind.
2. “The Silence Of The Lambs” (1991)
Still, to date, the most recent film to win the top five Academy Awards, and the only real horror movie to ever win the Best Picture Oscar (unless we’re counting “Crash”…), “The Silence Of The Lambs” virtually invented the serial killer movie as we now understand it — even ignoring the various other movies spun off from Thomas Harris’s books, basically every rote CBS procedural only exists because of this. But even nearly 25 years on, it remains so much better than virtually every one of its imitators. Adapting Harris’ novel about an FBI agent (Jodie Foster) enlisting the help of a cannibalistic, incarcerated serial killer (Anthony Hopkins) to catch another murderer, Jonathan Demmewas a counter-intuitive choice, but one that proved perfect: the film’s a lean, yet textured, utterly gripping thriller, smart and witty and feminist and even moving, bringing all the best of Demme’s work to the genre world. Hopkins’ performance might have dulled with imitation and parody, but Foster’s certainly hasn’t, and technically the film’s flawless. But perhaps above and beyond anything else? It scares the living hell out of you, from the coiled-snake feel of Lecter himself to the knuckle-biting tension of the final basement confrontation with Buffalo Bill.
1. “Se7en” (1995)
Before David Fincher was an Academy Award-nominated auteur and one of our most respected directors, he was just another cocky, relatively unproven young striver who had cut his teeth on music videos and was looking to make a splash in the world of features. That splash came in the form of his hellish sophomore feature “Se7en,” and the splash itself turned out to be big, bloody, and actually quite controversial. Indeed, the notion that a vicious serial killer who grounds his murders in theological gobbledygook was once an idea that possessed some degree of novelty… why, it’s as shocking as if you were to receive Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box! “Se7en” is filled with these kinds of visual horrors, which suggest a work by Francis Bacon adapted by the Marquis de Sade (a morbidly obese man who is force-fed to death, a body in the worst stages of decomposition, etc.). From the constant rain that falls from the heavens onto the nameless metropolis where the action unfolds to the wondrously scuzzy look of the film, every moment in “Se7en” is infused with an almost physical sense of menace. The film’s sense of evil is uncomfortably palpable, and though Fincher has made other solid serial killer flicks — mainly his rich and dazzling crime procedural “Zodiac” — “Se7en” might just be the hardest one to purge from your nightmares.
Honorable Mentions:
As ever, there are plenty of films that we could have mentioned, but either didn’t quite have the support, didn’t quite qualify as horror, or weren’t quite good enough to make the final list. Among them were David Cronenberg’s trippy “Naked Lunch,” E. Elias Merhige’s experimental “Begotten,” big-budget all-star bloodsucker adaptations “Interview With A Vampire” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Anthony Waller’s underrated chiller “Mute Witness” (featuring Alec Guinness’s final big-screen appearance), Peter Jackson’s undervalued horror-com “The Frighteners,” Robert Rodriguez’s Tarantino-penned “From Dusk Til Dawn,” David Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” and Roman Polanski’s Johnny Depp starrer “The Ninth Gate.”
Depp also featured in Tim Burton’s hugely enjoyable “Sleepy Hollow,” while “Hellraiser III” is a pretty good sequel, and Wes Craven’s “The People Under The Stairs” is worth checking out. Plus there’s the extreme “Boy Meets Girl,” strong Spanish chiller “The Nameless,” Dan O’Bannon’s Lovecraft adaptation “The Resurrected,” Argento’s “Trauma,” Abel Ferrera’s “Body Snatchers” remake, “Tales From The Crypt” movies “Demon Knight” and “Bordello Of Blood,” the PG-13-tastic “Arachnophobia,” horror-comedy “Tremors,” killer-teacher movie “The Faculty,” and teen sleepover fave “The Craft.”
And don’t forget Richard Stanley’s “Hardware” follow-up “Dust Devil,” Swedish serial killer pic “Man Bites Dog,” Clive Barker’s cult pics “Nightbreed” and “Lord Of Illusions,” underrated killer-lion movie “The Ghost & The Darkness,” Bryan Singer’s “Apt Pupil,” Korean horror “Whispering Corridor,” the buckets-of-fun of “Lake Placid,” and Guillermo Del Toro’s compromised, but still engaging “Mimic.” Anything else we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments.
— Oliver Lyttelton, Jessica Kiang, Nicholas Laskin, Nikola Grozdanovic