20. “Kill List” (2011)
Every now and again, a film grabs you by the throat and never quits. By the end of “Kill List,” we felt dazed, confused and like we’d been kicked square in the balls. Many subsequent viewings and attempts to understand what the puzzle added up to followed, but it doesn’t matter so much: this is a film much more about mood and atmosphere than narrative. And what a mood it conjures! Things come to a screeching, upsetting halt in British indie genre master Ben Wheatley’s second feature, a wicked hybrid of “The Wicker Man,” hitman flick, kitchen sink Brit domestic drama, and occult movie. Structured around the titular list, our hero(?) confronts evil men he has few qualms dispatching, but then the early-sown seeds of creepiness begin to sprout and fully bloom into a series of terrifying realizations by the climax. By then it’s too late. The film puts you under its spell and lets go just when you’re not ready for it to end. Then you’re left picking up the pieces, with Wheatley’s eerie tone and nightmarish sound design haunting you for hours, days and weeks to come.
19. “Bug” (2006)
No doubt part of our ongoing affection for this small-scale, scratchy little nightmare of paranoia is that it represents a triumphant return to the horror genre for the director of the film many consider the greatest of all time: “The Exorcist.” But William Friedkin himself might take issue with that, frequently referring to “Bug,” which was based on the play by Tracy Letts, as less a “pure” horror than a kind of pitch black comedy love story. But with respect, its effect may be all twisted up with irony and perversely self-defeating psychology, but in the main it is simply unsettling as hell, featuring a terrific (and shamefully undervalued) performance by Ashley Judd and giving Michael Shannon one of the first of the big roles that really had us sit up and take notice. It’s a simple, near single-location story of a relationship that starts off a healthy influence on Agnes (Judd), but is soon undermined by the conspiracy paranoia that Shannon’s Peter holds, which manifests itself in the delusion that his very cells are infested with bugs after government tests were performed on him in the army. Yet its resonance runs deeper than that —Agnes herself is far from well. It’s one of the great tricks of Lett’s script and Friedkin’s absolutely sure grip on the material that the inversion of our sympathies happens as gradually and inexorably as it does, and its ideas and images linger in the mind long after it ends, sticky and foul as old flypaper.
18. “The Descent” (2005)
Great, nourishing horror movies often have a kind of allegorical value as well as a visceral one, in which universal themes resonate while also scaring you silly. However, Neil Marshall’s “The Descent” is not one of those. And it’s far from perfect, delivering a botched last third in which the creeping dread of the first two acts is lessened when we actually see the creatures doing the menacing. But it rides high on this list, which goes to show just how much we think of the first half of the film, tapping brilliantly into the innate fear of small spaces and the magnification of interpersonal issues that can happen in extreme situations. A group of six female friends go spelunking (a pastime also known as “Oh God, oh God why on Earth would you put yourself through that?”) and ends up trapped in an unmapped underground cave system with no hope of rescue. To be honest, at this point we were already swooning with fear, before the women’s relationships start to disintegrate as agendas are revealed and old grudges resurface, and before long they start to hear odd, unidentifiable, echolocation-y clicks drawing closer. The atmosphere Marshall creates in this first hour pretty much sings with tension and a kind of ancient, deeply-held fear of the dark and what it might be concealing, and nothing, not even the later rather generic unraveling of the plot, can dispel the hold those icky, dread-filled moments early on have on us.
17. “Antichrist” (2009)
We debated for days over whether Lars Von Trier’s bonkers, ultra-divisive movie “Antichrist” qualified as horror, until we decided that any film involving witchcraft and foxes saying ‘chaos reigns’ had to be here in some form. Loosely, the film involves the fallout between a couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) after their child’s death, as they head to a remote cabin as a form of therapy, something that proves to be a dreadful mistake. Depending on who you ask, it’s either the most obvious example of the grotesque and shameless misogyny and torture of women that Von Trier has displayed throughout his career, or it’s a bloody revenge picture about a woman who finally breaks after the crimes committed on her gender for generations. But either way, it’s an immaculately executed nightmare, a sort of “Don’t Look Now, No Seriously, Don’t Look, She’s Got Some Rusty Shears Now” with Anthony Dod Mantle’s photography in particular finding baroque beauty in the woods.
16. “Raw” (2016)
It hasn’t even hit theaters yet, and people are already losing their shit about Julia Ducornau’s directorial debut “Raw”— quite literally, in some cases, with the TIFF screenings having been accompanied by puking, fainting and hospitalizations — namely, the stuff horror legend is made of. But the critics who made it through have been raving (it won Best First Film at the LFF, among other prizes), and rightly so, because it’s a gorgeous, grisly nightmare. The film follows young vegetarian Justine (Garance Marillier in a striking debut) who’s training to be a vet but who discovers a taste for meat —not necessarily from animals— after a hazing ritual. Darkly funny, oddly affecting in its coming-of-age theme, and a bit difficult to watch in its bloodiest moments, it suggests that Ducornau will be a major force in the genre, or whatever else she tries to do, for decades to come. Look out for its full release in March.
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15. “28 Days Later…” (2002)
Danny Boyle was riding an early career high after the one-two punch of “Shallow Grave” and “Trainspotting” made him a young filmmaking star to certain cinephiles, but then came “A Life Less Ordinary” and “The Beach.” Both works saw him jump headfirst into the Hollywood pool, working with name stars and bigger budgets, but both underperformed domestically and received mostly tepid reviews.So after two quickie TV movies in 2001, Boyle went back to his low budget roots with this take on the zombie outbreak movie and established a consistent track record of trying new things every time out —if he didn’t always succeed, he sustained a vigor and love for cinema that saw him win a Best Director Oscar six years later. And ‘28 Days’ remains one of his very best. Shot on consumer grade DV cameras, it has a lovely Dogme 95 aesthetic perfectly in keeping with its subject matter. The pixelated imagery only adds to the confusion, paranoia and news-level reality of a terrifying apocalypse that spreads faster than the rage-fueled monsters at its center. Some get bogged down in whether or not it’s a true zombie movie —come on, is there any doubt? It is an original take on the genre, but it is a zombie movie, down to its humans-are-as-bad-as-the-monsters third act. And every time Zack Snyder gets credit for inventing fast zombies, our hearts sink while our cynicism reaches stratospheric heights. Then we put this great horror film on, remind ourselves once again why we love it so, and forget about all that noise.
14. “The Devil’s Backbone” (2001)
“Pan’s Labyrinth” is probably Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece up to this point, but though that film contains horror elements, it’s best considered a fantasy/fairy tale/coming-of-age picture. But that’s okay, because what not enough people acknowledge is that “The Devil’s Backbone” is almost as good as “Pan’s Labyrinth” —it’s another deeply existential meditation on the nature of war that takes place in a orphanage during the Spanish Civil War. In a piece of imagery so on-the-nose that it can’t help but resonate, an unexploded aerial bomb sits in the courtyard of an orphanage, forcefully lodged in the earth, waiting to go off. And since the words “directed by Guillermo del Toro” appear on screen, it should also be noted that there is a ghost, supposedly the spectral remains of a young boy who went missing on the day that the bomb landed. “The Devil’s Backbone” is a deeply uneasy movie, with a palpable atmosphere so thick you could carve it into slices, beautifully shot by del Toro’s frequent collaborator Guillermo Navarro and featuring the kind of moments that are not just memorable; they’re downright haunting. It might not be as ornate or magical as “Pan’s Labyrinth,” but it’s every bit as emotionally powerful and visually stunning. The two are obvious companion pieces, set at roughly the same place at roughly the same historical point, and are near-equals in terms of quality as well.
13. “The Others” (2001)
A splendidly atmospheric, old-fashioned ghost story featuring all the genre staples —haunted mansions, creepy ambivalent servants and afflicted children— Alejandro Amenabar’s “The Others” has more than enough evocative style to make up for the lack of gore-dripping talons or Asian demon children with scraggly hair. Featuring a lovely turn from Nicole Kidman that taps into her facility for neurotic, nervy characters who live oddly pristine existences, the film can also be read on multiple psychological levels. Like the terrific “The Innocents,” to which it certainly owes a debt, “The Others” has sub-themes about faith, piety and the dangers of isolation and sexual deprivation (especially for women), but Kidman’s sympathetic portrayal makes her role much more than simply that of a borderline hysteric. It’s also a terrifically well-made classic ghost story, beautifully shot and composed, with gas lights flickering across the faces of people who may or may not be there and every room feeling cavernous and stately, yet cold. And in the set-up of the children’s rare condition, in which they are hyper photo-sensitive and cannot be exposed to sunlight, contains an all-time great premise for a horror movie, and one that in using darkness and shadow so integrally must have been a dream job for cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe. It is a slow film and about as far from the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” as it is possible for two films in ostensibly the same genre to be, but its pleasures increase as it goes along, building to a truly satisfying finale that is equal parts tragic, cathartic, hopeful and despairing.
12. “The Wailing” (2016)
Korean horror hasn’t for the most part had the same impact as Japanese horror pics did in the late ’90s and early ’00s, despite the boom in great filmmakers from the country. But should there be a few more films like “The Wailing,” that might change. Hailing from Na Hong-jin, director of “The Yellow Sea,” it details an inept policeman (Kwak Do-won)’s attempts to solve a series of horrific deaths in a small lakeside village that may be connected to a Japanese stranger who’s recently arrived, incidents that lead to a murky trail including demonic possession, zombies and maybe the devil himself. Even at two and a half hours, it’s ferociously entertaining, throwing almost everything at the wall and 98% of it sticks, proving to have a number of genuinely frightening sections, including one of the best exorcisms ever put onscreen. Mostly overlooked on release in the U.S. (it was a huge hit in Korea), you need to seek it out ASAP —it’s on iTunes and other platforms now.
11. “The Babadook” (2014)
Only a couple of years after its release, “The Babadook” feels happily settled into its fast-earned status as an absolute classic of the genre. The debut film of Australian director Jennifer Kent stars Essie Davis as Amelia, a woman left distraught after the sudden death of her husband, and now having to care for her son (Noah Wieseman), who’s acting out in his own grief. But things go from bad to worse after he starts to believe that a monster from a children’s picture book is lurking in the house. Kent drenches the film in atmosphere, expertly deploying every trick in the horror toolbox to put the audience through the physical wringer, but it’s also a horror picture of real substance, digging into issues of mental illness, parenting and grief in an uncompromising way that would be sanded down in a more conventional studio horror picture. The film’s virtually a three hander, and while the Babadook itself is one of the most memorable movie monsters in years, it’s the performances of the human leads that are truly haunting.