Five films that definitely go bump in the night

From the gore splattered fright-fests of George A. Romero and Sam Raimi, to the old-school scares of Boris Karloff and Hammer Horror, to the tense, chilling spectacles of Ridley Scott and John Carpenter, cinema has provided us with a formidable array of pant-wetting flicks. I’m not just talking about slasher flicks, but those movies that simply succeed in sending shivers down your spine. The list below might not incorporate the best in terms of the horror genre itself, but they are this writer’s top five films to leave you with a puddle in your seat, your hair standing on end, and fingernails bitten right back to the bone. Feel free to chip in with your own lists and any disagreements, or nods of the head, below in the comments section.

Honourable mentions go to:

• Ringu (1998): Ignore Gore Verbinski’s painfully average remake and hit up the Japanese original. If the phone rings during the film try not to jump too far out of your skin.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): Wes Craven’s video nasty spawned many a sequel, but Freddy Kreuger would never be quite as chillingly effective as he was here. Truly the stuff of nightmares.
• Event Horizon (1997): A highly personal, chilling choice, this one. Like a cross between Alien, Dante’s Inferno, Doom and with a large chunk of 2001: A Space Odyssey thrown in, only not as good.
  
• Alien (1979): Its sequel is arguably the better film, but the Ridley Scott original is the scarier movie. Seriously, if you want to make a good sci-fi horror, the best first step you can take is getting H. R. Giger to design the freaking aliens!
• The Shining (1980): Narrowly missed out on the top 5. Jack Nicholson gives the performance of his life in a terrifying tale of madness from the esteemed Stanley Kubrick. Doesn’t really need an introduction. Possibly even better than the book on which it’s based.

Let the drum rolls commence….

5. The Evil Dead (1981)

A couple of decades ago That Bloke Wot Directed Spider-man reinvented the horror movie with this little gem and made a B-movie star out of Bruce Campbell in the process. Its sequels are funnier, but for balls out unpleasantness, The Evil Dead ticks all the right boxes. It sent the Eighties into a moral panic and has lost none of its original power. Replete with forest rape, soul-devouring demons, possessed corpses and the Best Chin In The Business, Raimi took the simple premise of a bunch of horny college kids camping out in the woods and poured a bucket of gore all over it. Demonic, depraved and utterly disgusting, The Evil Dead is the king of the video nasty.

4. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Not a conventional horror film, and all the better for it in many ways. There is a creeping, chilling atmosphere all over Roman Polanski’s masterpiece that comes not from the plot involving Mia Farrow’s fears of demonic rape and the satanic destiny of her child, but rather from the perfect performances and the excellent, moody direction. Polanski succeeds in holding our complete attention as the paranoia grows, never once relying on gore or splatter techniques, and the scene where Rosemary is raped by Satan is still as powerful as ever, forty years on, as is the film’s final scene. Michael Bay was apparently set to produce a remake of it. All I can say is thank fuck that never happened!

3. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

When it comes to zombie horror, George A. Romero is the Don, and this is his glorious legacy. Inspired by Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, and infinitely better than the shite Will Smith flick bearing that name, Romero’s movie is a veritable orgy of sadistic delights that revolutionised the horror genre; and all of a budget of barely $100,000. Turning the traditionally happy endings of horror on their heads, no-one gets out alive in this one. In the middle of an age of heroic identification with on-screen protagonists, Romero just decided that he might as well kill off the good guys too. Terrifyingly tragic but also splat-tastically funny, halfway through the film the schlock stops and you’re plunged into an undead nightmare. Brilliant.

2. The Thing (1982)

Whilst most box offices were raking in tickets for Spielberg’s E.T. – a much happier and optimistic view of alien visitation – a few were treating themselves to John Carpenter’s The Thing, which had a rather different take on extra-terrestrials. Ebert famously called it a ‘barf-bag movie’ and he’s right, the visuals being so utterly grotesque that it’s highly inadvisable to even consider food whilst watching this film. Essentially a sci-fi slaughterfest about a hostile alien prone to absorbing and replicating other life-forms, The Thing is now a cult classic, although it’s also a film I’ve never been able to sit through more than twice. In fact just thinking about it kinda makes me want to vomit everywhere…..please excuse me…….

And so we reach our number one. Apologies to those films that didn’t quite make it. I do feel a little bit sorry for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and it would probably be here somewhere if it hadn’t made me laugh quite so hard. The Blair Witch Project can fuck right off and receives automatic disqualification for not only being shit, but also for bestowing the ‘gift’ of shaky-cam on us. Thanks a bunch.

But yes, there can be only one winner….

1. The Exorcist (1973)

There are films that make you jump – the crappiest slasher remakes will do that – and there are films that make your stomach do backflips from piles of visible entrails and gruesome decapitations. But The Exorcist stands at the top of this list for ticking all the right boxes and for doing something far greater than cheap tricks can achieve: it is unshakeably disturbing. The terror is relentless, the performances are exceptional, the atmosphere never lets up, and Tubular Bells is inescapable.

The special effects are deployed brilliantly – that infamous spider-walk scene still freaks the hell out of me – and the plot, which occasionally runs the risk of falling up its own ass, manages to sidestep pretention and deliver a truly harrowing experience. It was so terrfying that at the time Linda Blair received so many death threats that the studio provided her with bodyguards for over half a year. I don’t think that’s ever happened to Milla Jovovitch.

So there you have it. Of course, there are limited and so if you think there’s a case of two to be made for any we’ve missed out whack some words down in the box below!