(Updated in September 2021)
Horror had mutated into an artier, more political, more self-aware beast by the time the sixties shuddered to a close. It had also gone international, and harsher violence, sweatier sex, and consciously probing social commentary supplanted the monster movies of the past. Out went the innocence, in came the irony as later sixties offerings like Spider Baby and Rosemary’s Baby swept in the cult movie era. The new decade began with a prime example of this new attitude.
Freddie Francis is probably most revered as the magician cinematographer behind the sumptuous images of The Innocents and The Elephant Man. He also had an extensive directing career, and his work was almost completely concentrated in horror for the UK’s big three studios Hammer (The Evil of Frankenstein), Amicus (Dr. Terror’s House of Horror), and Tigon (The Creeping Flesh). He did some fine work for those studios, but Francis made his most unique project for the less well-knownBrigitte, Fitzroy Films Ltd. This is appropriate since Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly does not fit easily alongside Hammer’s gothic horrors, Amicus’ anthologies, or Tigon’s hearty folk horrors and schlock.
The film’s fleeting and vague hint of an incestuous relationship between Girly and Sonny became a moral-majority lightning rod, and most theaters refused to book Francis’s pet project. It was more successful in the U.S. where it was marketed as a standard-issue exploitation film and its title was chopped down to Girly. Subtle. Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly still received some good notices and developed a bit of a cult following. Francis always regarded it as his best work.
94. The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971- dir. Robert Fuest)
A sad symbol of the new era was the passing and winding down of so many horror stars of yore. Peter Lorre died from a stroke on March 23, 1964. It took three ailments to bring down the mighty Frankenstein Monster: Boris Karloff succumbed to emphysema, bronchitis, and cardiopulmonary failure on February 2, 1969. Lon Chaney, Jr., managed two credits in the new decade with the not- too-fondly-remembered The Female Bunch and Dracula vs. Frankenstein, but our favorite moon howler, long ravaged by alcoholism, died of heart failure on July 12, 1973.
Hammer’s two main stars aside, this left Vincent Price as the final member of the old guard to carry classic horror’s torch into the future. As early as 1959, he had transitioned from the more sober horrors of The Fly to the winking fun of House on Haunted Hill. Throughout the sixties, he cultivated his talent for finding the fun in the frightening with scenery-chewing turns in Roger Corman’s horror comedies that pitted him against Karloff and Lorre and even further out roles like the ridiculous master criminal Egghead on TV’s Batman. Despite the occasional straight-faced part inThe Masque of the Red Death or Witchfinder General, Price’s campy die had been cast.
Perhaps no film fit that persona better than The Abominable Dr. Phibes, even as the actor gives one of his more restrained performances in the picture. Part of this is due to the restrictions of the character. Phibes is the survivor of a car crash who has lost the ability to speak, forcing him to (somehow) communicate through a phonograph. The robotic vinyl voice levels out Price’s relishing cadence. But with so much wildness swirling around him, Price doesn’t really need to do anything too crazy. The elaborate murders based on the ten plagues of ancient Egypt he devises to take revenge against the medical workers who failed to save his wife do a lot of the work for him. With the help of his lovely assistant Vulnavia (Virginia North), Phibes sics a flock of lip-licking bats on a snoozing victim, smooshes a guy’s head with a frog mask, creates a deadly hailstorm in the backseat of a car, and unleashes a plague of blonde rats in the cockpit of a biplane. He saves the most awful punishment for Dr. Vesalius (a game Joseph Cotton) and a necrophilia-tinged one for himself.
The Abominable Dr. Phibes is as visually outré as its plot. The mad doctor tinkles a giant psychedelic pipe organ in his garish art deco lair, makes calls on a rotary phone with a photo of his dead wife (Caroline Munro, whom we only see as a photo, and briefly, a corpse) at the center of the dial, and dances to his weird clockwork big band with Vulnavia, who has a taste for ornate, flowing gowns.
Even with all of his film’s silliness, Robert Fuest manages some disturbing images, as when he zooms in on a rat pulling apart red meat in the cockpit scene or when Phibes yanks off his Vincent Price mask to reveal a melted, feature-less skull. The film also set off a new subgenre in which Price plays some sort of ham executing a series of gimmicky murders. More on that to come...
In 1968, Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General arguably gave birth to a new sub- genre of realistic horror. Some have also credited it with pioneering another offshoot now known as folk horror. Yet I don’t believe that film lives up to its pioneering status since it lacks such essential folk-horror ingredients as nature’s threatening undertow and the clash between ancient and more modern cultures.
A more convincing ground zero for this new sub-genre is Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The discovery of a strange, demon-like skull leads a small community in 18th century England to a cult of young pagans who indulge in murder and rape in the name of their clawed master.
With its hippie-ish youth cult and the religious types who fight it, The Blood on Satan’s Clawcould have been emphatically reactionary, but it spreads its cynicism around enough to mute that charge. Patrick Wymark’s judge is a loathsome and unsympathetic “hero,” though this may be more the result of a somewhat sloppy execution than a conscious choice on the part of the filmmakers. While much of The Blood on Satan’s Claw works extraordinarily well, particularly Dick Bush’s enchanting outdoor cinematography, schlocky elements such as a disembodied claw stalking victims render the picture a bit of a mish mash. Despite its flaws, The Blood on Satan’s Claw is still entertaining and essential viewing as the first true folk horror picture.
Throughout the sixties, Hammer Studios unquestionably ruled British horror and set the pace for other U.K. thrill-merchants in terms of stories, style, and stars. Amicus Productions trailed behind Hammer but still managed to hack out a specific niche for itself by becoming the number-one exporter of horror portmanteaus. The first of these pictures appeared in 1964. Freddie Francis’s Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors was typical of the portmanteaus to follow: brief tales of varying quality bolted together by a frame story that resolves in grotesque irony. Hammer refugees, such as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, were often along for the ride.
Amicus churned out ten of these movies, the best of which was Francis’s 1972 adaptation of five gruesome tales that originally appeared in E.C. horror comics. Tales from the Crypt is so consistently good because the source material lends itself to brief segments perfectly. Screenwriter Milton Subotsky selected some real classics. “...And All Through the House” puts a couple of brilliant spins on the axe-murderer scenario by casting the killer as a Santa Claus amok on Christmas Eve and the victim (Joan Collins, who’d later recreate this role on an episode of American Horror Story) as a murderer in her own right. “Reflection of Death” is executed, like its illustrated forerunner, from a clever first-person perspective. “Wish You Were Here” is an update of “The Monkey’s Paw” with a truly disturbing twist. The other pieces aren’t quite up to those standards, although “Poetic Justice” features a nice turn by Peter Cushing and “Blind Alley” is the likeliest to get viewers squirming in their seats and gasping that old E.C. interjection: “Good lord! Choke!”
Fans adored Vincent Price but critics ridiculed him for his out-sized, hambone theatrics in nasty horror flicks. So it’s no wonder why Price so clearly relishes his role in Theatre of Blood.
Price is Edward Lionheart, a Shakespearean actor thought to have committed suicide, who returns from the dead to bump off the critics that ridiculed him for his out-sized, hambone performances. As Lionheart employs a cadre of homeless people and a hippie henchman to help cross the snooty, upper-crust critics off his list, there’s a whiff of social revolution about the movie. That he is also criticized for only acting in ancient plays and loses an award to a young actor named William Woodstock (ba-dum!) would be more appealing to preservation societies.
With its gimmick murders (they’re based on the killings in Shakespeare’s plays) and copious campy humor, Theatre of Blood has much in common with another key Price film, but Robert Fuest shot The Abominable Dr. Phibes as a vibrant psychedelic hallucination. Director Douglas Hickox realizesTheatre of Bloodwith grittier, dirtier, grayer realism,though cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky’s use of distorted, fish-eyed lenses really heightens the film’s nightmarish, stomach-churning grotesqueries.
98. Ganja and Hess (1973- dir. Bil Gunn)
In 1973, Jones appeared in a more pointed film. Bill Gunn may have been the first African American filmmaker to approach horror, though Ganja & Hess is not a typical genre film even beyond issues of race. Gunn’s style is deliberately disjointed, and his odd plot requires some work to follow. This brightly lit picture with its naturalistic acting and dialogue doesn’t feel anything like a horror movie, though it is often gory and disturbing.
Jones is Dr. Hess Green, an anthropologist studying a sort of ancient race of African vampires known as the Myrthians. Gunn, himself, plays Hess’s troubled assistant George, who attacks Hess with a Myrthian dagger before killing himself. The dagger has a similar effect to Dracula’s kiss. Hess drinks George’s blood and begins having visions of Mabel King as the Myrthian Queen. Welcome to the monster club, Hess.
When acidic yet vivacious Ganja Meda (Marlene Clark) comes looking for her husband, she strikes up a relationship with Ganja that goes deeper than their mutual attraction. Ultimately, Hess succumbs to Christian shame and gives himself the Van Helsing treatment with a crucifix. Ganja embraces her newfound monstrousness and moves on to an uncertain but potentially happier future.
Ganja & Hess is superficially unusual because of its role as an all-African American horror movie at a time when black-focused horror cinema barely existed outside of exploitation neat (1972’s Blacula) and abysmal (1973’s Blackenestein) (it barely exists today). Its experimental style, novel approach to the vampire, charismatic stars (Clark is marvelous), humane sexiness, and wariness of the Christian imagery lazily trotted out in other vampire movies are what make it audacious and unforgettable.
One of the most striking cinematographers of the sixties, Nicholas Roeg (The Masque of the Red Death, Fahrenheit 451) developed into one of the most audacious directors of the seventies. Roeg’s style should be self-contradictory. His choppy editing and jumbled timelines should undercut the emotional resonance of his meditative stories and very human characters, yet they create a sense of uncanny inevitability that makes the poignancy and the experimentalism hit harder.
Roeg’s most emotionally powerful and well-realized film is Don’t Look Now. This adaptation of a short story by Daphne du Maurier explores what has been said to be the most devastating experience one can live through: the death of a child. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland are the grieving couple. Christie’s Laura is open to the possibility that her lost daughter may be trying to communicate through a psychic. Sutherland’s John is the skeptic who may possess latent psychic abilities. He begins seeing a small figure in a red Mackintosh that resembles the one his daughter wore when she drowned. As the parents clash over Laura’s beliefs during a business trip in Venice, a serial killer stalks the canals.
Don’t Look Now works as a creepy tale of supernatural abilities and unexpected murderers and packs one of the great shock scenes of horror cinema. The film is most memorable as a realistic, aching study of mourning. Its sex scene is famous not because of any erotic value but because of its truth: two deeply sad people cling together while working to rebuild their damaged lives. Roeg intercuts the creative lovemaking with John and Laura performing mundane activities. One moment you could be suffering over the death of a loved one. One moment you could be having passionate sex. One moment you could be brushing your teeth. Roeg swirls these moments together, each one commenting on the other, crafting a complete portrait of life as it hurtles toward death.
100. The Wicker Man (1973- dir. Robin Hardy)
Having made some of the best horror films of the fifties and early sixties, Hammer Studios had degenerated into cheap exploitation for good by the seventies. Some of these films are still great fun (The Vampire Lovers, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires), but the studio had long since lost any desire to produce anything but camp.
Released by British Lion Films in 1973, The Wicker Man feels like what-might- have-been had Hammer continued taking its horror duties seriously while also feeling like nothing before or after it. Hammer stars Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt are in tow for a completely bizarre pagan musical undulating with queasy paranoia. Edward Woodward is Sgt. Howie, a police investigator lured to tiny Summerisle off the coast of Scotland where a young girl has gone missing. There he finds a pagan society with barely concealed secrets and a delicious lack of respect for his Christian ultra-conservatism. Director Robin Hardy uses Paul Giovanni’s eerie folk songs to unsettling effect as the residents of Summerisle test Howie’s devotion to his job and religion and confound him with strange behavior and contradictory clues. It all builds to a fevered climax that was unwisely given away by the film’s trailer and poster art.
Even if you already know how The Wicker Man unravels, it is still essential viewing for its originality, terrific music, wicked humor, and disturbing atmosphere. Unfortunately, the film was edited for distribution in America at Roger Corman’s request, and further butchered when released in Britain on a double bill with Don’t Look Now. The excised material lost for years, most audiences saw a severely altered version of The Wicker Man, though a decent reconstruction appeared in 2001. This is the recommended way to view what may be Britain’s greatest horror film and unquestionably the crown jewel of folk horror.
101. The Exorcist (1973- William Friedkin)
The Exorcist has often been called the scariest movie ever made. Does it live up to that reputation? William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel of demonic possession has no shortage of shocks and gross-outs: the pea-soup puking and the carpet peeing, the child’s mangled face and potty mouth, the crucifix “masturbation,” the spinning head. But are these moments, which are the film’s most discussed, scary or just grotty? That depends on the viewer’s sensibilities.
As far as I’m concerned, The Exorcist is most effective during the quietly spooky moments that precede all the mayhem and bodily fluids. Strange phenomena whirl around an archaeological dig in Iraq. Odd sounds clatter from a Georgetown attic. A recording reveals a choir of tortured, demonic voices when played in reverse like some eighties heavy metal album.
Such chilling scenes are quickly overwhelmed with heavy-handed horror and even heavier-handed conservatism. Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil is an agnostic single parent working in the “immoral” film industry. She is punished with a daughter whose demonic possession manifests with threatening sexuality and metaphorical menstruation. Chris is rescued from her disbelief in religious superstitions and her daughter’s satanic sexuality by a self-sacrificing priest struggling with his own doubts.
Religious symbolism was not new to horror. Crucifixes, crumbled Eucharists, and holy water were integral to dispatching Dracula. Yet those objects were used as convenient totems of goodness, whereas The Exorcist makes an explicit plea to embrace Christianity and reject the “evils” of secularism and sexuality, which makes the movie harder to embrace. Dracula was evil, but appealing, charming. The demon in The Exorcist is unappealing on every level: ugly, witlessly vulgar, unable to keep its lunch down or its head in the right direction.
The Exorcist may be ideologically flawed and lacking the subtlety of genuinely scary films, but the performances are uniformly excellent, particularly those of Burstyn and Jason Miller as Father Karras. Dick Smith’s demon design and the use of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” are iconic. And there are truly frightening moments like the ones described above, as well as creepy images secreted within the film at a nearly subliminal level. Even if you have trouble stomaching the Bible-thumping, you'll still have fun hitting the pause button at just the right moment to glimpse one of those demon faces.
102. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974- dir. Tobe Hooper)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre marked as distinctive a shift in the evolution of horror as Psycho or Night of the Living Dead had in the previous decade. Or is it devolution? Without anything as superfluous as plot, meaningful dialogue, professional acting, or social conscience, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre strips horror to its very essence. Tobe Hooper’s debut is an 84-minute sensual assault on the viewer. The nonstop screaming and chainsaw buzzing are as unendurable to the ears as the vomit-tinted images are to the eyes. Had it been shot in Smell- O-Vision, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would have played in theaters funked- up with the stench of rotting meat.
Because the movie is so relentless, viewers tend to leave it believing they’ve seen something a lot more graphic than it is. The violence is largely left to our imaginations (Hooper supposedly kept the gore to a minimum in the hopes of getting a PG rating. Ha!), yet we are seeing something truly horrific because the director subjected his cast to a real ordeal. Actors essentially had to perform their own stunts in many instances, suffering various injuries. As Leatherface, Gunnar Hansen wielded a real, running chainsaw. Real meat decorated the set, and as it rotted in the over-100° Texas heat, cast and crew had to endure its wretched stench. Hooper pitted his actors against each other in private to create tension on the set.
All of these behind-the-scenes tidbits are apparent in the exhausting finished product. The moments of humor—such as a grotesque, absurdist dinner sequence— do nothing to lighten the tone. The grainy cinematography creates the uncanny sensation that we are watching a genuine snuff film.The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will be repellent to the mass of filmgoers, but its complete concentration on unnerving viewers makes it a bizarre work of art and essential viewing for steely horror fans.
Four years before the release of the movie everyone celebrates as the first true American slasher movie, Bob Clark put out a picture that set quite a number of the slasher playing pieces on the board before John Carpenter could. Young people being picked off one-by-one by a mysterious killer? Check. Murders centered around a beloved national holiday? Check. Misleading most-likely suspect? Check. There’s even the roving, first-person camera pov for which Carpenter got way too much credit.
What sets Black Christmas apart from Halloween and its progeny is the depth of its characters and the unwillingness to completely cede the story to mechanical kills. In fact, so much of Black Christmas plays as straight drama that it often doesn’t feel like a horror movie at all. Of equal importance to its serial killer plot are the trials of Jess Bradford (Olivia Hussey), who finds herself impregnated by her unstable boyfriend Peter (Kier Dullea), who insists she have the baby despite her preference for an abortion. Yet the action keeps getting drawn back to that terrifyingly gibbering obscene caller terrorizing a sorority house like buckshot to a magnet.
While formulaic future slasher pictures would most likely view Jess as the ultimate immoral young woman deserving of bloody comeuppance,Black Christmas presents her as wholly sympathetic and justified in her choice to not want a child. She does not deserve punishment, and the movie seems to know this. Even perpetually drunk Barb (the excellent Margot Kidder) is completely likable. So Black Christmas violates one of the essential slasher tropes: it feels tragic instead of basely exploitative.
104. Young Frankenstein (1974- dir. Mel Brooks)
Hardy stuff likeThe Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre surely left old-fashioned monster fans longing for the days when a canned lightning storm and a Jack Pierce-makeup job were enough to get the job done. But Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein weren’t likely to elicit much more than a roll of the eyes from audiences subsisting on a steady diet of cynicism from the likes of Hooper, Friedkin, and Wes Craven— not to mention non-horror auteurs, such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and John Cassavetes. To survive in the contemporary climate, the classic creeps had to take their proper place for better or worse.
greatest of all monsters a fresh lease in Young Frankenstein. No longer was the Monster set loose to draw gasps. Now he would provoke guffaws. Yet Wilder and Brooks’s parody does not belittle our old friend or the movies we adore. Young Frankenstein is a loving, richly detailed tribute to Universal’s Frankenfranchise. The black and white cinematography, authentic sets and costumes, Pierce-esque makeup, and sumptuous score by John Morris all play on the viewer’s sense of nostalgia. Unlike Satan or Leatherface, the Monster, as embodied by Peter Boyle, reminds us of the charm of a sympathetic creature. Comedy or not, his speech at the film’s climax is deeply touching.
But let’s not forget that laughs are at the top of Brooks and Wilder’s agenda, and their script provides a barrage of perennial one-liners (“It’s pronounced Eye- gor”) and unforgettable comedic sequences (“Puttin’ on the Riiiitz!”). Boyle, Gene Wilder as the doctor, Madeline Kahn as his fiancé (“financier”), Teri Garr and Marty Feldman as his assistants, Kenneth Mars as the police inspector with a grudge against the Family Frankenstein (“It’s pronounced Fronkensteen”) and Cloris Leachman as Frau Blücher (“Naaaay!”) are all better than they’d ever be in any other picture. Plus, fans of Universal’s classic Frankenstein films will have a ball spotting the references to everything from James Whale’s original Frankenstein to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
105. The Stepford Wives (1975- dir. Bryan Forbes)
Horror movies are often used as nifty Trojan Horses for political commentary, yet surprisingly few are willing to take a look at the genre’s commonest victims. Women are likelier to be dispassionately dispatched in horror films than anyone else, and it wasn’t until Bryan Forbes adapted Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives that such disposability was addressed.
Despite being the creation of men, The Stepford Wives treads where no horror film had before: feminism. Joanna Eberhart is a young wife and mother with ambitions of becoming a photographer who “messed a little with women’s lib” while living in New York City. Now she and the family have moved to the pre-fab community of Stepford, Connecticut, where she is surrounded by submissive wives and husbands who gather to collude in the mysterious Stepford Men’s Association. Finding a likeminded ally in neighbor Bobbie Markowe, Joanna scratches through Stepford’s veneer and is horrified by what she discovers.
Although its title wives have entered the vernacular as shorthand for subservient women, The Stepford Wives does not receive the attention it deserves as one of the sharpest films of its day. William Goldman’s script and Forbes’s direction do not squander an opportunity to underscore the film’s themes while never stumbling into ham-handedness. Men are the film’s villains, and these men are some of the most insidiously evil on film, but Joanna's husband (Peter Masterson) at least expresses some remorse for his own shallowness and willingness to follow the pack, though he does get over that rather quickly. Katharine Ross is excellent as the hero and Paula Prentiss is absolutely brilliant as saucy Bobbie. After spending time with such likable, intelligent leads, the finale is acutely painful. The Stepford Wives takes on much and succeeds marvelously on all levels: it’s a darkly funny satire of suburban blandness, plastic surgery, and advertising (“I’ll just die if I don’t get this recipe!”); a horror film packing some genuinely disturbing sequences; a tragedy; and a groundbreaking stab at the patriarchy.
Dario Argento bridges Italian giallo (graphic, lurid crime stories) and pure horror with Deep Red. David Hemmings is Marcus Daly, a music teacher with a P.I.’s curiosity who gets sucked into investigating the murder of a medium when he witnesses her getting smashed through her apartment window.Argento intensifies such scenes by presenting them from the killer’s perspective with roaming, first-person shots, making the viewer feel uncomfortably complicit in the violence.
Deep Red is also beautiful. Argento’s obsession with vivid color doesn’t end with the buckets of blood spilled throughout the picture, and the horror isn’t always graphically gross. The children’s song that is the killer’s calling card is eerie. A mechanical puppet makes an appearance for no other reason than its extreme creepiness. Argento gives us some much-needed breaks from the tension by introducing a romance between Marcus and reporter Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi). Though Argento cops out in the end, their arm-wrestling match is a playful subversion of seventies cinematic sexism. He also introduces a red herring that seems expressly designed to tease his audience’s homophobic assumptions.
Of course, Argento has always been more bent on administering visceral thrills than enlightenment, although he makes one major misstep by having Goblin score the film with agitated prog-funk that totally shatters the mood whenever it starts farting away. Argento’s taste in music is often questionable, but good taste is not really paramount in a flick full of throat gouging, decapitation, and bathtub boiling.
107. Jaws (1975- dir. Steven Spielberg)
The giant, mechanical shark in Jaws was accused of everything from driving swimmers away from beaches to driving filmgoers from the gritty movies that had defined seventies cinema. Granted, Steven Spielberg’s debut feature employed special effects to thrill audiences and drew record-breaking revenue, but its thrills do not make Jaws any less thoughtful or its characters any less complex. And after the kills have lost their shock value with repeated viewings, and sophisticated contemporary special effects have rendered “Bruce” the Shark less realistic, Jaws continues to work wonderfully as a character piece.
And what characters it has: Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) the conflicted police chief; Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) the smart rich kid with an arsenal of shark-finding technology; Quint (Robert Shaw) the salty, glib sea captain who has seen more than his share of horror. Quint’s account of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the feeding frenzy that followed may be cinema’s most spellbinding monologue. Dreyfuss’s enraptured attention contributes as much magic to the scene as Shaw’s recitation. We care about these characters, and it is a rare monster movie that possesses human heroes more interesting than its monster. A lot of work went into animating these people, who were dull stereotypes in Peter Benchley’s mediocre novel. Much of the credit goes to Carl Gottlieb, who continued revising and improving the script throughout the shoot, but Dreyfuss, Shaw, and Roy Scheider’s completely committed acting may be the film’s greatest triumph.
All that being said, Jaws still works as a top popcorn flick. The adventure sequences are exhilarating without overpowering the reflective moments. Gottlieb’s dialogue is consistently quotable and very, very funny. The shark looks phony, but it is kept off screen enough that its attacks are still frightening. John Williams’s score is unnerving and exciting in the film’s more adventurous scenes. Steven Spielberg shows that he is capable of intricate orchestration of action and intimacy before he started allowing spectacle to take the starring roles in his films for good. Watch Jaws back-to-back with Jurassic Park and the more important elements become painfully clear.
Jim Sharman’s version of Richard O’Brien’s stage musical The Rocky Horror Show did not invent the midnight movie phenomenon (that would be Jodorowsky’s freak-western El Topo). It just defines it. Everyone knows the ideal way to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show is at midnight with an audience of toilet-tissue-tossing wackadoos in garter belts. Still Roger Ebert was exaggerating when he said that he could think of nothing less interesting than watching the movie at home alone.
109. The Tenant (1976- dir. Roman Polanski)
Polanski wraps up his trilogy of urban horror films with his weirdest installment. The director himself plays Trelkowski. Like Carole Ledoux in Repulsion (and the actor/director, himself), Trelkowski is dislocated in an unfamiliar, hostile nation. The Polish immigrant takes up residence in a Paris apartment building in which his every step draws complaints from officious neighbors. Trelkowski also suffers attacks from within, as he grows obsessed with Simone Choule, the former tenant who gave up the apartment after shattering her body in a botched suicide attempt. Left to stew in his shadowy room, Trelkowski convinces himself that his neighbors are conspiring to transform him into Simone and force him to reenact her leap from the window.
Humor plays a broader role in The Tenant than it had in either Repulsion orRosemary’s Baby, but then the director starts weaving thick threads of psychological horror into the film’s increasingly disturbing tapestry. Trelkowski experiences hallucinations that work as both parodies of horror-movie imagery and sincere horror. Still reeling from the murder of his wife Sharon Tate and their unborn child, Polanski may not have been merely simulating Trelkowski’s paranoia and mental deterioration in The Tenant, and Polanski’s abhorrent personal behavior certainly revealed that there was something terribly wrong with him. The baggage he brings to the film helps his performance transcend his limitations as an actor, and it heightens the queasiness of the film’s marriage of humor and horror. Knowing we’re watching a real-life monster on screen makes for a pretty queasy viewing experience too.
110. The Omen (1976- dir. Richard Donner)
Following in the cloven footsteps ofRosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, The Omen is neither as suspenseful/satirical as the former nor iconic/shocking as the latter. Richard Donner’s adaptation of David Seltzer’s novel remains fresh partly because it does not have such a looming reputation. Rosemary’s Baby remains the very best of the period’s devil-kid movies, but The Omen is more enjoyable than The Exorcist because there is a self-aware wink in its eye. Donner’s shocks could easily pass for schlocks: the showy nanny suicide, the baboon siege, the nonstop menacing looks from demonic Damien and his screechy temper tantrum as he approaches a church, the almost Rube-Goldberg-esque death sequences, and a bonkers discovery involving a dead jackal. The Exorcist is goofy too, but its “scariest movie ever made” reputation makes its silliness more difficult to digest. The Omen pays minor lip service to current issues—themes of the devil infiltrating a political family are detritus of the Nixon era— but the film is too broad to take as serious political commentary. That’s fine since The Omen is such a hoot on its own creepy, crazy terms. Jerry Goldsmith’s choral score reflects that over-the-top appeal perfectly and Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, David Warner, Billie Whitelaw, and little Harvey Stephens turn in neat performances.111. Carrie (1976- dir. Brian DePalma)
Stephen King’s first published novel nearly went out with the trash. Only after his wife pulled the first few pages from his waste bin and convinced him to complete it did King will Carrie into existence. We all know how his ridiculously successful writing career continued from there, but he has not always been well served on film. Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Carrie is one of the best King (and De Palma) films because the story is focused with a relatable, emotionally resonant lead character.
Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) cowers at the far fringes of her cliquey high school. She matures later than her peers in a shower scene that is as sad as the one in Psycho was shocking. Carrie’s ignorance about her own body can be traced back home where her religiously domineering mother chides her about her sexuality and locks her in a tiny closet to pay penance to a spooky statue of St. Sebastian. After a particularly spiteful peer plays a vicious prank on her at the prom, Carrie whips up a telekinetic tempest staged in disconcerting split screen.
King and De Palma’s often-painful look at adolescence, and its disturbing, misfit wish-fulfillment finale, are offset by humor that while occasionally too silly for its own good (the sped-up tuxedo-modeling sequence), gives the film the flavor of an E.C. Comic, as does the shocking epilogue. Nancy Allen as Carrie’s classmate Chris Hargensen and Piper Laurie (who thought the movie was a comedy after reading the script!) as her horrific mother play their roles as cartoon-villains without diluting the direness of Carrie’s plight. That’s probably because Sissy Spacek is so committed in the title role, conveying Carrie’s discomfort in her own body, her desire to be accepted, her joy when she believes this to be happening, and her scariness when she discovers it isn’t.
112. Suspiria (1977- dir. Dario Argento)
Dario Argento fully graduated from Italy’s top maker of giallo to the country’s contemporary horror maestro when he delved into the supernatural withSuspiria. The first and best chapter in the “Three Mothers Trilogy”, Suspiria is set in an atmosphere-rich ballet academy where American student Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) has recently enrolled. A series of strange and violent events coincide with Bannion’s arrival that may have something to do with the academy’s history as a hub of witchy rituals.
The plot does not get much deeper than that as Argento busies himself with the gory set pieces that are the film’s raison d'être. A woman is hanged in outlandishly enough style to outdo a similar scene inThe Omen. Another traverses a room full of barbed wire. Maggots drip from the ceiling like some nauseating pipe leak. Jessica Harper wanders through this freakishly ornate landscape ethereally until finally confronting horrific Helena Markos: the Mother of Sighs (whom Harper later revealed was played by a local veteran prostitute). Suspiria would have been more effective had Argento toned down some of its assaultive visuals and chosen a subtler outfit than Goblin to compose the soundtrack, but it remains a vivid, poetically choreographed nightmare, as gorgeous as it is grotesque.
113. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977- dir. Don Taylor)
Overshadowed by the towering legacy of Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls and the infamous shittiness of John Frankenheimer’s Island of Dr. Moreau, Don Taylor’s 1977 version of H.G. Wells’s horror classic tends to get dismissed. Yet the excellent monster makeup, eerie jungle setting, and composer Laurence Rosenthal’s elliptical, evocative main theme easily transcend the film’s shoddy reputation. Taylor created an old-fashioned monster movie in an era with few, subtly calibrating the pace from the disquieting stillness of the early passages to the chaotic creature orgy that concludes it. Burt Lancaster as Moreau, Michael York as castaway Andrew Braddock, and Richard Basehart as the sheep-like Sayer of the Law all give restrained performances that compliment the film’s somber tone. In contrast to Charles Laughton’s mustache-twirling interpretation of the mad doctor in Island of Lost Souls, Lancaster plays Moreau as a serious man of science whose concepts of right and wrong have been distorted by too many years isolated in the jungle. Barbara Carrera is also noteworthy as beast- woman Maria, whose blink-and-you-miss-it fate ends the picture on a potentially tragic note. The subtle tempo and acting are matched by impressive makeup work that does not look nearly as low budget as one would expect from an AIP picture.
114. House (1977- dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi)
When Toho, the studio responsible for all those terrifically cheesy Godzilla movies, approached Nobuhiko Obayashi about making Japan’s answer to Jaws, the filmmaker took a novel approach. He recalled seven of his school-age daughter’s worst fears and crammed them into a haunted house movie that plays like Suspiria reimagined by Sid and Marty Krofft. A severed head flies from a water well and bites a schoolgirl on her bottom. Disembodied fingers pound on a people-eating piano. A girl gets into a kung-fu brawl with firewood. A cat’s eyes glimmer with cartoon sparkles. And there isn’t a single shark in sight.
Naturally, Toho was baffled byHausu(House), as were critics, but the film became a huge hit in its homeland because kids instantly recognized its candied horrors and psychedelic flights of fancy from their own whimsical imaginations. As gruesome as this story of seven schoolgirls who meet varying fates in an old dark house can be, the delivery is more cartoonish than an episode of Scooby Doo. Teeny-bop pop chirps cheerily on the soundtrack, and the characters are as transparently farcical as their adventures, each one named for the stock stereotype that dictates her every move: there’s Fantasy, Gorgeous, Kung Fu, Prof (as in “Professor”), Mac (as in “Stomach”...she’s always eating!), Melody (the musician), and Sweet. Collect them all! The scares are on the level of those in The Wizard of Oz, which means they will particularly disturb kids. The special effects are non-stop, ranging from primitive video manipulation to “How the Hell did they do that?” magic. As nonsensically whimsical as a toddler improvising tall tales, House is a puzzling delight.
115. Eraserhead (1977- dir. David Lynch)
David Lynch emerged from the world of painting and sculpture, and his early short films are avant-garde extensions of the abstract visual arts. So is his debut feature, though many critics have categorized Eraserhead as horror because its dark, dank, black and white cinematography recalls early horrors from Nosferatu to Night of the Hunter, its images are consistently nightmarish and occasionally gory, and its baby is one of cinema’s most disturbing monsters. The film’s shadowy composition, marionette-like acting, surrealism, unashamed emotiveness, and absurd humor are reminiscent of Lynch’s fellow avant gardists Buñuel and Cocteau. Eraserhead is most accurately viewed as a genre of one.
Mel Brooks famously declared David Lynch “Jimmy Stewart from Mars,” and Eraserhead barely resembles a product of Earth. It’s certainly tough to place as a film made in 1970s Hollywood. With a bare minimum of dialogue (“Oh, you are sick!”), Eraserhead has the flavor of a silent film (the charmingly inarticulate Lynch has a notorious distrust of language; his first short The Alphabet was nothing less than a nightmare about learning letters). However, sound plays a key role: the clanging of Henry Spencer’s industrial landscape, the Fats Waller records he plays on his little turntable, the hissing of his radiator, the mewling of his mutant baby.
Ah, the baby. Lynch wisely refuses to reveal how he made it (one popular theory is that it’s some kind of puppet fashioned from a calf fetus!), but its symbolic significance is not as difficult to decode. Lynch had recently discovered his wife was pregnant, and his fears about first-time fatherhood can be felt in every sickening roll of the baby’s eyes, every loll of its swollen tongue, every snicker it emits at its father’s expense. Yet it is erroneous to view the baby as a clear-cut stand-in for Lynch’s daughter, as it also functions as the embodiment of Henry’s apparent self-loathing. When the odd little lady living in his radiator assures him that “In heaven everything is fine,” she may not be impelling Henry toward suicide as much as telling him to uproot his own feelings of anger and self- loathing—something Lynch, himself, was only just learning to do via transcendental meditation. Therefore it isn’t surprising that Lynch views Eraserhead as his most spiritual film, but for the many who fixate on the grotesque baby—and fail to see the humor in a tiny, bleeding chicken—it is most easily digested as a horror movie. Regardless of labels, Eraserhead remains a completely unique experience percolating with stark beauty, huge laughs (the dinner party is a mini-masterpiece of uncomfortable comedy), a deeply poignant performance from Jack Nance as Henry, and moments of breathtaking transcendence. A perfect film.
116. Dawn of the Dead (1978- dir. George Romero)
Ten years into the zombie apocalypse, America is in a state of anarchy. The media is breaking down, the FBI has failed to contain the epidemic or control a crumbling society, and it’s everyone for themselves. As the zombies glut themselves on human flesh, a tiny band of survivors hole up in a shopping mall and glut themselves on the various products and luxuries inside. Creating their own little creature-comfort-crammed cages in the recesses of the building, our heroes are in danger of morphing into passive, brain-dead creeps not much different from the walking dead stalking them.
George Romero takes a more decisive, though less subtle, critical stance in Dawn of the Dead than in the preceding Night of the Living Dead. The sequel plays more like a satire, even as gory horror—as realized by up-and-coming make-up whiz Tom Savini—is plentiful and even more stomach churning in full color. Romero’s ample, often slapstick humor makes graphic images of cannibalism, disemboweling, and cranial gunshots easier to stomach. The likable cast of non- dead characters fulfills viewer fantasies when zipping through a mall giddily on a glutinous shopping spree and realizes nightmares when they start succumbing to the zombie onslaught. The epic structure lends weight to the film’s criticisms of the military, vigilantism, and mindless consumerism. Dawn of the Dead is less atmospheric and visceral than the first installment of the “Living Dead” series, but it is Romero’s most accomplished and satisfying film.
117. Halloween (1978- dir. John Carpenter)
For better or worseHalloweenspawned a new strand of horror that would dominate the genre in the decade to come. Seen out of context, John Carpenter’s film can seem hopelessly formulaic, but let’s not forget that Halloween was the movie that set the slasher formula in place: a superhuman killer hacks up horny teens only to meet his match in the most virginal of the lot (which film theorist Carol J. Clover labeled “The final girl”) and a fate ambiguous enough to allow room for an endless stream of sequels.
Carpenter’s film stands out from the mass of joyless, predictable, cynical slasher movies because he executes his with a certain amount of style and a shocking amount of restraint. After a fairly disturbing prologue in which young Michael Myers commits his first murder on Halloween night, 1963, Carpenter reduces the pace to a slow crawl with the adult Michael stalking an atmospherically autumnal Illinois suburb. There we meet our future final girl, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), and Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence), the Van Helsing-esque doctor on the hunt for the escaped killer. Carpenter peppers his film with references to the grandpappy of slasher films, naming the good doctor after John Gavin’s bland hero in Psycho, casting Janet Leigh’s daughter as Laurie, and weaving themes of incestuous desires into Michael’s back story. Of course, masked Michael is not the compelling, sympathetic monster Norman Bates was. He’s more like the shark in Jaws, his William Shatner mask fashioning a dead, expressionless face, his actions ruled by an animal instinct to kill.
Many have read much into Halloween—from critics who condemn it as near pornographic in its depiction of the slaughter of sexually active women to those who praise it as near-feminist because of the heroine’s survival instincts—but Carpenter dismisses such analyses of his movie. He intended Halloween to be nothing more than a scary way to pass 90 minutes, and despite its slow pace and mechanical plot, it accomplishes that job well enough.
Remaking an iconic movie is always a tricky, and often pointless, project. Perhaps no pre-2001 sci-fi flick is as iconic as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so Philip Kaufman certainly had his work cut out for him. His decision to take Jack Finney’s story in a more satirical direction could have been disastrous (see the 2004 version of The Stepford Wives), but he balances out his comic portrayal of the “I’m OK, you’re OK, let’s take a seaweed bath” generation and cute touches such as a cameo by original Invaders star Kevin McCarthy (not to mention the most hilariously weird dog on film) with genuinely effective scares, not least of which is a surprise ending that is now iconic in its own right.
The core cast is an unlikely yet terrific mix: Donald Sutherland, Brook Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Leonard Nimoy. While Nimoy is effectively off-putting as a clearly insidious psychiatrist and self-help writer, the rest of the gang is entirely likable, and we feel genuinely bad when they start succumbing to the alien replicas representing the results of dehumanizing, rat-infested urban living.
119. The Brood (1979- dir. David Cronenberg)
Horror films often spawn from anger, whether it’s Romero’s political angst or Hitchcock’s barely repressed sexual aggression. Few are as upfront about their anger asThe Brood. While fighting for custody of his daughter, David Cronenberg conceived this nasty item in which an abusive mother (Samantha Eggar) falls under the thrall of a therapist (Oliver Reed) peddling half-baked regression methods at his prison-like compound. Even as his followers declare him a genius at his absurdly theatrical public sessions (foretelling talk show therapists like Dr. Phil), his former patients range from the pathetically dependent to the physically ravaged. The doctor’s masterpiece of misguided psychology is Nola Carveth, who literally gives birth to anger, which manifests as monstrous, murderous mockeries of the young daughter she abused.
120. Alien (1979- dir. Ridley Scott)
Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon made the masterstroke of fusing the two hugest blockbusters of the seventies when he wrote Alien, a hybrid of Jaws-style terror and Star Wars technology and creature creation. A master of mood and shadow, director Ridley Scott realized Alien as a finely calibrated balance of simmering terror and unexpected shocks. Electrifying thrills are abundant by way of a chest- busting baby alien and its towering, multi-jawed adult self, but the angst-steeped stillness that bridges the creature’s attacks are just as nerve unraveling.
Alien also resembles Night of the Living Dead in its uncommon hero. O’Bannon had a male actor in mind when he wrote the role of Ripley, but producers David Glier and Walter Hill decided to cast a woman to distinguish their film from the mass of male-dominated action flicks. Without a screenplay altered to suit that gender change, Sigourney Weaver plays the hero with a level of strength and resolve rarely afforded female characters. Alien wins extra progressive credit by allowing the female and African American crew members on the Nostromo to outlive their white, male shipmates.
As the crew, Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartwright, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, and Ian Holm have strong chemistry, and we mourn whenever one falls into the alien’s clutches. As much as the victims are missed, the creature is a thing of awe. Designed by biomechanical artist H. R. Giger, the alien is a killing machine with the phallic toothiness of the shark in Jaws, the lean, armored physique of Darth Vader, and the emotionless cool of both.
121. Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht (1979- dir. Werner Herzog)
The dark, serious new-horror cinema of the seventies made little room for the beloved monsters of previous decades. Hammer studios gave up the ghost by the mid-seventies when it ended its increasingly desperate Dracula and Frankenstein movies. Andy Warhol-associate Paul Morrissey recast the two legendary creatures in a pair of gross, campy movies that had little in common with the Universal classics of the thirties. At the same time, unpleasant stuff like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Last House on the Left, and The Hills Have Eyes made certain horror fans long for the days when monsters could still arouse sympathy and horror movies could stir more than nausea.
If Jaws indicated that horror movies could still be fun, the tremendously popular 1977 revival of Balderston and Dean’s Dracula stage play, and a subsequent film adaptation by good-old Universal, revealed the most renowned undead creature was not dead yet. The same year that John Badham released his Dracula remake, visionary German director Werner Herzog reached even further back to the first feature adaptation of Stoker’s classic. Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht is both a superb homage to F.W. Murnau’s film and a more accessible glimpse into Herzog’s genius thanAguirre: The Wrath of GodorThe Enigma of Kaspar Hauser are. The film is surprisingly faithful to Murnau with recreations of the vampire’s shadowy stalk through a small village and a return to a subtly surreal seaside graveyard. Klaus Kinski’s make-up is patterned on Max Schreck's in the 1922 version, although Kinski looks more bat-like than ratty Schreck. Herzog still picks up on Murnau’s parallels between Dracula’s arrival and the arrival of the rat-infested Bubonic Plague enthusiastically. Like a vile reimagining of the writhing mass of monkeys in Aguirre, rats so infest Nosferatu that characters literally have to wade through them just to enjoy breakfast.
Kinski’s performance synchs with the infestation surrounding him. He oozes disease as a Dracula drained of the sexual power Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee radiated. Kinski’s vampire is a simpering, sickly creature. When he feeds on his victims, he isn’t dominating them; he’s desperately scrambling to self-medicate. Dracula may be the main monster, but the real threat seems to rise from nature— a familiar Herzogian theme. The vampire isn’t nearly as troubling as the billowing storm clouds expanding overhead, the stretch of untrodden land Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) must cross to reach his castle, the wailing wolves surrounding his castle, or that horrible sprawl of rats. Herzog plays with other character archetypes, remolding Mina (here named Lucy and played by kohl-eyed Isabelle Adjani) as cagey and clever and Van Helsing as an ineffectual skeptic.
