Friday The 13th
A franchise most known for it’s hulking, un-killable, hockey-mask-wearing, machete-wielding villain Jason Voorhees, it’s easy to forget that this iconic antagonist isn’t really a part of Sean
Cunninghams’s 1980 original—he only shows up at the very, very last minute. Along with the likes of Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th helped define the slasher craze of the 1980s, and delivered the definitive kids-at-camp horror film. Full of tension and shocks and a very young Kevin Bacon getting speared through the neck, Friday the 13th is one of the authors of what we have subsequently come to accept as key components of horror, firmly establishing the steps for all of the by-the-numbers genre movies that followed.
Shaun Of The Dead
Shaun of the Dead is the one movie on this list that works as a comedy first and as a horror second, but it does both so exceedingly well that there was no way this slice of fried gold could be ignored. From the minds of star Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright, 2004’s Shaun of the Dead gave the zombie genre the "hometown bloke" spin and turned Pegg’s Shaun and Nick Frost’s Ed into legitimate movie heroes. With homages galore and weapons ranging from rifles to cricket bats to the Batman soundtrack on vinyl (but not Purple Rain), the movie wisely balances the narrative spotlight between imaginative zombie kills and the pub-loving Shaun fighting to keep his life from spiraling away. As quotable as it is blood-soaked and hilarious, Shaun of the Dead is boosted by a stellar supporting cast of talented Brits, including Bill Nighy, Dylan Moran, Kate Ashfield and Lucy Davis (among many others). Fuck-a-doodle-do, this movie is fantastic.
Scream
In the current landscape, it’s practically impossible to have a horror movie that doesn’t have meta, self-referential elements. You can thank horror master Wes Craven and his 1996 film Scream for that. As annoying as this trope has become in recent years, as handled by Craven, Scream was a game changer. Using comedy, a whodunit-style mystery, and every slasher cliché in the book, in Craven’s hands this mixture is a masterful work of genre subverting satire that honors the history of horror, deconstructs what came before, and also blazes a bold new trail. Beyond any academic praise you want to heap on the film, at the same time Scream is all of these things, it’s also a great horror film, one that is inventive and funny and harrowing all at the same time.
The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari
When it comes to mind-boggling cinematic experiences, it’s somewhat strange that one of the most impressive efforts is nearly a century old and contains no spoken dialogue. First assembled from the compacted and pulverized nightmares of the paranoid (assumedly), German director Robert Wiene’s 1920 classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari astounds in every way, boasting a progressively frightening narrative of the titular hypnotist using another man to commit murders, while also utilizing one of film’s earliest and greatest twist endings. (And don’t dare blame this movie for inferior filmmakers’ copycatting.) But what makes Dr. Caligari so singularly enduring is without a doubt the endlessly striking and distinct set design, which offered few elements of grounded consistency in frames filled with distorted angles, jagged edges and odd shapes. It’s a rainbow of madness for the eyes, despite being in black-and-white, and its relatively short runtime is just another reason to rewatch and find details you’d previously missed.
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