Table of Contents
17. Ring (1998)
Countless horror films deal with possession. But Hideo Nakata’s J-horror classic, about a cursed VHS tape that dooms all who watch it, is one of the few which itself feels actually possessed. The threat, a string of grainy, initially meaningless images, was viral before that term had even found its modern meaning. And the movie’s signature shock – a forbidden breaching of the barrier between the on and off-screen worlds – brilliantly fused jump-scare showmanship to gnawing, slow-build dread.
16. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Few would have guessed it at the time: we were too petrified by the swinging torch beams and twig-built totems. But this shoestring American indie – marketed as footage recovered from an occult documentary shoot in the woods gone horribly wrong – pre-empted a generational shift in the way the world produced and consumed moving images. Its DIY aesthetic gave us horror raw and unmediated, with a seeming built-in truthfulness that made its scares all the harder to shake off.
15. Pulse (2001)
Techno-paranoia may have never been so unnerving – or prescient – as in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s early internet-age chiller, in which ghosts worm their way into the world of the living via the Web. Here, online space is a sort of digital spirit realm, through which evil can be contacted and channeled, and portals opened to places that should never be found.
14. The Thing (1982)
What do you get if you cross HP Lovecraft with Agatha Christie and some all-time most revolting creature effects? The answer, courtesy of John Carpenter, is cinema’s most rivetingly horrid whodunit, in which Kurt Russell frantically tries to put a stop to the extraterrestrial monster that plans to mush together an Antarctic research team like so much human Play-Doh.
13. Halloween (1978)
Carpenter again – endlessly imitated but never matched, the horror master’s low-budget slasher film virtually invented the genre, making brilliant use of widescreen, and of the director’s own score, to make you jump out of your chair. Despite its reputation, the film is almost entirely gore-free.
