Face-carving killers! Whale carcasses!
Pod people from beyond the stars! Keep watching for more near-perfect horror movies… if you dare.
Based on Jean Redon's novel of the same name, Eyes Without a Face follows Dr. Génessier,
a plastic surgeon who feels responsible for the role he played in the accident
that disfigured his daughter, Christine. With the help of his laboratory assistant Louise,
Dr. Génessier's desperation drives him to abduct and peel the faces off young women
so he can relieve his infantilized daughter and her creepy, featureless plastic mask.
According to Criterion, when the film premiered in France the audience "dropped
like flies" — especially during the infamously graphic surgical scene. But the film enjoyed
an enthusiastic critical re-evaluation during its 1986 theatrical re-release,
and has since claimed a spot in cinema history as a masterful,
and even poetic, piece of body horror cinema. Slate's David Edelstein writes:
"Eyes Without A Face [is] among the most disturbing horror films ever made."
Eyes Without a Face enjoys an average 98% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes,
and came in at number 38 in Time Out's list of the 100 best horror films. It holds a Metascore of 90.
Co-directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, King Kong follows an adventurous
film crew that discovers the "eighth wonder of the world": a giant prehistoric ape who falls
head over heels for the beautiful Ann Darrow. Kong's romantic aspirations are foiled, however,
when the crew abduct him to New York City, where the monstrous monkey promptly wreaks havoc.
Sporting a weighted average Metascore of 90 and a 99% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes,
Kong was a technical marvel for its time, boasting groundbreaking technology such as stop-motion
animation and matte paintings. As Roger Ebert puts it in his "Great Movies" write-up:
"In the very artificiality of some of the special effects,
there is a creepiness that isn't there in today's slick, flawless, computer-aided images."
Indeed, there's something unnervingly tactile about Kong's stuttering movements;
something primeval and ancient that rhymes nicely with the film's mystique
as one of the true milestones of Hollywood movie-making.
"It wasn't the airplanes. 'Twas beauty killed the beast."
Sitting pretty with a 90 Metacritic score, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds
did for birds what Jaws would do for sharks a decade later.
A sub-genre-defining creature feature, the film's swarms of avian adversaries
aren't so much individual animals as they are a force of nature; a furious storm of
beating wings and pecking beaks with unknown motivations but a clear, murderous, objective.
When the film first premiered in 1963, it was met with mixed reviews,
rejected, in part, for its overt allegiance to the lowly trappings of exploitation cinema.
And yet the passage of time won out, and the critical tide turned in Hitch's favor.
The Birds now holds the number seven spot on the American Film Institute's list
of the greatest American thrillers. All told, Hitchcock's movie remains a creepy, high-flying
benchmark when it comes to killer animal flicks. Here's to never going outside ever again.
A controversial, gothic tale of tragedy and psychosis,
disgraced director Roman Polanski's first English-language film is widely praised as
one of cinema's most unsettling portraits of mental and emotional disintegration.
A fragile young Belgian manicurist named Carol
suffers from a debilitating fear of men. When her sister and roommate Helen leaves
their shabby apartment for an Italian getaway with a married man, Carol retreats deeper into
her own fractured mind, where visitations have feverish and ultimately violent consequences.
Following its premiere at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival,
Repulsion was met with sizable critical acclaim as "a small but piercing human tragedy,"
per a 1965 review in The New York Times. The film enjoys a near-perfect 95% approval rating
on Rotten Tomatoes and clocks in at number 54 on Time Out's list of the 100 best horror movies.
An impressive sophomore effort that will surely intrigue fans of claustrophobic terror trips,
Repulsion is a classic chiller well deserving of its 91 Metacritic score.
Don't let Frankenstein's age fool you. James Whale's 1931 adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel
packs an enormous, harrowing punch. Boasting a legendary and alarmingly sympathetic performance
by Boris Karloff as the Monster, Frankenstein tells of an obsessive doctor driven to restore
life to a creature assembled out of scraps of rotting flesh.
While Dr. Frankenstein's experiment proves successful, the piecemeal creature is
confused, traumatized, and unable to move peacefully through the world of the living.
Ingrained in the pop culture consciousness and saddled with the burden of historical relevance,
it's tempting to hold Frankenstein at arm's length. But its reputation as a masterpiece
is fully deserved. Frankenstein holds a 100% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes and
frequently places on both genre-specific lists, such as Bravo's "100 Scariest Movie Moments"
and broader gauntlets like The New York Times' Best 1000 Movies Ever. The American
Film Institute ranked this line as the 49th greatest movie quote in American cinema:
"It's alive, it's alive! It's alive, it's alive!"
The film claims an outstanding Metascore of 91.
Son of Saul takes place almost entirely in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a complex of
concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany during World War II. There,
a Jewish-Hungarian prisoner named Saul serves as a member of a unit of Jewish inmates forced to
assist in the disposal of gas chamber victims. The plot follows Saul's dangerous and desperate
attempt to provide a proper Jewish burial for a young boy he adopts posthumously as his son.
As Christy Lemire astutely notes in her review
for RogerEbert.com, Son of Saul tackles the ungraspable horrors of the Holocaust
by placing its horrific elements in the periphery, to the end that:
"The suggestion of suffering is more unsettling than wallowing in it."
Likewise, The Film Stage's Giovanni Marchini Camia
lauds the film as "a towering landmark for filmic fictionalizations of the Holocaust."
When it debuted at Cannes in 2015, the film was awarded the Grand Prix
and the prestigious FIPRESCI Prize. Later, at the 88th Academy Awards, the film won the Oscar
for Best Foreign Language Film. On Metacritic, Son of Saul holds an impressive score of 91.
Even without directly invoking the obvious trappings of the genre,
Hungarian directors Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky
expertly craft an atmosphere that is unmistakably, and oppressively, horrific.
Werckmeister Harmonies takes place in an anonymous provincial town in the dead of winter. Despite the
biting cold, townspeople gather to gape at the main attraction of the traveling circus
that now occupies the town square: the massive, stuffed carcass of a whale.
People come from far and wide to gape at the bloated monster, but, over time, the tension
between the townsfolk and the gawking visitors becomes unbearable and erupts into violence.
Like much of Tarr's work, Werckmeister Harmonies is the dictionary definition of "slow cinema,"
composed of thirty-nine long, dreamlike single-camera shots that play out languidly
over the course of the film's 145-minute runtime. When the film was released in 2000, it was met
with critical acclaim and praise for, as The Guardian's Richard Williams puts it: a "bleak
vision of chaos and capitalism." According to a statistical breakdown from They Shoot Pictures,
Don't They, the film is presently the 34th most critically acclaimed film of the 21st Century.
Unsurprisingly, it boasts a 92 score on Metacritic.
In a chilling blend of science fiction and horror, Don Siegel's 1956 film Invasion of the Body
Snatchers is one of the most astute political allegories of 1950s America. Released at the
height of the cold war, the film's acute vision of insidious conformity struck an anti-communist
nerve while flirting with a more seditious critique of the tyranny of the McCarthy era.
"Can't you see, they're after you! They're after all of us! Our wives,
our children, everyone! They're here already!"
Based on Jack Finney's serialized 1954 sci-fi novel, The Body Snatchers,
the film follows a small-town doctor as he slowly uncovers the truth about the recent
unsettling changes in his sleepy community. Namely: the town is quietly being invaded by
an alien presence who gestate in massive seeds and take over people's bodies as they sleep,
producing emotionless, indistinguishable carbon copies of the original person.
Boasting a 92 Metascore and an impressive 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, in 2008
the American Film Institute recognized the film as the ninth best entry
in the science-fiction genre. Steeped in unchecked paranoia and alienation,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a taut and atmospherically tense horror film
with very little horror on-screen. All the better to wreak horrific havoc on your imagination.
Adapted from Daphne Du Maurier's short story of the same name,
1973's Don't Look Now is a trauma-laced slow dive that feels, unavoidably,
like the logical extension of family grief. It is a protracted nightmare that
muddles the line between a psychological break and the genuinely supernatural.
The movie follows a married couple who move to Venice after the death of their young
daughter Christine. Confined in the city's elegant decay, they both begin to experience
a series of terrifying and increasingly dangerous occurrences that defy explanation.
Tempted by the irrational notion that their daughter might still be alive,
the couple form a disturbing friendship with two sisters, one of whom claims to be clairvoyant.
Directed by Nicolas Roeg, a former cinematographer with an undeniable eye for color and composition,
Don't Look Now is a breathtaking marriage of giallo tropes and pulpy intrigue. The film
also features one of the most memorable final scenes in genre film, a remarkable
climax that cements the film's reputation as an all-time great. With a Metascore of 95,
Roeg's stylish examination of the maddening power of loss is essential viewing for genre fans.
"We belong dead!"
Those three immortal words encapsulate the macabre heartache of Bride of Frankenstein,
James Whale's crushing follow-up to his iconic gothic monster flick.
Amazingly, Bride is one of those rarities in cinema: a sequel that is better than the original.
Picking up right where the first film left off, Bride of Frankenstein reconnects with
the deranged doctor, who has fallen back under the spell of his former mentor,
Dr. Pretorius. When Pretorius encourages his pupil to resume his experiments
and create a mate for the Monster, the shattered Frankenstein finds that he cannot refuse.
Frequently identified as the crown jewel of Universal monster movies,
Bride of Frankenstein's overarching theme about a relationship society doesn't deem natural
retains its relevance to this day. And it's all the more heart-breaking considering Whale
himself was openly gay. With a fantastic 95 on Metacritic, Bride of Frankenstein is a must-watch
for anyone looking to see what all the fuss is about when it comes to classic-era horror films.
In 1967, a horror novel graced the annual best-sellers list of Publishers Weekly
for the first time in 30 years: Rosemary's Baby,
by Ira Levin. A precision thriller about the devil impregnating a woman on the Upper West Side,
Levin's novel was swiftly adapted into a film just one year after its publication.
Starring Mia Farrow as the titular Rosemary and John Cassavetes as her husband Guy,
Roman Polanski's satanic slow-burn frequently tops "best of" lists for good reason.
In 2014, Rosemary's Baby was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the
National Film Registry. And in 2010, The Guardian ranked it as the second-greatest horror film
of all time. Ruth Gordon's performance as Minnie Castevet, the nosy neighbor
quite literally from hell, earned her an Academy Award for best supporting actress;
it would be the last Oscar awarded to a horror movie until 1991's The Silence of the Lambs.
Every film ambling under the umbrella of "elevated horror" owes an immense,
demonic debt to Rosemary's Baby and its revolutionary vision of satanists as
ordinary folks who might pass you in the street. With uncomfortably long takes,
claustrophobic set design, and immersive trance-like pacing, this is a film that
wheels and deals in pure psychological horror. It's more than worthy of its 96 Metascore.
Psycho begins with a deceptively conventional set-up: Marion Crane,
a real estate clerk, embezzles a sizable chunk of change from her employer
in the hope of starting a new life. When she's caught in a torrential downpour,
she takes refuge at the Bates Motel, an isolated establishment run by Norman Bates,
a quirky mama's boy who probably wouldn't even hurt a fly. Probably.
"We all go a little mad sometimes,"
Transitioning from a straight-forward noir to something far nastier,
Psycho's unsettling portrait of a predatory Peeping Tom remains as forceful today as it
was in 1960. While the film's devious rug pulls are now widely known, Psycho continues to function
as one of the most gripping and suggestive entries in the horror-thriller sub-genre.
With a leering camera that often mirrors its predatory subject,
the movie actively revels in the sinful, voyeuristic allure of cinema itself,
twisting the act of watching into something deviant and transgressive. It makes perfect sense,
then, that Alfred Hitchcock's enduring masterwork boasts a near-flawless 97 on Metacritic.