There are so many great ones that I left out that I decided to make a second list. Hey, the OP didn’t say I couldn’t.
1. Poltergeist
2. Jaws
3. Martin
4. Repulsion
5. The Two Faces Of Dr. Jekyll
6. Mad Love
7. Rabid
8. Hostel 1&2 (I liked ‘em. Sue me)
9. We Are Going To Eat You
10. Halloween (’78)-Can’t believe I forgot that one while witing list 1!
11. Terror Firmer
12. Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead
13. Child’s Play
14. I Spit On Your Grave (‘78)
15. House Of 1000 Corpses (Yeah, yeah)
16. The Wolf Man (’41)
17. The Thing (‘51/’82)
18. The Seventh Victim
19. Bay Of Blood
20. Piranha
All the movies on my list sends a chill down your spine(Specifically, if you saw them within the date they came out)..If it didn’t, it shouldn’t be on your list !
1-The Exorcist
2- Jaws
3- Alien
4- Silence of the Lambs
5-The Omen
6- Misery
7- Carrie
8- The Thing
9- Dawn of the Dead
10- Phantasm
11- Evil Dead
12-Texas Chainsaw Massacre
13- Psycho
14- Nightmare on Elm Street
15-Hellraiser
16-Seven
17-Jeepers Creepers
18-The Blair Witch Project
19-Poltergeist
20- Cape Fear(De Niro)
Honorable mention in no particular order:
The Birds
Resident Evil
Nosferatu
Them
Halloween
Rosemary’s Baby
Saw
Day of the Triffids
Invasion of the Body Snatchers(original)
Hostel
Willard(original)
The Amityville Horror
The Shining
The Relic
Village of the Damned
The Thing
Forgot ….Deliverance , Cloverfield, The Descent, Dreamcatcher and The Ring !
In no particular order:
Psycho
The Thing
The Innocents
Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau)
Kwaidan
The Shining
Session 9
Repulsion
Rosemary’s Baby
The Tenant
The Exorcist
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (P. Kaufmann)
The Birds
Alien
In the Mouth of Madness
The Omen
The Mothman Prophecies
Don’t look now
Night of the Living Dead
The Woman in Black
No order except maybe the first one, numbers are just to keep track.
1. The Seventh Victim
2. Night of The Hunter
3. Nosferatu
4. Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages
5. Black Sunday
6. The Birds
7. Don’t Look Now (though not a horror film Roeg/Cammell’s ‘Performance’ is at times just a frightening)
8. Freaks
9. Bram Stroker’s Dracula
10. Eyes Without a Face
11. The Devils
12. I Walked With a Zombie
13. Cat People
14. Bride of Frankenstein
15. Dead of Night
16. Jigoku
17. Vampyr
And I’m cheating big time on these last few but
18. Polanski’s apartment trilogy
19. Romero’s Living Dead trilogy
20. Evil Dead Trilogy
More! More! I’m still not satisfied!!!! Look at all those exclamation marks!!!!!! I’m practically having an orgasm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Grr!! Boo!!
1. Tombs Of The Blind Dead
2. The Golem
3. Unwilling Lovers
4. It Conquered The World
5. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (‘56)
6. Bride Of Chucky- Not terribly scary, but very funny. This is more of a parody on the series.
7. Thirst (’09)
8. Creature From The Black Lagoon
9. The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari
10. Videodrome
11. The Brood
12. The Tingler
13. Nosferatu
14. Vampyer
15. Theater Of Blood
16. The Witchfinder General
17. The Last House On The Left
18. Eyes Without A Face
19. Not Of This Earth (’57)
20. A Nightmare On Elm Street 1&2
Ohh you want some horror shit!!?!?! You want some fucking scary shit huh little boys and girls? Man fuck all those classics we have all watched the exorcists, the dawn of the deads, the nosferatus etc
What about some RARE shit that obscure shit that barely anyone knows about, well the fucked up people who watch obscure surreal shit know about it but the typical movie geek who’s scared of the Resident Evil MOVIES and not the GAMES need to study this shit!
1. Begotten directed by E. Elias Merhige
If you want some of that SURREAL/black and white nightmarish think of the video in The Ring watch this shit!! I downloaded this movie onto my computer and within the first 30 minutes of it my nose automatically started to fucking bleed for no reason!! I was like WHAT THE FUCK and turned off windows media player and DELETED that movie! BEGOTTEN cursed me I’ll never be able to watch that movie again…..maybe one day…but straight up THAT SHIT MADE MY FUCKIN NOSE BLEED!
2. Martyrs directed be Pascal Laugier
French horror film, BRUTUAL violence, bloody but gorgeous women being tortured. Very artistic, poetic in a sense, but very disturbing undertones. The ending haunted me…
3. Salo directed by Pasolini
Come on now…this movie is fucking disturbing, this truely is horror. Picture yourself as one of the SLAVES in this movie now that’s some SCARY fucking SHIT!!? Not a “horror movie” but the feeling you get physically after you watch this movie is definitely not a “good one”!
4. Eraserhead by David Lynch
A lot of people would LAUGH at this entry because they find it boring, I don’t know for some reason ERASERHEAD especially seeing the BABY disturbs my inner psyche….nightmarish and surreal….atmospheric score, the music is PERFECT, haunting and memorable.
Shit that’s all I can think of now but I’m pretty sure the weirdos out there can add more disturbing horrific horror fims that I haven’t peeped yet!
Psycho
The Whicker Man
Alien
Dracula (1931 and 1979)
The Exorcist
The Shining
M
Nosferato
The Omen
Silence Of The Lambs
Jaws
Misery
Frankenstein (1931)
Cabinet Of Dr Caligari
Dark Water (Japan, 2002)
Carrie
Dahmer
Freaks
recently recorded Horror Of Dracula, really want to see it now
I love all the Ju-on releases (the japanese ones ONLY i might add) and some other asian horror flicks:
Sundel Bolong (1981, Indonesia)
Misteri Rumah Tua (1987, Malaysia/Indonesia)
Nang Nak (1999, Thailand)
Three (2002, Korean/Thailand/Hong Kong)
The Eye 10 (2005, Thailand/Hong Kong)
I still have a lot to add but can’t think of anything else for now..
I’m not much of a horror fan, but… nobody has mentioned:
Sombre (Grandrieux)
A new one for me:
The Devil by Zulawski.
I should add “Dorm” aka “Dek hor” (2006, Thailand). I’ve provided the links to it and it’s up at Scorpiorising’s wall if anyone’s interested..heh
If you’re counting Diabel then it’s the best. I think it’s more of a black comedy, a bitter polemic of sorts. As in The Cremator – given that the protagonist is the killer – I think it flips it from a horror to a black comedy. I don’t like myself for contesting a Zulawski film being included in anything, though, so you can have it.
1. Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero)
2. Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale)
3. Peeping Tom (Michael Powell)
4. Night of the Living Dead (George Romero)
5. The Black Cat (Edgar Ulmer)
6. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick)
7. Eraserhead (David Lynch)
8. Eyes without a Face (Georges Franju)
9. I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur)
10. Kwaidan (Masaki Koboyashi)
11. Halloween (John Carpenter)
12. King Kong (Ernest Schoedsack)
13. Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur)
14. Psycho (Alfred Hitchock)
15. The Fly (David Cronenberg)
16. Carrie (Brian De Palma)
17. Freaks (Tod Browning)
18. The Thing (John Carpenter)
19. Black Sabbath (Mario Bava)
20. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper)
Apologies to too many wonderful horror movies to mention, but especially to those from the great Hammer films.
I don’t disagree about that classification of Diabel—when I first saw it I thought surely it was an influence on Sam Raimi.
Surely, and yet doubtful. It wasn’t even shown until after Evil Dead 2 was released, after all, being banned indefinitely and all.
Maybe it’s in one of these lists, but I recommend Carnival of souls (1962)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055830/
I saw it when I was 15 at midnight, alone, on television without expecting anything. I was litterally tetanized.
Maybe it’s a little dumb now, I’ve never checked it again (too scared ^^)
Some of these may be beyond ‘genre’ classifications, and some may be science fiction rather than horror, but… In no particular order:
Zigeunerweisen / Heat-Haze Theatre (Seijun Suzuki)
The Cremator (Juraj Herz)
Cure / Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Bug (William Friedkin)
Cat People / I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Torneur)
Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Tetsuo (Shin’ya Tsukamoto)
Ghost Stories (Masaki Kobayashi)
The Thing (John Carpenter)
Mother Joan of the Angels (Jerzy Kawalerowicz)
Day of the Dead (George Romero)
The Black Cat from the Grove (Kaneto Shindô)
The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson)
Carrie (Brian De Palma)
Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey)
Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees (Masahiro Shinoda)
Freaks (Tod Browning)
Aibohphobia
I don’t have any unspoken gems up my sleeve, but one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen is the final episode of Twin Peaks. Just sayin’.