9 Under-rated Horror Masterpieces By Directors You Love
Get a load of these forgotten horror classics!
Horror is such a productive genre, with so many prolific filmmakers, that it’s hard to keep up with the headline hits sometimes, let alone the hidden gems that don't get the fanfare they deserve. This is particularly true as the years pass and absolute stone-cold masterpieces recede into obscurity, soon to be undeservedly forgotten, written off and ignored by critics and fans alike.
This is even true of some of the best work by the most well-known directors working in the genre. John Carpenter, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg - they've all made under-appreciated slices of genius that have somehow slipped under the radar.
But it's not just horror directors. Some of the biggest names in film have made great works of horror that need a little more love than they've received.
Us horror fans love to find weird old oddities, though, and it's a good job we do - there's all sorts of amazing stuff out there that needs discovering. This list shines a light under the dirty rocks of horror history, finding out what's squirming down there.
9. Prince Of Darkness
You know the hits: Halloween. The Thing. Escape From New York. Assault on Precinct 13. But none of John Carpenter’s movies before or since can equal Prince of Darkness, from 1987, for sheer skin-crawling creepiness.
A priest discovers an ancient vat of sentient green goo that has been locked in a church basement for centuries. An investigative team of scientists and theologians are brought in to work out what it is, and it's not long before an unstoppable string of eerie demonic possessions starts churning the team into mincemeat.
The central idea turns out to be full-tilt bananas. The essence of the antichrist is contained in the slime, and it needs to inhabit human hosts in order to bring Satan into the world and initiate his reign of chaos. But it absolutely works: Prince of Darkness features plenty of first-rate scares, a pitch-perfect central performance by Donald Pleasance, nauseating make-up effects, a cameo by Alice Cooper, and one of the most iconic dream-cum-hallucination scenes in all 1980s horror.
It's one of those braincurdlers that gets under your skin, too. You won't want to look in the mirror for a while after watching this...