9 Under-rated Horror Masterpieces By Directors You Love

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...