2. Psycho
The shower scene, Bernard Herrmann's score, the blonde, the lone male, the big reveal. Alfred Hitchcock's most impactful film is also his purest. Psycho was intended to look like a cheap exploitation picture, shot in monochrome and on a pretty paltry budget. But it ended up being his most enduring; one of the finest films ever made and certainly one of the finest horror films ever made. Building from a traditional Hitchcock premise (the ordinary person in a criminal situation), Psycho grows into a manifestation of our worst fears: that one day we could end up in a strange and alien place having committed a crime - when we'd always told ourselves that we were good - and that, once there, we'd be set upon by a madman, and that we'd die, and the last significant thing we would've ever done on this spinning rock we call home would've been to commit that the crime, the one we never thought we were capable of.