10 Best Slasher Films Of All Time

You’ve got to have a Dario Argento movie on a list like this, and Tenebrae is one of the Italian auteur’s most striking films, boasting arresting camerawork by Luciano Tovoli who also shot The Passenger. Its murder sequences, which include a limb amputation that Quentin Tarantino would re-use in Kill Bill, are set to an equally memorable synth-heavy music score composed by several former members of Goblin.

Speaking of the film’s influence, note the sequence where Argento’s louma crane moves around outside a house where two women are about to be murdered, peering through the windows like a voyeur. Five years later, Brian De Palma pulled off a similar shot while making The Untouchables.

Such was the film’s power that in March 1984 the BBFC cited it as one of the most offensive Video Nasties and, in order to keep it from corrupting British viewers, kept the uncut version off video shelves until 2003. The major bone of contention was the aforementioned amputation, a 4-second shot where a woman’s bloody stump continues to spray crimson across her apartment. Thanks to fans such as Tarantino, there was worse carnage on display at your local multiplex.