10 Fun Horror Films You Need To See

It began when William Castle, drinking coffee near the Samuel Goldwyn studio, saw Vincent Price and offered him the lead role in a movie about a millionaire who invites six people to spend the night in a haunted house. Castle secured the actor’s services with his description of the film’s climax: “Your skeleton scares the sh*t out of your wife and she loses her balance and falls into the vat of acid!”

The film was House On Haunted Hill (1958) whose onscreen ghosts were manifested in theaters as wire-supported inflatable skeletons that emerged at crucial moments to frighten the audience. It was a cheap, semi-satirical picture, part ghost train ride and part publicity stunt. 

The idea that horror could be silly, gimmicky, tongue-in-cheek fun was an appealing one, but as the 1960s progressed, genre films instead became more explicit, with one of the decade’s biggest hits, Night Of The Living Dead (1968), ushering in a trend for downbeat endings. It wasn’t until the likes of John Landis, Joe Dante and John Carpenter began making films crammed with in-jokes that horror became fun again.

The following films are all full of silly, tongue in cheek humour and, most of all, fun. In this era of soulless reboots, you should check them out.

Blood Diner is your typical story of two brothers who, years after their serial killer uncle died in a police shooting, decide to resurrect him as a talking brain in a jar. He then tells them to resurrect the Lumerian goddess Sheetar by calling her forth at a “Blood Buffet” where her spirit must be summoned into a body stitched together from the cadavers of murder victims.

A film that delights in its puerility, revels in its cartoonish outragousness and never goes over the top when it can ascend into the stratosphere, Blood Diner is a pseudo-sequel to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (1963). According to the Godfather of Gore himself, he was due to helm a straight sequel (which he did years later) but Jackie Kong, the picture’s director, had other plans.

A volatile director, dubbed “Queen Kong” by cast and crew, she often pulled colleagues aside for a “Kongfrontation” (a word seen on a billboard in one sequence), which perhaps explains the level of frantic energy that permeates the film. Blood Diner might be clumsy, mean-spirited and offensive, but you have to admit: it’s never boring.