100 Greatest Horror Movies Of All Time
19. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, may sound like a gruesome story, but it's actually remarkably tame by today's standards. In any case, together - with films like Black Christmas and Halloween - Hooper's tale of a group of teens falling afoul of a grizzly group of slaughterhouse inbreds pioneered the slasher genre.
Irrespective of its perceived lack of gore, or its long contested social commentary, Texas Chainsaw remains one of the most unnerving horror films of the 20th century. Partially inspired by the grim real-life case of Ed Gein, Leatherface, with his mask made of human skin and his house adorned with human furniture, is the stuff of nightmares, and a key reason why the film is so iconic.
Texas Chainsaw is a gruelling experience, but one worth seeing through to its iconic ending.
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18. Hereditary
Part of what feels like a new wave of more considered, less formulaic horror, 2018’s Hereditary was quickly labelled one of the most frightening movies ever made; a real slow-burn of clench-release tension, and the perfect utilisation of character-based creepiness with a side of the supernatural.
Best of all? There’s not ONE jump-scare; not one reliance on a volume spike to unnerve you. Instead we get a tightrope of misdirection, keeping the tension sky-high as director Ari Aster injects in-camera frights, “Did I just see that?” moving objects and a captivatingly intense performance from Toni Collette, playing an increasingly unhinged mother struggling to keep her family together after the passing of her weirdly ritualistic grandmother.
An original score only ices off the cake, as Hereditary’s ending is the right side of divisive genius, leaving us with enough information for a solid interpretation that retroactively elevates the entire experience.
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17. Halloween
Michael Myers. Halloween. The Night He Came Home. What else needs to be said about John Carpenter and Debra Hill’s 1978 classic?
Halloween may not have been the first slasher movie, but it almost certainly (although perhaps unwittingly) pioneered the genre’s greatest tropes. Any discussion of the film, however, is incomplete without addressing the genius creation of Michael Myers - the living embodiment of pure evil, given human form.
Of course, the true horror of Halloween lies in its setting, and in the real-life roots of Myers' origin. Haddonfield was the very definition of a sleepy American suburb, and Myers was just another man in a mask. Throw in Donald Pleasance's chilling character portrait of Michael possessing the "devil's eyes", the ghostly visage of Bill Shatner and Jamie Lee Curtis' feature film debut, and it's easy to see why Halloween endures as one of the horror genre's defining productions.
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