5. The Stepfather (1987)
This plays on a very simple nightmare, what if you father was a serial killer? What makes this one even scarier is that it's best on the real life killing of John List who murdered his family and calmly left the area to take on a new identity. List was a man of stricture and religion who believed his family were going to hell because they didn't go to church and his daughter had been caught smoking and wandering the streets. They'd let him down. It's a terrifying idea and one that Joseph Reuben (who would revisit similar themes in the big budget Sleeping With The Enemy) took on from mystery writer Donald E. Westlake's screenplay. The main reason this film works though is because of Terry O'Quinn's masterful performance as Jerry Blake. Similar to Frederick Clegg in The Collector, you actually begin to feel sympathy with this man who, as we know from the opening shots, has already murdered at least one family. He is a real estate salesman who simply wants 'a little order round here'. Unfortunately, when things go wrong with the relationship with his daughter, Jerry begins to make plans again... Hurt perhaps by two terrible sequels and a pointless remake, this is a brilliant, forgotten nightmare movie. The terror that his daughter Stephanie (Jill Schoelen) feels when she sees her father angrily talking to himself in the basement or when his wife Susan (Shelley Hack) has to remind him 'who he is' are played straight and, for that, feel horribly real for an american psycho film. Strip away all the horrible gloss and stars of the overrated Fatal Attraction and you find this film. A tightly wound, family drama which leaks psychotic tendencies.