![]() With Suspiria I wanted 400 degrees,’ giallo auteur Diaro Argento famously said about his supernatural slasher. ‘Fear is a 370-degree centigrade body temperature. Farrow and Cassavetes’s performances as a couple disintegrating serve Polanski well in his attempt to make the potential alienation of everyday family life feel horrific, and the faux-naive score, evoking lullabies, makes the whole affair feel doubly creepy in the most heady way possible.Ĭast: Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio BucciĪn elegantly choreographed dance of death There are some more explicit key scenes – a potential nighttime rape and a chilling climax – that serve to get right under our skin without making the whole premise seem ridiculous. This is the intelligent, subtle face of horror, as Polanski limits the specifics to a minimum and keeps us guessing as to how much is going on merely in the mind of Mia Farrow’s character as she comes to believe she’s been impregnated by a creepy bunch of well-to-do Manhattanites with a connection to the occult. It’s hard enough moving into a flat and trying to start a family without having to wrestle with the enveloping suspicion that your new neighbours might be satanists dead-set on parenting a demon child via you. And make no mistake: The Exorcist is most definitely a horror film: though it may be filled with rigorously examined ideas and wonderfully observed character moments, its primary concern is with shocking, scaring and, yes, horrifying its audience out of their wits – does mainstream cinema contain a more upsetting image than the crucifix scene? That it still succeeds, almost four decades later, is testament to Friedkin’s remarkable vision.Ĭast: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon In cutting from the clanging bazaars of Iraq to the quiet streets of Georgetown, in blending dizzying dream sequences with starkly believable human drama, Friedkin created a horror movie like no other – both brutal and beautiful, artful and exploitative, exploring wacked-out religious concepts with the clinical precision of an agnostic scientist. The first to achieve that blend with absolute certainty was The Exorcist – which perhaps explains its position as the unassailable winner of this poll. The first film to attempt to bring the two together was Rosemary’s Baby, but Polanski’s heart clearly belonged to the surreal. On the other, there were the more outrageous dream-horrors popular in Europe, the work of Hammer Studios in the UK and Mario Bava and Dario Argento in Italy, films that prized artistry, oddity and explicit gore over narrative logic. □ The 15 scariest horror movies based on true storiesĬast: Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Max von Sydowīy the ’70s, horror had divided into two camps: on one hand, there were the ‘real life’ terrors of Psycho and Night of the Living Dead, films that brought horror into the realm of the everyday, making it all the more shocking. □ Cinema’s creepiest anthology horror movies Written by Tom Huddleston, Cath Clarke, Dave Calhoun, Nigel Floyd, Phil de Semlyen, David Ehrlich, Joshua Rothkopf, Nigel Floyd, Andy Kryza, Alim Kheraj and Matthew Singer All of them, though, are guaranteed to scare the hell out of you. Some are bloody and grotesque, while others manage to raise the hairs on your arm with mere suggestion. Among our picks, you’ll find traditional slashers that jab at our most elemental instincts for survival and psychological terrors that probe the most deep-seated human fears. In turn, that’s caused a reappraisal of the genre’s past as a whole – and as this list of the greatest horror movies of all-time proves, horror has never deserved its status as filmdom’s second-class citizen. Oscar statuettes have still been hard to come by, but the likes of A Quiet Place, Get Out and Hereditary have helped elevate the standing of horror among critics, while crowdpleasers like M3GAN and The Conjuring sequels are among the only non-MCU films consistently bringing audiences to the theatre post-pandemic. Even the likes of Psycho, The Shining and The Thing took years to become widely regarded as classics. It’s not entirely without reason: at the dawn of the VHS era, murdering horny teenagers proved to be the easiest way to a quick buck, leading to a wave of cheap schlock overtaking multiplexes and video store shelves. Fans loved it, sure – for its most hardcore adherents, it’s not just a genre but a lifestyle – but critics generally regarded it with derision, and award shows have often ignored it all together. For a long time, horror was treated like cinema’s devil-horned stepchild. ![]()
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