Most contemporary horror films don’t show a lot of imagination, since they’re either remakes or part of some ghastly trend like torture porn. But some films have survived beyond that crucial opening weekend to become cultural touchstones. With this week’s release of The Babadook, it’s worth looking back at some horror films that have stuck around, still scaring us years later.
1. The Blair Witch Project
(Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
The film that launched a million bad found-footage films – and an equal number of amusing YouTube parodies – is still pretty scary. A documentary crew (Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard) recount their search for the fabled Blair Witch, getting lost, separated and then, in a climax that people still aren’t clear about, becoming victims. Sure, it spawned a stupid sequel, but its techniques also helped create the gruesome [REC] franchise, the first of which could easily be on this list. GS
2. Cure
(Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)
Ringu and Audition wound up representing modern Japanese horror in the public consciousness, but Kurosawa’s merciless, allegorical creeper – about a cop (Kôji Yakusho) and a psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) investigating outbreaks of homicidal madness among apparently unrelated Tokyo residents is a far more disquieting accomplishment. What looks and sounds like an ordinary police procedural is actually a stealth delivery system for a nightmare – the Platonic ideal of a nightmare, really – that doesn’t stop just because the movie’s finished. NW
3. Kill List
(Ben Wheatley, 2011)
A pair of hit men (Neil Maskell, Michael Smiley) dispatched to murder some very bad people find the mission nowhere as simple as it seems. Wheatley’s second feature is a juggernaut pointed straight into the darkest depths of cinema – it’s Don’t Look Now by way of The Wicker Man (the good one, not the one with Nicolas Cage), in the best possible way. It’s also not really identifiable as horror until the last reel until then it’s just unbearably tense and unsettling. But good luck shaking off that final image. NW
4. The Descent
(Neil Marshall, 2005)
The new millennium featured a few attempts to make deep, dark, subterranean holes claustrophobic and really creepy – remember 2005’s The Cave and 2011’s Sanctum? But only Marshall’s The Descent has attained must-see status for its kick-ass group of female explorers (including Shauna Macdonald and Natalie Mendoza, who would later find a real-life horror story in the dangerous Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark musical), the slimy, pale, blind creatures they find down there and the ending that managed to be both thrilling and poignant. GS
5. Paranormal Activity
(Oren Peli, 2007)
Sure, the Paranormal Activity franchise descended fully into self-parody after five kicks at the digital-video can – a sixth, subtitled The Ghost Dimension, is due this Halloween – but Peli’s original packs a hell of a punch, especially if you see it in the all-encompassing darkness of a movie theatre. Peli understands the importance of dread: he teaches us to anticipate bad things when the time code on Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat’s bedroom footage speeds up and slows down, and makes the empty spaces of their home seem increasingly ominous and threatening. Come to think of it, are they empty? Are you sure? NW
