This is a list of my favorite horror films. There’s lots of gay shit, some body image shit, and several black cats.
36.) A BAY OF BLOOD (1971)
A Bay of Blood is often discussed in relation to Friday the 13th and the latter film’s beat-for-beat retread of several of the former’s kills. Though an obvious influence on all later slashers, Bay actually bears little resemblance to Friday, and that comparison draws undue attention to the teenagers who invade Bay early in the film only to be quickly dispatched. Indeed, they are gone before the film’s halfway point, and Bay spirals from there, quickly departing from traditional slasher formula and culminating in deviously sinister, nihilistic fashion. Its twisting plot, beginning with its unconventional opening, can be hard to follow as secrets emerge in flashbacks and the body count grows higher, but its mostly convoluted thrills manage to, like the best slashers, be great fun.
35.) The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
The Creature from the Black Lagoon is a very gay Universal monster movie. Its central emotional conflict, aside from the ecological tension with the eponymous Creature (Ricou Browning), involves the constant jostling of two wet, bare-chested men in tight shorts. Creature’s most evocative wrestling match sees the Creature himself tangling and twirling with male lead Mark (Richard Denning) in an underwater ballet. The most stunning scenes of the film are its serene and haunting underwater sequences, which were among the first widely distributed underwater footage. The expansive sensory experience of these moments grounds the film’s ecological messages in intimate connections with a natural landscape.
34.) Tourist Trap (1979)
Tourist Trap is an odd little film with a variety of ideas. It’s a delirious mashup of seemingly Scooby Doo-inspired haunted house scares (e.g. eyes that follow you around the room), Texas Chainsaw grimy exploitation realism, supernatural telekinesis a la Carrie, and repeated mentions of a Psychoesque new highway that’s diverted traffic away from the eponymous museum/motel haunt. That’s not even including Tourist Trap’s distinctive scream-moaning mannequins or its maddening funhouse score or its killer who possesses far more personality and is far more terrifying than many of the slasher greats. All of these elements are skillfully synthesized to create a deeply disturbing and innovative slasher film.
33.) Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)
Amidst the unsettling violence for which Silent Night, Deadly Night earned its notoriety, the film considers our failure to recognize and adequately respond to trauma. Beneath its exploitation-style exterior and potentially silly premise of a (sexy) killer Santa, Night is actually a carefully rendered bildungsroman; its unexpectedly extensive investment in the formative years of its protagonist, Billy, reveals the circumstances that lead to the film’s eventual massacre. Its structure is only one of its many strange—even queer—choices: my favorite scene and the scene that introduces an adult-aged Billy tilts to reveal his well-muscled frame with explicit dialogue describing his unexpected fitness and maturity. The moment, like so many in the film, is complicated, both celebrating viewers’ desire while implicating the complicity of their gaze.
32.) The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
The Cabin in the Woods has everything. It defies classification because it’s so unlike most horror films. It shares a lineage with “meta” horror films like Scream that explicitly critique established horror formulas, but unlike Scream’s commentary directed specifically at slashers, Cabin aims its critical eye at all of horror. Cabin’s commentary is most effective on the first watch, and subsequent viewings reveal a somewhat lackluster middle section. However, when experienced fresh, its thrills, particularly its cacophonous third act, are exceptional. Even on subsequent watches, Cabin’s ballet of tropes and the slow erosion of its characters’ nuances remain devastating and recontextualizing.
31.) The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
The Return of the Living Dead takes the zombie movie in an entirely new direction. Return’s ever-evolving structure and presence ensure that its thrills are never anticipated. The characters that traditionally die first in horror don’t die first in Return, and the characters that I expected to be hollow were far from it. In fact, it’s the emotional vulnerability of its key characters, particularly some of its teenagers, and the film’s resolve to capture and reveal its characters’ pain that makes Return special. Return lingers on the pressure and pain that its characters endure, their agony, not sadistically but empathetically, investing them with humanity; even the zombies retain humanity, much like Romero’s did in Day the year Return was released.
30.) The Voices (2014)
Marjane Satrapi’s The Voices is a strange film. The uniquely odd sensibilities of Satrapi and her cast (Ryan Reynolds, Anna Kendrick, and Gemma Arteron among others) congeal into a terrifically insane circus show. The Voices is disturbingly real, its most horrific images that of mundane sordidness, of animal feces and trash. However, it treats its characters with refreshing intimacy and kindness, especially its women, even when they endure terrible violence, but also its protagonist, a lonely and surprisingly self-aware serial killer. Oh, and its twisted and joyous end-credits sequence is one of my favorite scenes in horror. Ever.
29.) The Stepford Wives (1975)
The most frightening thing about The Stepford Wives is its portrait of palpable malaise. That mundane but potent dissatisfaction pervades the performance of its protagonist, Joanna (Katharine Ross), as she drifts through empty spaces early in the film. Yet, Joanna also exudes intelligence and determination in her interactions, making the eventual terrors she encounters more moving. Throughout, The Stepford Wives wisely centralizes Joanna’s core relationships, especially her charming friendship with Bobbie (Paula Prentiss), only to depict their decay and Joanna’s growing despair as potential allies and sources of support disappear. Her malign husband (Peter Masterson) is never overtly menacing but instead frightening because of his absence in the domestic sphere and complete emotional unavailability. He reeks of apathy, his misogyny just barely, and perhaps never even, veiled.
28.) Hellraiser (1987)
Clive Barker’s strange, sexy sensibilities have often spoken to me. I grew to love his style reading his fiction—particularly his short story “In the Hills, the Cities” in his collection Books of Blood, a story whose outlandish brutality can only be captured by Barker’s surreal prose and would fail horribly if recreated on film. Barker’s prose often fails to translate in adaptation, but Hellraiser is one of the few films to succeed. Its wildly inventive plot and complex web of interconnected characters are unpredictable, yet those characters remain grounded even while surrounded by absurdity. Hellraiser succeeds above any other Barker adaptation to envision unique images: sweaty, sensual bodies become flayed exhibits of grotesque grandeur with the aid of its satisfyingly practical effects.
27.) Saint Maud (2019)
Director Rose Glass is a master of stunningly sublime visual imagery. Saint Maud is the story of a weird, ordinary life, a small life, and every so often, that life is interrupted by transcendent light, experiences of spirituality rendered in evocative detail. Throughout, desire remains a potent component of its dirty, hypnotic haze, and its increasingly desperate eponymous lead (Morfydd Clark) burrows through every scene until she rises in the film’s final moments, crowned with a scepter of glory, almighty, all high. Saint Maud is devastating and captivating and unique.
26.) American Psycho (2000)
For some time, I feared that I was Patrick Bateman. I don’t want to murder people. I haven’t murdered anyone. But I have at points in my life compulsively worked out and ate right and slept well and used moisturizers and overcleaned. At times, I’m afraid that I envy and am attracted to Christian Bale in American Psycho, that the Eugen Sandow-obsessed part of me is so fucking overwhelming despite how long and how ardently I’ve tried to resist it. Sometimes, I’m afraid when I write, like I am now, I sound like Bateman when he talks about music. I want to write about the way Bale performs Bateman with aplomb, the way he shimmies to “It’s Hip to Be Square” and delivers masterfully measured voice-overs, and indeed I just have written about these things, but really, I can only say: I am afraid of Patrick Bateman, and I am afraid that I’m anything like him because he is a monster.
25.) Sleepaway Camp (1983)
Sleepaway Camp is a twisted film. The majority of its characters are horrible, the most vile and disgusting things you’ll see onscreen with Angela’s Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould) turning in a particularly disturbing performance. Though ostensibly a fun, light slasher, it can be hard to watch because its monsters feel so real and familiar. However, the film, purposefully or unpurposefully, humanizes its queer characters—they’re the only decent people in the film—while also complicatedly silencing and sidelining them. Ultimately, Sleepaway Camp is a masterful exploration of sex, gender, and childhood: a condemnation of the ways that children are overly sexualized and socialized to perform specific roles while made ill-equipped to have respectful and emotionally intimate sexual and social relationships.
24.) Creep (2014)
When done well, found footage creates an unmatched intimacy and immediacy that’s deeply unsettling in its verisimilitude; Creep is an exemplar of the found-footage genre. Creep’s delightfully uncanny lead (Mark Duplass) crosses boundaries of acceptability with calculated precision. Impossibly, Duplass’ performance appears almost innocuous yet obviously unhinged, a sensitive balance that invites viewers to observe the gears spinning behind his gaze. The tension built by the cat-and-mouse game Duplass enacts with his victim is unlike any I’ve experienced in horror, and the eroticism underlying the relationship between the two subtly complicates the pair’s exchanges. Creep interrogates ideas of sincerity and trust held by both its characters and the audience. Complimenting its layered core performances, Creep’s editing delivers a perfectly tight, unrelenting pace as the film repeatedly denies audience expectations with its understated reveals.
23.) Ring リング (1998)
Most people know the basic premise of Ring: there’s this tape, and anyone who watches it dies seven days later. Knowing that setup, it’s hard to imagine a film actually showing said tape or that the tape could contain the most deeply, deeply unsettling series of images I’ve ever seen. It takes extreme confidence to show an audience the tape and incredible imagination to make the tape feel so frighteningly unnatural, but Ring succeeds at both. Like with the tape, the film accomplishes all of its most visceral terrors through a combination of grainy black-and-white images and distorted sounds; those bits of TV-static-filled footage evoke an unrivaled otherworldly horror. But Ring’s more immediate appeal is its emotionally developed characters. It begins with a scene of two teenage girls discussing the urban legend at the film’s core. The intimacy between the two girls, their laughter and expressions, feels truer than the teen relationships of nearly any western slasher film, and I feel much worse when the underlying dread of the girls’ interaction becomes realized minutes later. Similarly, the intimacy between Ring’s protagonist and her son feels adeptly drawn, and the son—a young child, characters frequently misused in horror films—displays remarkable comprehension and emotional intelligence. Ring’s use of urban and distinctly technological myth-making is unique to its time, in the waning years of the millennium, and place, due to Japan’s highly compact and metropolitan nature. That specific variety of folklore exists elsewhere—notably in Pulse and the video game Persona 2—but never quite as effectively.
22.) Hour of the Wolf (1968)
Fear, jealousy, loneliness. Hour of the Wolf renders these emotions in unexpected ways with surreal, horrific accuracy. It’s a disarming film, often cacophonous, chaotic, but sometimes tender. Hour of the Wolf foregrounds intimacy, recognizing the gestures couples share: familiar jokes, familiar touches. More significantly, Hour of the Wolf tracks the moments when a single partner in a relationship reckons with its collapse, the accumulating wreckage. At various points in the film, Alma Borg (Liv Ullmann) reaches out to her husband (Max von Sydow), describing the way she wants to grow old with him, showing him her accounting of their finances. I identify with each of these careful approaches—moments she’s no doubt rehearsed in her head—and her aching desire for connection. I recognize the ways she asks for appreciation, affection, to be acknowledged.
21.) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is intensely naturalistic. There’s a reason so many people believed its opening-title-card claim that its story is real. Of a cohort with films like Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and Straw Dogs, Texas Chainsaw’s brutal, unflinching grittiness is a unique product of 1970s exploitation. Those 1970s exploitation films are the most viscerally terrifying horror films I’ve experienced, and Texas Chainsaw stands above the rest. Its use of naturalistic sound effects—that camera shutter sound—and sleazy, filthy sets eats away at your resolve and sense of complacency. No other horror film has left me as anxious and unnerved, watching my bedroom door as hours pass in darkness.
20.) Lady in a Cage (1964)
Lady in a Cage is wickedly smart. From its sharp opening title sequence that ends with gawking cars driving by a dead dog in the street, the film’s jagged perspective is clear. The mad street block where the action takes place cynically captures a vision of humanity where people ignore violence until it’s impossible not to. This outside world mirrors widow Cornelia’s (Olivia de Havilland) own existence within her opulent bubble, doting on her dapper son with undue affection. At the outset of the film, he abandons her, leaving a note expressing his discontent with their relationship, but she becomes stuck in her private elevator before she can read it. Trapped, she finds herself the subject of an invasion. Her son’s note is a planted thread; when it’s finally pulled, he’s explicitly outed in a moment especially revelatory for the time of the film’s release. Cornelia, her son, and the gaggle of invaders reveal their depth through small, exquisitely rendered moments: performance and writing choices. In particular, Cornelia’s trials, including her painfully near-successful efforts to escape the elevator before the invasion, show her growth throughout the film. By the film’s end, I scream at Cornelia to become the dead dog in the street, to force the violence she’s endured on the self-absorbed people passing.
19.) Stage Fright (1987)
The first time I watched Stage Fright, my black cat, named Lucifer, laid curled in my lap purring. Early in the movie, it’s revealed that Stage Fright’s black cat is also named Lucifer, a revelation that filled me with joy. Later, this shot happened, my own cat still on my lap, and I lost my shit. Necessary spoilers: the cat lives.
Suffice to say, I’m biased with Stage Fright. Still, there’s plenty to love. Stage Fright is a fun slasher filled with effective images: the killer’s bizarre owl head and the many times the film engages the theatre stage as a part of its violence. Furthermore, slashers rarely consider the emotional weight of their massacres, but Stage Fright meaningfully interrogates, however briefly, the trauma its Final Girl endures.
18.) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
There’s little I can say about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that hasn’t been said; its genius is widely celebrated. Through its renowned, imaginatively designed sets, the film creates hauntingly uncanny images that have never and will never be replicated. I’m consistently drawn in by its edges and contours, the dreamy aesthetic of its carefully crafted frame. Caligari is uniquely a product of early cinema, and it understands the power of visual storytelling in the cinematic medium better than any other horror film.
17.) Seige (1983)
With police on strike and streets silent, a group of homophobes walk into a bar. Inside, several skinny fags and a couple punk women hang about, the bartender in a sailor outfit complete with ascot. The bartender pulls a gun on the invaders, and the fags cheer him on. The invaders disarm and kill him, but the fags see. We are witnesses. The invaders line them up to execute, one by one. A single survivor escapes, but as long as one fag lives, our stories are told.
After the early-film massacre at the gar bar, the lone survivor seeks refuge in a mostly empty apartment building, its only residents a clear found family: two blind friends, a couple, and one nerdy, survivalist neighbor. The homophobes’ assault to eliminate all witnesses to their crimes follows in brutal and agonizing fashion. Delightfully inclusive, Seige presents fags as heroes; the blind friends use their evidently super hearing to scout for the group. The group defends their home from homophobes with household weapons and a series of traps, all while the film maintains a beautiful sense of architecture and space, emphasizing the tension of every moment. Every hero dead is a shattering loss. Siege is a gem.
16.) The Night of the Hunter (1955)
At times, The Night of the Hunter plays like Huck Finn meets a serial killer complete with a boat ride downriver. At others, it’s more obviously a fairy tale, the story of Bluebeard, Rev. Henry Powell (Robert Mitchum), killing a series of widows, but Powell’s also the Big Bad Wolf, always in sheep’s clothing, always howling. The Night of the Hunter is impeccably directed, a truly cinematic and stylistic film filled with haunting images, the most terrifying of which are Powell’s sinister figure continually framed in shadow, Caligari’s influence clearly evident. Its folkloric simplicity facilitates an unexpectedly ethereal melancholy, and its performances, particularly the children’s, create remarkably nuanced characters.
15.) Hellbent (2004)
Advertised as the first ever gay slasher, Hellbent is a cheaply made, often silly film. The experience of watching it, especially early in the film, is that of unending eye-rolls at its truly cringe-inducing, ever-increasing series of ridiculous antics. It begins with a scene of two guys making out in a car filled with balloons—“they’re for my mom,” one of them says—that ends when one of the men is decapitated while receiving a fellatio-adjacent foot rub. Hellbent only gets wilder from there. However, those antics unexpectedly evolve into a slightly more nuanced and dread-filled experience. Hellbent’s awkward early scenes, mostly made so by the film’s minuscule budget and goofy script, emphasize the social discomfort of its protagonist, Eddie (Dylan Fergus). Eddie grows more interesting and complicated throughout, and by the end of Hellbent, after a couple of genuinely frightening final encounters with the killer, Eddie emerges as a dorky, eyepatch-wearing hero. For me, the simple moments of Eddie trying to keep his friends safe on a night out or trying to hit on a cute guy make Hellbent special.
Check out chapter 5 of Darren Elliott-Smith’s Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins for more on Hellbent.
14.) The Wicker Man (1973)
The Wicker Man is a fascinating dissection of manhood, sexuality, religion, and otherness. The film is generally associated with its distinct atmosphere, that wickedly bizarre, pervasive sense of foreign “folk” that helped spawn an entire subgenre of horror. The film interrogates viewers’ assumptions with numerous scenes of alien rituals. In one, a group of young boys frolic with ribbons and sing about reproduction while girls sit studiously inside a classroom. In that scene and throughout, The Wicker Man’s all-important, musicalesque score informs its explorations of societal binaries; it contrasts the ostensibly natural Christian hymn of its opening scene with the equally spiritual yet earthier and folkier vocals of the rest of its score. While its score is stunning, The Wicker Man truly shines in its characterization of its prudish protagonist, Police Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward)—a figure quite reminiscent of Robert Mitchum’s Henry Powell in Night of the Hunter. Howie arrives on the island of Summerisle sneering and stomping, a perfect fool to foil the deliciously devious Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee). Perhaps the strangest scene in the film occurs when the innkeeper’s daughter (Britt Ekland) tries to seduce Howie through a wall. She sings and dances naked, pounding the wall and slapping her own body while the police sergeant prays to resist his growing ecstasy. Incredibly, The Wicker Man manages to make that parading lunacy work and even provides the scene a meaningful intentionality with a late-film reveal. That revelation and the film’s other revelations make The Wicker Man an enduring cultural force and an enjoyable watch.
Check out The Faculty of Horror’s episode on The Wicker Man.
13.) Fright Night (1985)
Jerry Dandrige (Chris Sarandon) is hot as fuck. Vampires have been associated with sex since their inception in literature, but Sarandon brings an unmatched sexual energy to his performance as Dandrige. Fright Night uses that carnal physicality to tell a vampire story with a decidedly suburban setting, a story in which the supernatural and Gothic seamlessly blend with the excess and gloss of 1980s America. The threat of Dandrige emerges from his ability to manipulate and seduce those that surround Fright Night’s protagonist, Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale). With its overt eroticism, it’s not difficult to see why the film has received so much attention for its gay subtext. Besides the spine-tinglingly titillating Sarandon performance at the center of the film, its wildly raucous, guitar-riff-filled score also takes center stage. That score highlights the film’s best moments, like Charley’s voyeuristic exchange with Dandrige through their adjacent bedroom windows as the vampire is about to feast on a naked woman or when Charley’s girlfriend spins through a nightclub dancing with Dandrige only to glimpse a mirror and find her reflection dancing alone. Somewhat surprisingly for a vampire film, Fright Night also flaunts one of the best werewolf transformation sequences in all of horror film, made more grueling by the desperate, dying whines of the wolf in question.
12.) An American Werewolf in London (1981)
When I first watched An American Werewolf in London as a teenager, I think I primarily loved it for its perpetually naked, very handsome lead, David (David Naughton). On revisiting American Werewolf, its love story feels hollow, despite the sexual agency of its female lead, yet it remains a quirky, very dark film. It opens with the smooth, jaunty tune of Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Moon” and continues that winking, stylistic tone throughout. Its early gothic terror of the moors, the apparent natural hunting ground of a werewolf, evolves organically to the devastation wrought when a werewolf tears through the Tube or a grimy porno theater and emerges on the streets on London. However, American Werewolf is most effective when David repeatedly hallucinates his dead best friend and eventually the victims of his own massacres who all encourage him to take his own life to prevent more death—one of said victims utters the phrase “carnivorous lunar activities.” It’s that twisted and comedic yet deeply cynical flair, accompanied by the strikingly gory visages of these deceased specters produced with remarkable special effects, that makes American Werewolf special. The effects deserve the praise they’ve received, especially the infamous transformation scene; even the fully transformed werewolf is wonderfully withheld from the audience except for rare shots, and in those shots, the beast they’ve constructed is quite frightening.
11.) Halloween (1978)
Halloween’s effectiveness is largely the result of its music. That’s not entirely fair, and yet it’s true, evidenced not only by me but by its initial would-be distributors who were unimpressed by an early pre-score cut. It’s not a slight when I say that the film relies on its score, because that score does everything. Halloween was an early favorite for me, a film formative in my understanding of the horror genre. It’s the film that I return to most often, because I’m never not in the mood for it. Once I hear its score and see that jack-o-lantern title, I’m there. It also has genuinely frightening moments like its killer-POV opening, Micheal’s ruminative head tilt after killing Bob, and Laurie’s desperate but unacknowledged pleas at her neighbors’ front doors. I learned to appreciate critical observation of horror film by engaging in the massive critical conversation surrounding Halloween, including Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Halloween has influenced all of horror film but it’s been particularly significant in my growth as a horror fan.
10.) Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Eyes Without a Face is lovely and quietly interior, its powerful visual storytelling emerging much like a silent film. It opens in Hitchcockian style with a woman driving down the highway, corpse in her back seat, the scene framed with stark high-contrast images and set to a carouselesque suspense score. Its momentum slows after this first scene, yet it remains enjoyable with the introduction of its protagonist (Édith Scob), a forcibly masked young woman who transcends in the final shots of the film. It’s exciting to see a woman in horror, especially in such an early entry, receive the compassion and display the agency of Christiane in Eyes Without a Face. For this and many other reasons, Eyes mirrors Psycho released the same year.
9.) Closet Monster (2015)
Body horror is queer horror. Closet Monster understands this. In its opening series of vignettes, Closet Monster catalogues the moments so many queer people experience in their early life: those small asides that beg you not to reveal yourself. The moments that define you in opposition to what you must not be. The thing you are. Closet Monster renders those moments in evocative detail while revealing the eroded layers of masculinity that structure them. I first saw Closet Monster in college when I was a few years older than the protagonist, Oscar (Connor Jessup). I’ve followed Jessup since, and I admire his vulnerability and charm. Closet Monster is a deeply personal and nearly perfect movie for me. It includes a Where the Wild Things Are-esque, fag-as-fuck makeover; a waterfall kiss; and intimate conversations with a hamster. Closet Monster is dreamy, unsettling, sometimes hilarious, and always heartfelt.
8.) Scream (1996)
Clearly, I have a fondness for slashers, and Scream is one of the best. Scream’s reputation is as the slasher that critiques other slashers. It emerged after a decade and a half of slashers dominating the horror genre and pointed at the things that had come before it. Yet, its satire is often, especially when watched today, heavy-handed and obvious. But Scream still holds a place in my heart because it does what slashers do best. Like Halloween, to whom Scream alludes more than any other movie, it captures a fundamental—however mundane and suburban—dread. For me, Scream rises above other slashers, because of its earnest, goofy performances rather than its satire. In particular, Courteney Cox, especially considering where she was in her career, and Matthew Lillard are perfectly quirky and outlandish. Additionally, like many of the films on this list, Scream has an incredibly effective opening, adroitly balancing tension and scares with ridiculousness. More than anything, Scream is fun.
7.) Get Out (2017)
Get Out is unique in its position in time and culture. It emerged at a moment when critical conversations about race exploded (as they have often exploded, seemingly sudden in their appearance at the forefront of the cultural conversation despite nonwhite people knowing they are omnipresent, and they will never stop exploding), simultaneously igniting retaliatory increased racial tensions and violence. Get Out is explicitly engaged in that cultural moment, directly addressing concerns of state violence while employing the images of other modern activists and poets; in particular, the early scene of Chris hitting a deer, his emotional reaction to its body, and the film’s later uses of deer imagery (not to mention the film’s positioning of white womanhood and black manhood in horrific contrast) recall black buck stereotypes and Kate Clark’s Little Girl popularized in Claudia Rankine’s bestselling poetry collection Citizen. Additionally, Get Out’s director, Jordan Peele, has been remarkably forthcoming, readily discussing his film, refusing to withhold any of its secrets or restrict its access.
I am hardly the most interesting or valuable voice talking about Get Out. See this insightful Graveyard Shift Sisters’ post for all you could ever want on the film.
6.) Black Christmas (1974)
I would unequivocally rate Black Christmas as one of the most accomplished horror films ever made. Its characters are nuanced and interesting—its final girl is pregnant and seeking an abortion throughout the film, revealing the film’s unique investment in the gender politics of the period of its release—and its terrors are (literally in my case) goosebumps-inducing. I can’t overstate that it’s actually chilling: its most famous line, “The calls are coming from inside the house,” though not a reveal at all—it’s revealed from the start of the film that the killer is hiding in the house—still rattles the nerves and shakes the spine. Black Christmas demands watching.
5.) Knife+Heart (2018)
Knife+Heart’s exploration of the violation of queer bodies pains me more than the violence of any other horror film. It is traumatic. Yet, Knife+Heart ends with several scenes of profound sweetness and compassion. It demonstrates extraordinary empathy for even its darkest characters—both its lead and its killer—and highlights small moments of intimacy between them and the people they destroy with their actions. Its conclusion is ethereal and passionately romantic, yet its coda reminds viewers to be critical of romanticizing or obfuscating the incredible violence queer people endure. Knife + Heart resists simplicity while celebrating joy.
4.) Kuroneko 黒猫 (1968)
Kuroneko, translated “Black Cat,” begins with a still shot of a house and a treeline. Bird screeches echo in the distance. As if out of nowhere, a group of samurai emerge from the treeline, their descent upon the house almost imperceptible, their bodies one with the landscape; their presence is only revealed by the slight rustling of leaves and grass, but by the time I notice them, they’re at the door of the house. The whole film works this way, its terror a slow, creeping specter. Fog rolls across its sets, fabrics shift and wave in ghostly ways, and faces are often expressionless yet filled with emotion. I’ve mentioned that I have an affinity for black cats, right?
3.) Rift (2017)
Rift delivers sincere emotional intimacy between two gay men and terrifying home invasion moments. Its slow, contemplative pace emphasizes both the beauty and isolation of the Icelandic countryside. It delights in deliberate wandering, allowing its protagonists to be swallowed by their surroundings and one another. I love Rift, because it and its horror engage with gay men’s specific sexual and romantic experiences. A good deal of its horror and drama draw from the specificity of gay male promiscuity and anonymous hookups, yet the film never proselytizes stereotypes. Rift feels true. It allows its gay protagonists to be tender and affectionate toward one another, with one intensely warm scene leaving me in tears. Few horror films achieve Rift’s lovely balance of character drama and chilling terror, and no film in recent memory has moved me so deeply through its reflection of my own lived experience.
2.) Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Night of the Living Dead’s opening is beautifully concise and simple. The directness and randomness of the attack in the graveyard and the way Johnny brawls with the zombie, their wrestling bodies entangled, instills a specific fear for me. The zombies in the film are more mundane than zombies would grow to become; that graveyard zombie just looks like a slightly disheveled, strange-faced man, and it makes him more terrifying. The simplicity of Night’s zombies mirrors the smallness of the entire film, and that smallness creates a more appealing and identifiable atmosphere. Similarly, its opening, like the rest of the film, is shot inventively but quite cheaply and thus, for me, charmingly. The film’s oft-discussed racial politics are incredibly important, providing the film an enduring potency and intelligence. But they’re muted (as also oft-discussed by director George Romero), an unaddressed tension. That tension pervades the film and enhances the already endearingly independent production. Ultimately, I adore Night for its sophisticated yet uncomplicated approach.
Check out the Horror Noire book and documentary for more on Night of the Living Dead
1.) Psycho (1960)
I saw Psycho long before I was engaged in any of the cultural dialogue surrounding it. In my early teenage years, I watched a lot of horror films with my mom, mostly movies she’d watched as a teenager in the early eighties; she got me into the genre. One night, we watched Psycho, and my mom fell asleep, and I became enthralled by its menacing score and shadowy images, its measured crawl. I was captured by the depth and force of Janet Leigh’s performance and found the handsome Anthony Perkins twisted but irresistible. I tensed in horror when Perkins as Bates was revealed in the fruit cellar not because I was afraid of him—I adored him—but because I began to understand the way the world was afraid of me. I curled my toes as he sat wrapped in a blanket, dark eyes and a dark smile, the voice in his head ruminating over a fly, the frame withering, his face becoming skeletal.
Though remembered and praised almost exclusively for its infamous shower scene, its smaller moments are more emotionally powerful: Marion’s suspenseful road trip to the Bates Motel, the subtle deceptions and anxieties that pervade all of her interactions, and her dreadful encounter with Norman and his birds. Along with its terrific ending, these are the moments I remember and enjoy best.
I’m so pleased that Psycho wasn’t spoiled for me because Hitchcock was right in his determination that it be seen fresh. After my initial viewing, I became obsessed with Hitchcock’s filmmaking, seeking out Rope and Strangers on a Train and growing to secretly idolize Perkins and Farley Granger as queer icons. Psycho is my favorite horror film because that first midnight viewing changed me. It was the first time my queerness and love of horror became entangled. Psycho was my first movie love.
