Dominic Corry picks out some of the best classic scary flicks to watch this Halloween.
At its purest, Halloween is about being scared and enjoying it. There is no medium more adept at eliciting this kind of reaction than cinema, where the language of nightmares comes to vivid life before our eyes.
Here I will cite five classic chillers all worth revisiting for Halloween. They are each guaranteed to give you the willies in the best way possible. A lot of horror films are merely grisly, grim or gruesome. These five are scary. Good scary.
Dead of Night (1945)
Horror anthologies are making something of a comeback, and this timeless British classic is still the best one ever made. Exploiting the framing device with a creativity rarely replicated in the genre, Dead Of Night presents five creepy tales told by various guests attending a party at a secluded mansion. One of the segments is outright comedic, but most are superlatively creepy, especially the final sequence which contains cinema's definitive ventriloquism horror story.
Forget about The Exorcist, which is great, but also sombre, intense and exhausting. The Omen is just as scary but actually fun to watch. It's a particular joy to anticipate the elaborate "accidental" death scenes - their macabre elegance is well-suited to the joy of Halloween. The spirit of these set-pieces is ably carried these days by the equally enjoyable Final Destination series, also great Halloween viewing.
Scary movies, Halloween, The Omen and The Ring will send shivers up your spine.
Halloween (1978)
Too obvious? John Carpenter's proto-slasher classic is always worth revisiting because it holds up better than 100 per cent of the innumerable films it inspired. The invasive power of the 'there's no safety in the suburbs' message has not dissipated one bit, and Jamie Lee Curtis is timelessly great. The demonstrable reverence Carpenter shows for the masters of cinema makes Halloween a bridging film between an older, subtler notion of horror and the more pronounced modern style. To paraphrase the poster tagline, horror really came home with this film, and it never felt like a sanctum again. Thanks, Halloween!
Scary movies, Halloween, The Omen and The Ring will send shivers up your spine.
Creepshow (1982)
Like Dead of Night, this is a horror portmanteau with a novel framing device. Showing direct aesthetic reverence for the old EC horror comics in a manner that prefigured what Robert Rodriguez did with Sin City (2005), director George A Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead) and writer Stephen King (Christine, Misery) construct a day-glo/pitch black film filled with bright colours, dark humour and knowing scares. King himself plays the lead in one of the five segments, a hick who is engulfed by an alien moss. The sardonic tone may bouy some viewers through most of the film, but I challenge anyone not to be totally freaked out by the final segment - They're Creeping Up On You - in which a germ-phobic billionaire finds his hermetically-sealed apartment overcome with unwelcome guests. It's a pretty definitive depiction of a widely held fear, and it's guaranteed to get under your skin.
The Ring (2002)
Scary movies, Halloween, The Omen and The Ring will send shivers up your spine.
Many people think think that the American remake of Hideo Nakata's Japanese game-changer is a more effectively scary version of the story. I am one of them. The crazier aspects of the original kept me at arm's length, fear-wise, but I really leaned in to Gore Verbinski's stylish, relatively measured take. He shows a great awareness of horror convention, and dances around it delicately, building up tension like a maestro. I've seen this film many times, and it simply never stops being scary. Also: Hendo.
Bonus Modern Classic Chiller: It Follows (2014)
Scary movies, Halloween, The Omen and The Ring will send shivers up your spine.
This acclaimed indie horror very much lives up to its newly minted reputation. It shows a deep understanding of certain universal fears and exploits that very effectively. It also benefits greatly from its awareness, and subsequent subversion, of horror conventions, not just those of the cinematic kind. Watching this film was the last I got legitimately nervous in a movie theatre. I liked it.
• What are your favourite classic chillers? Comment below!
