Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Visceral in a way that modern murder porn like The Human Centipede could never muster, Tobe Hoopers micro budget classic relies on masterful suggestion rather than gratuitous gore. Unnerving from the start, the set up is textbook: innocent kids stumble upon creepy farm, kids get chased, kids are attacked by guy in mask. It’s probably the most uncomplicated, yet most horrifying horror movie ever made.
Alien
It’s not what you see; it’s what you think you see. Working on the simple idea that the frightened human mind can invent more horrifying imagery than anything he can put on screen, Ridley Scott crafts a tense atmosphere around a plot where little actually happens. Aboard the commercial spaceship Nostromo, the crew answers a distress signal from a nearby planet and pick up an accidental guest….
The Thing
Jaw-dropping visual effects aside, John Carpenter wins so epically here due to a finely tuned use of character and location. While the premise may sound simple (12 men stuck in an Arctic station while a shape shifting alien picks them off one by one), it’s the paranoia and suspicion that shreds the nerves, with the characters having no idea if they’re truly who (or what) they say they are.
Psycho
1960
Achingly innovative, Psycho is the proto-slasher. Without Psycho, there’d be no Halloween, no Friday the Thirteenth, and no Scream. It’s that simple. While the shower scene is legendary (and rightly so), such brutal bloodshed was groundbreaking at the time, packing 87 cuts into a frenzied 45 seconds, Hitchcock created perhaps the most iconic and perfectly timed shock in cinema history, and that’s just the beginning of it
Shining
Much as he did for sci-fi almost two decades earlier with 2001, Stanley Kubrick re-defines the horror genre with The Shining. Starring Jack Nicholson in career best form as a writer working as a caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains over winter. As his sanity unravels, his relationship with his son and wife comes under strain, and things take a very dark and unsettling turn