10 of my favorite horror films

I'm leaving out the obvious classics (Exorcist, Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, etc). I'm also leaving out Exorcist III, which is one of my all-time favorites, but since I've never found anyone who agrees with me, it gets an entire post of its own later on.

Don't Look Now
(1973, dir: Nicholas Roeg): Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in a slow-building creepfest set mostly in Venice. Somewhat infamous for its realistic sex scene, the thing that electrified me as a kid was the premise that getting glimpses of the future might, in inspiring you to try and avoid it, actually lead you straight into the arms of your terrible fate, as if the visions were given by malevolent and playful gods. Its climax also has an image so creepy it burned itself into my pliable, childish mind and hunkers there, to this day, grinning and gibbering.

Ravenous
(1999, dir: Antonia Bird): This is the most exhilarating movie you'll ever see about cannibalism. There's not a weak performance in it, not a weak element: music, script, editing, pacing, story, all right on. Once you've seen it, TRY and forget Robert Carlyle's manic fit in the snow outside the cave or Jeremy Davies' anguished cry, "He was licking my wound!" Or the marvelous endgame, in which two men caught in a bear-trap play Whoever-Dies-First-Gets-Eaten.

the Blood on Satan's Claw
(1971, dir: Piers Haggard): I'm perplexed and confounded to see the director for this; I've thought all this time it was my favorite Michael Reeves film. In any case, I caught it on late-night TV when I was a kid and was entranced and repelled by the patches of fur and especially the witch-dunking scene, which fascinated me. The best non-Hammer horror outing of its period.

Company of Wolves
(1985, dir: Neil Jordan): A chick-flick among horror films, this is a reworking of Angela Carter's werewolf stories from the Bloody Chamber.It follows fever-dreams in the troubled sleep of a girl just tumbling off the edge of puberty. Everything in the film is symbolic, as in a dream. Sound awful? Weirdly, it's not, largely due to the world Jordan creates with meticulous care: a world of nightmarish fecundity in which nature is constantly encroaching and man constantly battling it back. It's filled with strange, good images (Terence Stamp as the Prince of Darkness, brooding on a memento mori in the back of a limousine driving through a village in the Dark Ages) and performances (Angela Lansbury as Red Riding Hood's very disturbing grandmother).

Prophecy
(1995, dir: Gregory Widen): Who wouldn't love to live in a Miltonian universe in which angels vie with men for the love of God, in which the heavens are perpetually rent by war between seraphim, where Christopher Walken is the ruthless archangel Gabriel and Viggo Mortensen, best of all, is Lucifer? For two hours and two sequels, you can! Revel in the Manichaean angst, and don't be afraid of the sequels: the first one, especially, is well worth the effort (look close for a cameo by Glenn Danzig).

Dead Zone
(1983, dir: David Cronenberg): Gripping and unpretentious rendering of the Stephen King classic. Christopher Walken gives a brilliantly low-key performance as a man who emerges from a coma with unnatural powers, and you'll never watch the West Wing easily once you've seen Martin Sheen's powermad senator Greg Stillson.

Night of the Demon
(1957, dir: Jacques Tourneur): The British cut of the great, atmospheric chiller based on an MR James story about rationalists caught in the grip of black magic. I never get tired of watching it.

Angel Heart
(1987, dir: Alan Parker): Some of us remember a time when Mickey Rourke was heralded as the De Niro of his generation, and this is his best work. It's after WWII and Rourke's unkempt, charming PI who has an inexplicable fear of chickens follows a missing persons case steeped in voodoo from New York to New Orleans. Under Parker's unfailingly deft hand the sense of dread grows to unbearable levels. Music, flashback and strange images weave a hypnotic spell, and if it weren't for two badly miscalculated elements (the glowing eyes and the obviousness of the name Louis Cyphre), this would be a perfect movie. The rumour at the time was that the sex scenes cost Lisa Bonet her career as a Cosby girl.

The Legend of Hell House
(1973, dir: John Hough): Richard Matheson adapted this one from his own source material; think of it as the Haunting of Hill House on steroids. Three psychic investigators and one spouse spend a week at Hell House to plumb the secrets of its apparent evil. The remarkable thing about this one is that through daring use of camera angles and a near-brilliant manipulation of ambient sound Hough brings the house to life, makes it a constant, lurking, and genuinely frightening character through whose eyes we see much of the action. Some overwrought acting (I'm looking at you, Roddy McDowell) and absurd plot points, but well worth it.

the Fool Killer
(1965, dir: Servando Gonzalez): Beautifully filmed in B&W, this is a good one to watch while feverish or sleep-deprived for the full, dream-like effect. Reminiscent of Charles Laughton's great Night of the Hunter, it follows a boy (Edward Albert) on his travels through post-Civil War America. He's on the run and he hardly knows from what, but whatever it is it's epitomized in his mind by the mythical demon of the title who may or may not be his mysterious travelling companion. The tent-revival scene is a surreal moment of genius, not to be missed. Out of print on VHS only, last time I checked.