“Psycho,” 1960
Alfred Hitchcock, one of horror’s original superstar directors, gave “Psycho,” the story of a runaway secretary who’s stolen money only to find terror at the Bates Motel.
“Night of the Living Dead,” 1968
The zombie craze started quite a bit earlier than “The Walking Dead,” kiddos. George A. Romero’s classic 1968 zombie film helped create ?the genre.
“The Exorcist,” 1973
It seems that every other horror movie these days is about an exorcism of some sort, and they’re all garbage — probably because they’re not the original: William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist.”
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” 1974
His name is Leatherface because he wears a mask made of human skin. He wields a chainsaw and lives in a family of cannibals. He’s inspired hoards of remakes , but this Halloween, check out the original.
“Halloween,” 1978
Before Rob Zombie, there was John Carpenter and his terrifying vision of the man in the mask, Michael Myers. Having murdered his sister when he was just 6 years old, “Halloween” is the story of this terrifying icon on the run from the mental institution on his now-famous Halloween hunt.
“The Shining,” 1980
When you put the brilliance of Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King and Jack Nicholson together in one horror film, you get nothing but cinematic brilliance. If you haven’t seen “The Shining,” plan on a movie night to see Nicholson yelling the famous, “Here’s Johnny!” in all of its glory.
“Scream,” 1996
Is it horror? Is it comedy? Yes. Very 1990s, very campy, but altogether terrifying, “Scream” is impressive on many levels, most notably, the fact that it has so many levels.
“The Blair Witch Project,” 1999
By now, we’re all nauseatingly sick of the “found footage” genre, but when “The Blair Witch Project” was released, it was fresh and horrifying.
“Saw,” 2004
Despite Hollywood’s way of killing anything that is good by giving it half a dozen sequels, the original “Saw” stands as one of the best horror films of all time — truly scary, blood everywhere and definitely a fun ride with an ending you won’t soon forget.
“The Conjuring,” 2013
It’d been a while (like, years) since a horror flick as good as “The Conjuring” had come out when the film was released, so this one took audiences by storm with how scary it was — reminding us of the true beauty of this genre.
What the expert says
Weekend spoke with horror film expert Joshua Coonrod, a Ph.D. candidate at IU studying independent horror film and currently teaching in the Department of Communication and Culture. Here’s what he had to say about the horror genre.
“It creates very basic visceral pleasures — it’s what a lot of people call a ‘body genre.’ So no matter how society or culture changes over time, fear is an instinct that we react to very specifically, very emotionally, in a way that doesn’t really change. So that idea that people will always be interested in having movies that push on their senses, well, the sense of fear is one that’s always going to be kind of ingrained in the human experience, and as long as that’s there, people will theoretically want to test it with horror films.”
