The 25 Greatest Horror Films of the Past Quarter Century, Part Four

Here’s the fourth and penultimate installment of my list of the twenty-five greatest horror films from the past quarter century, starting from the bottom and gradually heading to the top by the end of this year. We’ve reached the Top Ten, just in time to provide some horrific holiday cheer. 

Here’s a link if you missed the third installment here’s the link. I’ll try to stay as spoiler-free as possible for recent films.

#10 – Funny Games (2007)

Writer/director Michael Haneke apparently always wanted to set this story in the United States but couldn’t get the funding in 1997 when he made the original Austrian version (which is also excellent). When he had the opportunity to do a shot-for-shot remake in the U.S. ten years later with English-speaking actors, he even filmed it in the same house from the earlier movie. Although this picture is similar thematically to The Strangers, it’s not really interested in using the subject of home invasion to scare people; Haneke doesn’t even consider it a horror film. I respectfully disagree. It’s a deliberate provocation to its own audience, a piece of meta cinema that questions why anyone would want to watch a film like this.

The film starts sedately with a car driving down a road to calming strains of classical music and a guessing game with the family in the car about which composer they’re listening to. Then the title credit fills the screen and the music changes to loud, screaming chaotic noise from John Zorn’s band Naked City, and I thought to myself, “I’m going to like this movie.”

George (Tim Roth), Ann (Naomi Watts) and their young son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), are arriving at their vacation home next to a lake. They see two young men with their next-door neighbors, and when those two men, Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet, who went on to later direct The Brutalist), come by, they’re welcomed inside the family home because they’re assumed to be friends of the neighbors. But they’re not. They’ve just killed the neighbors after having torturous fun with them, and now they’re intending to do the same with this family, if George and Ann can’t successfully fight back.

The performances are all good, but Pitt stands out in portraying manipulative menace. His character is in on the joke, looking at the camera to smirk at the viewers or speak to them directly, like he’s doing this for us. When Paul is asked why he doesn’t just kill his victims immediately, he replies, “You shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment.” 

The most memorable sequence involves Ann wresting a rifle away from Peter and shooting him, which feels like the traditional moment when the heroine is about to defeat the villains and survive. But Haneke pulls the rug out from under the audience by having Paul use a tv remote to rewind the film he’s in to a point where Peter hasn’t been shot yet and can adjust his actions so Ann can’t kill him. The sounds of shock in the theater in which I saw the film were notable – no one saw that coming. That scene breaks the rules of conventional narrative cinema. The ending is also memorable, when the bound Ann is casually pushed into the lake to sink and drown as Paul and Peter chat about breakfast before moving on to their next victims.

Haneke seems to be asking why we enjoy movies that revel in depicting violence and sadism and saying that we are not apart from it, that we are in fact complicit in what we choose to enjoy. I don’t personally agree with this point of view, but I think it poses a very interesting question. The final shot, of Paul staring at the camera, at us, about to start tormenting and killing a new family, is accusatory. Are we not entertained?

#9 – Get Out (2017)

Writer/director Jordan Peele’s debut film was a wonderful surprise, because up until this point his work had primarily been in comedy, although the connections between horror and humor have been discussed before. He continued to prove his talent for scary cinema with Us and Nope, but I’d argue that Get Out is still his strongest movie. It feels fresh, is impeccably acted and genuinely unnerving in the best way. 

Young black man Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) has been invited out by his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) for a weekend away to meet her family at their upstate New York home. His TSA employee friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery) warns him against going, telling him he’ll be brainwashed and made into a sex slave, but Chris ignores this, thinking Rod’s ideas to be ridiculous. Rose’s parents, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener), seem innocuous enough, but Chris gets an unnaturally formal vibe from the household’s black servants. The trap is sprung when Missy hypnotizes him and he finds himself the subject of a silent auction for old white people to take control of his body. Now he just needs to get out of this nightmare.

Kaluuya is the epitome of low-key charm in the first half of the film but is more memorable in his reactions to things going wrong, especially in the first hypnotism scene, in which his fear and grief are displayed unforgettably across his face. Williams is superb as the seemingly model girlfriend who is actually a lure to kidnap people into a new variant of slavery. Her delivery of the line, “You know I can’t give you the car keys, right, babe” is chilling. Whitford is great as the seemingly liberal dad (“I would’ve voted for Obama three times if I could’ve.”) and Keener excels as the hypnotist mom. Stephen Root makes the most of his screen time as a secretly malicious blind man, and Howery is hilarious as Rod, who sounds crazy but is more or less right about everything.

Peele’s direction is deft, but it’s his writing that makes the movie so impressive. The plot structure is admirable in its conciseness and although it does eventually get serious, there’s a lot of effective dark humor. Before Peele reveals the outrageously blatant racist plan, he seeds examples of racism into the script, from the white privilege displayed in Rose’s interaction with a cop to Rose’s brother talking about how with Chris’s “genetic makeup” he could physically train to become a “beast.” And the scene in which Missy commands the hypnotized Chris to “sink into the floor” into the Sunken Place is genuinely horrifying, mainly because it’s so unexpected in its particulars. 

Get Out was the debut of an original voice in horror, and it’s such a well-made and scary film that it certainly belongs on this list.

#8 – Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Who knew that what we needed in 2004 was a “rom-zom-com?” Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright did, and the world was immediately better for it. Essentially a perfect movie, it’s eminently quotable (“You’ve got red on you”) and gloriously rewatchable, occupying the same hallowed cinematic space as The Big Lebowski. It works as both a romantic comedy and a tongue-in-cheek zombie flick and still holds up brilliantly twenty-one years later.

Shaun (Simon Pegg) is an unambitious electronics store manager who is essentially content playing video games with his unemployed friend Ed (Nick Frost) and drinking at their favorite pub, The Winchester. His girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield), however, is tired of his static lifestyle and unkept promises, and she breaks up with him. Heartbroken, Shaun wants to try and get her back, but the small complication of most of London suddenly becoming flesh-eating zombies gets in the way of his plans.

Shaun of the Dead rightfully launched Pegg and Wright’s careers, and Frost was never better than he was in this film, delivering a hilarious performance that can perhaps best be described by a line from the movie: “How’s that for a slice of fried gold?” The cast of this picture is an embarrassment of riches, a veritable who’s who of British comedy and acting talent from that decade, including Peter Serafinowicz, Dylan Moran, The Office’s Lucy Davis, Bill Nighy, Rafe Spall and Penelope Wilton, not to mention cameos from Martin Freeman, Reece Shearsmith, Tamsin Greig and Matt Lucas. 

Wright’s direction is dazzling and clever, often creating humor through camera movement or editing. His pacing is energetic, like a just opened can of soda that never loses its fizz. He excels at set pieces, with the opening montage of workers robotically going through their jobs predicting the living dead they’ll soon become to a scene in which Shaun walks through his neighborhood that is repeated exactly later without Shaun noticing everyone has become zombified. 

Pegg and Wright’s script is a finely tuned comedic engine that never stops having fun with its premise (Ed tells Shaun’s mother, “We’re coming to get you, Barbara”; an Italian restaurant is called Fulci’s), but it doesn’t neglect either its romantic comedy or horror aspects. You care about Shaun’s relationship with Liz, but also the last quarter of the movie gets genuinely tense. I especially enjoyed all the conflicting tidbits of news footage throughout claiming to know what’s causing the event, from a crashed satellite to a somehow familiar “rage virus.”

Shaun of the Dead was a classic from the moment it was released, and the passage of time has not changed that status at all.  

#7 – Longlegs (2024)

In 1970s Oregon, one day a young girl walks onto the front lawn of her house and is confronted by an odd-looking tall man with a high-pitched voice whom she hasn’t met before. One smash cut to titles later, it’s the 1990s. The girl is now rookie FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who has been assigned to an investigation of a decades-old, ongoing serial killer case. Once a year for more than twenty years, families are found brutally murdered, always by the father of the family. A coded letter is left behind, with the word LONGLEGS printed at the bottom. No DNA or any proof of any person other than the family members is ever there, as if Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) was not present during the murders. When the “half psychic” Lee discovers one of the murders in progress, she is surprised to find a letter from Longlegs waiting for her inside her home. She’s able to decipher the code, and she’s immediately appointed one of the leads on the case. The closer she gets to Longlegs, however, the greater the overwhelming sense of evil surrounding her becomes.

Monroe does a great job as Lee, portraying her as a woman resembling an uncomfortable guest at a party; inward and tense and focused on her work, suggesting there is nothing else in her life. Blair Underwood does nice work as her FBI supervisor Agent Carter, getting to demonstrate different sides of his acting talent as his character goes from confidence to deepening alarm as the investigation proceeds. Alicia Witt excels as Lee’s protective and fearful mother, Ruth, concerned if her daughter is still regularly saying her prayers. Kiernan Shipka (star of Perkins’ earlier film, The Blackcoat’s Daughter) has only one scene in this film, but she absolutely kills in that scene, playing the previously catatonic survivor of one the murder scenes with pitch-perfect, spooky assurance. The strength of Cage’s performance as Longlegs is that, although he isn’t actually onscreen very much, he feels as if he’s an unnerving presence all the time. Looking like a malefic Tiny Tim, his face pasty white like an already-dead thing, he uses quirky mannerisms and vocal changes to make it mostly seem as if Longlegs is just an eccentric weirdo, but when he finally gets to explain himself, the sense of the character’s deep delight in satanic evil is palpable.

Writer/director Oz Perkins’ preference for low light and muted winter colors is on full display here, the seemingly physical manifestation of an existential malignancy smothering the world. His lingering shots of empty rooms or hallways generate increasing tension in an audience brought up to expect jump scares. The sound design is an expert mixture of white noise, backward music, industrial clattering and barely heard voices, combining with the visuals to create a pervasive sense of dread. The first ten minutes of the film are tight and very effective, throwing us into the deep end almost immediately, which is startling but also exciting.

Perkins’ script is clever and successful in multiple ways, from its deliberate uses of tropes from other films to wrongfoot an audience expecting the familiar to its enigmatic structure that travels back and forth in time as its puzzle is gradually revealed. He can deliver uncanny moments with the best of them, such as an exquisitely eerie reveal of a lifelike doll found in a fetal position in a dark, dusty attic. He also displays a surprising sense of humor that undercuts the horror, especially in a scene in which a teenage clerk in a store isn’t impressed with the oddball Longlegs and yells out, “Dad, that gross guy is back again!”

It’s clear that Perkins has his own distinctive style that has only grown and deepened as he’s made movies such as The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House, and Longlegs seems like the work of an artist who’s in full command of his talents. It’s a confident, impressive and aesthetically thrilling film.

Thanks to ArtsBeatLA for permission to repost this piece.

If you want to read my deep dive into the film with spoilers, here’s a link.

#6 – 28 Days Later (2002)

Even in the early days of this fledgling century, the message on the church wall in this film seemed prescient: REPENT. THE END IS EXTREMELY FUCKING NIGH. Of course, now we fondly look back at those more optimistic times. 28 Days Later was a necessary injection of fresh blood for the horror genre from director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, and it started a series that is still continuing today (28 Years Later: The Bone Temple opens in January). 

Well-intentioned animal rights activists learn the definition of irony when they free chimpanzees infected with a highly contagious “rage virus,” which quickly spreads to the activists and causes societal collapse in the U.K. Twenty-eight days later, bike courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes from a coma to discover that London is eerily empty. When he’s attacked by some of the infected, he’s saved by survivor Selena (Naomie Harris). They team up with father and daughter Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Hannah (Megan Burns) and travel to a military outpost for safety. Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston) is happy to see them, but not for the reason they imagine.

All of the performances are solid in the movie. Murphy and Harris’ film careers certainly got a boost, and Gleeson took another step in his journey to becoming a beloved Irish acting icon. However, the focus of the picture isn’t so much on individual performances but on selling the concept, and it succeeded brilliantly at that. Even though it’s not technically zombies but infected people, 28 Days popularized a “fast zombie” trend that influenced countless flicks that followed it, especially Train to Busan, which I wrote about earlier and is number nineteen on this list.

Boyle’s choice to shoot the film on digital video cameras brings a look of chaotic reality to the proceedings, and the effort to film at dawn to show a completely deserted London pays off to truly evoke a sense of cataclysm. For some reason, the scenes toward the end of the story, in which Murphy runs shirtless and spattered with blood through the rain as he hunts his prey, visually strongly reminds me of Rutger Hauer chasing Harrison Ford at the conclusion of Blade Runner, which is a compliment.

Garland’s script is smart and brimming with memorable scenes and details, from the memorable one-two punch of its opening to the small and cruel point that infection takes 10-20 seconds, which pays off in the heartbreaking sequence in which Frank knows his daughter will soon be in danger from him. The film is a barrage of sad and savage feels, from the letter from Jim’s suicidal parents telling him, “Don’t wake up,” to the coldblooded way Serena dispatches a screaming friend who has just been infected. But it’s also about how the main group becomes a makeshift family, and Jim trying to reduce Serena’s despair concerning the fate of the world by saying something that we could all perhaps focus on these days – “It’s not all fucked.”