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

Here’s the second installment of my list of the twenty-five greatest horror films from the past quarter century, starting from the bottom of the list and gradually heading to the top by the end of this year. Here’s a link if you missed the first installment.

I’ll try to stay as spoiler-free as possible for recent films. Happy Halloween!

# 20 – Paranormal Activity (2007)

Here’s a possibly divisive one. There are those who think this film isn’t scary, and that nothing happens in it, slowly. And then there are the rest of us, who find this movie to be remarkable in both its concept and execution. Sure, it’s similar to The Blair Witch Project in its ability to make something you never see frightening, but whereas Witch focused on the fear of being lost and in danger, Paranormal makes home scary. And not just this suburban home, but any home. Your home, for instance.

Young couple Micah and Katie have begun to notice odd noises and flickering lights in their home. Micah decides to document the events via cameras and audio recorders to debunk Katie’s fears. Katie points out that she’s been followed by supernatural occurrences since she was a child, hearing a voice and seeing a dark mass at the foot of her bed. She hires a psychic to come to the house to possibly give them help, but the psychic essentially turns tail and says that a demon is connected to Katie. Over twenty-one nights, the paranormal activity gets more intense. Katie, terrified, begs Micah to stop investigating and possibly making the demon angry, but Micah refuses, determined to fix the situation by himself.

Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat give very likeable, convincing performances as the unlucky couple, and their achievement is even more impressive when you learn that they improvised almost all the dialogue from a plot outline. The movie details how people can gradually be broken down by fear, and their portrayals convey that very well. Katie is falling apart, feeling doomed, while stubborn Micah, sensing his male ego under threat, keeps pushing back foolishly until his provocation is definitively answered. 

Director/screenwriter Oren Peli (who also produced, photographed and edited) shot the film in just seven days, but it doesn’t seem like that when one watches it. Peli tapped into how quickly the ordinary world can suddenly seem not so safe anymore, in a way that everybody can understand. Who hasn’t heard an unexplainable noise in their home at night? The film’s greatest achievement (and one that inspired countless found-footage movies) is how it uses silence and small things to make the audience lean in to gradually ratchet up the tension, so by the time the film concludes, everyone is primed for a catharsis of fear. After that memorable final scene, the fact that the movie cuts abruptly to a black screen with the most minimal of credits is also disorienting – Wait, what just happened?  

#19 – Train to Busan (2016)

Director Yeon Sang-ho’s action/horror movie is one of the most ferociously entertaining “zombie films” ever, although (just like 28 Days Later) it doesn’t feature zombies, per se, but people infected by a bioengineered virus (however, for simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to them as zombies in this article anyway). That would be enough to include it on this list, but it’s also very moving and, like the George Romero films that birthed the genre, it has social commentary as well. Also, zombie deer!

Divorced businessman and neglectful father Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) is guilted into taking his young daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an) on a train to visit her mother. Unfortunately, at the same time their train leaves the station, a virus rapidly infects most of South Korea, turning the infected feral and murderous. The population of the train is not free from this, and soon Seok-woo is fighting to save his daughter’s life from swarms of crazed attackers. He teams up with other passengers to survive, but as the outbreak grows, there’s no safe place to stop the train.

As with all the best zombie films, the zombies aren’t as important as the characters, and Train to Busan features plenty of great ones. The entire point of the plot is Seok-woo’s transition from being a selfish jerk to regaining his humanity and becoming a good father, and Yoo’s portrayal succeeds in this beautifully. Su-an gives a terrific performance as his genuinely good daughter, and the two of them make the ending of the film emotionally powerful yet redemptive. It’s maybe the only zombie movie that could make you cry. Ma Dong-seok is great as tough guy Sang-hwa, memorably punching his way through dozens of zombies, and Kim Eui-sung is wonderfully despicable as the monstrous businessman Yon-suk, more than willing to sacrifice everyone to save his own vile life.

Train to Busan is filled with energetic filmmaking and exciting action set pieces, from a train station filled with military zombies chasing the heroes back to their train to hundreds of infected holding on to the back of the train, crawling over each other to keep it from getting away. Screenwriter Park Joo-suk blends social commentary amidst the chaos: wealthy capitalists come off the worst (Seok-woo’s company may inadvertently have caused the virus), but government isn’t much better, with tv announcements claiming that “your safety is not in jeopardy” as the country burns down. 

This movie is a rare thing – an action/horror film that expertly delivers the suspense and scares but one that is also full of heart.  

#18 – The Ring (2002)

Gore Verbinski’s remake of Hideo Nakata’s original film Ringu is almost certainly the scariest PG-13 film ever made. I remember seeing it on its opening weekend and noticing the palpable fear the film evoked in the audience – an acquaintance of mine at the screening was seated towards the front and quickly changed her seat to sit in the back of the theater because it was too intense being that close. There are those who argue that the original Japanese film was better (it doesn’t fall into the time parameters of this list, however, being from the late ‘90s), but I prefer this version. It’s visually stunning, artfully composed on every level, a doom-soaked nightmare of cold, inexorable dread.

Two teenage girls discuss the urban legend of a video tape that kills anyone who views it within seven days. They find to their great sorrow that this story is absolutely true. Seattle journalist Rachel (Naomi Watts), the aunt of one of the girls, is asked to look into what really happened by her grieving sister. She locates the creepy, surreal tape and watches it. She immediately thereafter receives a phone call with a female voice simply saying, “Seven days.” At first Rachel doesn’t believe that she’s been cursed with a death sentence, but after enough weird shit begins accumulating, she begins investigating more seriously. After her young son innocently watches the tape, she knows she has the solve the mystery or they both will die horribly. 

Watts may first have been noticed by the critics in the previous year’s Mulholland Drive, but she had her first commercial hit with The Ring, and she made the most of it with a fierce yet sympathetic performance. One thing that surprised me on my recent rewatch of the film is how many unexpected actors are in it: Amber Tamblyn, Jane Alexander, Logan Roy himself (Brian Cox), and a young Adam Brody, who rocked it as Male Teen #1, serving up some eerie exposition. David Dorfman, who played Rachel’s son, Aidan, delivered a suitably spooky portrayal as the boy, who doesn’t seem so much frightened as weirdly knowledgeable about the situation.

Shot for shot, The Ring looks amazing, an art horror movie with a Hollywood budget, and the trio of director Verbinski, cinematographer Bojan Bazelli and production designer Tom Duffield did wonders on this project. The entire film has a deliberate greenish tint that creates a sickly, claustrophobic feeling. It never stops raining, and when Rachel visits a country farm, it’s visibly decaying, the roof sagging with the sheer weight of moss. It’s such an accomplished horror movie that it’s startling to realize that Verbinski’s direct follow-up to this film was the very different Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

Ehren Kruger’s script created a ticking clock of a plot, with an opening sequence that both set up the premise very concisely and delivered a terrifying short sharp shock that reverberated through the entire movie. Other notable scenes include a horse going mad on a ferry, a descent into a well reminiscent of a scene in The Changeling, and the famous ending fake-out in which all seems to be fine until the grotesque, rotted version of evil spirit Samara comes crawling out of the television. 

Random things that amused me: The DreamWorks logo before the film is green and staticky, like a faulty VHS tape. Samara – an evil spirit, mind you – goes to the trouble of leaving messages on answering machines. The entire premise of the story wouldn’t work now; Samara would just stream her cursed video and infect the entire world at once. The last shot of the film is essentially the filmmakers exposing the audience to the cursed video. Most alarming of all, it turns out I have a familial connection to Samara – her last name is Morgan!

The nice trick The Ring plays on its audience is the idea that all of the work Rachel puts into discovering the source of the curse and endeavoring to make it right by finding Samara’s body and laying it to rest will stop the deaths. Rachel’s fractured family comes back together; heroic good intentions have supposedly saved the day. But they haven’t. Samara doesn’t want justice; she wants revenge on everyone, forever. Rachel and her son are forced to duplicate the tape in order to be allowed to live. There is no hope in The Ring, only complicity in evil. 

#17 – 30 Days of Night (2007) 

A lot of adaptations of graphic novels lose the thread of what made the original version so memorable, but not this one. Perhaps this is because the novel’s author, Steve Niles, co-wrote the film’s script with Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson. Director David Slade and cinematographer Jo Willems also took care to faithfully recreate the vividly original art by Ben Templesmith from the comic. Regardless of the reason, 30 Days of Night is so much better than one might have expected. 

The basic premise is so simple but clever it’s surprising that no one ever used it before. Barrow, Alaska, is the northernmost town in the United States, and every winter it experiences a polar night that lasts for a month. This sounds like the dinner bell to a clan of vampires, who isolate the community and start greedily depleting its “liquid resources.” A group of townspeople, led by the sheriff and a fire marshal, attempt to survive the month until the sun will drive the bloodsuckers away, but as their resources and population dwindle, the situation looks dire. 

The visual look of the film is striking – the dark of the night, the blank canvas of the snow, and the crimson streaks of blood creating a movie that is (as the old joke goes) black and white and red all over. Slade’s direction is expert, from an overhead shot tracking several city blocks as the townspeople are being slain by the vampires to various sequences in which the creatures leap from roof to roof, easily stalking their oblivious prey. The vampires themselves look and act differently than most filmic nosferati, bestial creations that move and attack quickly, communicating through screeches and growls.

Ben Foster makes an indelible mark as the Renfield of the piece, a Cajun loner with terrible teeth known simply as The Stranger. He brings a feral intensity to his performance, full of belief in his vamp masters, dismissing the sheriff with a curt, “I don’t talk to dead men.” Danny Huston is bluntly powerful as the vampire leader, Marlow, with a role performed almost entirely in a made-up language. He has my favorite scene in the entire film, in which a young woman, about to be killed, pleads to God. Huston looks at her, then up at the sky, slowly searching all around for a deity. He then focuses back on the woman, his black gaze almost pitying, shaking his head. “No God,” he says. 

#16 – The Mist

There have been many good or great adaptations of Stephen King’s work, but The Mist is perhaps the best representation of the primal King experience – sympathetic characters forced to deal with the incursion of the supernatural, or, in this case, creatures from another dimension. This film is a superb realization of the novella of the same name, and King himself thinks that the ending (possibly the grimmest conclusion in all of horror cinema) improves upon his original story. 

One evening in a small town in Maine, a large thunderstorm causes damage to artist David’s home. The next day, he and his young son Billy make a trip to the local supermarket for supplies. While there, after what feels like an earthquake, a mysterious mist descends upon the town, and a man runs into the store saying there are things inside that mist that are attacking people. Although the people in the store are initially dubious of this claim, they quickly find out that it’s true as various tentacled monstrosities and giant insects begin to prey on them. This is bad enough, but when religious loon Mrs. Carmody starts talking about human sacrifices within the store to appease an angry God and people begin to follow her, things get even worse.

Thomas Jane does an outstanding job as David, who tries his best to be the hero but is simply overwhelmed by circumstance. His performance at the film’s climax is suitably raw and agonized as he screams in horror and despair. Marcia Gay Harden is wonderfully despicable as Carmody, a deranged person just waiting for her chance to spread chaos. The movie is filled with excellent actors, with William Sadler, Toby Jones, Frances Sternhagen and Andre Braugher making the biggest impressions. 

Frank Darabont’s direction is perfectly suited to the material, expertly balancing the character drama with giant spiders leaping out of the dark. His loading dock set piece, in which a screaming supermarket employee is pulled out into the mist by huge spiky tentacles, is impressive, but a scene in which Carmody commands her mob of followers to sacrifice a young soldier is equally unnerving. The creepy-crawly beasts are a brilliant use of both practical and CGI effects, and the reveal of a behemoth monster lumbering along at the end of the movie is perhaps the best Lovecraftian creature ever presented on film. 

Darabont’s script is wonderfully crafted, a dark tale in which a supermarket becomes the end of the world in microcosm, and in which the good guys lose. In rewatching the film for this list, I picked up on something I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed before. In the early part of the movie, a young mother needs to leave the market to go and be with her young children. She asks for someone to accompany her, but nobody does. Bitterly disappointed in them all, she says, “I hope you all rot in hell,” and mostly, they do, as if in judgment for their self-centeredness. 

(On the special edition of the film, there’s a black and white version. Darabont declares this to be his preferred director’s cut. Personally, I think the film uses color extremely well and works better in its original release version, but it’s a great movie either way.)