MY TOP 10 HORROR FILMS OF THE PAST FIFTY YEARS

Balladeer’s Blog takes a look at my top horror movies of the past fifty years. It is NOT a list of my all-time favorite horror films, just the ones that fall within the round number of fifty years.

If the selected movie spawned a franchise I rank the franchise’s top five flicks by titles only. As always, these are just my opinion. We all have our favorites and none of us are right or wrong.

MY LIST: 

WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? (1976) – Narrowly beating out Devil Times Five for the top spot, this Spanish film was written and directed by Narcisso Ibanez Serrador and co-written by Juan Jose Plans. In my opinion this is still the best “evil children” horror movie ever made.

An English couple vacation on a European island where they gradually realize that the local children are all unhinged and have been killing off any and all adults.

In the tradition of “the animal kingdom strikes back” movies, we are given vague reasons behind the violent uprising of children, in this case atrocities around the world which leave the very young as victims in their wake.

Don’t expect a bloodbath but do expect a very well-made film that is far eerier and much more powerful than similar efforts like Beware! Children at Play or any of the Children of the Corn movies.

Unearned Virtues: Having a cast which was largely unknown in the U.S. added to the film’s impact.

The Franchise’s Top Five: Not applicable. 

THE OMEN (1976) – This was one of the few 1970s movies that managed to almost live up to the cultural phenomenon of The Exorcist. Lore regarding the Antichrist and its number being 666 entered the mainstream thanks to the success of this powerful film.

When the husband (Gregory Peck) in a high-powered American couple learns that his and his wife’s child was just stillborn he lets himself be suckered into accepting a changeling child to replace the dead infant so that his wife need never learn the truth. 

The sinister replacement boy Damien displays a darker and darker nature as he ages. Before long, fanatically devoted governesses enter the web of horror surrounding the lad and religious figures start approaching the boy’s “father” regarding prophesies about the Antichrist.

Anyone who opposes Damien meets with increasingly horrific fates as events unfold.     

Unearned Virtues: None. It earned them all.  

The Franchise’s Top Five: 1. The Omen (1976)   2. The Omen 3: The Final Conflict (1981)   3. The Omen 2 (1978)   I don’t consider any of the others worth mentioning. 

HAUSU (1977) – Hausu aka House was one of the earliest Japanese horror films to make a big impression here in the U.S. and deservedly so. This movie helped define “J-horror” in all its wild, far-out glory.

Seven young ladies in Japan go to stay at the country home owned by the aunt of one of them. They are in for infinite torment as the place turns out to be haunted by nearly incomprehensibly evil forces.

Hausu combines the best qualities of haunted house stories with witch tales, but presented through the prism of Japan’s off-kilter approach to horror. The body count among the unfortunate young ladies rises amid violent, nightmarish madness that wouldn’t be matched until The Evil Dead came along.

Unearned Virtues: A cast unknown here in the west helped viewers lose themselves in the movie.  

The Franchise’s Top Five: Not applicable.  

TERRIFIER (2016) – Damien Leone swam upstream against the “silliness and cutesy in-jokes” obsession in so many modern horror films to present a monstrous figure whose perverse, deadly deeds were presented in serious, adult ways.

Art the Clown, Leone’s addition to horror film icons, is a supernatural entity in a clown costume who is as silent as Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees but takes his violence to the next level. Leaving a victim still alive but with their arms and legs all removed & obscenities carved into their body is not beyond Art.

Leone introduced this vile character in a few short films, then in an anthology movie, then presented his feature length debut in 2016’s Terrifier. A sequel followed and at least one more film in the franchise is scheduled for the near future. 

Unearned Virtues: None. It earned them all.   

The Franchise’s Top Five: 1. Terrifier (2016)   2. Terrifier 2 (2022)   3. All Hallow’s Eve (2013)   4. The Ninth Circle (2008 short)   5. Terrifier (2011 short)            

HALLOWEEN (1978) – John Carpenter added much more film technique and much less fake blood & gore compared to his predecessor Herschell Gordon Lewis in this iconic movie. Halloween branded itself in people’s memories and spawned untold numbers of imitators, including the Friday the Thirteenth franchise. 

As a child, little Michael Myers picked up a knife and stabbed his babysitter to death while dressed in his Halloween costume from trick or treating that night. After years of confinement in a mental institution, the deeply disturbed and inhumanly silent figure is full grown.

He escaped and returned to his hometown of Haddonfield on Halloween to slice and dice additional victims, including another babysitter. At Michael’s heels is his primary evaluator, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), who knows better than anyone else how monstrous Michael’s unsalvageable mind really is.

Michael Myers’ mask and perpetual silence are legendary in horror film history. His grotesque act of killing and eating a dog added to his loathsomeness.    

Unearned Virtues: None. It earned them all.

The Franchise’s Top Five: 1. Halloween (1978)   2. Halloween 2 (1981)   3. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)   4. Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (1982)   5. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)   

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) – Tobe Hooper’s iconic film about graverobbing, serial murders, cannibals and crafting masks, accessories and furnishings out of human flesh and bone. As non-supernatural horror films go, this flick may be unbeatable. 

Travelling young people come across a deranged hitchhiker, then encounter his even more unhinged colleagues in murder and cannibalism. One by one they are knocked off all the way down to their Final Girl.

The lead murderer and gourmet chef of human cuisine, Leatherface, used a chainsaw as his weapon of choice. Some critics still recoil at the way Leatherface even goes so far as to chase and kill a victim in a wheelchair.   

Unearned Virtues: A cast of unknowns and the roughness of many low budget films accentuated the impact. The novelty value of John Larroquette being the narrator also boosted the movie’s cultural kitsch value when he became a big star on Night Court. 

The Franchise’s Top Five: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)  In my opinion, none of the other films are worth listing. 

PHANTASM (1979) – With this movie Don Coscarelli forever changed the way we look at funeral homes. And funeral home directors.

What lies beyond death? And what kind of fate awaits us there? Phantasm provides a very grim and merciless possibility that owed a tiny bit to the 1895 work The King in Yellow.

Angus Scrimm’s depiction of the being called the Tall Man added him to the movie monster pantheon alongside the likes of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, Freddy Krueger, Pinhead, La Llorona and Michael Myers. Scrimm perfectly captured the creepy vibe given off by some morticians (no offense) and the slowly revealed lore behind the Morningside Funeral Home was nicely crafted.

When thinking about Phantasm, what comes to mind are coffins, graves, mortuaries, the Lady in Lavender, sex in a graveyard and flying metal balls that can slice into your forehead, then pump out blood and brain matter. This movie was originally rated X for violence on its first release.   

And to some Phantasm fans, the heroic figure Reggie is up there with Bruce Campbell’s iconic Ash Williams from the Evil Dead films. By the way, I prefer supernatural horror to “evil human beings” horror, which is why I ranked this above Texas Chainsaw Massacre.     

Unearned Virtues: The usual low budget, independent gimmes – the unpolished production and lack of recognizable faces helps immeasurably in losing yourself in the movie.  

The Franchise’s Top Five: Just go in numerical order from Phantasm to Phantasm V.  

HELLRAISER (1987) – Frank Cotton, a disgusting man who has exhausted sexual sensation with women, men, animals and corpses, looks for new thrills by purchasing one of the legendary LeMerchand Puzzle Boxes.

Like a Rubik’s Cube from Hell, solving the LeMerchand Box by manipulating it into the Lament Configuration summons the Cenobites of the Order of the Gash, led by the Hell Priest, better known as Pinhead (see poster).

Those unearthly entities abduct those who summon them and subject them to bodily distortion and pain so intense it sometimes crosses over into pleasure. They engage in body horror that even Cronenberg might wince at.

The aforementioned Frank is so despicable that he is willing to escape the Cenobites by betraying his brother, his sister-in-law, his niece and others into the hands of the demonic torturers. The kinky, creepy lore that Clive Barker crafted for Pinhead and his kind could fill dozens of movies, but sadly was only done right a few times.    

Unearned Virtues: None. Hellraiser earned it all.  

The Franchise’s Top Five: 1. Hellraiser (1987)   2. Hellraiser 2: Hellbound (1988)   3. Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996 Extended Cut ONLY)   4. Hellraiser: Hell Seeker (2002)   5. Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth (1992)

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) – Wes Craven’s addition to the great Hall of Fame of supernatural monsters, Freddy Krueger, debuted in this film in all his unique, blood-soaked glory.

If my list’s upcoming number one movie was like a brutal home invasion or a violent mugging, A Nightmare on Elm Street was like a Universal Studios Horror Classic updated for the slice and dice 1980s.

Child murderer (and worse) Freddy Kruger was burned alive by a mob of vigilante parents from Elm Street who were appalled at the killer being freed on a technicality. Rather than go to Hell, Krueger’s soul took refuge in the dream dimension, from where he began preying on the surviving Elm Street children when they reached their teen years. 

Once he killed someone in their dreams, their body died in real life. (As learned in subsequent chapters and tv shows, the evil dream stalker was unable to enter the dreams of children or insane people.)   

Robert Englund brought the vile Freddy to life and made him one of the most feared and dreaded monsters in cinema. Wes Craven’s team conjured up magnificent lore for the film, including the ghosts of some of Freddy’s child victims from when he was alive jumping rope and doing the eerie jump rope song starting with “One, two, Freddy’s comin’ for you … three, four, better lock your door …” 

Unearned Virtues: Craven included footage from my number one film in A Nightmare on Elm Street as a shoutout to the torn poster for The Hills Have Eyes (a previous Wes Craven movie) that was included as an Easter Egg in movie number one, coming up next. 

The Franchise’s Top Five: 1. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)   2. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)   3. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)   4. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)   5. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)    

THE EVIL DEAD (1981, 1983) – The independent movie that launched the careers of Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Robert Tappert. This film used what I consider the best approach to horror: the action takes place over the course of a single night, no losing momentum by giving the characters down-time between the hells they face.

A group of partying twenty-somethings at a creepy cabin in the Tennessee mountains discover the tape recorder into which the scholar who owned the cabin dictated his translations of the Sumerian Book of the Dead. The tape plays the incantation that gives demons license to possess the living, thus dooming the movie’s characters just like it doomed the scholar and his wife before them.

It’s like The Exorcist meets Night of the Living Dead meets John Carpenter’s The Thing. There’s no telling who will be possessed and when, and once possessed the victims look monstrous and viciously attack those still unpossessed.    

The Evil Dead‘s bits of business are well known – the POV tracking shots, the Sumerian book “bound in human flesh and inked in human blood”, the trap door basement, “Join us … Join us”, the rough wooden crucifixes over the graves of the dismembered dead and so many more.  

Anything lost by the crudeness of some effects was more than made up for by Sam Raimi’s energetic camerawork and a refusal to follow the traditional American horror film formula. I could literally write thousands of words about every single little thing I love about this original Evil Dead movie.

Along with the original Halloween and original Night of the Living Dead, this is one of the most imitated and riffed on works in horror film history. Think of Demons, Demons 2, Demons 3, Rabid Grannies, Dead Alive, The Medusa Spring, etc.   

Unearned Virtues: A cast of (then) unknowns and the roughness common to so many low budget flicks accentuated the movie’s disturbing impact. Also, as much as I love this film, plus Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, I have to admit that home video gave The Evil Dead the extra push it needed into iconic territory. Ask the managers of video rental stores in the 1980s.

        And, harsh as it sounds, those rental copies were often viewed on much smaller screens which helped obscure the scenes with incomplete makeup which really stood out on theater screens and later on big-screen televisions.    

The Franchise’s Top Five: 1. The Evil Dead (1981, 1983)   2. Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987)   3. Evil Dead Rise (2023)   4. Army of Darkness (1992)   5. Evil Dead (2013 remake)

*** AND FOR ANYONE WONDERING, I CONSIDER ALIEN AND THE THING TO BE SCIENCE FICTION, NOT HORROR. THAT’S THE ONLY REASON THEY’RE NOT ON THIS LIST.

FOR MY REVIEW OF THE NIGHTMARE ENDS ON HALLOWEEN AND THE NIGHTMARE ENDS ON HALLOWEEN II, A PAIR OF FAN FILMS IN WHICH FREDDY KRUEGER TAKES ON PINHEAD, LEATHERFACE, MICHAEL MYERS AND JASON VOORHEES CLICK HERE.