The 25 Best Horror Movie Sequels
There have been more good horror sequels than one might think, the best of which you’ll find here in our countdown of The 25 Best Horror Movie Sequels.
This weekend, the horror genre’s most shocking franchise continues with the release of Paranormal Activity 3, the latest found-footage picture about yet another house plagued by an unseen demon. Tapping into the subtleties of the best haunted house movies (see: 1963’s The Haunting), the Oren Peli-created series generates scares through noises and suggestion, not viscera and ultra violence. But the implied frights aren’t what’s so shocking about the Paranormal Activity films—it’s the producers’ ability to consistently improve on the previous entry. In the horror field, where slashers endlessly hack up teenagers in countless sequels, that’s abnormal.
The first sequel, last year’s Paranormal Activity 2, went to great lengths in order to justify its existence, cleverly developing a malicious folklore for its returning characters via a nifty prequel conceit; definitely scarier than Peli’s 2009 original, Paranormal Activity, 2010’s successful Part Two also one-upped Peli’s work in terms of overall quality.
And now, if all of the early reviews and strong word-of-mouth buzz aren’t complete bullshit, directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost (Catfish) have triumphantly bested the second chapter with Paranormal Activity 3. According to the critical feedback, the latest edition, set way back in 1988, is the meanest, darkest, and most aggressively terrifying PA movie yet.
The Paranormal Activity franchise is officially reinvigorating one of the genre’s lamest practices: the cash-grab sequel. Blame the substandard Saw, Friday The 13th, and Halloween follow-ups for the scary movie sequel’s bad name. However, there have been more victories than one might think, the best of which you’ll find here in our countdown of The 25 Best Horror Movie Sequels.
RELATED: The 15 Hottest Girls Who Go Topless in Horror Films
Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)
This weekend, the horror genre’s most shocking franchise continues with the release of Paranormal Activity 3, the latest found-footage picture about yet another house plagued by an unseen demon. Tapping into the subtleties of the best haunted house movies (see: 1963’s The Haunting), the Oren Peli-created series generates scares through noises and suggestion, not viscera and ultra violence. But the implied frights aren’t what’s so shocking about the Paranormal Activity films—it’s the producers’ ability to consistently improve on the previous entry. In the horror field, where slashers endlessly hack up teenagers in countless sequels, that’s abnormal.
The first sequel, last year’s Paranormal Activity 2, went to great lengths in order to justify its existence, cleverly developing a malicious folklore for its returning characters via a nifty prequel conceit; definitely scarier than Peli’s 2009 original, Paranormal Activity, 2010’s successful Part Two also one-upped Peli’s work in terms of overall quality.
And now, if all of the early reviews and strong word-of-mouth buzz aren’t complete bullshit, directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost (Catfish) have triumphantly bested the second chapter with Paranormal Activity 3. According to the critical feedback, the latest edition, set way back in 1988, is the meanest, darkest, and most aggressively terrifying PA movie yet.
The Paranormal Activity franchise is officially reinvigorating one of the genre’s lamest practices: the cash-grab sequel. Blame the substandard Saw, Friday The 13th, and Halloween follow-ups for the scary movie sequel’s bad name. However, there have been more victories than one might think, the best of which you’ll find here in our countdown of The 25 Best Horror Movie Sequels.
RELATED: The 15 Hottest Girls Who Go Topless in Horror Films
Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)
25. Damien: Omen II (1978)
Director: Don Taylor
Stars: William Holden, Lee Grant, Jonathan Scott-Taylor, Robert Foxworth
Director Richard Donner’s 1976 classic The Omen is one of horror’s bleakest and coldest crowd-pleasers, with nary a laugh in it and scares rooted in realism, aside from that glorious plate-glass decapitation. For the unnecessary sequel, Damien: Omen II, the filmmakers wisely exaggerated the tone in an effort to give the follow-up its own identity, a move that, while giving the film a goofier aesthetic, makes Omen II more fun to watch.
Picking up seven years after Satan spawn Damien survived the first film’s events, Don Taylor’s sequel centers on a much more tactful kid, now 13 years old and able to implode enemies’ brains with self-inflicted aneurysms. There’s also a killer scene in which a guy is split in half by elevator cables, and another where a woman’s eyes get picked apart by a raven before she’s flattened by a truck. Not exactly the slow-burning tension of Donner’s flick, but you’ve got to appreciate Taylor’s willingness to go the extra mile.
24. Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter (1987)
Director: Joseph Zito
Stars: Kimberly Beck, Corey Feldman, Crispin Glover, Peter Barton, Joan Freeman, Judie Aronson, Lawrence Monoson, Ted White
Had the franchise’s producers stuck to their word and kept this fourth installment as the last Friday The 13th movie, Jason Voorhees’ slice-and-dice series would have ended on an unexpectedly high note. But, alas, the overzealous and greedy bastards in Hollywood have shat upon The Final Chapter 12 times now, ultimately staining the film’s reputation, and unfairly so.
The Final Chapter does everything you’d want from a slasher flick, particularly one starring Mr. Voorhees and his dirty hockey mask. The kills are especially gruesome and come in seemingly endless succession, the female soon-to-be victims are all buxom, sexy, and totally cool with going topless, and the comic relief nerds are actually kind of funny. Hell, even a young Corey Feldman isn’t at all grating as the horror movie lover who gets to finish Jason off “for good.”
23. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)
Director: Wes Craven
Stars: Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Miko Hughes, Tracy Middendorf, David Newsom
We’ve been hard on Wes Craven as of late, calling out his 10 worst movies earlier this year and downplaying Scream 4, but that’s only because we’re aware of just how great the man can be when he takes chances. Look no further than 1994’s New Nightmare, the franchise’s seventh entry, and its most ambitious.
Craven plays himself, a director working on a Nightmare On Elm Street sequel, while original heroine Heather Langenkamp also joins in on the meta storytelling as, that’s right, herself. But then Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger shows up as, indeed, himself and starts killing Langenkamp’s friends off and possesses her young son.
The beauty of New Nightmare is how well Craven handles the self-reflective plot, giving the movie-within-a-movie premise its much-needed scares by minimizing Krueger’s funny one-liners used so overindulgently in the previous Nightmare sequels. If we ever see a Scream 5, perhaps Craven should co-star in it.
22. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
Director: Tobe Hooper
Stars: Dennis Hopper, Caroline Williams, Bill Moseley, Bill Johnson, Ken Evert
With his 1974 cult classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, director Tobe Hooper apparently lost something in the translation. In author Jason Zinoman’s excellent book Shock Value, Hooper chats about his initial comedic intentions for the film, thinking that its scenes of deranged cannibals taunting a blonde victim at their dinner table would muster up heavy laughs from audiences; when people only shit their pants, Hooper was confused.
Twelve years later, after directing the massive hit Poltergeist, an empowered Hooper took a shot at finally delivering the horror-comedy he’d originally strived for in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. The blood and guts, barely seen in the first Chainsaw Massacre, pours in rivers thanks to Tom Savini’s makeup effects, which, in a way, works as a self-deprecating comment against Hooper’s original’s unearned reputation as the ultimate gore film.
And the comedy, at times slapstick but always disturbed, leaves The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 much less frightening than its predecessor. But that’s what Hooper desired, and, for that, he’s successful.
21. Nekromantik 2 (1991)
Director: Jorg Buttgereit
Stars: Monika M., Mark Reeder
Nekromantik 2 very well could’ve been included in our recent “Movies You Can’t Un-See” countdown, right alongside director Jorg Buttgereit’s 1987 original. In reality, the two films are somewhat interchangeable, both humping morality and good taste with rampant necrophilia—only, in Nekromantik 2, the protagonist is a female, giving it an uncomfortable degree of eroticism for mentally disturbed male viewers.
The sickest of sexually charged guys might get off on watching the “heroine” orgasm after chopping off her lover’s head and replacing it with a corpse’s detached noggin. But then they’d have to explain themselves once Buttgereit rewards her wretchedness by ending the film with a pregnancy announcement, which is slightly less horrendous than the sight of actress Monika M.’s lead slicing off a dude’s genitals and preserving them in her fridge.
Are we recommending Nekromantik 2? Well, yes, but not as a movie you need to watch, but as one that, if you’re twisted enough to peep it, earns nasty goodwill for its mind-boggling audacity.
20. Troll 2 (1990)
Director: Claudio Fragasso
Stars: Michael Stephenson, George Hardy, Margo Prey, Connie Young, Jason Wright, Darren Ewing
On a purely technical level, Troll 2 is arguably the worst horror movie sequel ever made, if not also one of the worst all-around movies ever shot. But anyone who’s seen the wonderful 2011 documentary Best Worst Movie knows that director Claudio Fragasso’s unbelievably awful flick uses its direness to its utmost advantage.
Troll 2 is the textbook “grab some beers, call up some friends, and have a blast” bad movie, littered with non-acting, monster effects that look worse than what’s currently available at your local Halloween superstore, and double-stacked bologna sandwiches used as weapons. It’s best to look at Troll 2 as a horror-comedy, even if the actors and Fragasso unfortunately play everything straight. Incompetent filmmaking has never been so entertainingly pitiful.
19. Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)
Director: Tod Williams
Stars: Katie Featherstone, Sprague Grayden, Molly Ephraim, Brian Boland, Micah Sloat
Paranormal Activity 2 shouldn’t have been any good. Think about it. The first Paranormal Activity, directed by first-timer Oren Peli for pennies and with a pair of unknown actors, was an unexpected, rags-to-riches success, that rare case of a new filmmaker’s homemade passion project exploding into the public’s collective conscious. It doesn’t seem likely that Peli envisioned his humble little flick as the first of a blockbuster horror trilogy (or more, depending on how well Paranormal Activity 3 performs at the box office this weekend); thus, Paranormal Activity 2, merely produced by Peli (and directed by the non-famous Tod Williams), started off as an opportunistic cash grab that, at the very least, wouldn’t embarrass itself a la Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.
Or so we thought. As it turned out, Paranormal Activity 2 seriously improved upon Peli’s film. For starters, the scares hit harder, thanks to Williams’ tactic of prolonging the suspense early on before erupting with demonic mayhem in the finale. Most importantly, though, screenwriter Michael Perry found intelligent ways to connect the two films’ dots, taking an unanticipated “prequel” approach that added tons of fascinating mythology and back-story. The bar is resting quite high for Paranormal Activity 3.
18. Night Of The Seagulls (1975)
Director: Amanda de Ossorio
Stars: Victor Petit, Maria Kosty, Sandra Mozarowsky
In need of a particularly hardcore foreign horror flick? Seek out Spanish filmmaker Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead movies, the exploitation-quality shockers about a pack of undead Templar Knights who ride around on equally deceased horses and slaughter unsuspecting victims. Not the craziest set-up, we realize, but de Ossorio’s penchant for going the extra mile in the gore department is what gives his Blind Dead series all of their off-kilter charm.
In Night Of The Seagulls, the fourth entry, the Knights have a pointed interest in hot, busty women, starting the movie off by kidnapping a hottie, bringing her back to their lair, and ripping off her top before ripping out her heart. That’s merely the appetizer for the film’s major set-piece, in which the living townsfolk bully a pretty young thing into getting chained to rocks as a sacrifice for the Templar crew. Is the film misogynistic? Absolutely, yet it’s also the rare fourth horror sequel that manages to enhance the franchise, not drag it down into shitsville.
17. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) (2011)
Director: Tom Six
Stars: Laurence R. Harvey, Ashlynn Yennie, Maddi Black, Dominic Borrelli, Bill Hutchens, Vivien Bridson
Looking back on it, it’s quite laughable to think that critics and audiences were so disgusted by Tom Six’s The Human Centipede when it debuted last year—as the sequel, released earlier this month, confirms, the Dutch filmmaker’s first trip into medical grotesquery was mere child’s play. Or, rather, the psychological slow-burn leading up to the black-and-white sequel’s balls-out sickness.
Totally meta, The Human Centipede II follows the overweight and antisocial Martin (Laurence R. Harvey), a parking garage attendant who’s obsessed with Six’s first Centipede movie. So, he bludgeons strangers with a crowbar, brings them to an abandoned warehouse, cuts their knees open, bashes their teeth in with a hammer, and staples their mouths to someone else’s ass—he’s a real people person.
For all of the backlash that Six has received thus far for Full Sequence, the fact that he’s a skilled director often gets overlooked, but it’s the truth. The Human Centipede II is so effectively disgusting because that’s how Six made it, consciously, with in-your-face close-ups and an all-around bizarreness in tone that never allows the viewer to settle into a groove. It takes real chops to be so despicable.
16. Final Destination 2 (2003)
Director: David R. Ellis
Stars: A.J. Cook, Ali Larter, Michael Landes, Jonathan Cherry, Keegan Connor Tracy, Terrence “T.C.” Carson, David Paetkau, Justina Machado
It’s difficult to imagine today, now that we’re five movies deep into the increasingly absurd, yet shamelessly entertaining, franchise, but Final Destination (2000) took itself very seriously. And, in spots, director James Wong’s series-starter utilizes that stone-faced veneer to its advantage—just not often enough. The concept of Death preying on folks who’ve cheated its life-ending plans is inherently absurd, and the unseen killer’s methods of destruction gradually amplify in audience disbelief.
Once director David R. Ellis stepped into the arena, the set-up's opportunities for black comedy were nicely realized. Final Destination 2, Ellis’ lighter and nuttier sequel, stages its bloody death scenes as morbid punchlines, a formula that’s been employed by subsequent Final Destination with mixed results; Ellis and screenwriters Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, on the other hand, nailed it. Just try not to laugh when a drawn-out sequence inside a dentist’s office ends with a humungous plate glass crushing a dumbass kid who’s pointlessly harassing pigeons.
15. Friday The 13th Part 2 (1981)
Director: Steve Miner
Stars: Amy Steel, John Furey, Warrington Gillette, Adrienne King, Kristen Baker, Betsy Palmer
It’s only right that Jason Voorhees’ first appearance on screen come in one of the better Friday The 13th flicks. You figure the majority of the movies are quite terrible artistically, so the deformed serial killer deserves some good reviews. And in Friday the 13th Part 2, Jason picks up right where his mother left off at the end of the first one, before she was decapitated, of course. As evidenced by the later sequels, though, Jason is much more creative with his kills, a character trait that completely benefits Part 2.
With a white sack over his head (the infamous hockey mask didn’t appear until Part 3), Jason, in no particular order, rams a machete into a wheelchair-bound kid’s skull and pushes the chair down a flight of stairs and shish-kabobs a young couple while they’re having sex, amongst other slayings. Unlike the following Friday The 13th movies, Part 2 feels the realest, mainly because Jason’s still a living, breathing man in it, not an unstoppable ghoul with more than nine lives. Furthermore, we never actually see Jason get killed at the film’s end, so the necessity for a third installment is warranted—quite the anomaly for a Friday The 13th sequel.
14. Phantasm II (1988)
Director: Don Coscarelli
Stars: James LeGros, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm, Paula Irvine
With 1979’s Phantasm, writer-director Don Coscarelli introduced the masses to one of horror’s great unsung villains: The Tall Man. Played by the gangly and creepy-looking Angus Scrimm, Coscarelli’s bad guy doesn’t belong in the same lane as Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, Michael Myers, and Freddy Krueger—he’s more ethereal presence, controlling his dwarf minions and zombie army from the comfort of a mausoleum. And, to great effect, Coscarelli sparingly inserts The Tall Man into Phantasm, keeping him off screen for most of the film.
In the sequel, Phantasm II, Coscarelli decided to fully showcase his secret weapon, and, surprisingly, it’s not a case of “too much of a good thing.” The Tall Man gets plenty more to do, and through the character’s increased presence Coscarelli gives The Tall Man a more human feel—he’s less of an otherworldly being in Phantasm II, and the realism makes him all the more scary.
13. Psycho II (1983)
Director: Richard Franklin
Stars: Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, Meg Tilly, Robert Loggia, Dennis Franz
In 1983, there were few souls braver than director Richard Franklin and screenwriter Tom Holland. Showing off their huge cojones, the duo tackled one of the riskiest and most seemingly unnecessary sequels imaginable: a follow-up to Alfred Hitchcock’s flawless, beloved, and genre-defining horror classic Psycho (1960). Was it a terrible idea in theory? You bet your ass it was, and it’s perfectly understandable if the film’s title alone invokes apathy or fury in the minds of Hitchcock followers.
Having said all of that, Franklin’s and Holland’s resulting film, Psycho II, is the ultimate pleasant surprise. Catching up with Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) 22 years after his Psycho murder spree, the sequel focuses more on Bates than Hitchcock’s movie, which used Perkins’ character as a crucial supporting player.
Psycho II finds Bates questioning his sanity while back in the mansion where he stashed “mother’s” body, and Franklin makes great use of the familiar location, holding his camera on the iconic locations from Hitch’s flick (the shower, the fruit cellar) as an anticipation-grinder for viewers steeped in the ’68 film’s imagery. It’s an unlikely triumph, no question.
12. Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
Director: Tony Randel
Stars: Doug Bradley, Ashley Laurence, Imogen Boorman, Kenneth Cranham, William Hope, Clare Higgins
Clive Barker, the English master of sexually perverse horror, dropped a horror landmark with 1987’s Hellraiser, a domestic nightmare about a dead husband who requires his wife to lure men back to their attic so he can slaughter them and obtain their flesh and souls. Directed by Barker, and based on his own novella The Hellbound Heart, the successful gore-a-thon was, contrary to popular belief, more psychologically effective than viscerally impactful, earning its power through methodical pacing.
The 1988 sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, loses nearly all of that patience, opting for accelerated gore and a higher body-count. Even the layered mythology is more show than tell, depicting the Cenobites’ horrific torture maneuvers for sinners and fetishistic slaves. And, for that, it’s endearing, if not inferior to Barker’s original. But second-best isn’t always a bad thing. Once it’s accepted as its own monstrosity, Hellbound works immensely as a ghastly series of try-not-to-look-away images.
11. Inferno (1980)
Director: Dario Argento
Stars: Leigh McCloskey, Irene Miracle, Eleonora Giorgi, Daria Nicolodi
For most films, the adjective “incoherent” would be an insult, but not for a Dario Argento movie. Incoherent is a fitting way to describe Argento’s phantasmagoric 1977 magnum opus Suspiria, a dreamlike presentation that burrows into the viewer’s mind with its dazzling Technicolor palette, operatic death scenes, and haunting musical score—coherence is, pleasantly, an afterthought.
The concept behind the Germany-set Suspiria involves the first of the Three Mothers, an ancient trio of witches that have splintered off into different parts of the world. Inferno concerns the second “mother,” Mater Tenebrarum (Mother of Darkness), a pissed-off entity that resides inside a New York City apartment building. Like Suspiria, Inferno makes very little sense, yet, fortunately, it’s also salvaged by Argento’s knack for insanely ambitious set-pieces, such as a cripple’s body getting eaten alive by rats under a hot dog vendor’s demonic control (no joke).
Adding to Inferno’s pedigree is the fact that Italy’s original master of horror, Mario Bava, directs the film’s best sequence, an underwater search for a key that’s exceptionally scary before the floating corpse even makes a cameo.
10. The Exorcist III: Legion (1990)
Director: William Peter Blatty
Stars: George C. Scott, Brad Dourif, Ed Flanders, Jason Miller, Nicol Williamson
Following up a blockbuster of The Exorcist’s magnitude isn’t easy by any means, but that’s still no excuse for the confusingly inept sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). William Peter Blatty, author of the original Exorcist novel and the 1973 classic’s screenwriter, clearly felt the same way. In 1990, more than a decade after The Heretic partially sullied his brainchild’s good name, Blatty made his directorial introduction with The Exorcist III: Legion and restored all of the previously depleted good faith.
Blatty’s first clever decision was to inject Legion’s plot with a dash of the occult, revolving his consistently unsettling pic around the channeling of a long-dead serial killer who marked his victims with religious symbols. The second wise move was casting George C. Scott as the protagonist, a coup that elevates the film to the upper echelon of credibility. And, last but not least, Blatty takes his time before jolting viewers with paralyzing frights, namely an expertly placed jump scare achieved with a nurse and a pair of shears. Why Blatty hasn’t directed a movie since Exorcist III: Legion is beyond us.
9. The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
Director: Rob Zombie
Stars: Bill Moseley, Sid Haig, Sheri Moon Zombie, William Forsythe, Ken Foree, Leslie Easterbrook
When Rob Zombie’s directorial debut, House Of 1,000 Corpses, premiered in 2003, very few, if any, critics and cinema purists expected a piece of high art. One of rock music’s most outlandish personalities, Zombie’s reputation as a nihilistic performer guaranteed that his brand of film would be just as maniacal; besides, no one anticipates much out of musicians turned filmmakers, anyway. So when people saw House Of 1,000 Corpses, an uneven freakshow crammed with great ideas and hazardous execution, the unhinged camerawork and nonsensical writing fell in line with the anticipation.
And that’s why Zombie’s follow-up, the far more serious The Devil’s Rejects, knocked fools on their asses two years later. Continuing the exploits of Corpses villains Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), Otis (Bill Moseley), and Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), The Devil’s Rejects forgets all about the first movie’s dark comedy. Zombie shoots the film’s open-road landscapes with true grit, giving his best movie to date the feel of a nightmarish western at times.
Mostly, though, The Devil’s Rejects is brutal horror, a distinction exemplified by a sequence in which one of the trio’s victims, wearing the face of her murdered lover, runs onto a highway for help and gets flattened by a speeding truck. Even if you know the scene is coming, it’s still a visceral shock.
8. Halloween III: Season Of The Witch (1982)
Director: Tommy Lee Wallace
Stars: Tom Atkins, Stacey Neikin, Dan O’Herlihy
Halloween III: Season Of The Witch’s reputation definitely precedes it. Back in 1982, the film’s arrival without Michael Myers’ participation confused the hell out of audiences, much like director Tommy Lee Wallace’s unconventional sequel still does today whenever uninformed watchers happen across it on cable, expecting to see The Shape and his trusty butcher’s knife.
Original Halloween director John Carpenter, onboard for Season Of The Witch as a producer, never intended to pull a fast one on folks, though; planned as a potential Halloween-themed franchise starter, Season Of The Witch abandoned the slasher tropes of the two previous Myers-led films and combined a ton of unrelated and creatively demented ideas.
The film centers on inventor Conal Cochran, a “mad scientist” type who launches the Silver Shamrock line of Halloween masks as a way of killing children. The exact strategy is the stuff of ridiculous genius: Inside every Silver Shamrock is a piece of Stonehenge that unleashes deadly insects once the Shamrock TV commercial’s addictive jingle begins. So what if there’s no Michael Myers? Halloween III: Season Of The Witch is horror’s most misunderstood and unjustly slighted sequel.
7. Day Of The Dead (1985)
Director: George A. Romero
Stars: Lori Cardille, Joe Pilato, Terry Alexander, Sherman Howard, Richard Liberty, Jarlath Conroy, Anthony Dileo Jr., John Amplas
In our eyes, George A. Romero’s extensive zombie movie catalog needn’t have gone any further than 1985’s Day Of The Dead, the second quasi-sequel to 1968’s genre-changing Night Of The Living Dead. The writer-director’s undead flicks that have come after Day (most painfully Survival Of The Dead) pale in comparison, losing all of his previous thematic subtlety and reaching for frustrating camp. With Day Of The Dead, though, Romero kicked ass in cynically dark fashion, crafting an anti-humanity knockout that’s been unfairly slighted over the years by wrongful dumbasses.
Granted, it’s the talkiest of Romero’s early zombie trilogy, yet the dialogue does a fine job of establishing the characters (Army types holed up in an underground bunker) as more than possible dinner for the crowds of lifeless ghouls. One area in which nobody can deny Day, however, is its gore factor. Makeup effects guru Tom Savini churns out some of his sickest work ever here, including guts spilling out of a lab-rat zombie’s opened stomach and the final act’s massive soldier buffet, complete with hands tearing bellies open, fingers getting chewed off, and a guy’s torso being pulled clean apart from his lower body.
6. A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
Director: Chuck Russell
Stars: Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, Craig Wasson, Patricia Arquette, Laurence Fishburne, Bradley Gregg, Rodney Eastman, Jennifer Rubin
Prior to developing The Walking Dead’s hugely successful first season, Frank Darabont was widely respected as the director of the dramatic Stephen King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. The praise was well-deserved, of course, but horror lovers knew Darabont for his two other, less-heralded accomplishments: co-writing one of the horror’s best remakes (1988’s The Blob) and Freddy Krueger’s most imaginative flick (A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors) with Chuck Russell.
Also directed by Russell, Dream Warriors ups the stakes in both narrative and imagery, pitting Krueger (Robert Englund, naturally) against a group of young mental patients under the care of the original Elm Street hero, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp). In their dreams, the kids are able to fight back against Fred with special powers, but that doesn’t stop Sir Krueger from graphically offing the dreamers in wonderfully inventive and hideous ways.
The most celebrated death scene: when Freddy’s arms poke out of the TV set and ram the blonde girl’s head into the screen. Our personal favorite, however, has to be the human marionette Krueger makes out of a male victim, cutting the tendons in his wrists and feet and walking him around like a grotesque puppet. It doesn’t get much better than that, sickos.
5. Aliens (1986)
Director: James Cameron
Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Carrie Henn, Paul Reiser, Jeanette Goldstein
One of the best compliments you can pay to a movie sequel is the assessment that the follow-up would work even if the first film didn’t even exist. You can dub that the Aliens outlook, after writer-director James Cameron’s starkly different yet also faithfully reverent 1986 gem. Knowing that he was treading on sacred genre ground, Cameron, riding high on his 1984 breakthrough The Terminator, took Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) into a fresh arena: the action-horror world.
Ridley Scott’s Alien operates like a slow-burning and intensely eerie haunted house movie set in space, with H.R. Giger’s horrific extra-terrestrial designs replacing undead spirits; Cameron’s Aliens, however, never stops for breath. The alien threat is larger in number, the set-pieces roar with breakneck intensity, and the direction is fluid even at its most frantic. The box office record books point toward Titanic and Avatar as Cameron’s crowning achievements, but any film lover with half-a-brain knows that Aliens is the man’s best work.
4. Evil Dead II (1987)
Director: Sam Raimi
Stars: Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley DePaiva
The old horror philosophy of “give ’em more insanity in the sequel” must have been a daunting assignment for Sam Raimi and his Evil Dead colleagues. The Evil Dead, released independently in 1981, shocked and awed the film community with low-budget ingenuity, going way overboard with geysers of blood, freaky ghouls, and tongue-in-cheek humor. So when it came time to send the anti-heroic Ash (Bruce Campbell) back to the demon-infested cabin in the woods, Raimi did the only logical thing: He crapped on good taste and delivered a flick that bashes subtlety with a spiked hammer.
Played more for gory slapstick laughs than its predecessor, the batshit Evil Dead II continuously one-ups itself, starting off with Ash lopping off his possessed girlfriend’s head and then cutting off his own hand, and that all happens before the second act. Once the action tips into joyous absurdity, Raimi has a field day with experimental camerawork and loony ideas, such as Ash jamming a chainsaw into his handless stump of an arm and going to demon-slaying work. If that’s not awesome to you, you’re reading the wrong list.
3. The Silence Of The Lambs (1991)
Director: Jonathan Demme
Stars: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Ted Levine, Scott Glenn, Brooke Smith, Kasi Lemmons
In a rather loose way, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence Of The Lambs follows Michael Mann’s 1986 flick Manhunter, their connecting thread being the presence of the world’s classiest cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, played in Lambs by Anthony Hopkins (in Manhunter, the character is portrayed by Brian Cox). And, for extra background, The Silence Of The Lambs is based on author Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel of the same name, itself the literary sequel to Harris’ ’81 book Red Dragon (the source material for Manhunter).
Got all of that? Cool, now that we’ve ironed out the logistics, let’s get right down to it: The Silence Of The Lambs remains the best serial killer movie of all time. Point blank. The only horror movie to ever win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, Demme’s white-knuckler weaves together phenomenal acting (by Hopkins and Jodie Foster, specifically), gruesome visuals, psychological tautness, and one of the creepiest movie villains out there, the lady-killing and skin-suit-making Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). In terms of credibility, horror doesn’t get much more legit than Lambs.
2. Bride Of Frankenstein (1935)
Director: James Whale
Stars: Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Elsa Lanchester, Ernest Thesiger, Valerie Hobson, Gavin Gordon
When casual moviegoers think of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, chances are that they’re recollecting the monster’s cinematic debut in 1931, a film that’s widely considered to be the birth of American horror. And thinking of director James Whale’s original classic isn’t a bad thing at all—it’s just that, all things considered, 1935’s Bride Of Frankenstein is the pinnacle of both Whale’s horror career and Universal’s groundbreaking monster movie run back in the ’30s. A remarkable picture that’s stood the test of nearly 80 years, Bride Of Frankenstein has it all: genuine scares, first-rate acting, impressive special effects, and a striking audacity uncommon for its time.
It’s also the originator of the old “the monster is unkillable” trick used to death by every slasher movie franchise. Except in Whale’s film, the justification for Frankenstein’s resiliency, after he was presumed dead at the end of ’31’s Frankenstein, doesn’t feel like a cheat. The patchwork zombie’s reward for surviving the first movie’s burned-down windmill: He gets an equally deceased female companion (played by Elsa Lanchester).
Too bad she shoots him down, a cold shoulder move that doesn’t lead to anything positive for everyone in sight—any dude who’s been denied by a lady should feel his pain as he destroys the laboratory. So, yeah, every man alive can relate.
1. Dawn Of The Dead (1978)
Director: George A. Romero
Stars: Ken Foree, Gaylen Ross, David Emge, Scott Reiniger, Tom Savini
Now that AMC’s The Walking Dead is officially the highest rated series in the history of cable television, zombies are legitimately the hottest monsters on the block. So it’s more inexcusable than ever for heads to continue to neglect George A. Romero’s horror masterpiece Dawn Of The Dead if they’ve yet to see it, because, frankly, it’s the greatest zombie movie ever made. That’s right, even better than Romero’s predecessor, the equally brilliant Night Of The Living Dead. By a small margin, but still superior.
Conceived amidst the rise of American consumerism in the late ’70s, Dawn Of The Dead works magnificently as a social allegory, positing its survivors’ decision to hide out inside a large shopping mall as the ultimate shopaholic solution. More importantly for horror goons, though, Romero’s second living dead flick is impeccable as a scare-show, packing ridiculous amounts of suspense, carnage, flesh-ripping, and inventive zombie kills (scalping with helicopter blades, for example) into its epic two-plus-hours running time.
To put it bluntly, it makes The Walking Dead, a show we love, look like Chopper Chicks In Zombietown.