Pocket Cinephile Horror Essentials - # 1. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper, 1974

Hooper's film is dark, deliberate, unnervingly naturalisitc, and, as such, an unimpeachable masterpiece. The final word in horror.

Pocket Cinephile Horror Essentials - #2. The Shining, Stanley Kubrick, 1980

Kubrick's fever dream telling of Stephen King's haunted hotel ghost story is a pitch perfect marshalling of sight and sound where every passing moment is grossly more unsettling than the last.

Pocket Cinephile Horror Essentials - # 3. Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski, 1968

Polanski's film, a giant in any discussion of horror, translates the taut, hard-driving pyschological suspense of his best early works (Knife in the Water, Repulsion) into a classic American spine-tingler.

Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan Demme, 2008

Demme's film is insular and grief-stricken, filled with characters either too unlikable or underdeveloped to bear the weight of their considerable collective neuroses.

Pocket Cinephile Horror Essentials - # 4. Suspiria / Inferno, Dario Argento, 1977 / 1980

These first two installments of Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy stand as the epitome of hyper-stylish horror. The plotting is superfluous, but the director's setpieces are awe-inspiring master strokes.

Pocket Cinephile Horror Essentials - # 5. Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero, 1968

Romero has built a career, and an extensive filmography, from mining the socio-political possibilities of the un-dead. This, his staggering first film, plays that card first and best and with startling immediacy.

Pocket Cinephile Horror Essentials - # 6. Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau, 1922

Murnau's proto-expressionist vampire film is quite simply the template for castle-bound, blood sucking terror. Later retold admirably by Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski (Nosferatu-Phantom der Nacht, 1979), and reinvented by E. Elias Merhige (Shadow of the Vampire, 2000), the film is one of the pillars upon which any house of horror is built.

L'Avocat de la terreur (Terror's Advocate), Barbet Schroeder, 2007

Schroeder's exhaustive investigative documentary concerning the career of French attorney Jacques Verges, if somewhat lacking in clarity, nonetheless offers a dizzying glimpse at the proliferation of terrorism in the 20th Century.

Pocket Cinephile Horror Essentials - # 7. The Exorcist, William Friedkin, 1973.

Friedkin's film is by now synonymous with "real world" horror. With a mood that manages a resolute naturalism even while invoking the supernatural, the film's effects subsequently range from creeping uneasiness to out and out hide-your-eyes terror.

Pocket Cinephile Horror Essentials - #8. Freaks, Tod Browning, 1932

Browning's sideshow horror fable is a marvel of early cinema. Eminently watchable depsite, and more likely because of, its cast of non-professional actors, the film is truly unsettling and nothing if not lasting.

Pocket Cinephile Horror Essentials - # 9. Evil Dead II, Sam Raimi, 1987

Raimi's horror comedy sequel-cum-remake of his own no budget film is a gritty tour-de-force, fueled by Bruce Campbell's incendiary lead performance and a gaggle of gloriously DIY special effects.