Pocket Cinephile Horror Essentials - The Complete List

# 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.

#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.

# 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.

# 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.

# 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.

# 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.

# 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.

#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.

# 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.

# 10. Don't Look Now, Nicholas Roeg, 1973
Roeg's film is an immensely stylish, neo-gothic head scratcher that deploys minions no less impressive than the Church, the Elderly, and the Color Red in service of its considerable chills.