It would be almost criminal to select the best horror movies of all time without including old Drac and Frank, the guys who began it all. With talkies just a little more than months old, these two landmark horror films, produced in the same year of 1931, set the standard for all to follow:
1. Frankenstein (1931) was the filming of the Mary Shelley classic about a scientist who discovered a way to bring the dead back to life. The result was a hulking monster who scared the hell out of nearby townspeople and every moviegoer for at least three generations. The movie also established a horror film career for a mild-mannered English actor named William Henry Pratt. Appearing on the set with the hulking costume and make-up for his role as the reanimated man, including the squared head and bolted neck, the director of the film insisted that the actor be billed with a spooky name, and thus he became Boris Karloff.
2. Dracula (1931) brought a Hungarian actor first to Broadway to star in the stage version of the Bram Stoker horror tale. However, Bla Ferenc Dezs Blask spoke almost no English. While memorizing the script, his language tutor had Bela pronounce each word with emphasized precision. As a result, the newly-named Bela Lugosi's speaking style became a sensation, and since the film version was released, his funny accent as Count Dracula has been imitated by other horror film actors, kids on the playground and comedians ever since.
The story, as if anyone from age six to 90 doesn't already know it, is about a 600-year-old vampire dressed in a snazzy tux, who sleeps in his coffin during the day and comes out at night. He must constantly wander the earth, to sink his fangs in some unlucky human, usually a beautiful blonde bimbo, to drink blood. By being punctured by the fangs, the victim also becomes a vampire. Sometimes, to get airborne and cover more territory and victims, Count Dracula turns himself into a bat. The only way to kill a vampire is to drive a stake through his/her heart, which makes for some very bloody scenes in the score of Dracula movies that followed the original.
3. Pyscho (1960) is a horror classic because of two memorable scenes in Bates Motel conjured up by the master of spooky films, Alfred Hitchcock. The most famous is Janet Leigh being knifed to death in the shower. Even though the film was in black and white, we could imagine all that black stuff swirling around in the bathtub was red blood.
The other horror scene is when creepy nutcase Norman Bates (Tony Perkins), dressed as his dead, preserved-in-a-rocker mom, knifes a visitor and sends him toppling down the stairs, also covered in black stuff that has to be blood. There have been many cinema imitations since, including the grisly murders, and in color with red stuff all over the victims. But nothing could ever equal the original in horror, shock and awe.
4. The Thing (1951) has personal connection. After I finished my recalled Navy duty in the Korean War, I got a job as a writer on a Los Angeles newspaper. Just about every noon, I ate at an all-you-can-eat 99-cent buffet near my office on Sunset Boulevard. Sometimes a six-foot-six young, sandy-haired guy would be scarfing down huge amouts of food at a nearby table. For the 99 cents we paid, he really piled up his plate at least three times per meal, and the restaurant owners certainly lost money on him.
The big guy looked familiar, and when I asked an employee who the chow hound was. The guy laughed and said, "Don't you recognize him? He was the vegetable monster thing in "The Thing". Later, James Arness, the big young actor with the big appetite achieved another role as Marshal Matt Dillon in "Gunsmoke".
"The Thing" has a very simple story. A bunch of Army scientists setting up an arctic science lab find a circular space ship under the ice. Later, they realize that it is from another planet where vegetation has evolved into intelligent beings, and one of its inhabitants (Arness) gets loose and begins using humans as food. Finally, the horrified scientists set up an electrical charge trap and burn up the veggie monster. In a scene reminiscent of "The Wizard of Oz", when the witch is hit with water and shrinks down to a puddle. The same happened to the veggie monster, but instead of saying, "I'm melting! I'm melting!", he just disappeared like the food on a Jim Arness platter in the buffet restaurant.
5. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) spawned a whole bunch of sequels and copycat movies because of the evil slasher star, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). The terrifying character originally was tried for murdering kids with his gloved razor blades. However, he escapes jail when the evidence is lost. When a group of angry citizens chase janitor Freddy back into his basement, he is horribly burned in a boiler exploson, and just before he dies, he vows he will get even with his killers.
A generation later, the ghost of Freddy comes back at night, even more horrifying than ever, and appears in frighteningly real nightmares of the kids whose parents had burned him to death. Then the dreams become reality, and the ghostly Freddy begins murdering sleeping people. Except for Englund in many sequels, the film's original actors never went on to become stars. Except, of course, a bright-eyed teenager named Johnny Depp, who did some of his own slashing in his "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies.
6. Soylent Green (1973) is a horror movie, but not due because of some slasher or monster. Much worse. It scared the hell out of me because it presents everyday life in our near future that is more terrifying than some contrived villainy. Humanity has multiplied and multiplied until everywhere there are masses of seething people crowded shoulder to shoulder .
All living quarters are jammed full of people who can hardly move, and when they sleep, they cover every inch of space in buildings and on the streets. To ease the population surge, large trucks roam the streets and without warning, scoop up loads of people, never to be seen again. Regular food sources have long ago disappeared, and people eat only soylent green, square wafers supplied by the state.
Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) is a city cop who tries to do his duty in the mass of humanity, and can only get away from the horror by visiting the tiny apartment of his elderly friend, Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson). When Sol decides it's time to die by state-assisted suicide, Thorn watches in sadness until Sol's body disappears by conveyor belt.
Thorn, suspicious of what soylent green could be, follows the truck carrying Sol's body to a processing plant. Thorn then knows the horrible truth. Soylent green is processed dead people. He escapes the plant and tries to warn the residents of his building, but the state police kill him, giving Heston another dramatic death scene to add to his resume.
7. Carrie (1976) is a Stephen King horror tale about a hapless nerd of a high school girl. Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is ridiculed and tormented by the in-crowd of hip boys and girls. As with all King novels, his characters are other-worldly creepy, and you just know they'll take abuse only so long before they unleash their supernatural powers at the dastardly offenders.
The culmination of Carrie's angst comes after trying to deal with her religious freak of a nutcase mom (Piper Laurie) and the final humiliation at the school prom. The cruel kids told her she'd be crowned queen on stage, but she gets a bucket of sheep blood all over her instead. In a fury, Carrie emits deadly destructive waves of violence that send the prom attendees in all directions, some to a violently horrible death. So, hey, teenagers, watch out when you bug the class nerd next time!
8. Jaws (1975) made us all afraid to go ever go swimming in the ocean again, and "Vertigo" made us afraid to ever take a shower again. I guess all we can do is turn the back yard hose on us once in awhile. The opening sequence of the great white shark horror epic is enough to also make us never want to go to a movie again. A young party girl takes off her clothes and runs into the surf. Suddenly her smile turns to terror as her body is jerked under. She comes to the surface once, then in a cloud of bloody water, she disappears forever.
Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) dashes around trying to warn summer bathers, but no one wants to listen to him until the great white strikes again. And again. Then, terrified, people go running out of the water in panic. He finally gets the shark by tossing a grenade down its wide open jaws, but only after his boat and the captain are eaten up by the predator.
9. The Shining (1980) is a great terror film because Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) goes from loving husband and father to a raving, murderous maniac. And no one does it better nor as menacingly than Mr. Nicholson. His family is holed up in a haunted old hotel, and the fantasy includes ghosts of former guests and dancers as Jack's family tries to cope with his growing insantity.
The most well-known scene is when his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duval) locks a door to keep him from attacking her. He batters through it with an axe, sticks his grimacing, contorted face through with the frightening line, "Heeere's Johnny!" I believe he took that nutty look and snarling growl with him when he portrayed the Joker in "Batman".
10. The Omega Man (1971) is another Heston futuristic shocker. I've always admired Heston's grim-faced acting, whether he's in the distant past as Moses or in the future as Dr. Robert Neville. The doctor seems to be the only healthy human left alive after a biological war, and is holed up in an abandoned hotel penthouse. He must go out into the deserted city to pick up supplies, and also deal with other survivors, a bunch of menacing, night-roaming bleached zombies. With his personal arsenal of weapons, he always blasts away stacks of attacking bad guys, but the endless mob of the creeps keep trying to kill him.
The theme of the movie is laughable when watched in 2008. The 1971 story reveals that the end of humanity happened six years later, in a 1977 war between China and the now no long existing Soviet Union. Of course, as in most Heston movies, the hero must die dramatically. Ironically, it happens just as he discovers a small group of young humans has survived the plague and there is hope for mankind's future. Corny? Of course, but Heston always gives great, clenched-teeth performances and memorable death scenes.