25. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Ha, I can feel the hardcore horror fans starting to lighten up a little now (while mainstream fans balk). Just you wait. ;) But yeah, Tobe Hooper's low budget slasher film was a benchmark of massive proportions. As with Psycho, it was inspired by the repulsive exploits of real-life killer Ed Gein, although it took that inspiration in a whole different direction, but another predecessor deserving of a nod would be Deliverance, made just two years earlier. And since, there have been hundreds of TCM wannabes, most of them pale shadows. There's a scene where Leatherface slams shut a sliding steel door that still gives me inexplicable nightmares. And it's odd: the reputation of this film doesn't prepare you for its reality. It's not particularly gory, for one thing—plenty of smart misdirection and suggestion precludes the need for it. It's just kind of insane, creepy, and frightening. (And yes, I know the image is from one of a kazillion remakes, but I like its feel; for me it captures some of the dread of the original, and I like minimalist road shots. Whatever.)
26. Se7en
Ditto. You could flip this and the last entry around. Both are doing a very similar thing: demonstrating the bleak, nihilistic heart at the centre of the police procedural/ forensic psychology subgenre (without these films, we may never have arrived at a CSI, a Dexter, or now, of course, a Hannibal). Crime, horror? The distinction melts away, along with any sense of justice, redemption or hope, with the now-infamous ending. But before we even get there, we've tripped over a series of gruesomely tormented corpses and witnessed some of the worst things humans are capable of. This is some dark and frankly terrifying shit. Casting and performances, as with the previous entry, were nigh on perfect.
27. The Silence of the Lambs
This is the point where people get upset with me and say Silence is not a horror film. Well, its my list, dammit, and you can go make your own (aw, sounds meaner than I meant it to), and if you think this is a stretch, wait till you see what I have even higher up the list! But I say if this isn't horror, then what is? It's not just Lecter and his taste for both intrigue and human flesh, it's Clarice's courageous yet aching vulnerability throughout, it's the liberal use of real life serial killer awfulness to "flesh out" the backstory, it's creepy as hell from start to finish and finally, how can a movie featuring a man who is trying to fashion a woman suit from the skin of his victims not be deemed a horror film? Every bit as sharp as Thomas Harris's source material with an added feminist sensibility. A film balanced perfectly on its moment in time.
28. Night of the Living Dead
Without Romero's classic film, we almost certainly wouldn't have had the relentless zombie mania of the last few years. And it always makes me smile that such a bleak, violent, and even subversive film made its debut between the so-called Summer of Love and Woodstock. Ha. Schizophrenic much, America? But like the Body Snatcher movies, Living Dead was read by more thoughtful critics as social commentary, in this case critiquing anything from the '60s counterculture, Vietnam and the Cold War, to American racism. And in terms of its reception, the critical arc went from "junk film" to the Library of Congress adding it to its National Film Registry. (This trailer is funny, yet the film really isn't.)