The Top Ten Classic Horror Movies

James Verniere - Boston Herald

Fright Flicks are Scream of the Crop

Get in the mood for Halloween by renting and revisiting some classic horror movies. Here are the 10 best:

1. "The Bride of Frankenstein" (1935). The bells are ringing for Boris Karloff's Monster and Elsa Lanchester's Nefertiti-like, wedding-dress-cum-shroud-clad Bride. This, girls and boys, is the one and only, a pitch-black Gothic-comic fantasy about death and matrimony, and a sequel better than its predecessor.

2. "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" (2005). My favorite Burton film (co-directed by Mike Johnson) with roots in another title on this list, "Corpse Bride" is a stop-motion extravaganza featuring unmatched spooky-world lighting, costume, set and character design, all this and Christopher Lee, too.

3. "The Blair Witch Project" (1999). How brilliant is your no-budget movie if you figure out a way to make the actors shoot it? A nightmarish journey into, but not out of the woods begins as a faux-documentary and ends up scaring you half to death.

4. "Black Sunday" (also known as "La maschera del demonio") (1960). The first of two films on this list by Italian master Mario Bava, this "Corpse Bride" inspiration boasts Scream Queen Barbara Steele at her most amazingly photogenic in a dual role as both a beautiful princess and evil queen/vampire witch. Oh, baby.

5. "Black Sabbath" (also known as "I tre volti della paura") (1963). Bava's tripartite attempt to re-create the U.S. success of his first "black" title with septuagenarian Karloff magnificent as a vampirized patriarch, complete with weeping vampire child.

6. "Kwaidan" (1964). Before J-horror there was "Kwaidan," a collection of eerie ghost stories inspired by the Japan-set tales of Lafcadio Hearn, atmospheric and haunting.

7. "A Tale of Two Sisters" (also known as "Janghwa, Hongryeon,") (2003). Ji-woon Kim's totally whacked South Korean effort is the story of sisters haunted by ghosts in the rural home of their father and new stepmother. The recent American remake, grotesquely retitled "The Uninvited," was, natch, a total failure.

8. "The Shining" (1980). Probably the most influential and classiest fright film of the modern era, Stanley Kubrick's Stephen King adaptation is a flipside to Hitchcock's "Psycho," and the ultimate, "Daddy's-not-himself-today" movie.

9. "Ringu" (1998). Accept no (American) substitutes. This Japanese J-horror high-water mark, redubbed "The Ring" when it was remade with Naomi Watts, will scare the bejesus out of you.

10. "The Exorcist" (1973). The power of Christ compels me to include the film that made icons out of a foul-mouthed, projectile-vomiting, head-rotating demon girl, "Tubular Bells" and the sight of Max von Sydow's title character arriving in the rain.

---

More movie news

Movie reviews

Copyright 2009 by Boston Herald