Halloween with the Dispatch: 20 underappreciated horror movies

This isn’t a list of the best horror movies, mind you. But if you’ve already seen Psycho, Alien, and that movie where the vampire sparkles, maybe we can help.

Anyway, here’s the list of our favourite horror movies you might have missed. (Don’t worry, we’ll get back to zoning variance stories tomorrow.)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

The town is peaceful. The lawns are clipped. The men wear suits. Cocktails are plentiful and the driveways are just long enough to fit the massive cars everyone drives. But one by one, pod people are imitating and replacing the townsfolk. They have no emotion. They don’t believe in love. And they’re coming after you next.

On a political level, it’s like the George Orwell novel of 1950s science-fiction horror movies. It’s the one flick claimed with equal fervour by the left and the right.

The movie “fed on the paranoia of McCarthyism,” noted Roger Ebert.

Writing in 1957, critic Ernest G. Laura suggested it was: “natural to see the pods as standing for the idea of communism which gradually takes possession of a normal person.”

Years later, star Kevin McCarthy told an interviewer: “I never felt it had any political significance. It came afterwards.”

While the movie looked like noir and felt like horror, the guy behind the camera was dedicated to action.

Don Siegel, who would go on to make Dirty Harry and Escape from Alcatraz, has our heroes in constant motion, running and fighting (and fighting sleep) as they take flight from an ever-expanding colony of the pod people.

But what is it really about?

Siegel never said. However, according to Quentin Tarantino’s book Cinema Speculation, Siegel had a term he’d apply to producers and studio executives who were unimaginative or stultifying or generally not worthy of respect.

He called them pod people.

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Words matter. Some people’s words, however, matter more than others.

Sam Neill stars as a dashing investigator and a devout skeptic who, at the urging of a major publisher, takes a wandering author job.

A Stephen King-like writer named Sutter Cane has gone missing and Neill is tasked with bringing the horror author back to reality.

But reality, we soon discover, isn’t what it used to be.

Director John Carpenter has made scarier movies (Halloween, The Thing) but for anyone who stayed awake with a horror story wondering what might happen if the words jumped off the page and into the world, In the Mouth of Madness resonates.

Critic Sheila Johnston wrote that In the Mouth of Madness gets buried alive by its “incredible imploding plot.”

Maybe. But what a way to go.

Vincent (1982)

So, has Tim Burton always been like this?

Apparently.

Long before Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands or Frankenweenie, Burton directed this six-minute stop-motion gem.

Narrated by Vincent Price, the movie tells the story of Vincent Malloy, a macabre poet/mad scientist who has the misfortune of also being a seven-year-old boy whose mother wants him to have fun. In the sunshine.

Funny, spooky, and as gothic as a raven wearing eyeliner, it might not be the best Tim Burton movie, but it’s definitely the Tim Burtonest.

Onibaba (1964)

Concealed by the tall grass, a young woman and her mother-in-law do terrible things in the shadow of a war.

The two keep their dark secrets until an army deserter arrives. The partnership is promptly ruined amid lust, fear and jealousy – the perfect recipe to summon a demon.

Shot in black-and-white, this adaptation of a Japanese folk tale might be the scariest sounding movie ever made. Propulsive drums, pelting rain and the tones of wind sweeping through the grass create a terrifying soundscape.

The movie also contains an inflexible moral lesson. While we can choose to wear terrible masks, we can’t always choose when we take them off.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933)

The movie was set to premiere in Germany in the spring of 1933.

However, as production was wrapping up on Fritz Lang’s supernatural crime thriller, Adolf Hitler came to power and – less than two weeks before the eagerly anticipated premiere – Joseph Goebbels was appointed head of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

“Art is free, and so it shall remain,” Goebbels stated. “But it must become accustomed to certain norms.”

He banned the movie as a threat to public order and safety.

If it wasn’t for a producer who grabbed the film negatives and hopped on a plane to Paris, the movie could have become one of those fabled lost films.

But why was it so controversial?

The movie imagines a deranged criminal writing madly in a bid to establish a new criminal empire. His words and recordings of his speeches act like a contagion, infecting those close to him and compelling a gang of thugs to do monstrous things. Some of those thugs dress like Nazi officers and one unfortunate actor even sports the Hitler haircut.

The gang’s ambition was to destroy the state and built an empire on its ruins, Lang later explained in a 1964 interview included on the Criterion edition of the film.

The movie is tightly edited and exciting, with strong action scenes, a chilling murder in traffic, and a few surprisingly funny moments.

It’s about corruption on a most basic, individual level, and the way rot can spread from one mind across a society.

Frailty (2002)

It’s a Texas gothic tale of family and faith, murder and duplicity.

One night, a loving single father awakens his two young boys. He tells them an angel has visited him in the night and given him a task. He must find and slay the demons that walk among us.

The story winds through decades, murders, an investigation and a peculiar interrogation but, at its core it’s always about the vulnerability of those two boys and the terrible question they’re left with: Is Dad OK?

Featuring Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaughey and Powers Boothe, the movie is a tense, well-crafted thriller that terrifies you even when you’re not sure who you should be terrified of.

The Vanishing (1988)

It’s the rare scary movie where a jump would be a relief.

Aside from a few moments of comedy as dark as a dirt floor, The Vanishing offers no release for our tension. Instead we’re compelled to sit and witness the unfolding story of grief and obsession.

The plot revolves around a young couple, Rex and Saskia, separated on vacation. Rex knows something happened to Saskia, guesses it was something bad, but he needs to know more.

“Why doesn’t he turn away?” we ask.

But then, neither do we.

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

“No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal – the redness and the horror of blood.”
–Edgar Allan Poe

A COVID party, it turns out, isn’t an entirely new idea.

Director Roger Corman’s retelling of Poe’s pandemic tale is a perfect marriage of the ominous and the opulent.

Vincent Price stars as the poisonous and privileged Prince Prospero. As disease rages outsides, Prospero hosts a lavish and debauched celebration inside his castle where, as the one percent of the one percent, he imagines himself invulnerable to the pestilence infecting the peasantry.

The story is dark and gothic but the movie, photographed by future filmmaking great Nicolas Roeg, is radiant with colour, particularly rich, glossy reds.

It’s difficult to turn a five-page story into a 90-minute film without rendering the source material unrecognizable. But this film, padded with another Poe story, may be the most faithful – and the best – big screen adaptation of Poe.

Return of the Living Dead (1985)

Zombies and punk rock: two great tastes that taste great together. (At least the zombies seem to like it.)

There had already been sequels – both official and otherwise – to horror classic Night of the Living Dead when this one came along. However, this combination of gore, slapstick comedy, and satire is the only flick that picks up where the original left off – sort of.

You see, Night of the Living Dead was real but, due to some incompetent government bureaucracy, those famously undead fellows who were coming to get Barbara are now right down in the company basement. Do you wanna see ‘em? Of course you do.

Roger Ebert called it a “satisfactory ghoul movie,” but it’s much more.

Besides the pulsing soundtrack and solid style, the movie includes the greatest single line in undead history.

After chowing down on some medical technicians, a zombie shuffles to the ambulance, grabs the radio and, like he’s ordering nachos at a bar, croaks: “Send more paramedics.”

The Invitation (2015)

According to Rotten Tomatoes, this is better than The Exorcist.

Ridiculous, I know. But while that ranking makes me despair for the state of film criticism and tomatoes, it’s also a testament to the impact of director Karyn Kusama’s terrifying dinner party movie.

The setup is simple: just a gathering of old friends at a nice house in the hills.

Picture it: you’re at a table with people you love . . . only you don’t know them anymore. And the more they talk about their lives, the more you wonder if you ever did. It works on the same principle as Invasion of the Body Snatchers but – if you know anyone who’s been radicalized one way or another – this one hits closer to home.

The gang’s all here. But oh how you wish they weren’t.

The Parallax View (1974)

So, you’re not scared of vampires, zombies or werewolves? But how about the government, man?

Made for people who have spent far more time than is healthy thinking about grassy knolls, this represents the pinnacle of director Alan J. Pakula’s paranoia films.

The film stars Warren Beatty as an implausibly good looking reporter who investigates a political assassination and finds the They the conspiracy-minded always suspected.

It turns out lone nuts fall from one big tree.

Room 237 (2012)

It’s not a horror movie. And yet there’s something about this one that’s more unsettling than some horror movies.

This oddly disembodied documentary pores over Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining while a series of voices theorize, guess and explain – sometimes with absolute certainty – what the movie is really about.

Is it about the moon landing? (Which director Stanley Kubrick faked, we’re told.) The labyrinth and the minotaur? Could it be about some of the most terrible crimes in the history of humanity?

When Kubrick’s movie first came out, critic Pauline Kael suggested audiences weren’t frightened, “because Kubrick’s absorption in film technology distances us.”

After watching Room 237 and passing through those hotel hallways over and over again, you might wish everyone involved had a little more distance.

The documentary is a wormhole of obsession where you get to see what you’ve seen before through new eyes. Some of the theories are ridiculous, some are unconvincing, but one of them is correct.

Oh no. Have I become one of them?

Invisible Agent (1942)

No, it’s not as iconic as The Invisible Man with Claude Rains, but it has its own charm.

The 1942 movie centres around the grandson of the original invisible man after he’s recruited by the government to use his family’s deep dark invisibility secret to help fight the Nazis.

Yes, the movie has flaws. But on the other hand, you get to watch Nazis get punched a lot.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

It’s a Dracula movie without a vampire.

Instead of a castle in Transylvania, there’s a mansion in Beverly Hills.

And inside that mansion, the air grows stale. Years pass. The aristocratic occupant eschews sunlight. She is unchanged, out of sync with the world, and thirsty for the stardom that once belonged to her.

Night of the Hunter (1955)

As a director, Charles Laughton was a one-trick pony. But what a trick it was.

Robert Mitchum stars as a conniving “preacher” with love tattooed on one hand, hate on the other, and greed in his heart.

There’s hidden money in town. The children know where it is. The bad man chases them. A few twists and turns aside, that’s the plot, but I don’t think anyone remembers the plot.

It’s not just that the bad man chases the children – it’s that he pursues them with the inevitability of a nightmare.

The Black Swan (2010)

Asked about the movie, my wife said: “It’s about ballerinas but it’s all messed up.”

There’s dance, liberation, hallucination, sex and Tchaikovsky.

Race With the Devil (1974)

It’s not the devil that’s scary in this movie. It’s the devil worshippers.

And who are the devil worshippers? Well, you just can’t tell and that’s the problem.

Drive-in dynamo director Jack Starrett ratchets up the tension with shots that linger just a little bit longer than they should. Was that gas station attendant just doing his job, or . . . is he in on it too?

The movie also features a sequence in which the great Warren Oates tries to outrun a swarming cult of Satanists in a Winnebago.

The Devil’s Advocate (1997)

The devil is real in this one. And he practises law.

Director Taylor Hackford does everything right. The courtroom scenes are strong. The depiction of those small, selfish choices that can ruin a marriage are real.

It’s a very good movie heading into the third act. That’s when Al Pacino goes for the gusto.

Pacino sets celluloid and everything else ablaze in his magnificently over the top performance.

“Oh, I have so many names.”

“Satan?”

“Call me Dad.”

Creepshow (1982)

Like many anthology horror movies, this one’s hit-and-miss.

“The Crate” is particularly slow and tedious. But in the last chapter, we get to the good stuff with a story called: “They’re Creeping Up on You.”

It’s about a titan of industry who views the rest of humanity as insects. And it’s about the night he gets what he deserves.

“They’re Creeping Up on You” is a bit like that portrait of Kramer on Seinfeld. You’re repelled. But you cannot look away.

The Innocents (1961)

Sixty years after its release, this adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw remains one of the finest horror movies ever made.

The story revolves around a governess looking after troubled children at a country estate. It’s been done before and since, but never quite so well.

Is it a psychological thriller? A ghost story?

Either way, you’ll sleep with the lights on.