The mistake most marathons make is consistency - same tone, same energy, film after film. Vary the weight. Follow something heavy with something lighter. Let the list breathe.
The 80s and 90s remain a goldmine. Films that were commercially dismissed on release and now considered essential.
The finest horror films use fear the way poets use silence. Not as the subject â as the space that makes everything else reverberate.
As the president of a trashy TV channel, Max Renn is desperate for new programming to attract viewers. When he happens upon "Videodrome," a TV show dedicated to gratuitous torture and punishment, Max sees a potential hit and broadcasts the show on his channel. However, after his girlfriend auditions for the show and never returns, Max investigates the truth behind Videodrome and discovers that the graphic violence may not be as fake as he thought.
When a rogue priest discovers the exact date the Antichrist will be born, he enlists a Death Metal record store clerk and a cheesy TV psychic for an urban spree of gore, sacrilege and twisted humor to prevent the Apocalypse.
An insurance investigator visits a small town while looking into the strange disappearance of a popular horror novelist. He soon finds that the impact of the author's books is far more than inspirational.
When two bumbling employees at a medical supply warehouse accidentally release a deadly gas into the air, the vapors cause the dead to rise again as zombies.
Skeptical young detective Ichabod Crane gets transferred to the hamlet of Sleepy Hollow, New York, where he is tasked with investigating the decapitations of three people - murders the townsfolk attribute to a legendary specter, The Headless Horseman.
These films work because they respect their audience. They don't rush to the scare. They build it, layer it, let it sit â and then they deploy it perfectly.
The Freelings' suburban home becomes the center of paranormal activity that opens a portal to the 'other side'. With help, they must cross over to get their daughter back.
After receiving an exotic small animal as a Christmas gift, a young man inadvertently breaks three important rules concerning his new pet, which unleashes a horde of malevolently mischievous creatures on a small town.
A down-and-out Brooklyn detective is hired to track down a singer on an odyssey that will take him through the desperate streets of Harlem, the smoke-filled jazz clubs of New Orleans, and the swamps of Louisiana and its seedy underworld of voodoo.
Elliot, a successful gynecologist, works at the same practice as his identical twin, Beverly. Elliot is attracted to many of his patients and has affairs with them. When he inevitably loses interest, he will give the woman over to Beverly, the meeker of the two, without the woman knowing the difference. Beverly falls hard for one of the patients, Claire, but when she inadvertently deceives him, he slips into a state of madness.
When an unsuspecting town newcomer is drawn to local blood fiends, the Frog brothers and other unlikely heroes gear up to rescue him.
True stories carry a different weight. Knowing it happened - knowing real people made these choices - changes how you watch.
These films work not in spite of their darkness but because of what they do with it. Fear, in the right hands, is one of cinema's most honest tools.