For a Friday with friends, you need a film that doesn't require perfect silence to work. Something engaging enough that it holds attention even in a room with people in it.
The finest horror films use fear the way poets use silence. Not as the subject â as the space that makes everything else reverberate.
While vacationing on a remote German island with his younger pregnant wife, an artist has an emotional breakdown while confronting his repressed desires.
Un Chien Andalou is an European avant-garde surrealist film, a collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.
A vengeful witch, Asa Vajda, and her fiendish servant, Igor Jauvitch, return from the grave and begin a bloody campaign to possess the body of the witch's beautiful look-alike descendant: Katia. Only a handsome doctor with the help of family members stand in her way.
Two hillbillies are suspected of being killers by a group of paranoid college kids camping near the duo's West Virginian cabin. As the body count climbs, so does the fear and confusion as the college kids try to seek revenge against the pair.
American tourists David and Jack are savagely attacked by an unidentified animal while hiking on the Yorkshire Moors. After retiring to the home of a beautiful nurse to recuperate, David soon begins experiencing disturbing changes to his body and mind.
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.
When a Sumatran rat-monkey bites Lionel Cosgrove's mother, she's transformed into a zombie and begins killing (and transforming) the entire town while Lionel races to keep things under control.
A mother of two inherits a home from her aunt. On the first night in the new home she is confronted with murderous intruders and fights for her daughters' lives. Sixteen years later the daughters reunite at the house, and that is when things get strange...
A family is forced to live in silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound.
A vampire relates his epic life story of love, betrayal, loneliness, and dark hunger to an over-curious reporter.
Beautiful young manicurist Carole suffers from androphobia (the pathological fear of interaction with men). When her sister and roommate, Helen, leaves their London flat to go on an Italian holiday with her married boyfriend, Carole withdraws into her apartment. She begins to experience frightful hallucinations, her fear gradually mutating into madness.
The best measure of whether a film is worth watching is whether you'd recommend it to someone you respect. These all qualify.
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.