Friday night with friends is about energy. You want something that earns its place in the conversation - a film that people are still talking about on the way home.
The finest horror films use fear the way poets use silence. Not as the subject â as the space that makes everything else reverberate.
A dangerous combination of radiation and insecticide causes the unfortunate Scott Carey to shrink, slowly but surely, until he is only a few inches tall. His home becomes a wilderness where he must survive everything from spiders living in the cellar to his beloved cat.
A brilliant plastic surgeon creates a synthetic skin that withstands any kind of damage. His guinea pig: a mysterious and volatile woman who holds the key to his obsession.
During an ever-growing epidemic of zombies that have risen from the dead, two Philadelphia SWAT team members, a traffic reporter, and his television-executive girlfriend seek refuge in a secluded shopping mall.
In a mid-19th century Essex country house, a young governess for two children becomes convinced that the house and grounds are haunted by ghosts and that the children are being possessed.
An American newcomer to a prestigious German ballet academy comes to realize that the school is a front for something sinister amid a series of grisly murders.
The horror films worth watching are the ones that stay with you not because of the scares but because of what the scares meant. These films mean something.
Henry Frankenstein pieces together body parts in the hope of bringing a human-like creature to life. The mad scientist's dreams are shattered by his monstrous creation awakening with rage to a world that hates and fears him.
Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.
Aspiring Florida defense lawyer Kevin Lomax accepts a job at a New York law firm. With the stakes getting higher every case, Kevin quickly learns that his boss has something far more evil planned.
While working on a thesis about audiovisual violence, film student Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured until death. Soon she discovers that she was a former student in her university, and that the authors of the video are not very far either.
A small-town doctor learns that the population of his community is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates.
There are films that remind you, without sentimentality, that people are capable of extraordinary things. These are some of them.
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.