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The movie industry continues to innovate and excite with bold cinematic spectacles that push international box office totals into the billions. Like any form of entertainment, movies are guilty of succumbing to certain trends. That being said, the horror genre has always resonated with fans and there’s something raw, visceral, and universal about getting frightened.
Horror films have gotten more ambitious and creative than ever before. However, these groundbreaking pieces of cinema wouldn’t be possible without the earlier movies that broke barriers and popularized new ideas and tropes. As such, there are several horror movies that changed the game.
10/10 Black Christmas Sets The Standard For Modern Slashers
There are some excellent horror films that exploit the cozy atmosphere of Christmas and the winter holidays, but Bob Clark’s Black Christmas from 1974 is a pivotal piece of horror cinema. In fact, it’s largely considered to be the first slasher movie.
Not only is Black Christmas terrifying because of the movie’s detached villain, but its haunting use of first-person POV shots from the killer’s perspective was also revolutionary at the time. These shots have since become the norm in the genre. Several Black Christmas remakes have come and gone, but none match the impact of the original.
9/10 Night Of The Living Dead Establishes The Zombie Paradigm
George A. Romero is largely considered to be a pivotal voice in the development of zombies as pop culture currently perceives them, as flesh-eating reanimated corpses. 1968’s Night of the Living Dead kickstarted this trend.
Curiously, the term “zombie” never appears in Night of the Living Dead as the film uses “ghoul,” which is the preferred nomenclature. Romero’s scrappy approach to horror, as well as his use of the undead as a tool for social commentary, forever changed the genre and launched separate zombie film series.
8/10 Psycho Plays With Perception With A Psychological Twist That’s Still Talked About
Alfred Hitchcock made dozens of films that are still considered to be triumphs of cinema. 1960’s Psycho has received a remake, multiple sequels, and even a TV series that functions as an origin story and expansion of the Norman Bates lore. None of this would have happened if Hitchcock’s original picture wasn’t such a scary story that got under the audience’s skin.
Psycho‘s iconic shower murder scene is just one of the moments in the movie that’s become endlessly referential. However, the final twist that surrounds Norman Bates and the identity of “Mother” is something that’s gone on to define countless other psychological horror stories.
7/10 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Immerses Audiences In A Rural Waking Nightmare
Leatherface is among the most famous slasher icons on the horror genre’s Mount Rushmore. It’s Tobe Hooper’s unsettling 1974 masterpiece, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that presents Leatherface and the rest of the Sawyer family to the world. Tobe Hooper’s gritty horror film plays with a lot of curious tropes, like the disclaimer that this is a real story to further perturb the viewer.
At the time, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a game-changer as it had its villain wield a mundane power tool as a murder weapon. Now, the film is viewed as one of the prototypical examples of rural and folk-based horror.
The Blair Witch Project remains one of the most profitable independent films of all time that’s practically impossible to recreate in today’s modern world. Found-footage films are still incredibly popular in the horror genre.
While The Blair Witch Project isn’t the first movie that blurs the lines between fact and fiction, it was the first breakthrough success that truly left audiences uncertain over what they had watched. Less is more in The Blair Witch Project, a philosophy that’s often neglected in the slew of found-footage horror films that have since followed.
5/10 Suspiria Is A Standout Giallo Film That Highlights Dario Argento’s Sensibilities
Dario Argento first emerged as a director in the 1970s and he’s since amassed a filmography of nearly 20 films that explore heightened serial killers and supernatural forces. Suspiria isn’t Argento’s first feature, but it’s a landmark entry in the proliferation of the “Giallo” subgenre, in which he’s viewed as a forefather.
Suspiria combines Argento’s stylized violence with hypnotic colors and visuals, all of which are set to a rocking score by Goblin. The first in Argento’s acclaimed “Three Mothers Trilogy,” Suspiria is still a landmark piece of ‘70s horror.
4/10 Poltergeist Starts Many Of The Modern Haunted House Tropes
Ghost stories and haunted houses represent some of the earliest horror archetypes. They’re easy stories to return to, but it’s the Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper collaboration, Poltergeist, that’s responsible for many paranormal tropes that audiences now accept as fact or take for granted.
Poltergeist’s haunting tale is born out of the desecrated burial ground underneath the family’s home. This recipe for disaster has been consistently repeated, as has the idea of a dark force from the other side targeting an innocent child through innocuous objects like a television or doll.
3/10 The Evil Dead Establishes The Creepy Cabin In The Woods Archetype
Sam Raimi has become one of the biggest names when it comes to superhero cinema, but the director’s roots go back to schlocky B-movies and over-the-top horror films. The Evil Dead is Raimi’s calling card and a property that he’s returned to more than anything else.
The series has continually reinvented itself and incorporated humor and time travel into its apocalyptic zombie premise. However, The Evil Dead plays it straight and establishes an effective “cabin in the woods” framework that’s grown into its own subgenre.
2/10 Saw Kicks Off The Gratuitous Violence And Inventive Torture That Dominates The 2000s
Love it or hate it, the Saw series was unavoidable during the 2000s. A new entry in the gory survival saga arrived each year in time for Halloween. There are nine films in the franchise, including 2021’s Spiral, but James Wan’s original movie is a restrained exercise in minimalism compared to the extremely gratuitous sequels.
That being said, Saw‘s masochistic follow-ups help usher in the decade’s fascination with violent stories of torture. While Saw changed the game in that respect, the ultra-violent trend was perpetuated by other series like Hostel and Wolf Creek.
1/10 Scream Popularizes Post-Modern, Self-Aware Horror
Wes Craven is a prolific name in horror and he’s responsible for several successful franchises. Craven first begins to really experiment with meta-textual and self-aware storytelling in his final Nightmare on Elm Street sequel, New Nightmare, but Scream sees these exciting ideas properly come to life.
Scream is incredibly influential in terms of self-aware and satirical horror films, but also when it comes to the snappy pop culture-filled dialogue that dominated in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Scream helped rejuvenate the slasher genre during this time and had countless imitators follow in its wake.
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