American horror films

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Delirium

A Vietnam veteran, a vigilante group and a plot that gives up. Not the Lamberto Bava one.

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Blood Rites

Andy Milligan shooting in Staten Island with a hand-held Auricon. An acquired taste nobody acquires.

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Don't Go in the Woods

Shot in Utah for 100,000 dollars with a score that never stops. Beloved by a small and stubborn group.

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Hellbender

Made by one family during lockdown for almost nothing, and it looks better than films with fifty times the budget.

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Night of the Demon

Bigfoot tears a man's genitals off. That is the scene, that is the film, that is why it was prosecuted.

obscure

Don't Go Near the Park

Cursed cave dwellers from 12,000 BC eating people in modern Los Angeles. Incoherent throughout.

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Fight for Your Life

A home invasion built entirely on racial abuse. Genuinely hard to watch and not for craft reasons.

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Frozen Scream

Every line is dubbed, including scenes with nobody talking. Almost hypnotically incompetent.

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Mardi Gras Massacre

An Aztec-obsessed killer in New Orleans. A Blood Feast remake in all but name, and slower.

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Revenge of the Bogey Man

Roughly 40 percent flashback to the first film. A sequel assembled rather than made.

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The Slayer

A painter's nightmares kill people on an off-season island. Genuinely atmospheric and badly underrated.

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The Witch Who Came from the Sea

Millie Perkins is extraordinary in it. A sad film about incest and memory, banned as a gore film.

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Unhinged

Three women, a mansion, rain, and a twist. Shot in Oregon and stranger than its reputation.

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Axe

68 minutes, shot in nine days, and oddly melancholy for something on a banned list.

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Forest of Fear

Marijuana growers, a herbicide and some very slow zombies. On the list by accident of title.

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Hell House LLC

A team building a Halloween haunted attraction in a real abandoned hotel, and the footage is all that is left.

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Terror Eyes

A motorcycle killer in Boston with a kukri. Rachel Ward's debut and a real giallo influence.

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Don't Look in the Basement

An asylum where you cannot tell staff from patients. Shot in twelve days in Texas and quite effective.

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Evilspeak

Clint Howard, a military academy, a computer and a lot of pigs. Better than it has any right to be.

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Human Experiments

A women-in-prison film with a brainwashing subplot. Linda Haynes deserved better material.

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Madhouse

A deaf teacher, a disfigured twin and a rottweiler. Shot in Savannah and better made than most of the list.

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Deadstream

A disgraced livestreamer broadcasts himself alone in a haunted house for the clout, and gets exactly what he deserves.

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Impetigore

An Indonesian folk horror about a woman who returns to a village that has been waiting for her.

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Let's Scare Jessica to Death

A woman fresh out of a psychiatric hospital moves to a Connecticut farmhouse, and the film never confirms what is real.

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Love Camp 7

The film that started the nazisploitation cycle. Lee Frost, a backlot, and no defence available.

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Messiah of Evil

A California coastal town waiting for a blood moon, made by the writers of American Graffiti, and it looks like nothing else.

cult

Pranks

A dorm over Christmas break and a plot that runs out. Notable mainly for an early Daphne Zuniga.

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Resolution

Two friends in a cabin while something rewrites the story around them. Benson and Moorhead's first film.

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The Blackening

A group of Black friends at a cabin play a racist board game that traps them, and the whole film is the joke that the Black character always dies first.

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The Front Room

A pregnant woman is forced to care for her husband's monstrous, dying, evangelical stepmother.

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Don't Go in the House

A man with a flamethrower and a steel room. The mother is the point and the film knows it.

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Nightmares in a Damaged Brain

Its distributor's executives went to prison over this one. The DPP case that ended in jail sentences.

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Spring

A love story that happens to involve an immortal woman whose body is not stable. Benson and Moorhead again.

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Cannibal Apocalypse

Vietnam veterans come home with a bite that spreads. A better idea than the film delivers.

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Nightmare Maker

Susan Tyrrell as the aunt, giving a performance far too committed for the film around it.

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Azrael

A near-wordless survival film in a post-apocalypse where a cult has cut out their own tongues.

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Birth/Rebirth

A morgue technician and a grieving mother reinventing Frankenstein without any of the theatrics.

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Parents

A boy in 1950s suburbia suspects the leftovers his parents keep serving are people. Bob Balaban directed.

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The Legend of Hell House

Richard Matheson adapting himself. Colder and nastier than The Haunting, and nearly as good.

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The Perfection

Swerves three times and mostly earns them. Best watched knowing nothing at all.

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The Toolbox Murders

The first fifteen minutes are notorious. The remaining seventy are a different and much duller film.

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It Lives Inside

An Indian-American teenager unleashes a demon from Hindu folklore while trying to assimilate.

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Motel Hell

A folksy farmer makes the best smoked meat in the county. The secret is people, planted in the garden up to their necks.

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Q: The Winged Serpent

An Aztec god nests atop the Chrysler Building and eats sunbathers, and Michael Moriarty is extraordinary.

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Snuff

A dull Manson knock-off with a fake murder stapled on the end and a marketing campaign of hired protesters.

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The Boogey Man

A haunted mirror and a Halloween score Ulli Lommel could not afford to license properly.

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Cam

A camgirl finds an identical copy of herself has taken over her account and locked her out.

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The Dark and the Wicked

Bryan Bertino's bleakest film. Two siblings return to the family farm as their father dies and something takes the household apart.

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The House of the Devil

Ti West made a 1983 film in 2009, on 16mm, and the first hour is a girl walking around a house alone.

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Daughters of Darkness

Elizabeth Báthory in an empty Ostend hotel out of season, and it is the most elegant vampire film ever made.

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In the Earth

A scientist and a guide walk into a forest during a pandemic and find a man, and a spirit, that do not want them to leave.

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No One Will Save You

A woman alone in a farmhouse fends off an alien home invasion, with almost no dialogue in the entire film.

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Sting

A girl raises a spider that fell from space in a New York apartment block, and it grows.

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Tales from the Crypt

Amicus adapting the EC Comics, with Joan Collins menaced by a killer Santa and Peter Cushing as a wronged dustman.

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The Uninvited

The first Hollywood ghost film to play it entirely straight. Almost nothing has aged.

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The Wretched

A teenager suspects the woman next door is a witch wearing the neighbours' skins. A word-of-mouth streaming hit.

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When Evil Lurks

Argentinian, merciless, and it establishes early that the film will not spare anybody. It means it.

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Blood Feast

The first gore film. Shot in four days for 24,500 dollars and it looks it, which is half the appeal.

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Night of the Comet

A comet turns most of Los Angeles to dust, and two Valley girls inherit the city.

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Phase IV

Saul Bass's only feature. The ants are shot like a nature documentary and it is deeply strange.

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The Innkeepers

Ti West's other 1970s-feeling film, about two clerks working the last weekend of a haunted hotel.

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The Love Witch

Shot on 35mm to look exactly like 1969, written and designed by one person, and very funny.

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The Stuff

A white dessert oozing from the ground becomes a national craze, and it is eating the people who eat it.

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You Won't Be Alone

A Macedonian witch story told as a Malick film, and it is about what it is to be a person.

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Dead & Buried

Eerie, well made, and completely undeserving of the list. Stan Winston's effects.

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The Blackcoat's Daughter

Oz Perkins' debut. Glacial, wintry, and the timeline is doing something you will only spot late.

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The Funhouse

Hooper on a real budget with Rick Baker's monster. Nowhere near nasty enough to be on this list.

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The Sentinel

A model moves into a Brooklyn brownstone that turns out to be the gateway to Hell, guarded by a blind priest.

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Wolfen

Not really a werewolf film. Something older is hunting in the ruins of the South Bronx.

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Burnt Offerings

A family rents a summer house that heals itself by consuming them. Karen Black, Oliver Reed and Bette Davis.

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Death Trap

Hooper's follow-up to Chain Saw, shot entirely on a sound stage lit in red. A hotel, a scythe and a crocodile.

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Martin

Romero's own favourite. A vampire film in which there may be no vampire, only a disturbed boy with razor blades.

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Prophecy

Mercury poisoning produces a mutant bear in the Maine woods, and it is angrier about logging than most activists.

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Ravenous

A Sierra Nevada fort in 1847, cannibalism as manifest destiny, and a score unlike any other.

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Session 9

Shot in a real abandoned asylum, and the building does most of the work.

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Society

A Beverly Hills teenager suspects his family are not human. The last twenty minutes prove it, wetly.

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The Driller Killer

Ferrara's debut, and mostly a film about being broke in New York. The sleeve got it prosecuted.

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The Vast of Night

A radio DJ and a switchboard operator in 1950s New Mexico chase a signal across one night. Shot for almost nothing.

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Faces of Death

A mondo compilation whose most famous scenes are staged. Sold as real and marketed on being banned.

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Flesh for Frankenstein

Shot in 3D with Udo Kier and a spleen. Warhol's name on it, Paul Morrissey's film.

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Ms .45

Abel Ferrara's second film. A mute seamstress, a .45, and a nun's habit at the end.

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Relic

Dementia as a house that grows corridors. The last ten minutes are unexpectedly tender.

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Strange Darling

Told out of order in six chapters, shot on 35mm by Giovanni Ribisi. The structure is the whole trick.

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The Endless

Two brothers return to the UFO death cult they escaped, and time is looping in the hills.

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Watcher

An American in Bucharest who cannot speak the language and is not being believed. Quietly excellent.

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Maniac

Joe Spinell wrote himself the lead and Tom Savini blew his own head off on camera.

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May

A lonely young woman decides that if she cannot find a whole person to love, she will assemble one.

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Woman of the Hour

Anna Kendrick's directorial debut, about the serial killer who appeared on The Dating Game mid-spree.

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A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

An Iranian vampire western shot in California, in Farsi, in black and white. Nothing else looks like it.

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Basket Case

A young man carries his surgically-separated deformed twin in a wicker basket, and they are taking revenge.

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Creep

Two actors, a cabin and a camera. Mark Duplass is the most unsettling thing in modern horror.

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His House

A South Sudanese couple in British asylum housing. The haunting and the bureaucracy are the same thing.

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Rabid

Cronenberg's second feature, with an experimental skin graft, a stinger in an armpit, and a plague across Montreal.

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Sleepaway Camp

A cheap, badly acted summer camp slasher with an ending that has been argued about for forty years.

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The Entity

A woman is repeatedly assaulted by an invisible entity, and the film sides with her against the psychiatrists.

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Color Out of Space

Nicolas Cage, alpacas, and a colour that does not exist. More faithful than most attempts.

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Cuckoo

A German alpine resort, Hunter Schafer, and Dan Stevens doing an accent. Deeply strange.

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From Beyond

Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs reunite after Re-Animator for a Lovecraft story about a machine that reveals what is always there.

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Late Night with the Devil

A 1977 Halloween talk show broadcast, live, going wrong. David Dastmalchian finally gets a lead.

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Opera

Argento's last great film, and the needles taped under the eyes are the image of his career.