The films

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Day of the Dead

The bleakest of Romero's trilogy, hated on release, and Tom Savini's best work.

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Prince of Darkness

The second of Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy, and it is quantum physics as a book of the dead.

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Videodrome

Predicted most of what people now say about the internet, using a Betamax slot in a man's stomach.

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Fright Night

A teenager works out his new neighbour is a vampire and no adult will believe him, so he hires a washed-up TV host.

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Dead Ringers

Jeremy Irons plays twin gynaecologists who share everything, and Cronenberg's coldest, saddest film.

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The Dead Zone

Cronenberg's most restrained film, and Christopher Walken plays a man who can see how it ends.

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The Fog

Carpenter's follow-up to Halloween: a Californian coastal town, a hundredth anniversary, and something owed.

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The Lost Boys

Joel Schumacher's MTV vampires in a California beach town, and it made the genre cool for a decade.

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Angel Heart

Mickey Rourke hunts a missing crooner for a client called Louis Cyphre, and the answer is the worst possible one.

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Hellraiser

Clive Barker adapting his own novella, and the Cenobites are on screen for about eight minutes.

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An American Werewolf in London

Rick Baker won the first ever Academy Award for makeup for a transformation that hurts to watch.

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Cannibal Holocaust

Found footage nineteen years before Blair Witch, and six animals actually died to make its point.

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Christine

Carpenter directing King's killer car in the same year he made almost nothing else work.

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Evil Dead II

Half remake, half sequel, and it turns the first film into slapstick without losing the nastiness.

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Poltergeist

A suburban family, a television, and a chair-stacking sequence that has never stopped being copied.

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They Live

Carpenter's angriest film, disguised as a B-movie, about sunglasses that let you see the ads underneath everything.

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The Fly

Under the effects it is a film about watching someone you love get a terminal illness, and Goldblum plays it that way.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street

Craven's best idea: a killer who gets you where you cannot stay awake to avoid him.

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Friday the 13th

Copied Halloween without any of the craft, added Savini, and proved the formula worked anyway.

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The Evil Dead

Prosecuted dozens of times and won more often than it lost. Raimi was 21 and it shows in the best way.

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The Shining

King hated it. Everyone else was right. The geography of the hotel is deliberately impossible.

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The Thing

Flopped, was called empty and disgusting, and is now the most imitated horror film of its decade.