Horror films

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Zombie Flesh Eaters

A zombie fights a shark. There is also an eye and a splinter. Fulci's most purely entertaining film.

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Bone Tomahawk

A slow western for 90 minutes, then one scene people never forget. You will know it when it starts.

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I Spit on Your Grave

Ebert gave it zero stars and called it "a vile bag of garbage". Clover argued the camera is with her throughout. Both cases are live.

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Raw

A vegetarian vet student develops an appetite. Julia Ducournau's debut and a genuine coming-of-age film.

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Re-Animator

The funniest Lovecraft adaptation ever made, which is not what anybody expected.

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The Monkey

Osgood Perkins doing King as a gore comedy. The deaths are elaborate and the film is laughing.

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Braindead

The bloodiest film ever made at the time, and it is a comedy about a man and his mother.

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Martyrs

Two films stapled together, and it takes its argument about suffering completely seriously.

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Audition

Spends an hour as a gentle romantic comedy. That is not an accident.

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Beau Is Afraid

Ari Aster's three-hour anxiety odyssey, and it is horror only in the sense that being alive is.

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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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Ready or Not

A bride versus her new in-laws and their family obligation. Very funny and mean.

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Barbarian

Go in knowing nothing. The structure is the point and every synopsis ruins it.

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The Platform

A vertical prison and a descending table of food. The metaphor is a brick and the film is effective anyway.

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Evil Dead Rise

Moves the cabin to a Los Angeles tower block. The cheese grater is the sequence people talk about.

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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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Titane

Won the Palme d'Or. A film about a woman, a car and a grieving fireman, and it is not a comedy.

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Irréversible

Runs backwards and uses infrasound to make you physically unwell. About 200 walked out at Cannes.

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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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Evil Dead II

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

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Battle Royale

A class of Japanese schoolchildren are dropped on an island and made to kill each other. Kinji Fukasaku's last major film.

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The Substance

Body horror about how the industry treats women over fifty, with Demi Moore doing the bravest work of her career.

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Oldboy

A man is imprisoned in a room for fifteen years with no explanation, released, and given five days to find out why.

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Saw

Two men chained in a bathroom, made for 1.2 million dollars in eighteen days, and it is far better than its franchise.

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The Silence of the Lambs

The only horror film to win Best Picture, and it wins the argument about whether it is one.