29. Wolf Creek
The Aussies are coming. And then some. This film takes its sweet yet never boring time building backstory and character so we truly care about these young British and Australian backpackers, before unleashing a "based on a true story" demented Crocodile Dundee character with the innocuous name of Mick Taylor. And yeah, we're plunged into a nocturnal outback world of pure awfulness we hope is over sooner rather than later, for the sake of the innocent and undeserving young folks stalked by this revolting yet gleeful human monster. If you can stomach it, it's a brilliant, sickening, relentless horror film, period.
30. [REC]
The great thing about the current state of horror in film is the truly global aspect of it. On my short list alone are French, Swedish, British, American, Australian, Finnish, Japanese, Canadian, South Korean, Dutch and, here, Spanish offerings, all bringing something new to the genre. Nerve jangling, claustrophobic, and pretty much plain terrifying, you're off balance throughout, with the film seeming to posit numerous scenarios (zombies, demons?) behind a strange and gruesome outbreak among the residents of a quarantined apartment block. Oh, and yeah, it's frightening.
31. The Wicker Man
Unlike anything else, this British film from 1973 was dated from the moment it was released, which doesn't matter, since it was self-contained and creepy-strange beyond belief from the get go. A unique clash between paganism and Christianity, liberal sexuality and puritanism, prurience and piety, bacchanalia and Presbyterianism, the rampant and the reproachful, the sensual and the censorious, all of its no-doubt predictable struggles play out against the foment of the times in which it was conceived, and yet the final and—oh god(s) help us—lasting impression is one of bleak, stark, inexorable, human-centric horror. Hence its inclusion here.
32. Carnival of Souls
The early '60s was a fertile period for new takes on horror. For one thing, I was born. Okay, kidding. Ha! But yeah, Hitchcock was working his special alchemy alongside a few others whose careers were—sadly and quite frankly, stupidly—not exactly enhanced by their association with the genre (I'm talking about you, Michael Powell!), but the context for this particular gem is difficult to unravel from such a distance. Eerie, creepy, spooky, and haunted are all adjectives that occur, but for me, the feminine sensibility—as depicted by the anxious, blurrily magisterial Candace Hilligoss—is the warm, strange heart of this self-contained and atmospheric wonder. That and a truly disconcerting "something wicked" motif, as painted by the manic, incessant dark carny music. (Pro tip: the full movie is on YouTube.)