Rashid’s Rankings: The 30 Greatest Horror Films (#26-23)

26: Audition (1999)
Audition has one of the biggest mood changes I’ve ever seen in a movie. The first half isn’t horror at all. It actually makes you seem like you’re watching a sweet little romance flick, then BAM! All of a sudden it becomes a torture film! I had already watched “Ichi The Killer” before I saw “Audition”, so Takashi Miike’s use of highly graphic torture came as to no surprise to me. This is one of the harder to recommend movies on the list because of the amount of violence, but I think every horror fanatic should watch “Audition”.

25: The Evil Dead (1981)
Okay, so the acting was bad, the plot was simple, and the budget was really low (only 1/3 of a million dollars) but that doesn’t stop it from becoming a fantastic film in the horror genre. It made a legend out of the now-much-worshipped Bruce Campbell (known as Ash in the Evil Dead trilogy). The movie is silly, and the violence is in the bucketfuls, though it wasn’t until Evil Dead II that director Sam Raimi really showed how far you could mix comedy with horror and do justice to both genres.

24: Gremlins (1984)
“Gremlins” took horror, mixed it in with the Christmas setting (a lot like “Black Christmas” did 10 years before), added a dash of dark comedy, and introduced quite possibly the cutest ‘creature‘ to ever appear on film. What’s not to love?

23: The Birds (1963)
It takes a director like Hitchcock to make a movie with no musical score, no actual ending, and no proper explanation and still wind up with greatness. Many people commend “Jaws” for making people afraid to go into the water because of a possible shark attack. Well 12 years before “Jaws”, Hitchcock made people fear birds (which I might add, is a lot more difficult than making people fear a blood-thirsty shark).

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