10 classic Halloween horror films

By Sophia Tulp, Associated Press

Sometimes you just have to go back to the classics.

This is especially true as Halloween approaches. For inspiration as you line up for your scary movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror films from the last 70 years and what Associated Press writers had to say about them when they were first released.

We’ve brought excerpts from these reviews back from the dead, edited for clarity – have they stood the test of time?

“Rear Window” (1954)

“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg and places him in an apartment window where, among other things, he can watch a murder on the other side of the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is presented to you, seen through the eyes of a peeping Tom.

James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others are a lot of fun.

– Bob Thomas

“Halloween” (1978)

At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis stars in a spooky little thriller called Halloween.

Jamie’s biggest success so far has been his regular participation in the television series “Operation Petticoat”. Jamie is much prouder of Halloween, even though it’s obviously an exploitation film aimed at the thrill market.

The idea for “Halloween” came from independent producer and distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a horror story with a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill wrote a screenplay about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown to murder his sister’s friends.

– Bob Thomas

“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)

“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one exciting sequence to the next. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including close-ups of skinned corpses. For the squeamish, it’s best to stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”

Ted Tally has adapted Thomas Harris’s novel with great skill, and Demme cranks the tension almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is taken a bit too far, although it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.

A story like “The Silence of the Lambs” requires skilled actors to bring it to life. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She offers steely intelligence, but also enough vulnerability to keep the tension going. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.

– Bob Thomas

“Scream” (1996)

In this clever, funny homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are killed in the same gruesome ways as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.

If it sounds like the script to every other horror film that comes and goes to the local cinema, it isn’t.

By turns frightening and funny, “Scream” – written by newcomer David Williamson – is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its nods to Wes Craven’s rivals in the gore department.

—Ned Kilkelly

“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)

Imaginative, intense and breathtaking are a few words that come to mind for “The Blair Witch Project”.

“Blair Witch” is the alleged footage found after three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods of western Maryland while filming a documentary about a legendary witch.

The filmmakers want us to believe that the footage is real, that the story is real, that three young people have died and we are witnessing the last days of their lives. That’s not it. It’s all fiction.

But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, the film’s co-writer and co-director, bring us to the edge of belief, fidgeting in our seats the entire time. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.

– Christy Lemire

“Saw” (2004)

Last but not least, the scary film “Saw” is harmonious.

This serial killer story is insanely plotted, poorly written, poorly acted, crudely directed, terribly photographed and clumsily edited, and all of these ingredients lead to a yawningly surprising ending. To top it all off, the music is also bad.

The film could be forgiven for all (well, not all, or even a fraction of many) of its flaws if there were any chills or scares in this sordid little horror affair.

But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who co-developed the story, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantness and ugliness.

– David Germain

Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.

“Paranormal Activity” (2009)

The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” comes out ten years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror films have more in common than just clever construction and shaky hand-held camera work.

The entire film takes place in the couple’s full-scale home, whose floor plan and furnishings are almost indistinguishable from other prefabricated homes built in the last 20 years. Its mundanity makes the eerie nocturnal activities all the more frightening, as does the anonymity of the actors who adequately play the lead roles.

The tenuousness of the premise becomes clear toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” has a raw, primal power, proving once again that suggestion has as much power to the mind as a sledgehammer to the skull.

–Glenn Whipp

Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three out of four stars.

“The Conjuring” (2013)

As likeable, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average scarefest.

“The Conjuring,” which incredulously boasts of being their most frightening case yet unknown, is structured in the 1970s style of “Amityville” and, if you’re so kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its ambitions for such a lineage.

But as effective as The Conjuring is, it lacks the raw, haunting power of the models it falls short of. However, “The Exorcist” is held to a high standard; “The Conjuring” is an unusually robust piece of haunted house genre filmmaking.

– Jake Coyle

Coyle gave The Conjuring two and a half stars out of four.

Read the full review here.

“Get Out” (2017)

Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele staged a similar confrontation with altogether more explosive results in “Get Out.”

In Peele’s directorial debut, the former Key and Peele star — as he often did in this satirical sketch series — upended even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left the comedy behind in favor of a more frightening portrait of the racism that lurks behind smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods great?”

It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films – never one of the most inclusive genres – the black man is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.

– Jake Coyle

Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.

Read the full review here.

“Hereditary” (2018)

In Ari Aster’s deeply nightmarish feature debut, Hereditary, Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks into a grief support group after her mother’s death and lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”

An evening of “Hereditary” is many things, but it should not be confused with an evening of healing and therapy. It’s rather the opposite.

Aster’s film, unrelentingly unsettling and relentlessly gripping, has an ominous atmosphere of danger and terror within it: a film so terrible and good that you have to see it, even if you don’t really want to, even if you may never be calm will sleep again.

The hype is mostly justified.

– Jake Coyle

Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.

Read the full review here.

Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.

Originally published: October 22, 2024 at 2:25 p.m

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