Exploitation films

Pink Flamingos

Divine competes to be the filthiest person alive. The most notorious act in film history closes it.

Assault on Precinct 13

Carpenter remaking Rio Bravo for $100,000. The ice cream scene is still shocking.

Day of the Dead

The bleakest Romero. Bub is the only sympathetic character in it.

Death Race 2000

Corman satire with actual teeth. Stallone before anyone knew.

The Wild One

Brando's motorcycle gang takes over a town. The film that invented teenage cool and terrified parents.

Videodrome

Long live the new flesh. Cronenberg's prophecy about media, the body, and a chest that opens.

Shaft

Gordon Parks directs a solid detective film. Isaac Hayes does the rest.

Dawn of the Dead

A shopping mall, four survivors, and Savini's finest hour.

Death Wish

Bronson as a liberal architect who buys a gun. A phenomenon, and reactionary.

Freaks

Killed Browning's career, banned in Britain for thirty years. Still unclassifiable.

The Last House on the Left

Bergman's Virgin Spring, brutalised. Genuinely unpleasant and knows it. Tonally a mess.

Game of Death

The film Bruce Lee left unfinished, completed with a double, a cardboard cut-out, and his real funeral.

The Warriors

Barely exploitation, entirely brilliant. A subway ride as Greek epic.

Deliverance

The respectable ancestor of the whole backwoods cycle, and still the best of it.

The Evil Dead II

Remake and sequel at once. Raimi discovers slapstick and never looks back.

The Omen

Studio horror with a Goldsmith choir and four very memorable deaths.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Almost bloodless, and still the most upsetting film here. The heat is the horror.

Enter the Dragon

Lee died six days before release. The mirror room still works.

Friday the 13th

Cynical, derivative, and it industrialised the whole form. Savini's finest hour.

Dirty Harry

The vigilante with a badge. Pauline Kael called it fascist and was not wrong.

Eraserhead

Lynch's industrial nightmare about fatherhood. It played midnight for years and made him.

Rosemary's Baby

Nothing supernatural is ever shown. It does not need to be.

Conan the Barbarian

The good one that caused all the others. Poledouris score is the best part.

The Evil Dead

Prosecuted in Britain. Actually a comedy, though it took years to admit it.

A Fistful of Dollars

An unlicensed Yojimbo remake. Toho sued and won. Started everything.

Halloween

$325,000 into $70 million, and every slasher after it is a photocopy.

Jaws

The broken shark forced Spielberg to suggest instead of show. It made the film.

Night of the Living Dead

Made for $114,000 in Pittsburgh. Invented the entire modern genre.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Fonda cast against type as a child killer. Leone's masterpiece.

Taxi Driver

The same story told by people who knew the protagonist was unwell.

The Birds

Hitchcock refuses to explain anything. Nobody since has had the nerve.

The Exorcist

Plays it entirely straight and takes the theology seriously. Still works.