The films

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Black Christmas

Predates Halloween and is scarier. The phone calls still work.

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Day of the Dead

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

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Drunken Master

Jackie Chan finds the formula: comedy, pain, and visible competence.

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Harakiri

A ronin asks to commit suicide in a lord's courtyard. What follows dismantles the whole code.

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The Night Porter

A serious, much-argued-about film that producers immediately misread as a template.

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The Wild One

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

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Videodrome

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

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Shaft

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

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Dawn of the Dead

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

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Django

A coffin, a machine gun, and mud everywhere. Banned in Britain until 1993.

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They Call Me Trinity

The comedy turn that ended the cycle by making it impossible to take seriously.

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Death Wish

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

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Freaks

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

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In the Realm of the Senses

The art film that shipped its own negatives abroad to beat Japan's censors. Unsimulated, and deadly serious about it.

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Suspiria

Barely a giallo and barely a plot. Possibly the most beautiful horror film ever shot.

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The Last House on the Left

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

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The Wicker Man

Not exploitation, filed here by shelf-adjacency. One of Britain's best films.

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Duck, You Sucker

Leone's revolution film. A Mexican bandit and an IRA dynamiter blow up the establishment together.

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Game of Death

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

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Irreversible

Noe runs the night backwards so the horror lands before the love does, and half the cinema left before either.

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The Warriors

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

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Cannibal Holocaust

A serious film about media atrocity that committed real atrocity.

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Deliverance

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

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Emmanuelle

The film that made softcore respectable at the box office. Glossy, empty, and enormously profitable.

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Fist of Fury

Bruce Lee kicks a 'No Dogs and Chinese' sign to splinters. The crowd never recovered.

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Mad Max 2

The template the whole Italian post-nuke cycle copied for a decade.

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The Big Boss

Lee's first lead. Briefly on the DPP video nasty list, absurdly.

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The Evil Dead II

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

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The Omen

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

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Battle Royale

A class of ninth-graders handed weapons and told to kill each other. Fukasaku at seventy, swinging hard.

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Mad Max

Made for nothing on public roads. You can feel every dollar missing.

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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

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

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Enter the Dragon

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

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Friday the 13th

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

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Godzilla

Not a monster romp. A sober film about nuclear annihilation, made nine years after.

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Dirty Harry

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