Another Halloween has come and gone. What did you guys do? I curled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn, and proceeded to scare myself silly. The horror movie is no better appreciated than in October, and with so many great horror movies out there, how many of you wasted your time watching The Shining on AMC for the 27^th time, or dusting off The Exorcist DVD for another spin?

Because the horror genre is such that unless it is this special time of year, it usually goes overlooked by the mainstream movie-going audience, the same movies get re-watched year after year. Thus, the classic horror movie canon is only 20-25 movies, at best. If you watch the same six movies every Halloween, they’re going to get boring after a while. The Shining is in danger of going the way of It’s a Wonderful Life.

If you’re interested in some alternatives to wearing out the DVDs of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, or Susperia, or torturing yourself with another Saw sequel, take a look at ten horror movies you should have watched but probably didn’t.

NOTE: The following is a list for the horror layman, not the true horror buff. If you are a true horror film fan, I would expect you to have seen most if not all of these; if you have not, shame on you.

1. The Vanishing - This is probably the best movie on the list (I’m referring to the Dutch original, not the Jeff Bridges travesty). The story is of a boyfriend who becomes obsessed with finding his missing girlfriend after she gets abducted at a truck stop. I’m reluctant to tell you anything more about the plot, but it is truly creepy. There is not one single drop of blood spilled in the entire movie, but the psycho is ten times scarier than a foaming-at-the- mouth Hannibal Lecter or John Doe.

2. Videodrome - This movie is well known to film fans, but the Cronenberg classic sometimes get overshadowed by his later work, such as The Fly or Dead Ringers. Videodrome is the movie that created the body-horror genre that Cronenberg’s The Fly and Tetsuo (see below) fall into. If ever there were a movie to make you squeamish whenever you touch your TV, or any electronic appliance for that matter, this might be it. Apart from the visuals that delight while they disgust, this is one of those great horror films, like Romero’s Dead trilogy, that actually has something to say. Cronenberg’s musings on sex, violence, and the media still seem as relevant as ever, especially now that people are constantly attached to their phones, and their Blueteeth.

3. The Night of the Hunter - Robert Mitchum = Wow. I recently watched this for the first time, and every modern movie psycho from Norman Bates to Jigsaw owes a debt of gratitude to Mitchum’s performance. He plays a nefarious preacher who marries and subsequently murders a widow (played, with all the broken intensity you could ever hope for, by Shelly Winters) to get to her children who know the whereabouts of a small fortune, hidden by their father. Directed by actor Charles Laughton in his only directing endeavor, the film has a visual style all its own, combining elements of film noir and German expressionism, a la Fritz Lang. The images in this movie will haunt me for a long time. I’ll admit I’ve been home alone and could have sworn I saw Preacher Harry Powell’s shadow on my wall.

4. Dog Soldiers - Vampires are all the rage right now and, really, they have been all the rage since 1897 when Dracula was first published. Max Shrek, Bela Lagosi, Christopher Lee, Anne Rice, Blade, and Buffy all preceded the Twilight craze. Vampires have so overshadowed the werewolf that, for every ten worthwhile vampire movies, you’ll get one watchable werewolf movie. Maybe that’s all about to change with the release of the new wolf-man movie, but hair is just not as sexy as fangs. That’s why a werewolf movie is such a rarity, and Dog Soldiers is one of the best of the last twenty years. Directed by Neil Marshall, whose The Descent was the best horror movie of 2005, Dog Soldiers tells the story of a small Scottish military group who, out in the woods doing their routine exercise, get more than they bargained for. They get werewolves. Marshall makes the most of a small budget, and Dog Soldiers contains plenty of laughs and scares.

5. Session 9 - Haunted house movies are so hard to pull off without devolving into mindless gore fests. Session 9 is a creepy haunted house movie, in the same vein of the original The Haunting. Director Brad Anderson apparently wrote the script after visiting a real abandoned mental hospital and almost wetting his pants in fright. The cast is terrific all around, populated by familiar faces David Caruso, Josh Lucas, and extremely underrated character actor Peter Mullan (from Braveheart and Children of Men). They play an asbestos-removal crew who are cleaning out (you guessed it) an abandoned mental hospital. Anderson goes to great lengths to establish real characters before the horror elements enter into the picture, which only adds to the horror when it finally arrives.

Six and seven on this list are a pair of Exorcist sequels. The Exorcist is not only one of the greatest horror movies ever made, but it is also one of the greatest movies ever made, so naturally any sequel is going to be a letdown, but if you are willing to view them as their own individual movies instead of tag-ons to a classic, two of the four Exorcist sequels are very worthwhile.

6. The Exorcist III gets a bad rap not only because it’s yet another sequel, but also because of the abysmal Exorcist II. Getting rid of the possessed child motif, the third Exorcist directed by the author of the original book, William Peter Blatty, is the best kind of supernatural police procedural. George C. Scott plays LT. Kinderman, Lee J. Cobb’s character from the first movie. The plot about Kinderman hunting down a satanic serial killer does sometimes get overly complicated and overly weird, but it’s the kind of overly complicated over-weirdness that will give you the willies deep into the night hours.

7. Dominion: A Prequel to the Exorcist’s story is almost more interesting than the film itself. Paul Schrader, of Taxi Driver fame, was commissioned to write and direct a prequel to The Exorcist, and upon handing over the completed film, he was promptly fired and replaced by Renny Harlin, who recast and reshot 60 percent of Schrader’s film and turned it into an incomprehensible, overly violent, completely unscary mess. Schrader’s version did get a second life on DVD and it is worth checking out. Far less violent than any of the previous Exorcist films, Dominion is the thinking man’s horror film, and as Roger Ebert says in his review of the film, it “does something risky and daring in this time of jaded horror movies: It takes evil seriously.”

8. Trick ‘r Treat - This Halloween season the horror movie fan community is generally atwitter about two movies. Paranormal Activity, the movie that cost $11,000 to make and as of Oct. 28th had grossed $61,600,000, is one of them. The other is a movie that was made two years ago but was never released theatrically. It was recently released on DVD, and has in only a few weeks developed a large cult following. Michael Dougherty wrote and directed this tale of four tales. Dougherty takes a page from the Quentin Tarantino playbook and turns four stories into nonlinear horror jack o’ lantern pie. Brian Cox, Dylan Baker, and Anna “Sookie” Paquin all chew scenery (literally and figuratively) in the best way, and the movie is a throwback to the eighties, before the Saws and the Hostels made torture porn so profitable, when horror movies were just plain old fun.

9. Tetsuo: The Iron Man - For a while, after the success of The Ring, American remakes of Asian horror movies were all the rage. It’s not surprising that American studios steered clear of Tetsuo. With a strong influence from David Cronenberg’s body horror classics, Tetsuo tells the story of a man known only as “the Metal Fetishist” who has a compulsion to stick scraps of metal into his body. The movie only gets weirder from there. This movie is not for the squeamish, but if you have a strong stomach (or masochistic tendencies) rent this and have your mind blown.

10. A Simple Plan - Adapted from a novel by Scott B. Smith by horror icon Sam Raimi, this is not your typical horror movie, but the behavior exhibited by its characters is every bit as horrifying as anything else on this list. The type of movie where the true villain is the Gordon Gecko in all of us, not the Hannibal Lecter. Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, and Brent Briscoe play two brothers and their friend who find four million dollars in a crashed airplane in the woods. They decide to keep the money and a very simple plan turns out to be not as simple as previously thought when the greed of every character begins to erupt in often violent ways. It’s a cliché, but this movie is like watching a car crash in super slow motion.

Matthew Strickland is a senior at Drexel University. He studies English and Philosophy, and is anticipated to graduate in March of 2010.

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