Horror

We can hardly imagine how shocking this film was when it first broke into the film scene in 1968. There's never been anything quite like it again, though there have been numerous pale imitations. Part of the terror lies in the fact that it is shot in such a raw and unadorned fashion that it feels like a home movie, and is all the more authentic because of that. It draws us into its world gradually, content to establish a merely spooky atmosphere before leading us through a horrifically logical progression that we hardly could have anticipated.

When Kathy Thorn (Lee Remick) gives birth to a stillborn baby, her husband Robert (Gregory Peck) shields her from the devastating truth and substitutes an orphaned infant for their own - unaware of the child's satanic origins. The horror begins on Damien's fifth birthday when his nanny stages a dramatic suicide. Soon after, a priest who tries to warn Damien's father is killed in a freakish accident. As the death toll mounts, Robert realizes his son is the Antichrist and decides he must kill the boy to prevent him from fulfilling a cataclysmic prophecy.

Enter the stunning and surreal world of Phantasm - where nothing is as it seems and every move you make could lead to a fate worse than death! Writer/director Don Coscarelli (The Beastmaster) delivers this sci-fi/horror classic that has spawned a cult of fans worldwide and which Newsweek calls "off-the-wall, scary and marvelous." Thirteen-year-old Mike Pearson (Michael Baldwin) had always thought that the Morningside cemetery was a little creepy, but when he witnesses a body being taken away from a grave by an undertaker with superhuman strength, he decides to investigate.

Hammer Studios' greatest nemeses, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, once again square off in this reworking of Universal's The Mummy (with elements of The Mummy's Tomb and The Mummy's Ghost thrown in for good measure). Cushing stars as archeologist John Banning, whose dig for a lost tomb results in untold treasures but leaves his father a mumbling madman and marks the rest of the company for death.

Professor Van Helsing and Dracula meet again in this kung fu horror spectacular set in the village of Ping Kuei. After learning about the Seven Golden Vampires of the village, Hsi Ching, Vanessa Beren and Mai Kwei offer to guide Van Helsing and his son to Ping Kuei to free it from the curse of Count Dracula. Throughout their journey, the party encounters several unwanted attackers until they arrive at the golden vampires' derelict temple, inhabited by Count Dracula.

Sam and his older brother Michael are all American teens with all American interests. But after they move with their mother to peaceful Santa Carla, California, things mysteriously begin to change. Michael's not himself lately. And Mom's not going to like what he's turning into. The Lost Boys reshapes vampire tradition, deftly mixing heart pounding terror, rib tickling laughs and a body gyrating rock soundtrack.

Halloween is as pure and undiluted as its title. In the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a teenage baby sitter tries to survive a Halloween night of relentless terror, during which a knife-wielding maniac goes after the town's hormonally charged youths. Director John Carpenter takes this simple situation and orchestrates a superbly mounted symphony of horrors. It's a movie much scarier for its dark spaces and ominous camera movements than for its explicit bloodletting (which is actually minimal).

After Hammer Studios' tremendous success with The Curse of Frankenstein, they struck a deal to adapt Universal's catalog of classics and set their sights first on Dracula. Christopher Lee removes the monstrous makeup from the earlier film and makes his entrance as an elegant, confident, altogether seductive Dracula, a frightening figure of flashing eyes and erotic allure. Peter Cushing, with his hawklike profile and piercing eyes, turns his rationalist intensity to Van Helsing: man of science as crusading vampire hunter.

Peter Cushing delivers his most cold-blooded portrayal of the mad Baron in his fifth turn as Dr. Frankenstein. Abandoning his latest experiment after a drunk stumbles into his secret lab (upsetting a severed head) he hurriedly finds new lodgings with a sweet young thing (Hammer glamour babe Veronica Carlson) whose boyfriend (Simon Ward, in his film debut) works in the local sanitarium.

Put together a gloomy New England house, a dark night and four of America's legendary leading men and you have all the ingredients for the classic Ghost Story, a spellbinding motion picture based on the bestseller by Peter Straub. Co-starring Patricia Neal, Ghost Story is about the Members of the Chowder Society: Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and John Houseman, who get together each week to share tales of horror. Soon, however, a secret terror invades the group, and one by one, they die mysteriously because of a real life ghost story that is part of their past.