Freaky Flicks: Seven Horror Films for Adults

(Last year, we listed seven of the best horror films for the Halloween weekend. If you're looking for scares before marking Halloween with a new episode of The Walking Dead, here are zombies, plagues and quite possibly the most bad-ass horror monster of all time.)

With a few short days left until trick or treaters hit the neighborhood, we offered a list of family-friendly Halloween flicks. Here's a list of horror picks for adults, best enjoyed with the lights down after the kids are put to bed.

Alien, 1979

Nowadays, science fiction and horror go together like Angelina Jolie and bad scripts, but when Ridley Scott signed on as director of this seminal franchise, they were two distinct genres. For scifi fans, the devil is always in the details, and there's a lot to like here – from the monochrome, retrofuturistic tech on the flight deck of the Nostromo, to the somber treatment of interstellar travel and cryopreservation, which were foreign concepts to moviegoers at the time.

Like the Matrix, some of Alien's innovation is dulled in retrospect, thanks to the many movies that cloned its look and feel. But every horror movie where the characters are picked off one-by-one by a terrifying monster owes a debt to Alien and the titular species introduced in the movie. It wasn't just a freaky design – it was a living, breathing nightmare from the mind of H.R. Giger, the surrealist whose portraits of biomechanical landscapes draw viewers through morbid curiosity, the same way some people can't look away from horrific accidents.


The Ring, 2002

Purists will tell you it's best to appreciate this film in its original form – the 1998 Japanese version, based on a novel by a Tokyo-based horror writer. While it's true horror is a universal genre, and the Ring's most frightful moments don't depend on dialogue, a standout performance by Noami Watts and faithfulness to the Japanese original make this a worthy horror pick.

The Ring won't make you jump out of your chair or cover your eyes. There are no boogeymen leaping out of shadows or gore-drenched denouements. Instead, the Ring achieves its goal of making the audience uneasy through a slow, ever-building tension and the inevitable feeling that things are going to go horribly wrong.


1408, 2007

Next time you're in a hotel elevator, take a closer look at the buttons – you can stop at the 12th floor and the 14th, but the 13th floor is nowhere to be seen. In fact, I'm writing this column from the Ink 48 hotel in Manhattan, where the elevators are also missing buttons for the 13th floor. Hotels don't like to upset people, and thanks to cultural superstitions, most places simply relabel the 13th floor as the 14th. Others house kitchens, service areas and machine rooms on the 13th floor, out of view of guests.

In 1408, John Cusack is a jaded author who makes a living spending the night – alone – in haunted houses and writing about his experiences. Although his fans can't get enough of hauntings, Cusack's character doesn't believe in them, a skepticism made stronger by the fact that none of the haunted houses he's stayed in turned out to be haunted. When he gets a tip about room 1408 at the fictional Dolphin Hotel in New York City, Cusack's character can't resist debunking another hoax. (1 + 4 + 0 + 8 = 13, and the room, of course, is actually on the 13th floor.)

We don't even see room 1408 until more than 40 minutes into the film, and by the time Cusack walks through the door, the anticipation is almost too much to handle. We know it'll be haunted – there wouldn't be a movie if it wasn't – and 1408 doesn't exactly break new ground in the horror genre, but it does a damn good job of scaring the hell out of the audience. That alone makes this movie, based on a Stephen King short story, worth watching this Halloween.


Cube, 1997

Vincenzo Natali's receiving his round of props for the horror flick Splice, and joyous fanboys have already taken to messageboards to speculate on how Natali will bring William Gibson's Neuromancer to the big screen.

But for horror and science fiction fans, Natali is best known as the director behind Cube. Filmed in 1997 for less money than Alex Rodriguez makes in an at-bat, the Canadian indie developed a cult following in the afterlife of DVD sales. Like most stories with science fiction trappings, the characters weren't well-developed and the dialogue left a lot to be desired, but it was the Big Idea that left an impression in the minds of viewers.

Cube is essentially a movie about six people with short-term amnesia, who awake to find themselves in a deadly maze of interconnected cubes. They don't know why they're there, they don't know how to get out, and they learn about traps the hard way. In some rooms, a disturbance in air pressure could trigger a deadly whirlwind of razor blades; in others, any sound will cause the doors to seal and flames to spit from the walls. Cube's brutal traps and sense of claustrophobia were the inspiration behind the novella Diamond Dogs by science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds, and the movie's been name-dropped in songs by rappers and heavy metal bands alike. For fans who like their horror mixed with science fiction, Cube is a solid pick to raise the hair on the back of your neck.


Night of the Living Dead, 1968

Before Zombieland, before Milla Jovovich's acrobatic gunplay in the Resident Evil series, and before Will Smith battled superhuman ghouls in I Am Legend, there was Night of the Living Dead.

Released in 1968 and filmed for about $114,000, Night of the Living Dead introduced the concept of the zombie movie as we know it, with lumbering reanimated corpses terrorizing the living as society collapsed around them. It was also the most pronounced use of horror as a metaphor for political and cultural issues of the time.

Nowadays, it seems like second nature for a director to focus on a small group of survivors holed up in a barn or armory, trying to wait out the apocalypse. But at the time, horror was a much different animal, and Romero's brand of horror shocked audiences – not only for its blood and gore, but for the simple concept of focusing on ordinary people in ordinary surroundings. The result was a cast of characters the audience could really relate to. The fact that the now-widely celebrated film was panned on release proves that it was ahead of its time.


Carriers, 2009

There are lots of reasons this film shouldn't be on this list. It's light on gore. It doesn't have any monsters, ghosts or zombies. It was buried and was unlikely to see the light of day until its lead, Christopher Pine, scored the role of Captain Kirk in the Star Trek reboot.

It's mostly for the latter reason that Paramount decided to dust off this movie and release it. The studio execs probably thought blood-hungry audiences would go home angry. And they probably would have.

But Carriers should have been marketed like Children of Men – this is a movie for adults, a vehicle for exploring post apocalyptic themes with impunity. It's a genre film that behaves like a drama. The decisions people make when their lives are at stake are terrifying enough to contemplate, and Carriers realizes you don't need monsters and gore to drive that point home.


28 Days Later, 2002

One of the great things about Hollywood is watching what happens when talented directors take on genre films. Danny Boyle is better known for Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting, but to horror fans he was the man behind 28 Days Later.

Isolation is a recurring theme in post-apocalyptic horror. Most directors put their characters in strongholds, hunkered down and waiting out the days – think Romero in Dawn of the Dead. But in 28 Days Later, Boyle turns that concept on its head: protagonist Jim wakes up from a coma and steps out of the hospital to a silent, motionless, dead London. The film's title says it all – twenty eight days have passed since the zombie apocalypse, and Jim realizes he's very alone. Like Romero's films, the political and cultural subtexts are here, but they don't get in the way of compelling horror.

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