Horror Movies So many great horror movies have been made over the years that choosing eight is difficult, although the best of them all have certain elements in common that makes viewers crave them, and often leads to many sequels. If the same formula works once, then movie directors and producers will use it repeatedly with slight variations, and this happens with all vampire, zombie, werewolf, and slasher/psycho killer films. Any great horror film has to take basically ordinary people and throw them into a situation where they are confronted with evil or monsters of some kind. These characters must be sympathetic enough that the audience will identify with them and hope that they will finally overcome the monsters, a plot device as old as the heroic Beowulf confronting the dragon Grendel. Of course, many of the characters will not survive the conflict and sometimes none of them do. At least as important, the monsters must be sufficiently frightening and dangerous that the heroes face a real struggle for survival, although sometimes the monsters might also have a sympathetic or human side, as do many vampires and werewolves, for example. Even more interesting are horror movies in which the heroes also confront evil within themselves, or risk being transformed into monsters, which is a staple of vampire, zombie, alien, and demonic possession movies. No horror film will ever work well without sufficiently menacing monsters, just as no drama succeeds without villains or antagonists.

Zombie pictures have been one of the most popular horror genres of the last forty years, and the creatures have gradually become faster, hungrier and deadlier. In George Romero's very low-budget film Night of the Living Dead (1968), which has spawned many imitations and sequels over the years,...

This film reflects the tensions and fears of the Vietnam War era, with a black man and the young people left in the upstairs of the house to fight the monsters while a middle class couple hides in the basement. Only the black man survives in the end, only to be killed by a posse of rednecks led by the sheriff. Dawn of the Dead (1978), is Romero's critique of consumer culture in which the heroes escape from the city and end up hiding in a shopping mall, where the zombies are still wandering around as if they were shoppers. Indeed, the zombies finally take over the mall and the few surviving humans have to find another place to hide. At least as frightening was the British film 28 Days Later (2002), in which the zombies take over London and the few surviving humans run away to the countryside, only to encounter a group of violent and dangerous soldiers who are at least as bad as the monsters. This film ends with the zombies finally starving to death, and the surviving people are allowed to return to Britain, although in the sequels the virus that turns humans into zombies spreads all over the world.
One of the greatest tricks in horror films is to make the monster invisible or formless, or refrain from showing it in its full evil until the end. The Blair Witch Project (1999) takes three ordinary college students doing a film project on a witch that supposedly lived deep in the forest in Maryland, and then sends them on a journey like Hansel and Gretel into the haunted woods until they finally arrive at the witch's house. Filmed on a very minimal budget with no special effects, and no (visible) monster, the terror of this film is emotional and psychological, and in the end none of the characters…