Halloween At Home
As the leaves begin to turn and the supermarket shelves swell with pumpkin spiced goods, it’s time to draw the curtains, crack out the candy stash, and cozy up with one of these bloodcurdlers. Quench your bloodlust vicariously with Cronenberg’s "Rabid" (1977) or "Ganja & Hess" (1973), Bill Gunn’s vampiric cult classic; submit to a lethal rampage with ur-slasher "Black Christmas" (1974) or trippy psycho-thriller "White of the Eye" (1987)—or, perhaps you’d prefer the creeping dread of Southern Gothic tale "The Reflecting Skin" (1990), or indeed Bertrand Bonello’s foray into Voodou, "Zombi Child" (2019). Any way you slice it, this spooky selection is all killer, no filler.
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Black Christmas
Directed by Bob Clark | 98 mins | 1974
Disturbing phone calls and a lethally minded intruder drain the cheer from a sorority Christmas party in this seminal Canadian slasher—a lodestar for “Halloween” (1978) and indeed the entire subgenre. Now widely acknowledged as one of the best horror films e... -
Ganja & Hess
Directed by Bill Gunn | 113 mins | 1973
Cut by timid distributors and inappropriately marketed as grindhouse blaxploitation, this eerie, sui generis work by utterly iconoclastic director Bill Gunn ("Personal Problems") is, in its original form, nothing short of a masterpiece of ‘70s American cine... -
Nosferatu the Vampyre
Leaving February 1
Directed by Werner Herzog | 107 mins | 1979
Herzog brashly took up the mantle of German Expressionism in revisiting the unhallowed soil of Murnau’s masterpiece, with old foe and collaborator Klaus Kinski as the pestilent Count and Isabelle Adjani as the owner of the pale, slen... -
Possession
Directed by Andrzej Zulawski | 124 mins | 1981
Banned upon its original release in 1981, Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of a marriage unraveling is an experience unlike any other. Professional spy Mark (Sam Neill) returns to his West Berlin home to find his wife Anna (Isabe... -
Rabid
Directed by David Cronenberg | 91 mins | 1977
Like the mutant stinger that sprouts from Marilyn Chambers’ armpit, David Cronenberg burst onto the scene with the one-two punch of “Shivers” (1975) and “Rabid.” In his second feature—which rapidly became one of the highest-grossing Canadian films eve... -
The Reflecting Skin
Directed by Philip Ridley | 96 mins | 1990
A word-of-mouth sensation at Cannes, Philip Ridley’s debut feature is a macabre, magic hour-tinted work of Prairie Gothic—a Lynchian riff on “Days of Heaven,” spiked with intimations of the supernatural. Eight-year-old Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) becomes c... -
White of the Eye
Directed by Donald Cammell | 110 mins | 1987
In a directorial career marred by thwarted ambitions and cut short by his suicide at age 62, Donald Cammell nonetheless showed great flare for woozy, sinister surrealism, beginning with his 1970 debut, “Performance” (co-directed with Nicolas Roeg). In ... -
Zombi Child
Directed by Bertrand Bonello | 103 mins | 2019
“Listen up, white world / To my zombi roar”—René Depestre’s poem “Cap’tain Zombi” reverberates through this heady brew of a Voodou flick by the justly celebrated French auteur Bertrand Bonello (“Nocturama”). Moving between 2010s France and 1962 Haiti...
