Tag: Horror

  • The 10 best serial-killer movies

    People are rightly terrified of serial killers, but they sure like to cozy up to them from a safe distance. Let’s face it, savagery is fascinating. Unlike gangsters, serial killers such as Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the BTK killer seemed disturbingly recognizable—human in every outward respect. Early serial-killer pictures like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger:…

  • The 10 best haunted-house movies

    Creaking floors, hidden passageways, strange sounds, maybe a ghost or 13 … who doesn’t love a juicy haunted-house story? Cinema quickly jumped on the genre with adaptations of literary works, two of the earliest and most notable silents being 1927’s The Cat and the Canary and 1928’s The Fall of the House of Usher. The…

  • The 10 best movies about sex workers

    The movies have come a long way since the days of the “hooker with a heart of gold” archetype that populated westerns and gangster flicks. Sex workers have been a mainstay of film, but their treatment has transformed dramatically over decades. World cinema’s examination of sex workers has been more realistic and ambiguous than that…

  • The 10 best films about voyeurism 

    In cinema, where we watch characters who don’t know they are being watched, voyeurism is a feature and not a bug. It isn’t surprising, then, that movies often explore the implications of being a voyeur.  Some filmmakers, particularly Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, made it a cornerstone of their works. “When you’re watching something…

  • The 15 best slasher movies

    Slasher flicks can be traced back to the unnervingly intimate killers of Psycho and Peeping Tom, but the modern template snapped into place with Halloween, which transformed murder into a kind of ritualized stalking game. The late 1970s and early ’80s were the genre’s glory days, thanks partly to simple economics—low budgets, high returns—and perhaps…

  • The 15 best revenge movies

    Revenge is one of the oldest, most durable engines in storytelling. From The Lion King to John Wick, movie audiences have made it clear they like that eye-for-an-eye business. At least they do on that giant screen in the darkened theater, where moviegoers find complicit satisfaction in vengeance being served. Maybe part of the draw…

  • The 15 best films that explore class divides

    The silent-era comedies of Charlie Chaplin were not simply about an unlucky fellow with a funny waddle and mustache; his Little Tramp character highlighted the indignities heaped upon the poor. Cinema has a rich tradition of highlighting the divisions between haves and have-nots. During the Great Depression, screwball comedies goosed the upper-class to the delight…

  • The 10 best movies about the workplace

    Americans spend about one-third of their lives at work. That translates to roughly 90,000 hours, although in fairness that figure probably includes plenty of time spent watching the clock and scrolling through TikTok. The workplace, such a huge chunk of modern existence, is ripe for melodrama and farce, and everything in between. What follows are…