Tag: Horror

  • The 20 best opening scenes in film

    An opening scene is a contract with the audience, establishing a movie’s tone, stakes, and rules before the story has fully begun. Screenwriters have long had it drummed into their heads that the first 5 to 10 pages can determine whether a script gets read at all (much less made), while filmmakers know they have…

  • The 10 best performances by film directors (not typically known for acting)

    Scores of great actors have transitioned to equally successful careers directing—Clint Eastwood, John Cassavetes, Orson Welles, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, Greta Gerwig, and Jordan Peele, to name just a few—but the jump from behind the camera to in front of it is much less common. When it does happen, the result can be revelatory. Hence,…

  • The 20 best performances by a child actor

    W.C. Fields famously advised against ever working with children or animals. While any discussion of thespian animals can wait for another day, I come in defense of child actors, many of whom have delivered outstanding performances in the movies. One hopes the gifted young actors listed below weren’t subjected to the sort of head games…

  • The 10 best mindfuck films

    The label of “mindfuck films” didn’t really come around until the late 1990s, but moviemakers were producing mindfucks as far back as 1929, when surrealists like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí were slicing a calf’s eyeball in Un Chien Andalou. But one doesn’t have to resort to such extremes to make a mindfuck. For purposes…

  • The 10 best films about filmmaking

    It’s hardly surprising that an industry devoted to mythmaking has long been fascinated with its own self-image. Movies about moviemaking are nearly as old as the medium itself, with “behind the scenes” comedies about Hollywood appearing as early as the 1910s. Viewpoints vary widely, however, ranging from valentines like Singin’ in the Rain and Day…

  • The 10 best serial-killer films

    Serial killers fascinate and terrify us. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the BTK killer are disturbingly recognizable—monsters who are human in every outward respect. Early serial-killer films like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) and Fritz Lang’s M (1931) created a blueprint for a genre that exploded in popularity alongside…

  • The 10 best haunted-house films

    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 films 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…