Alien

One of the crew members on the doomed spacecraft Nostromo calls the creature in their midst a “perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” Which makes the alien an ideal movie monster in this beautifully designed, symphonically paced, all-time scary science-fiction thriller, scripted by Dan O’Bannon and directed by Ridley Scott. The crabby Nostromans are, in a way, the alien’s pediatricians: they see it in five gestations, from its incubation through birth (bursting out of a crew member’s chest), childhood and adolescence, into its final mature grandeur. Sigourney Weaver survived to star in three sequels, but the actors who had to die all got their moments. Our favorite: Harry Dean Stanton taking the wrong turn looking for the company cat. “Here, kitty kitty.”
Psycho

“It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream. And her head.” That’s Robert Bloch’s brief, jokey detailing of the shower scene in his 1959 novel Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock’s film version (brilliantly scripted by Joseph Stefano) not only expanded the murder into a montage masterpiece, it set new rules for the horror genre. Rather, it said the old rules no longer applied. Movies could kill off major characters, turn a nice guy into a psychopath into a victim and especially be both clinically realistic and artistically adventurous in the depiction of violence. Virtually all modern horror movies flow from this exalted source — one of the great studies of derangement.
More Best & Worst Lists
View AgainHorror Movies
- Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat
- The Fly
- The Exorcist
- Night of the Living Dead
- Freaks
- Blood Feast
- Carrie
- Men Behind the Sun
- Paranormal Activity
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
- Thirst
- Braindead/Dead Alive
- Jaws
- Bambi
- Audition
- The Phantom of the Opera
- Trilogy of Terror
- Peeping Tom
- Halloween
- Frankenstein
- Nosferatu
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers
- Alien
- Psycho












