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The 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time
From "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" to "Get Out," Variety selects the 100 best horror movies of all time.
Towering over the buildings, elevated trains and telephone wires he smashes through as if they were toy models (actually, now that you mention it …), with skin like shag carpeting, plates that line his back like small fir Christmas trees and eyes so beady they’re just this side of puppyish, the radioactive beast who stomped Tokyo is a walking metaphor for the nuclear devastation suffered by Japan during World War II. The film’s music (by prog rock legends Goblin) only gets funkier from there, as does its plot: David Hemmings plays an English pianist who witnesses a murder, which he feels compelled to investigate, even if such meddling seems destined to make him a target for a sadistic assassin, or two — Argento sprang that twist long before “Scream.” At the pinnacle of the giallo form he all but perfected, the Italian helmer luxuriates in stylistic overkill: black gloves, creepy dolls, an ominous mansion and all sorts of cranial trauma as heads are slashed, smashed and, in one triumphant moment, crushed by a speeding car. A scathing rebuke of both fascism (hence the location, a villa on Lake Garda, where Mussolini spent his last two years) and neo-capitalism (in which even the human body becomes a commodity for consumption), Pasolini’s obscene art-house endurance test mirrors the Marquis de Sade’s most controversial work, as 16 nubile innocents are rounded up and subjected to unspeakable degradation — from graphic mutilation to a demented coprophilic banquet — not by libertines (as in the novel) but by four intellectual elites: Duke, Bishop, Magistrate and President.
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