Digging up horror gems

By Russell Meeuf
Reader Contributor

Horror films are a year-round pleasure, but they are especially fun around Halloween — our culturally sanctioned holiday to indulge our fascination with death and decay.  What better way to celebrate than with movies about supernatural killers, the undead, or psychopaths run amok?  

Classic horror monsters — from Dracula to Freddy Krueger to Pennywise — are perennial favorites, and they reflect our collective obsessions and fears. But classic horror stories are almost always inspired by works that came before them. For every popular horror film that captivates the masses, there are countless lesser known (often low-budget) movies that helped pave the way for their brethren with more renown. 

If you’re looking to explore the depths of horror history this season, or wanting to impress your party guests with your cult-horror bona fides, or simply looking for something new to watch, check out these lesser-known horror classics:      

Carnival of Souls (1962) 

Kansas-based filmmaker Herk Harvey produced this influential cult horror film for a meager $33,000 — a tiny budget, even in the early 1960s. The film tells the story of a young woman’s eerie encounters with pale-faced ghouls that only she can see. Carnival of Souls’ black-and-white cinematography evokes German expressionist films from the 1920s, and it relies on an original organ score that gives the whole affair an ethereal quality. 

As the protagonist tries to navigate her haunted world, she is increasingly called to a mysterious, abandoned carnival in the desert, leading to an unforgettable encounter with the dead. 

The makeup design for the strange specters that haunt the protagonist would inspire George Romero’s famous zombies a few years later, and the slow, dreamlike unfolding of events would shape the surreal aesthetics of David Lynch in the decades to come. The climactic scene — shot in an abandoned Utah resort — is an extravagant, creepy and bizarre spectacle that makes the rougher elements of the low-budget film worth the wait.

Other similar films to check out: the 1963 low-budget splatter film from Herschell Gordon Lewis, Blood Feast (not for the faint of heart), or the bizarre Roger Corman film, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, also from 1963.  

Return of the Living Dead (1985) 

1985 was a big year for zombie films, seeing the release of the nihilistic zombie drama, Day of the Dead, and its cinematic cousin, Return of the Living Dead. Day of the Dead was the third in George Romero’s zombie series, while Return of the Living Dead was conceived by Romero’s onetime writing partner, John Russo, who split creatively from Romero and took the copyright to the term “Living Dead” with him. While Romero’s better known 1985 classic tackles the zombie apocalypse with a somber tone, Return of the Living Dead is a campy and hilariously disturbing zombie thriller with a punk-rock soundtrack. 

The film was adapted from Russo’s vision by horror/sci-fi legend Dan O’Bannon, who brought a zany comedy to the film’s gory premise. Capturing the first hours of a zombie outbreak (rather than dropping its characters into a world already lost to the undead), the film follows a group of rebellious teenagers who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time when the outbreak begins. 

Many of the tropes of the zombie film today are derived from Return of the Living Dead. We couldn’t have Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead without this zombie-comedy pioneer.  

Other similar films to check out: the low-budget slasher Sleepaway Camp from 1983, with one of the most shocking and disturbing twists in the genre, or Killer Klowns from Outer Space, a campy horror/sci-fi film from 1988 that has shaped the horror-comedy aesthetic ever since.   

Oculus (2013) 

Before horror-maestro Mike Flanagan became a household name through his run of popular Netflix horror shows — The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club and The Fall of the House of Usher — he worked his way through a series of smaller-budget horror projects where he honed his craft. 

Oculus is his sophomore film, telling the story of a brother and a sister who believe their family was terrorized by a haunted mirror in their youth. 

Jumping between the children’s traumatic past and their horrific present, Oculus toys with the characters’ sense of time and reality. In the process, the film highlights Flanagan’s central preoccupation as a storyteller: the real hauntings in this world are how we grapple with our past traumas. 

Of course, while the characters’ emotional turmoil animates the story, the ghosts are real, and Oculus delivers some visceral and clever scares (including one scene that will linger with you whenever you take a bite into a crisp apple).  

Other similar films to check out: Flanagan’s 2016 home invasion film, Hush, which he co-wrote with his wife, Kate Siegel, who also stars in this compelling thriller, or The Haunting in Connecticut from 2009, which helped launch the resurgence of the haunted house film in the mid-2000s, paving the way for modern classics like The Conjuring.    

Russell Meeuf is a professor at the University of Idaho who teaches in the film and television program. Among other books, he is the author of White Terror: The Horror Film from Obama to Trump, which explores the cultural politics of the contemporary horror film.  Find it at the Indiana University Press at iupress.org, Barnes and Noble, Amazon or wherever you buy books.