I loved the 1960 movie City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel). And you can watch it on YouTube here.
When you do get to see it, turn out every single light in the room, cover the mirrors, close the drapes, tightly–pitch black is your friend and you’ll thank me later.
That one still kicks ass.
Yes, it does.
Great movies already on the list, and I’d second most of them.
I’ll add these:
Night of the Demon/*Curse of the Demon * (it’s the same movie-- it had one title in the US, another in the UK, but now you find it under both titles).
The Seventh Victim
The Dead of Night
Also, not a horror movie per se, but very creepy & nightmare-fuelish is The Bad Seed.
Oh, also, Mystery of the Wax Museum. It’s a really early color film, done in a two-color process, which adds to the atmosphere.
And The Island of Lost Souls.
The Haunting is the only movie I can remember being scared by.
This is one instance where seeing a movie at home is better than seeing it in a theater. Laws and regulations don’t allow theaters to turn the lights out completely—there must be visible exit signs, and there are often minimum lighting requirements for safety purposes. There are no such rules for viewing it at home.
I’ve heard that safety regulations were much looser in 1966, when the stage version of Wait Until Dark was first performed (and also in 1967, when the movie was released). It was possible for a theater to be really dark back then.
1959: Caltiki – The Immortal Monster (2-disc Special Edition just released!)
1966: Seconds
And another vote for Night Of The Demon.
It just occurred to me that if you do watch it at home and try to block out all light–Holy socks, you have your work cut out for you: The TV will probably have an on/off light, the VCR will have a display (most likely blinking because it never got set when the power went off last), like-wise the DVD player and the sound system, the microwave display (popcorn), your iPhone, smoke detectors (minuscule, granted), maybe the remote has lighted buttons… I know I’m overlooking more light sources; a hard row to hoe, I’d say.
Perhaps what you need are some peril-sensitive sunglasses.
Ah, Caltiki – a movie that looked like a bad Mexican movie dubbed into English, when it was really a bad Italian movie set in Mexico, then dubbed into English. Another in the series of 1950s “Blob” monsters (The Quatermass movies, X-The Unknown, and, of course, The Blob) that flowed around and dissolved your flesh on contact. I grew up watching this on TV.
It wasn’t really scary by itself, except for a couple of scenes – the diver whose face got dissolved off, and the guy whose arm got dissolved down to the bone. Other than that, it was pretty minor fare.
If you want something more restrained and scary in its implications, I give you The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus ((AKA Les yeux sans visage – “Eyes Without a Face” 1960 in France, released two years later in the US), a French film in which a “mad” (well, at least extremely unethical) doctor and his equally ethics-challenge nurse kidnap girls so they can remove their faces and graft them onto his daughter, who was disfigured in an auto accident. Eventually, the figure, they’ll get it right.
What made this film very effective was that I was watching it on TV on WOR’s Supernatural Theater as a kid when they go to the operation scene. They show the evil surgical team methodically marking off the area of skin they want to excise, then carefully slicing into the skin (no blood), then they lift off the skin, like a mask, directly upwards towards the camera . Guaranteed to squick out any kids who happen to be watching. And how many would, at the late hour of 8 PM?
I’ll bet WOR got a lot of angry phone calls that night.
It surprised me years later when I saw a rack full of DVDs of the film (with the original French title – but I had learned that by then) on sale at Disney Downtown in Orlando.
http://www.ukhorrorscene.com/eyes-without-a-face-1960-blu-ray-review/
The Last Man on Earth With Vincent Price. This one is creepy and kind of sad. You really *feel *the loneliness.
The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.
More sci fi than horror, and Ray Milland does masticate his fair share of scenery but if you’re even the slightest bit squicked by eye related horrors, this one will give you nightmares. Especially the last scene.
Carnival of Souls Creepy through and through, from the icy female lead to the, um, “souls”. I was completely intrigued by the Salt Air Pavillion; what an exquisite setting for a horror movie.
Night Tide A young Dennis Hopper in a sailor suit and the 1961 Santa Monica pier! What else could you want?
Death Smiles on a Murderer This one is from 1973 and is weird as hell. It scared my young, horror loving self so badly that I couldn’t bring myself to watch it again until I was in my forties.
Hatchet for the Honeymoon 1970 Schlock, to be sure, but very effective, IMO. The ending stays with you longer than you might expect.
Last Man on Earth was the first film based on Richard Matheson’s vampire novel “I Am Legend”, and was much better than Charlton Heston’s The Omega Man, although maybe not better than the 2007 Will Smith film.
According to Stephen King, there’s a version of The Man with the X-ray eyes in which, after tearing his offending eyes out at the end, he screams that he can still see.
I watched Carnival of Souls as a kid many times on WOR’s Supernatural Theater, but forgot about the setting until I saw the film again several years ago. In the intervening time I’d lived in Salt Lake City, and it was weird to see all the SLC locales in the movie. When they shot the film, the Saltair Pavilion (the second one, used in the film) was on its last legs. It had closed in 1958 (it was almost an hour outside Salt Lake City), and looking pretty worn. The shopworn feel, accentuated by the cheap crepe paper decorations perfectly fits the dream/nightmare sequence filmed there of Dancing Zombies.
After two fires, it was gone in 1970. The present, third Saltair was built in the 1980s and almost immediately was almost destroyed by flooding. It’s the one I knew. It’s stil there, though.
Ugh. That’s the one! :eek: Looking at still photos from the scene you can tell it’s fake but gah was it horrifying.
I came in to mention Wait Until Dark. Horror master Stephen King himself says that one scene is one of the scariest ever filmed. An, may I add, one of the simplest.
Hepburn didn’t see THAT coming.
This. The Voice over is a little jarring to modern ears, but it’s totally worth it for the “God! God! Whose hand was I holding?” moment. Geez, that line still gives me the shivers.
Nosferatu (1922)
I’m a big fan of Roger Corman’s, especially his Poe cycle, so House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum(1961), Tales of Terror (1962) the Masque of Red Death (1964) *The Haunted Palace *(1963)
The list goes on.
The Uninvited