griggs's - Horror Films (Available on Cinema Paradiso) Everyone Should Watch Once List

At a local carnival in a small German town, hypnotist Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) presents the somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt), who can purportedly predict the future of curious fairgoers. But at night, the doctor wakes Cesare from his sleep to enact his evil bidding...

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"One Cut of the Dead" opens in a run-down, abandoned warehouse where a film crew are making a zombie film. Yet this is no ordinary warehouse. It's been said that it's the site of military experiments on humans.

From nowhere, real zombies arrive and terrorize the crew! This may sound like a the plot of a cliched zombie film, but 'One Cut of the Dead' is something completely different! Starting off with a non-stop one-take 37 minute shot, the film then completely switches direction and turns the zombie genre completely upside-down into a charming, audience-friendly comedy with an ending you won't see coming!

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A Japanese box-office sensation in 1968, Kuroneko is a sparse, atmospheric horror story, adhering to Kaneto Shindo's philosophy of using beauty and purity to evoke emotion.

Eccentric and more overtly supernatural than its breakthrough companion piece, Onibaba (1964), Kuroneko revisits similar themes to reveal a haunting meditation on duty, conformity and love. In this magnificently eerie and romantic film - loosely based on the Japanese folktale The Cat's Return - a mother and daughter-in-law (Nobuko Otowa and Kiwako Taichi) are raped and murdered by pillagers, but return from the dead as vampiric cat spirits intent on revenge. As the ghosts lure soldiers into the bamboo groves, a fearless samurai, Gintoki (Kichiemon Nakamura), is sent to stop their reign of terror.

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Made in 1954, 'Godzilla' was Japan's first foray into big budget sci fi - costing ten times the budget of the average Japanese feature and twice as much as Seven Samurai - released the same year.

The film created a monster that would enter the lexicon of popular culture, spawn fifty years of sequels and inspire a new genre: the kaiju eiga or Japanese monster movie. Directed by Ishiro Honda, a friend and collaborator of Akira Kurosawa, and starring Takashi Shimura as the revered paleontologist who uncovers the horrible secret at the heart of the monster (Godzilla is a long dormant Jurassic beast awoken by the atom bomb), the original Godzilla is a fierce indictment of the atomic age. Sold to an American distributor, the film was cut, dubbed into English, re-titled Godzilla: King of the Monsters! and new scenes were added starring Raymond Burr as an American reporter observing the monsters rampage from the sidelines. All trace of the anti-nuclear message was excised in the American version. Now regarded as one of the great classics of cinema and still rated amongst the top twenty Japanese movies of all time, the original Godzilla is perhaps the definitive monster movie - both a bold metaphor for the atomic age and a thrilling tour de force of pioneering special effects.

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With their marriage in pieces Anna and Mark's tense relationship has become a psychotic descent into screaming matches, violence and self-mutilation.

Believing his wife's only lover is the sinister Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), Mark (Sam Neill) is unaware of the demonic, tentacled creature that Anna (Isabelle Adjani) has hidden away for liaisons in a deserted apartment and will stop at nothing to protect.

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Twelve year old Oskar is an outsider; struggling to fit in at school and left alone to fend for himself at home while his mother works nights. One evening he meets the mysterious Eli.

As a sweet romance blossoms between them, Oskar learns to overcome his tormentors and discovers Eli's dark secret and the connections to gruesome events occurring across town. Together they must help Eli be gone and live, or stay and die.

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Santa Sangre is a temple torn down by bulldozers over the protestations of its leader Concha (Bianca Guerra); the wife of an unfaithful circus performer (Guy Stockwell) and the mother of Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky).

The Church is built on a gruesome crime scene, the first of many primal scenes for the young Fenix which also includes the death of the beloved circus elephant, the surreal funeral which follows, and above all the hideous violence which separates him from his family and leaves him confined in an asylum till his adult life. When he finally escapes, Fenix's nightmares are ready to become awful reality.

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A psychotic serial killer is on the loose, committing some of the most diabolical crimes the police have ever witnessed. No one is safe as the body count rises and the killer continues his evil odyssey of sadistic butchery.

But when the fiancée of an elite special agent becomes one of his victims, a personal investigation becomes a merciless and brutal game of vengeance. As one violent encounter leads to another, it's a game where the hunter becomes as unhinged as the hunted.

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Mark (Carl Boehm), a focus puller at the local film studio, supplements his wages by taking glamour photographs in a seedy studio above a newsagent.

By night he is a sadistic killer, stalking his victims with his camera forever in his hand trying to capture the look of genuine, unadulterated fear - an obsession that stems from his disturbing and terrifying childhood at the hands of his scientist father. Mark slowly becomes enamoured with Helen (Anna Massey), who lives with her blind mother (Maxine Audley) in the flat downstairs, but how long before he turns the deadly gaze of his camera towards her?

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Neve Campbell leads an all-star cast in this iconic slasher thriller that launched the 'Scream' franchise and breathed new life into the horror genre.

After a series of mysterious deaths befalls their small town, an offbeat group of friends led by Sidney Prescott (Campbell) becomes the target of a masked killer. As the body count rises, Sidney and her friends turn to the "rules" of horror films to help navigate the real-life terror they're living in. Buckle up for an irresistible killer ride!

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Whilst touring in France, a young couple (Rex and Saskia) stop for a break at a roadside service station. Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) leaves Rex (Gene Bervoets) to browse around the shops and vanishes leaving no clues as to her whereabouts.

Three years later Rex begins to receive taunting postcards from Saskia's supposed abductor and is drawn into a terrifying battle of cat and mouse in his desperate quest to discover the fate of his missing lover.

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Haunted by demons past and present, artist Johan Borg (Max Von Sydow) fights a losing battle to retain his sanity and maintain his artistic prowess. His wife Alma (Liv Ullmann), desperate to help him, finds herself starting to share his hallucinations.

But as Johan's mind continues to unravel, Alma is forced to choose between her love... and her life.

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From Robert Eggers, the visionary filmmaker behind the modern horror masterpiece 'The Witch', comes this hypnotic and hallucinatory tale of two lighthouse keepers (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) on a remote and mysterious New England island in the 1890's.

As an approaching storm threatens to sweep them from the rock and strange apparitions emerge from the fog, each man begins to suspect that the other has become dangerously unmoored.

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Whilst visiting a secluded, broken down cabin in the woods, teenagers Ash (Bruce Campbell) and hid girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) play their professor's tape of recitation of passages from 'The Book of the Dead'.

Evil supernatural powers are unleashed that turn Linda into a monstrous deadite and threatens Ash's life. When the professor's daughter and her friends arrive at the cabin, the night turns into a non-stop bloodbath with chainsaws, shotguns and flying eyeballs.

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Upset by her widowed father's plans to remarry, Angel (Kumiko Ohba) sets off with six of her schoolgirl friends in tow for a summer getaway at her aunt's isolated mansion.

In this house of dormant secrets, long-held emotional traumas have terrifyingly physical embodiments and the girls must use their individual talents if any are to survive.