Horror Story Plot Formulas

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In every horror movie, there is, of course, a protagonist and an antagonist. For convenience, I'm going to refer to them as the monster and the hero. Of course, the monster, both human and non-human, and the “hero” can just as easily be a girl or a woman as a boy or a man.

For there to be a story, there has to be conflict, and the major and most important type of conflict, that between the monster and the hero, results from their encounter. Therefore, they must come together, usually in the first part of the story. Writers have come up with a variety of ways for the monster and the hero to meet, if not greet, one another. These methods of encounter, in turn, help to establish various narrative formulas.

Some of these formulas we might call The Return, The Invasion, The Trespass, The Act of Vengeance, and The Fish Out of Water. Here are the breakdowns of these plots and a few examples of each.

The Return

Beginning

A monster (an ancient evil) awakens or returns.

Middle

The monster becomes active again.

End

By learning the monster's origin or nature, the hero eliminates or neutralizes the monster.

Examples: Summer of Night, It

The Invasion

Beginning

A monster moves into a community foreign to itself.

Middle

The monster becomes active in its new surroundings, behaving as it did in its original habitat.

End

By learning the monster's origin or nature, the hero eliminates or neutralizes the monster.

Examples: Dracula, 'Salem's Lot

The Trespass

Beginning

Trespassers disturb or threaten a monster's habitat.

Middle

The monster defends its turf.

End

The trespassers capture or kill the monster, escape from the monster, or are killed by the monster.

Examples: The Descent, Poltergeist, King Kong, The Thing

The Act of Vengeance

Beginning

The monster or his or her loved one is wronged.

Middle

The monster seeks to avenge him- or herself or a loved one.

End

The monster is imprisoned, killed, or otherwise neutralized or escapes.

Examples: The Abominable Dr. Phibes, I Know What You Did Last Summer, A Nightmare on Elm Street

The Fish Out of Water

Beginning

The hero, relocated to a strange new environment, usually that of the monster, is out of his or her depth.

Middle

The monster, at home in the environment, maintains the upper hand against the hero.

End

The hero kills the monster or escapes or is killed by the monster.

Examples: Open Water, Backcountry, Jaws.

Note: A future post may present other horror story plot formulas.

Horror Fiction: The Need to Nurture

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to Jib Fowles, adults, male and female alike, have a need to nurture children, animals, and other helpless creatures. In discussing this need, psychologist Henry Murray refers to feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, and healing such dependents.

Horror fiction, like advertising, often taps this basic need, either by showing its neglect or by perverting it. In addition, such fiction frequently depicts the nurture of children or pets as a way to set up the later reversal of such care when a villain disrupts or destroys familial or relationships or relationships based upon friendships or, indeed, kills family members or friends.

In the film Rosemary's Baby (1968), based on Ira Levin's 1967 novel of the same name, Rosemary Woodhouse is raped by Satan after her neighbors, a cult of Satanists, drug her. She believes that her vision of having been raped by the devil was a delusion and that her husband, Guy, is the true father.

After her baby is born, she is told that the child died, but she refuses to believe this and discovers the infant son in her her satanic neighbors' apartment, surrounded by the their fellow members of their cult. She is asked to accept the child as her own, and, reluctantly, she does so, rocking the baby's cradle as she smiles.

This plot involves the need to nurture, a drive so strong, especially when it is combined with the maternal instinct, the movie implies, that it can overcome even the fear and disgust that having delivered a son of Satan inspires. No matter what level of nurture Rosemary provides to her son, the child will not fare well; according to the Bible, her son, the Antichrist, or “the beast from the earth,”will be defeated and cast into hell, wherein he will suffer eternal torment (Rev. 19:19-20).

The plot addresses two questions: who (or whom) is to be nurtured and why?

Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil: Summer of Corruption, which originally appeared in his 1982 collection, Different Seasons, presents, as its subtitle suggests, a perversion of the need to nurture. Having discovered that an elderly German immigrant, Arthur Denker, is a Nazi war criminal, Kurt Dussander, a teenage boy, Todd Bowden, threatens to expose him if Dussander does not recount the atrocities that Dussander committed during the Holocaust.

The need to nurture is perverted in two ways: it is forced upon the nurturer, rather than freely given by him, and it involves teaching about atrocities rather than virtues. It also results in catastrophes, as, separately, Todd and Dussander murder homeless vagrants and Todd shoots a rifle at motorists on a freeway before he is killed by authorities.

King's 1977 novel The Shining also involves the need to nurture, this time addressing it negatively, by denying it to five-year-old Danny Torrance. His father, Jack, an alcoholic subject to fits of rage, broke his son's arm and was fired from his teaching position after assaulting a student. After accepting the position of caretaker of the vast, remote Overlook Hotel, Jack is possessed and, under the influence of a former caretaker's ghost, driven to murder his wife, Wendy, and Danny. 

King acknowledges that his own alcoholism and his anger and frustration concerning his own children's behavior was an inspiration for Jack's character. He also insists that Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel, the 1980 movie The Shining, departed from his novel's theme of a family's “disintegration” and objected to Kubrick's suggesting that Jack is influenced from within, by his own psychological demons, rather than externally, by the ghosts of the haunted hotel.

Scottish broadcast journalist Laura Miller takes issue with King's criticism of Kubrick, pointing out that, in King's novel, Jack's own choices cause the evil that afflicts him and his family, whereas, “in Kubrick’s The Shining, the characters are largely in the grip of forces beyond their control. It’s a film in which domestic violence occurs, while King’s novel is about domestic violence as a choice.”

King's Point of View

King's Novel	King's Criticism
Theme = family's “disintegration”	Film departs from novel's theme
Family's disintegration caused by supernatural influences	Film suggests Jack's own psychological demons cause his downfall

Miller's Criticism of King's Point of View

King's Novel	Kubrick's Film
Jack's own choices cause the evil that afflicts him and his family	Family's disintegration caused by supernatural influences
Domestic violence results from Jack's own choices	Domestic violence occurs

In short, Miller argues that King's novel is psychological, rather than theological, in its identification of the cause of the domestic abuse Jack commits, whereas Kubrick's film suggests that Jack's behavior, including his domestic abuse, results from supernatural influences—the opposite of King's own point of view and basis of his criticism of Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel.

King's criticism of Kubrick's film has been inconsistent, with King first damning and later praising the movie. In one comment, he attributes the filmmaker's sometimes “flat” scenes to a failure of imagination and religious faith:

. . . a visceral skeptic [concerning the existence of the supernatural] just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel. So he looked instead for the evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn't believe, he couldn't make the film believable to others. What's basically wrong with Kubrick's version of The Shining is that it's a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little . . . .

Critic Mark Browning suggests the opposite is true: King “feels too much and thinks too little.”

King's criticism of Kubrick and Miller's and Browning's criticism of King's criticism of Kubrick seem to suggest that romanticism tends to promote an emotional and psychological view of the problem of evil, such as King's, while a rationalistic outlook tends to advance a rational and theological or idealistic perspective regarding the existence of evil, such as Kubrick's.

If nothing else, the controversy between King's perceptions of Kubrick's movie and Kubrick's own point of view concerning his film suggest that stories that involve the need to nurture can address much larger issues, such as the romanticism, rationalism, and the nature of both evil and ultimate reality.

King approaches the need to nurture from a different perspective in It.

Not only do many of his adolescent characters lack a nurturing home environment, but one of them in particular, Beverly Marsh, is abused both by her father Alvin, and, later, her husband, Tom Rogan, among other, previous romantic partners. As an eleven-year-old girl, she is a member, with six of male friends of the same age, of the Losers' Club.

The parents of another member, Bill Denbrough, treat him with cold indifference following the death of his younger brother. His stuttering subjects him to the bullying of his classmates.

Benjamin Harrison, another member, is obese, which makes him a target of the same school bullies who torment and attack the other “Losers.” 

Edward Kaspbrak is a victim of “smother love” and his mother's Munchhausen syndrome by proxy; he also suffers psychosomatic asthma. 

Michael Hanion, another “Loser,” is African-American; he is persecuted by bully Henry Bowers because of a feud Bowers's father had with Hanion's father.

Bowers also persecutes Stanley Uris, who's a “Loser” by virtue of his Jewish faith.

As Fowles points out, advertisements can allude to the need to nurture by suggesting its absence. In fiction, children who are portrayed as being in need of feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, and healing are naturally sympathetic to readers, who hope such characters will get the care they need.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Affiliation

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Stephen King's novels are prime examples of horror fiction that appeals to readers' need for affiliation. Many of his books primarily concern an individual child (Carrie, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Christine) or a group of individuals, often children (It) who've been rejected by their peers. (Sometimes, as in Under the Dome, 'Salem's Lot, Desperation, and The Regulators, the group consists of both adult and adolescent members.) His recurring theme seems to be that, in humanity's struggles against evil, brotherly love saves the day. When such love is absent, as in Carrie, the ultimate result is catastrophic; when present, as in most of King's novels, the “good guys” triumph.

According to Jib Fowles, whether a person feels included in or excluded by his or her social peers, advertisements which appeal to the need for affiliation are effective. In the former case, an advertisement's “images of companionship are compensation for what Americans privately lack”; in the latter instance, these images are affirmations of their fellowship with others. The same, it would seem, is apt to be true of fiction's portrayal of affiliated characters or the lack thereof in such instances as that of Carrie White.

Affiliation is more complex than it may seem. Quoting psychologist Henry Murray, Fowles writes:

. . . the need for affiliation consists of 24 desires “to draw near and enjoyably cooperate or reciprocate with another; to please and win affection of another; to adhere and remain loyal to a friend.” The manifestations of this motive can be segmented into several different types of affiliation, beginning with romance.

In King's novels, there is little romance; he tends to focus on cooperation, reciprocation, and loyalty, which is more relevant to the adolescent characters typical of his fiction. Even when adults play a relatively important part, as they do in such novels as Desperation, 'Salem's Lot, Under the Dome, and others, there is usually little or no romance between them. His families tend to be dysfunctional, as in Carrie, The Shining, Under the Dome, It, and others. King's main approach to employing the need for affiliation in his novels is friendship. 
 

Dean Koontz's theme is the same as King's: against evil, brotherly love will save the day. Unlike King, however, Koontz populates his fiction mostly with adults. When children are present, they're usually in the charge of an adult, rather than acting on their own, as King's more autonomous adolescents typically are. At least insofar as his earlier work is concerned (I stopped reading Koontz when he trotted out his Odd Thomas series), an alpha male and a damsel in distress are brought together through dangerous circumstances that appear, at first, to stem from different origins but are revealed to have sprung from the same cause, often the malevolent motives of a powerful cabal, government organization, or sociopathic serial killer (Chase, Whispers, The Eyes of Darkness, Midnight, The Good Guy).

Whether through friendships among children rejected by their peers or romance between a couple whom shared dangers unite against a common foe, the fiction of both King and Koontz, respectively, tap the need for affiliation Fowles identities as one of the fifteen such 'basic needs” that unite and motivate people everywhere. These writers' use of this appeal is one of the reasons their fiction is probably routinely on bestsellers' lists.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Sex

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As we saw in the last post (the first in this series), Jib Fowles identifies 15 basic appeals used in advertising. These same appeals, we argue, are frequently employed in horror fiction; indeed, their presence in horror novels and movies accounts for much of the appeal of these types of fiction.

In this post, we'll take a look at the appeal to readers' or viewers' need for sex. The fulfillment of the “needs for,” as opposed to the “needs to” on Fowles's list, require the presence or participation of another person or persons besides oneself. While it is possible to satisfy oneself sexually, by masturbation or other means, to find true sexual fulfillment, one requires a partner (or, some might contend, partners), whether of the male, the female, both, or another gender.

In horror, the need for sex characteristically involves perversion. Since all communication is reducible to seven basic questions, the forms of sexual perversion about which horror writers may write take seven possible types of forms. (A type, as we're using it, means a sexual behavioral set identifiable by shared characteristics.) These types of perversion (i. e., a deviation, corruption, or distortion of the original nature of purpose of a person, place, or thing) can be subsumed under these questions:

Who?

What?

When?

Where?

How?

Why?

How many? or How much?

We can further refine these questions by associating each of them with specific referents:

Who?	What?	When?	Where?	How?	Why?	How many? or How much?
Agent (actor)	Object	Age, time or duration	Location	Method, process, or technique	Cause, motive, or purpose	Quantity (in volume or number)

Let's add a couple more rows, identifying an example of a horror novel or movie that perverts human sexuality by deviating from, corrupting, or distorting the original nature of purpose of a person, place, or thing involved in sexual behavior:

Who?	What?	When?	Where?	How?	Why?	How many? or How much?
Agent (actor)	Object	Age, time, occasion, or duration	Location	Method, process, or technique	Cause, motive, or purpose	Quantity (in volume or number)
Demon Seed (1973 novel; 1977 film)	The Exorcist (1973)	Maleus Maleficarum (1487)*	The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils])	Alien (1979)	Rosemary's Baby (1967 novel; 1968 film)	The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils])
A computer becomes a woman's sexual partner.	Regan MacNeil, the possessed girl, masturbates with a crucifix.	A demon, having assumed a female form, spends so long in intercourse with her victim that she absolutely drains him of semen and he thereafter dies.	Naked nuns conduct sexual orgies in a convent.	Parasitic pregnancy ends in the fetus's bursting through the human host's abdomen.	After being raped by a demon, Rosemary Wood-house conceives a demonic child.	Naked nuns conduct sexual orgies in a convent.

As the above table shows, the same movie may contain two (or more) of these types of sexual perversion: The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils]) contains orgies involving many individuals participating simultaneously in various sex acts; it also takes place in a convent. Likewise, these types of perversions can vary in how they are represented.

For example, a perverse location need not be a geographical place or an architectural space (a convent); it could be an anatomical site, as in Teeth (2008), in which a young woman discovers that she has two sets of teeth, one in her mouth, the other in her vagina. Other possible variations? One's partner could be a poltergeist, as in The Entity (1982) (Who?); human corpses, as in the necrophilia scenes in the novel Under the Dome (2009) (What?); or a man transformed into metal kills his girlfriend after his penis becomes a power drill, as in Tetsuo:The Iron Man (1989) (How?).

Writers are limited pretty much only by their imaginations, their sense of morality, their personal taste, and the law of the land. Publishing houses will print and distribute just about anything that promises to make a buck. It seems unlikely, though, that the majority of readers or viewers are likely to have a need for extreme types of sex, even when it occurs in horror stories.

* Although the Malleus Maleficarum is a book—a manual for prosecuting witchcraft trials—rather than a novel or a movie, it contains supposed accounts of demonic sex, one of which suggests such a long-lasting (and fatal) encounter between a succubus and “her” victim, a hermit, that the hermit was completely drained of his semen:

When he [the hermit] was done and had arisen, the demon said to him, “behold what you have done, for I am not a girl or a woman but a demon,” and at once he disappeared from view, while the hermit remained absolutely astonished. And because the demon, with his great power, had withdrawn a very great quantity of semen, the hermit was permanently dried up, so that he died at the end of a month's time.

One can imagine the use of this description of demonic sexual activity as the basis for a terrifying sex scene in a horror novel or movie!

Note: For you may also want to read my post “Note: You may want to read “Bentley Little: Aberrant Sex as Symbolic of the nature of Sin.”

Quick Tip: Vilifying Villains

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In popular fiction, including horror, it is to the writer’s advantage to make his or her villains despicable so that readers will despise them. In other words, it behooves writers to vilify their villains.

Normally, this feat is accomplished fairly easily. One need only show the antagonist, monster or otherwise, do something that is so utterly atrocious that readers refuse to sympathize with him, her, or it.

As human beings, we want to sympathize with others. We would prefer to like them, but, if we are unable to do so, we would, at least, like to understand them, for understanding others, even those who are cruel and evil, humanizes them.

That which is inhuman is more than merely frightening; he, she, or it is terrifying, largely because he, she, or it is altogether alien. What is totally strange and unknown is also unpredictable, and the unpredictable is terrifying.

Some deeds, by their very nature, put those who do them in the Totally Other, or Alien, category. We cannot sympathize with them, and we refuse to identify with them; they are inhuman. They are monsters. Their despicable deeds make them so.

Genres other than horror also sometimes make their antagonists inhuman and, therefore, monstrous. The Western Tombstone begins by depicting a band of outlaws’ slaughter of a wedding party, including the bride and groom--and the priest who was to marry them. From the outset, audience members regard them as fiends in human form and are rooting for Wyatt Earp to destroy them.

Usually, stalking, harming, and, especially, killing an innocent, such as a faithful canine or feline companion or, worse, a child will automatically put the perpetrator of such a crime on the readers’ most wanted list. Stephen King adopts this tactic in many of his novels; IT and Desperation are good examples. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist is another.

The brutal beating or rape of a woman also suffices to render a villain beyond contempt. King employs this stratagem in Rose Madder, and Dean Koontz favors it in many of his novels. Likewise, in the Clint Eastwood film Sudden Impact, even Dirty Harry lets the killer of her sister’s rapists off the hook when she takes the rapists to task with a bullet to the groin, followed by a second to the brain.

Vilifying the villain has another benefit for writers, too. After an antagonist’s inhuman deeds has rendered him, her, or it monstrous, readers will support virtually anything the hero or heroine does to the villain, including torture, for such a fiend, they will believe, deserves whatever befalls him, her, or it. Some deeds bring not only retribution, but also vengeance with a vengeance, so to speak. Think of Hitler. What punishment would have been too harsh in repayment for the horrors he inflicted upon millions? Or Ted Bundy. Was electrocution too light a penalty for what he did to all the women he tormented and killed?

Vilifying the villain allows writers to up the intensity of the action and, when payday finally comes, the price that he, she, or it is forced to pay at the hands of the protagonist-become-avenger.

Ideas That Don’t Work

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

When major players in the horror (or any other) genre succeed, they do so on a Wimbledon, World Series, or Super Bowl level. However, when they fail, they also fail on a spectacular level. Most of the time, the Stephen Kings and the Dean Koontzes and the Robert McCammons and the Douglas Prestons and the Lincoln Childs succeed. Occasionally, they don’t. This post is going to look at, possibly with a wince and a cringe, a couple of the more monumental disappointments in horror fiction--at ideas that didn’t work.

If in no other way than sheer volume, Stephen King’s novel, It, is one of the true monuments of horror fiction. Vast in scope, it’s equally ambitious--some have contended that it’s maybe too ambitious. Published in 1986, the tome contains over 1,000 pages. It tells the story of a band of unlikely adolescent heroes, The Losers’ Club. In 1958, they rid their town, Derry, Maine, of an ancient evil that comes in the protean, ever-changing form of a shape shifter dubbed “It.” Often, It wears the face of a diabolical clown, Pennywise, but it also appears as a mummy, a werewolf, or whatever other monstrous shape most terrifies the boy or girl to whom it appears.

Flash forward. It’s now 1985, and the Losers are successful adults, living out their lives in various, far-flung cities. Only one of them, Mike Hanlon, Derry’s librarian, has remained behind. When it seems that It has returned to Derry, Hanlon alerts the others, who’d sworn to return to vanquish the monster again if it ever comes back. All of them do return, except Stan Uris, who commits suicide upon hearing the news that their old adversary has returned. The adults take on their childhood foe, vanquishing it again in the sewers beneath Derry--for the last time, they hope.

The story proper is suspenseful, action-packed, and chilling--just what readers want and expect from King. It might well have been his magnum opus but for three ideas that don’t work. One of these ideas is similar--in fact, identical--to a J. R. R. Tolkien idea that doesn’t work, and Tolkien’s idea doesn’t work for the same reason that King‘s doesn‘t work.

Tolkien’s massive trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, is even longer, and far more complicated, that It. Although Tolkien’s tale is a fantasy, rather than a horror novel and it has moments of humor, it is, like It, an epic tale, and its tone remains elevated and noble throughout (except at one climactic moment), as befits an epic adventure. If not exactly elegant, the tone of King’s story is at least fairly serious, most of the way through, and would be sufficient except that, at the moment of the story’s climax, what has been a grand epic suddenly becomes a farce as the protagonists who have risked life and limb, both as adolescents and as adults, finally come face to face with the ancient evil that has haunted them since their childhood and has stalked society itself for centuries, and it turns out to be the same sort of corny, comic book monster that Tolkien, after the long and arduous journey that his band of heroes has undertaken, at great cost to their own physical and mental well being, presents to Frodo and Sam Gamgee: a giant spider. At these moments of climax, both King and Tolkien sorely disappoint their readers. Have they come so far, witnessing so much suffering, death, sacrifice, horror, and terror--and have they spent so many, many hours--to face, at the stories’ most emphatic moments, nothing more than an overblown arachnid? It’s ludicrous. And it’s a letdown.

A spider writ large is an idea that doesn’t work.

It’s not only disappointing, but it also makes the reader feel as if he or she has been cheated--and, worse yet, cheated after having read hundreds and hundreds of pages!

It would have been better to have left the big bad thing unseen or to have simply suggested its appearance than to have presented the reader with a spider as the embodiment of inexpressible horror. All that buildup has led to nothing more than a spider? We feel as if we’re Little Miss Muffet, and we wish we’d never sat down on our tuffets to read such claptrap.

We can forgive Tolkien, although not easily, because the rest of his epic is a true epic, in execution as well as in spirit. Although King has thrilled and chilled us at many turns and has, in the main, told an engrossing story, he didn’t stop with his stupid spider. He topped himself in reaching an even lower low. The spider’s age-old enemy is--drum roll, please!--a turtle.

It’s not just any turtle, though. It’s special.

In fact, it’s the creator of the entire cosmos. Countless ages ago, it seems that the reptile had a bad case of indigestion, causing it to regurgitate, and it vomited the universe from its upset tummy. As if even that‘s not enough for King, it’s implied that the turtle might have vomited forth several other universes as well. The spider-monster was a terrible idea, as is the turtle, but making them ancient enemies and having the universe result from a case of terrapin heaves is just too Kurt Vonnegut, especially for a horror novel that, up to now, at least--which is to say, for hundreds and hundreds of pages--has taken itself seriously and has given the reader every impression that he or she should also take the story seriously.

The result is that It becomes an ouroboros, putting not its foot in its mouth but another part of its anatomy. Tolkien’s tale, although damaged somewhat by the tacky, tacked-on spider-monster, retains its overall epic stature, because he doesn’t offer another idea that doesn’t work, letting ill enough alone. King’s It, which had such promise and could have been a great horror story, a masterpiece of the genre, is, instead, a massive, spectacular failure that ends as a parody of itself. King got into such a fix, perhaps, because he doesn’t know when to stop. The novel, in some critics’ opinions, is too long by half. In going for length, the author sacrifices quality, one bad idea being followed by a second and a third.

The spider-monster is an idea that doesn’t work.

The turtle-creator is an idea that doesn’t work.

The creation of the universe ex vomitus is an idea that doesn’t work.

Ultimately, therefore, It is a wannabe epic novel that doesn’t work.

It’s hard to believe that King's first novel, Carrie (1976), is of better narrative qualitythan It, which was penned relatively late in his career.

Toppers

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman 

We all have our ideas as to which movies are the best of their kind, which is fine, of course, as long as we’re able to give some indication as to why we hold these views (or, if you prefer, prejudices). Here are my picks, awarded one (terrible!) to five (great!) skulls, and the reasons behind them: 10. Tremors: Giant, burrowing worms? It’s campy. It’s funny. It also has it’s moments of sheer fear. Three stars. 9. It: The Terror from Beyond Space: A hungry alien aboard a spaceship is never seen--until it’s too late. The monster earns this one three stars. 8. Invaders from Mars: Sure, it’s sci fi, but anyone who thinks it’s not also horror hasn’t seen it. When even one’s parents can become something else--something alien--we’re in nightmare land, for sure. Three stars. 7. Halloween: There’s Jamie Lee Curtis. There’s also Michael Myers. Sibling rivalry stalks the silver screen, drenching us in the blood of teen victims. When her brother’s one of the undead and he has a yen for fratricide, what’s a poor girl to do? You can almost feel that oh-so-phallic knife as it rips and tears the maidens’ tender flesh. Babysitting’s overrated, but, at four skulls, this movie’s not. 6. A Nightmare on Elm Street: Some wouldn’t rate it as high, but I love the premise, which allows even the stupidest incidents, because, after all, anything’s possible in a dream. This movie conveys an honest, usually realistic sense of what it’s like to be trapped inside one’s own nightmare, and Freddy Kreuger’s a hoot. The protagonist, Nancy, is fetching, too, in a girl-next-door sort of way. Four skulls don’t seem too many. 5. The Thing (original): Sci fi, sure, but with a subtext of horror that’s not always submerged. Imagine being trapped inside a remote arctic outpost, far from the crowd’s maddening strife, with a thawed-out shape-shifter out for blood--your blood--and you get just the faintest impression of the claustrophobic terror this flick unleashes. James Arness makes a pretty good Thing, too. Four skulls. 4. King Kong (original): The werewolf writ large (and transformed into a gorilla). Besides, it’s beauty who kills the beast, not the other way around. The remake starring Naomi Watts has better special effects, but the original, although a bit campy, is superb for its time. It deserves four stars. 3. Psycho: Dated? Sure. But the shower scene! The creepy mansion. The fleabag motel. Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Based, in part, at least, on America’s worst serial killer of all time, Ed Gein. These elements alone make this a great among horror movies and rates it five skulls. 2. The Exorcist: The special effects may not be quite so special anymore, but it’s hard to beat the plot. What parent hasn’t wondered, at least once, whether his or her child isn’t possessed by the devil? The revolving head and the pea soup vomit alone are worth a visit to the Georgetown residence where priests take on the adversary of God himself. Five skulls for sure! 1. Alien: Some might argue, quite reasonably, that this is really a sci fi pic. It is. But it’s also a horror movie, in a broader context, because of the spectacle of blood, guts, and gore. The constant escalation of suspense and outright terror also qualify this film as a horror movie. The monsters, based upon the artwork of H. R. Giger, don’t hurt, either. It’s definitely a pulse-pounder and worthy of five skulls.