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Every year, we here at Sound On Sight celebrate the month of October with 31 Days of Horror; and every year, I update the list of my favourite horror films ever made. Last year, I released a list that included 150 picks. This year, I’ll be upgrading the list, making minor alterations, changing the rankings, adding new entries, and possibly removing a few titles. I’ve also decided to publish each post backwards this time for one reason: the new additions appear lower on my list, whereas my top 50 haven’t changed much, except for maybe in ranking. Enjoy!

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Special Mention:

Shock Corridor

Written and directed by Samuel Fuller

USA, 1963

Shock Corridor stars Peter Breck as Johnny Barrett, an ambitious reporter who wants to expose the killer at the local insane asylum. To solve the case, he must pretend to be insane so they have him committed. Once in the asylum,...

The Letter (1929) Review Pt.1. [Photo: Jeanne Eagels as jealous murderess Leslie Crosbie.] Low-key, however, is hardly the appropriate manner to describe Jeanne Eagels' bombastic talkie début in a role played in London by Gladys Cooper and on Broadway by Katharine Cornell. Eagels, a sensation on stage as Sadie Thompson in W. Somerset Maugham's Rain and the star of a handful of silent films (e.g., The World and the Woman; The Fires of Youth; Man, Woman and Sin, opposite John Gilbert), acts the part of the adulteress-murderess as if she were playing to the far corners of the gallery. (Rain was unavailable for a film adaptation at the time because Gloria Swanson had produced and starred in Raoul Walsh's Sadie Thompson the year before.) Eagels' performance is all mannerisms — hand to forehead to show distress, trembling voice to show despair — and no emotional core. While Bette Davis' 1940 Leslie looks and acts like a cool, calculating vixen,...

Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand in Vincente Minnelli's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever At Film Threat, Phil Hall comes up with a follow-up to his 2008 article about important lost films. Among the 50 titles on Hall's highly eclectic new list are a version of Carmen (1915) starring Fox vamp Theda Bara; The Life of General Villa (1914), in which Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa plays himself and future filmmaker Raoul Walsh played Villa as a young man; and the Rudolph Valentino vehicle A Sainted Devil (1924). Also, the 1928 version of Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, featuring Ruth Taylor; Jealousy (1929) one of two talkies (the other being The Letter) starring Broadway legend Jeanne Eagels; Lon Chaney's last silent film, Thunder (1929); and Alam Ara (1931), the first Indian talking picture. And more: Heartache (1936), the first Cantonese-language American production; segments from what was to become part III of Sergei [...]...