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Six Scary Sleepers

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Everyone has their own expectations of the Horror genre: what kind of scared do you want? Spooked or just shocked? The former means the film puts in the viewer a constant sense of dread and fear, the latter means you may jump out of your chair, or feel repulsed, but it doesn't get under your skin the same way. I'm more than willing to admit that Scream (at least the first one) was entertaining, even providing a few shocks for the money, but was too self-referential to be truly scary. Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street are two of the most popular horror films of all time, but despite all the slashing and gore, they put me to sleep (Freddy Kreuger notwithstanding). Some of the films that scared me when I was a kid did so without going over the top, but by creating an atmosphere of dread and fright, giving the sense that something really was going 'bump in the night.' Poltergeist scared me. Rosemary's Baby still scares me. Okay, when I was younger, my Dad succumbed to my pleadings and took me to see the (unintentionally) horrific Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which had about as much to do with the original Halloween as Jason Takes Manhattan  did with The Muppets Take Manhattan.

Anyway, the following underrated horror films, perfect for a pre-Halloween spookfest, will make you want to turn on all the lights when they're over.

The Changeling
I saw this ghost story when I was ten years old, and got spooked so much I actually had to leave the theater, waiting in the lobby until the film was over. Granted, it takes a lot more to scare you when you're an adult than it does when you're ten, but after recently revisiting The Changeling, I was still scared (though just a bit less so). The story of a boy murdered 70 years ago whose revenge-seeking ghost haunts the home of a lonely composer (George C. Scott) is a perfect example of creating fear through atmosphere. Things do go bump in the night in this film.

Grim Prairie Tales
Expecting to find a "Grade-Z" movie upon first watching this mix of horror and Western, I instead found to my surprise a nifty little "B" flick, helped out by the presence of two very good actors, James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif (who's been in his share of these kind of flicks). Two men sit around a campfire, trying to outdo each other's scary stories, which lead into a series of Twilight Zone-ish "tall" horror tales nicely interwoven around the framing story. Sometimes startling, sometimes weak,