The 100 best horror films

The 100 best horror films

The best horror films as voted for by more than 100 experts, including Simon Pegg and Roger Corman.
By Derek Adams, Dave Calhoun, Cath Clarke, Sarah Cohen, Nigel Floyd and Tom Huddleston, with the generous support of everyone at FrightFest and Cine-Excess

Dead Alive (1992)

At the time, Jackson’s satirical splatterfest was by far the goriest movie ever made (at least in the English language), yet the tone is gruesomely funny rather than violent or cruel. The innocent love affair between 25-year-old virgin Lionel (Timothy Balme) and the lovely Paquita (Diana Peñalver) is interrupted when his domineering mother is bitten by a Sumatran Rat-Monkey and transforms – through several putrescent stages – into a hideous zombie with a craving for human flesh. Most of the laugh-out-loud humour derives from the hilarious incongruity between the sedate suburban setting, with its polite ladies who lunch, and the blood-drenched spectacle of the loving couple fending off a slavering horde of flesh-eaters with household and garden implements – most iconically and most effectively, that great Kiwi invention, the fly-mo.—Nigel Floyd