Horror cinema has long relied on practical craftsmanship to deliver visceral scares. Leading this countdown is The Thing (1982), where a shapeshifting extraterrestrial infiltrates a remote Antarctic research base. The film is remembered for a tense sequence where the character Palmer, played by David Clennon, reacts to the creature’s reveal with the iconic line: “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding.”
In second place, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) features a legendary moment where a creature erupts from John Hurt’s chest. While the cast knew a surprise was coming, the exact nature of the effect caught them off guard, resulting in genuine shock. The scene utilized a mechanical torso filled with compressed air and animal innards, designed by Scott and built by Roger Dicken.
Third is the transformation sequence in An American Werewolf in London (1981). Rick Baker, who won the first-ever best makeup Oscar for his work, depicted David Naughton’s excruciating physical reconfiguration from human to beast. At number four, David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) features a famous head-explosion effect created by Dick Smith and Chris Walas, who filled a plaster skull with leftover burgers and shattered it with a shotgun blast. Condemned to be the spectral vehicle’s driver unless he can mend his ways, sjöström also plays the dissolute antihero. Henrik Galeen’s expressionist variation on the Faust legend reunites the stars of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari: Conrad Veidt plays the student who makes a deal with the devil (Werner Krauss), who steals his reflection. He shambles into frame – and gets the top of his head sliced off by a spinning rotor, thanks to the magic of splatter makeup maestro Tom Savini. Finally, his penis turns into a giant drill and destroys a coffee table. Sexy pre-code adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, fredric March won the best actor Oscar for his performance in this violent. Co-written by John Sayles, shows Robert Picardo (AKA Star Trek’s holographic doctor) saying “I’m gonna give you a piece of my mind” and offering a bit of his own brain to a horrified Dee Wall, joe Dante’s werewolf satire.
Society (1989) sits at number five, with surreal body-horror effects by Screaming Mad George, showing the elite merging into a grotesque mass. John De Palma’s The Fury (1978) takes the sixth spot, featuring a memorable psychic kill where a character is obliterated by telekinetic force. In seventh place, The Howling (1981) introduced Rob Bottin’s groundbreaking work, utilizing pulsating air bladders to transform a werewolf on camera. FW Murnau commandeers a variety of in-camera effects for this vampire masterpiece.
The eighth spot goes to the decapitation scene in The Omen (1976), where a glass sheet slides off a truck to kill photographer Keith Jennings. Number nine is Eraserhead (1977), featuring a chittering mutant baby crafted by David Lynch from an embalmed calf foetus. The tenth entry, The Birds (1963), captures Tippi Hedren’s harrowing attic scene, where real birds attached to her clothing caused genuine injury during a grueling week of production. The scene took seven days to shoot; Hedren described it as “the worst week of my life”. The schoolchildren, the gas station are impeccable set pieces, but the attack on Tippi Hedren in the attic is particularly terrifying, the climbing frame. Where Jack Nance, he of the tumbleweed hair-do, ends up having to look after a chittering mutant baby, david Lynch’s first full-length feature is set in an industrial hellscape.
The Exorcist (1973) ranks eleventh, famous for Linda Blair’s 360-degree head rotation and the invention of “projectile vomiting. And the deleted “spider-walk” became legendary before its restitution, the pea-coloured puke popularised the term “projectile vomiting”. An effect at once ludicrous and horrifying, thanks to Dick Smith and Marcel Vercoutere’s lifesize animatronic dummy, but the signature effect in William Friedkin’s film is Linda Blair’s 360-degree head rotation.
At number twelve, Eyes Without a Face (1960) remains an influential piece of arthouse horror, featuring a surgeon attempting to restore his daughter’s appearance by grafting the faces of young women. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931) follows at thirteen, marking a technical milestone with Wally Westmore’s lens-filtered makeup transformations. It would be 38 years before the director, Rouben Mamoulian, revealed how they achieved the groundbreaking onscreen transformation of Jekyll into Hyde: Wally Westmore’s makeup combined with coloured filters over the lens. Whose face is only briefly glimpsed in his Hollywood debut, james Whale’s adaptation of HG Wells’s novel owes much to the sardonic tones of Claude Rains. A surgeon kidnaps young women and – in explicit black and white – slices their faces off with a scalpel in an attempt to restore the beauty of his disfigured daughter. But is now hailed as an influential masterpiece, georges Franju’s eerie arthouse horror was dismissed on its release.
The Invisible Man (1933) takes the fourteenth spot, utilizing clever bandage removal effects to reveal the absence of a character, while Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) ranks fifteenth with its jarring industrial-style body horror. At sixteen, Dawn of the Dead (1978) immortalized the “Helicopter Zombie,” played by the late Jim Krut, whose character suffers a grisly demise at the hands of a rotor blade.
The list concludes with classic works: Nosferatu (1922) at seventeen used in-camera tricks like flipped negatives; The Student of Prague (1926) at eighteen showcased early split-screen techniques; The Phantom Carriage (1921) at nineteen mastered double exposure; and Ring (1998) at twenty, where Hideo Nakata used old-school practical approaches to make Sadako emerge from a television screen. When film-makers’ overreliance on CGI was increasingly making special effects less special, it took the old-school practical approach of Japanese film-maker Hideo Nakata to make one’s hair stand on end, towards the end of the 20th century. Just when you think the cursed VHS tape has claimed its last victim, Sadako’s vengeful ghost emerges from the well, comes closer … and climbs out of the television screen. The Swedish director Victor Sjöström makes extensive use of double exposure – all done in-camera because optical printing had yet to be developed – to depict Death’s soul-collecting carriage in this folk-horror classic. This evil doppelganger runs amok until Veidt confronts it in a split-screen climax. Sped-up action and stop-motion add to the unheimlich ambience until, exposed to the sun’s rays, cadaverous Count Orlok (Max Schreck) vanishes in a puff of smoke, flipped negatives. Shinya Tsukamoto burst on to the body horror scene with a no-budget semi-experimental cyberpunk nightmare in which a Japanese salaryman’s body parts gradually turn to metal through a combination of juddery time-lapse, stop motion and jump-cutting, all set to a clanging soundtrack. When his ex-wife claimed custody of it, warner reportedly kept the severed head until his divorce.
