The Return of the Ritual (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

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A man and his family return to his hometown, where he is then harassed by teenagers that died when he was a kid. R 96 min Comedy, Fantasy, Horror. In a fantastical 40's where magic is used by everyone, a hard-boiled detective investigates the theft of a mystical tome. R min Crime, Fantasy, Mystery. In a twisted 's where everyone does magic, a private detective investigates a murder case without it. R min Horror, Mystery, Thriller. During a routine case in L. Scott Bakula , Kevin J.

Trevor Edmond , Daniel von Bargen. R min Drama, Fantasy, Horror. A newcomer to a Catholic prep high school falls in with a trio of outcast teenage girls who practice witchcraft, and they all soon conjure up various spells and curses against those who anger them. A newer movie but it is genuinly scary but also for being acurate in its depiction of some of the rituals- minus the special effects of course. R min Drama, Mystery, Thriller. An exceptionally adept Florida lawyer is offered a job at a high-end New York City law firm with a high-end boss - the biggest opportunity of his career to date.

R min Mystery, Thriller. A rare book dealer, while seeking out the last two copies of a demon text, gets drawn into a conspiracy with supernatural overtones. Although slow at times the storyline of the film draws the viewer in to the world of demons and satanic cults. With the explosive ending- that almost makes sense- and historical references it deserves a high spot on my list. When a young woman becomes afflicted by stigmata, a priest is sent to investigate her case, which may have severe ramifications for his faith and for the Catholic Church itself. I loved this movie the first time I saw it.

Although uplifting in a way this movie has the aspects of possession horror films that I love. R 81 min Horror, Mystery. Three film students vanish after traveling into a Maryland forest to film a documentary on the local Blair Witch legend, leaving only their footage behind. Heather Donahue , Michael C. Williams , Joshua Leonard , Bob Griffin. Love it or hate it, this movie jump started and popularized a sub-genre of horror that- when done well- has captivated audiences. At the end of the century, Satan visits New York in search of a bride. It's up to an ex-cop who now runs an elite security outfit to stop him.

R 90 min Adventure, Fantasy, Horror.

HORROR MOVIE NIGHT- Witchy, satanic and cultish collection

A group of tourists arrives in Burkittsville, Maryland after seeing The Blair Witch Project to explore the mythology and phenomenon, only to come face to face with their own neuroses and possibly the witch herself. Based on the true story of drugs, satanism, and murder in the upper class town of Northport, Long Island in A Catholic teacher meets an atheist journalist, whom a group of Catholics and priests believes has been chosen by the devil himself to be the Antichrist.

PG min Drama, Horror, Thriller. A lawyer takes on a negligent homicide case involving a priest who performed an exorcism on a young girl. This movie mixes courtroom drama with a tale of a real life exorcism. Although it is not focused on the horror aspect throughout the entire movie the scenes of Emily Rose being possessed are shocking and terrifying. R 98 min Drama, Fantasy, Horror.

Copy from this list Export Report this list. Refine See titles to watch instantly, titles you haven't rated, etc. Feature Film 76 TV Movie 4. IMDb user rating average 1 1. Black Sunday Not Rated 87 min Horror 7. This '60s classic is a must see for any cult horror fanatic. Witchcraft Not Rated 79 min Horror 6. The Witches Not Rated 90 min Horror 5. One of the most talked about 'witchy' movies, it is a must see.

Rosemary's Baby R min Drama, Horror 8. The Witchmaker M 99 min Horror, Mystery 5. Virgin Witch R 88 min Horror 4. The Devil Witch Unrated 91 min Horror 5. The Exorcist R min Horror 8. Beyond the Door R 99 min Horror 4. To the Devil a Daughter R 95 min Horror 5. The Omen R min Horror 7. Thats the makings of a good horror movie. Shock R 93 min Horror 6. Suspiria R 92 min Horror 7. The story focuses on an Alaskan town beset by vampires as it enters into a day long polar night.

Comic book adaptations like the Blade series, Constantine , and Hellboy also became box office successes.

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The Resident Evil video game franchise was adapted into a film released in March , and several sequels followed. Other video game adaptations like Doom and Silent Hill also had moderate box office success. Some pronounced trends have marked horror films. Films from non-English language countries have become successful. The Devil's Backbone is such an example. A French horror film Brotherhood of the Wolf became the second-highest-grossing French language film in the United States in the last two decades.

Martyrs , a French-Canadian horror film, was controversial upon its release, receiving polarizing reviews. Another notable film is The Orphanage , a Spanish horror film and the debut feature of Spanish filmmaker J. Shutter is a Thai horror film which focuses on mysterious images seen in developed pictures. Cold Prey is a Norwegian slasher film directed by Roar Uthaug.

Another trend is the emergence of psychology to scare audiences, rather than gore. The Others proved to be a successful example of a psychological horror film. A minimalist approach which was equal parts Val Lewton's theory of "less is more", usually employing the low-budget techniques utilized on The Blair Witch Project , has been evident, particularly in the emergence of Asian horror movies which have been remade into successful Americanized versions, such as The Ring , The Grudge , Dark Water , and Pulse In March , China banned the movies from its market. What Lies Beneath is a supernatural horror film directed by Robert Zemeckis , starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple who experience a strange haunting of their home.

Orphan is a notable psychological horror film. Another psychological horror film is , based on Stephen King's short story of the same name. The films I Am Legend , Quarantine , Zombieland , and 28 Days Later featured an update of the apocalyptic and aggressive zombie genre. The latter film spawned a sequel: An updated remake of Dawn of the Dead soon appeared as well as the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead and Spanish -Cuban comedy zombie film Juan of the Dead This resurgence led George A.

The Australian film Wolf Creek written, co-produced, and directed by Greg McLean revolves around three backpackers who find themselves taken captive and after a brief escape, hunted down by Mick Taylor in the Australian outback. The film was ambiguously marketed as being "based on true events"; the plot bore elements reminiscent of the real-life murders of tourists by Ivan Milat in the s, and Bradley Murdoch in ; and contained more extreme violence. An extension of this trend was the emergence of a type of horror with emphasis on depictions of torture, suffering, and violent deaths, variously referred to as "horror porn", "torture porn", "splatterporn" and "gore-nography" with films such as Ghost Ship , The Collector , Saw , Hostel , and their respective sequels, frequently singled out as examples of emergence of this subgenre.

Cloverfield is another found footage horror film. The Mist is a science-fiction horror film based on the novella of the same name by Stephen King. Antichrist is an English-language Danish experimental horror film written and directed by Lars von Trier , and starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a legal drama horror film directed by Scott Derrickson , loosely based on the story of Anneliese Michel. The Children is British horror film focusing on the mayhem created by several children.

Another British horror film is Eden Lake. Remakes of earlier horror movies became routine in the s. In addition to the remake of Dawn of the Dead , as well as the remake of both Herschell Gordon Lewis ' cult classic, Maniacs , and the remake of Tobe Hooper 's classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , there was also the Rob Zombie -written and -directed remake of John Carpenter's Halloween. It was critically panned by most, [66] [67] but was a success in its theatrical run, spurring its own sequel. This film helped to start a "reimagining" riot in horror filmmakers.

The film, Carrie , saw its second remake in , which is the third film adaptation of Stephen King 's novel of the same name. Child's Play saw a sequel with Curse of Chucky , while Hellraiser: Judgment become the tenth installment in the Hellraiser film series. Halloween is a slasher film which is the eleventh installment in the Halloween film series , and a direct sequel to the film of the same name , while effecting a retcon of all previous sequels. The Evil Dead is the fourth installment in the Evil Dead franchise , and serves as a soft reboot of the original film and as a continuation to the original film trilogy.

Serialized, found footage style web videos featuring Slender Man became popular on YouTube in the beginning of the decade. Such series included TribeTwelve , EverymanHybrid , and Marble Hornets , the latter of which has been adapted into a feature film. Slender Man is supernatural horror film, based on the character of the same name.

The character as well as the multiple series is credited with reinvigorating interest in found footage as well as urban folklore. Also, many popular horror films have had successful television series made: You're Next and The Cabin in the Woods led to a return to the slasher genre; the latter was intended also as a critical satire of torture porn. The Australian psychological horror film, The Babadook directed by Jennifer Kent received critical acclaim and won many awards. The Conjuring Universe is a series of horror films which deal with the paranormal.

Creation and The Nun Sinister is a British-American supernatural horror film directed by Scott Derrickson and written by Derrickson and C. Another notable supernatural horror film is Insidious The Witch is a historical period supernatural horror film written and directed by Robert Eggers in his directorial debut , which follows a Puritan family encountering forces of evil in the woods beyond their New England farm.

Get Out received universal acclaim from critics and audiences alike. Its plot follows a black man who uncovers a disturbing secret when he meets the family of his white girlfriend. A Quiet Place is a critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic science-fiction horror film with a plot that follows a family who must live life in silence while hiding from extraterrestrial creatures that arrived on earth on fragments from their exploded home planet, and which hunt exclusively by sound.

Annihilation is another successful science-fiction horror film. Hereditary follows a family haunted after the death of their secretive grandmother.

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Various themes were addressed in the horror of this period. Horror films which deal with troubled teens include Excision and Split The Autopsy of Jane Doe depicts coroners who experience supernatural phenomena while examining the body of an unidentified woman. The Purge is an action horror film franchise , consisting of four films and a television series , which are based on a future dystopian United States, where all crime is made legal once a year. Contracted , Starry Eyes , American Mary deal with body horror.

Kill List is a British crime drama psychological horror film which deals with contract killers. The Hallow follows a family who go to a remote rural place in Ireland and have to deal with demonic creatures living in the woods. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant address extraterrestrial themes. Friend Request and The Den are examples of cyber horror. The Neon Demon follows an aspiring model in Los Angeles whose beauty and youth generate intense fascination and jealousy within the industry.

Horror depicts a group of wealthy 7th grade girls who face a night of terror together after a social network game spirals out of control. The Other Side of the Door deals with a mother who attempts to use a ritual to meet her dead son for a last time to say goodbye, but misuses the ritual. Truth or Dare follows a group of college students who play a game of truth or dare? Origin of Evil focuses on a widow and her family adding a Ouija board to their phony seance business where, unbeknownst to them, they invite a spirit that possesses the youngest daughter.

The Blackcoat's Daughter also known as February is a American-Canadian supernatural psychological horror film which follows two Catholic schoolgirls who get left behind at their boarding school over winter break, where the nuns are rumored to be satanists. Goodnight Mommy German: Ich seh, Ich seh is an Austrian horror film. Horror films' evolution throughout the years has given society a new approach to resourcefully utilize their benefits. The horror film style has changed over time, but, in , Scream set off a "chain of copycats", leading to a new variety of teenage, horror movies.

Horror films' income expansion is only the first sign of the influences of horror flicks. The role of women and how women see themselves in the movie industry has been altered by the horror genre. Early horror films such as My Bloody Valentine , Halloween , and Friday the 13th were produced mostly for male audiences in order to "feed the fantasies of young men". Many early horror films created great social and legal controversy.

The gradual abandonment of the Code, and its eventual formal repeal in when it was replaced by the MPAA film rating system offered more freedom to the movie industry. Nevertheless, controversy continued to surround horror movies, and many continued to face censorship issues around the world. For example, 's I Spit on Your Grave , an American rape-and-revenge exploitation horror film written, co-produced, directed, and edited by Meir Zarchi , was received negatively by critics, but it attracted a great deal of national and international attention due to its explicit scenes of rape, murder and prolonged nudity, which led to bans in countries such as Ireland, Norway, Iceland, and West Germany.

Many of these countries later removed the ban, but the film remains prohibited in Ireland. While horror is only one genre of film, the influence it presents to the international community is large. Horror movies tend to be a vessel for showing eras of audiences issues across the globe visually and in the most effective manner. Jeanne Hall, a film theorist, agrees with the use of horror films in easing the process of understanding issues by making use of their optical elements. In fact, in many occurrences the manipulation of horror presents cultural definitions that are not accurate, yet set an example to which a person relates to that specific cultural from then on in their life.

The visual interpretations of films can be lost in the translation of their elements from one culture to another, like in the adaptation of the Japanese film Ju on into the American film The Grudge. The cultural components from Japan were slowly "siphoned away" to make the film more relatable to a western audience.

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January Learn how and when to remove this template message. List of alternate history fiction Retrofuturism Sidewise Award Writers. Bollywood horror films Cannibalism in popular culture Chinese horror List of disaster films Fangoria German underground horror Japanese horror Horror and terror Horror fiction List of ghost films List of horror film villains List of natural horror films Misogyny in horror films Monsters in fiction Monster movie Racism in horror films Social thriller Survival horror games Universal monsters Urban Gothic Vampire film Werewolf fiction.

Find me an author. Retrieved 24 April The X-Ray Fiend - ". Retrieved 6 December Retrieved 21 May Archived from the original on 15 April University of Toronto Press. Southern Illinois University Press. Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema. The first German art film: Eric Rentschler, Methuen Inc. No 25 best horror film of all time". Horror Films of the Silent Era.

Horror in Silent Films: IB Tauris, , p. Skal, The Monster Show: Retrieved 22 August Time Out Film Guide , London: The Encyclopedia of the Undead". The A-Z of vampires" October 31, Retrieved 27 September Behind the monster smash". French Language and Culture Blog. Bad Girls And Blood Freaks". Retrieved 14 October It just won't die". Archived from the original on 16 May Retrieved 24 June Archived from the original on 17 February Romero's Survival of The Dead: More Horror News , 6 May RAK Times , 11 June Retrieved 22 July Retrieved 7 September Archived from the original on 23 August Retrieved 26 May A gallery of darkly glittering fairy tales, Angela Carter's book takes "Sleeping Beauty," "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Bluebeard" — among others — and mutates them until they're poisonous draughts of sex and death, garnished with baroque curlicues of sadomasochism and cruelty.

A decadent, throbbing book in which the Beast licks off Beauty's flesh, the Erl-King is garroted with his own hair, and Little Red Riding Hood is warned about men who are "hairy on the inside" before throwing her clothes in the fire and seducing the wolf, it resulted in Neil Jordan's feverish and ravishing movie, The Company of Wolves. Don't step foot in the forest — or if you choose to, read cartoonist Emily Carroll's short story collection first, so you get an idea of what you might be up against.

Carroll's illustrations are shiveringly gorgeous, all bloody washes of red and icy blue shadows, spidery black and faint yellow glows in the darkness, woven through with skittering lines of story. Neil Gaiman's chronicle of Death's little brother Dream isn't strictly horror he is more a mopey goth, annoying and still somehow compelling , but our judges agreed that vast swaths of his realm, the Dreaming, are pretty horrific. And then there is the story "24 Hours," about a villain who steals an artifact from Dream and uses it to trap a group of people in an all-night diner and torture them — forcing them to confess their sickest secrets, worship him as a god and ultimately kill each other in gruesomely beastly ways.

They run the gamut from fairy tale to horror, but all of these stories consider the bodies and experiences of women, the violence visited on them and the ways they respond. Teenage Miranda Silver is tormented by a craving for things that aren't food, like chalk and plastic, and as this early novel by Helen Oyeyemi opens, she is dealing with her mother's death and the malevolent spirits in her house. Lush and incantatory, packed with twins, strange hungers and hauntings, White is for Witching is a cornucopia of creepy scares.

Oh Laura, oh Lizzie — maybe you should just have stayed home. But who can resist the temptations of "Figs to fill your mouth, Citrons from the South, Sweet to tongue and sound to eye? I'll buy, I'll buy. There is a line you can draw between the ghosts and spirits of horror and the silver nitrate ghosts that flicker across the frames of early silent films, and Gemma Files makes the connection clear in Experimental Film. Film critic Lois is at a low point in her life when, one night at an experimental film screening, she sees a few fragments of mysterious silent footage featuring a woman in a shimmering dress, moving through fields and speaking to workers; this is Lady Midday, a spirit fading along with her films, who sees in Lois a chance to regain her powers.

You know this story even if you haven't read it: A seemingly-idyllic New England village gathers for an annual lottery, at which it is gradually revealed that one resident will be stoned to death to ensure a good harvest. Outraged New Yorker readers canceled their subscriptions when "The Lottery" first appeared in , appalled at Shirley Jackson's insinuation that their comfortable lives might be hiding horrors. But some letter writers wondered whether such rituals were real, and if so, where could they be seen?

The horrors in John Fowles' first novel are purely human — it is Fredrick's monstrous desire for and feelings of entitlement toward beautiful art student Miranda Grey that drives the story. Where before he had been happy collecting and immobilizing butterflies, now it's Miranda he must pin down and keep. And how dare she be so ungrateful, so unwilling? Give this to the Shackleton fan in your life, but then run away quickly.

No heartwarming tale of ice-bound persistence here; The Terror takes on Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition in search of the Northwest Passage in which he and both his ships were lost. Franklin's real fate — frozen and starving, locked in the Arctic ice — is awful enough, but Dan Simmons ratchets up the horror with a mystery and a monster that looks like a giant polar bear. Our readers loved Dean Koontz, and our judges agreed that Intensity , his tale of a woman frantically fleeing a murderer, was their choice for the list and a natural fit in this category. There are no evil spirits here, no Elder Gods under the waves — just a tense duet between "homicidal adventurer" Edgler Vess, addicted to the intensity of experiences, and intended victim Chyna Shepherd, who turns the tables on Vess, risking her life to stop him.

Hopefully not, but if we don't guard against it, maybe so, too. The Girl Next Door is that guard. The big star of the Dell Abyss imprint, Poppy Z. Brite now Billy Martin spoke in the language of the marginalized, the forgotten and the lost. Brite's first two novels, Lost Souls and Drawing Blood , were inspirational texts for goth kids, gay kids, lost kids, unwanted kids — basically everyone the Happy Shiny '90s didn't have room for — telling them that no matter what anyone said, they belonged.

Exquisite Corpse , on the other hand, was a romance novel about two serial killers so bleak and unforgiving, it almost ended Brite's career. It pulls off that impossible trick of getting us to side with people we have no business siding with, and then it punishes us for our complicity, it punishes us for leering, it leaves us feeling dirty and compromised. When horror is really working, it works like this.

What hath the Internet wrought? To find the most original ghost stories these days, you have to dive into the online world of creepypasta: Like a nest of squirming eels, these stories mutate, procreate and cross-pollinate with alarming speed and slipperiness, occasionally getting mistaken for reality. Penpal — and its close relative John Dies at the End — capture the spirit of online horror and trap it between two covers. Not strictly a vampire story, despite the license-plate pun of the title — but Joe Hill's tale of a child predator who whisks his quarry away to a place called Christmasland where their souls are imprisoned to the tune of sugary Christmas music is still plenty blood-chilling.

With its biker heroine with supernatural gifts pursuing her classic-car-driving nemesis through roads real and strange, NOS4A2 is a wild ride. The aliens in Octavia Butler's short story are awful-looking insectoids who implant their eggs in human hosts, but that is actually not what is horrible in "Bloodchild. The Tlic see humans affectionately, as big warm convenient animals. And the humans, though troubled, mostly return that affection. Keep your vampires, werewolves and haunts — few things are as scary as "the darkness of man's heart. Blessed be the fruit This classic feminist dystopia is prominent in the public mind right now, and not just because it has been made into a TV series.

Atwood's book mines true horror from what people do to one another poor Offred, suffering through the Ceremony every month — and to themselves. Who really thinks Serena Joy was happy with her accomplishments? Toni Morrison's towering and beautifully crafted story concentrates the horrors of slavery into one singular horror — the apparition of Beloved, whose mother Sethe has killed her to spare her from being taken by slave catchers. While slavery has been over for a decade when the book opens, it's as much a specter in Sethe's new home as Beloved is and is destined to haunt and scar lives long after her unquiet spirit disappears.

Beloved isn't a horror novel in the strictest sense of the word, but our judges felt it more than deserved a place here. Butler , John Jennings and Damian Duffy. Octavia Butler's story of a young woman yanked backwards in time from the s California to the slave quarters of a Maryland plantation is horrifying enough on the printed page, but John Jennings and Damian Duffy's graphic adaptation means you really can't look away. Lots of movies, books and stories have been built on the premise of an out-of-control artificial intelligence.

But except for maybe HAL , none of them are as scary as AM, the supercomputer created by warring nations in Harlan Ellison's horrifying short story. AM abruptly gets tired of the war, ends it by triggering a mass genocide and spends the next century or so working out its hatred of humanity by torturing the last five remaining humans — but not letting them die.

In , Clive Barker burst onto the scene with one of the most remarkable debuts in horror: It was as if a band you had never heard of released a box set instead of a first album. Never treated with much respect in the United States his American publisher only printed them in paperback , the stories raised the bar for horror, making it sexier, queerer and more poetic.

Ranging from slapstick comedy to gross-out horror to breathtaking surrealism just in the first volume alone, each story is technically perfect and philosophically unnerving. Evil babies, mysterious jars, bodies in a lake, strange inheritances, monstrous families — whatever your favorite flavor of horror is, you're likely to find something to your taste in this collection. Ray Bradbury wrote these 19 stories early in his career, but they read like the work of a mature master, gripping and stylish.

If you can, find one of the editions that includes the striking, stark-edged illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini; they'll add an extra frisson for your reading pleasure. Martin — and some of the weirdest stories ever assembled between two covers. It won a World Fantasy Award in , and it's guaranteed to keep you occupied and thoroughly creeped out for a good long while.

Alternatively, you can use it to squash any pesky monsters under your bed. Tough guys are generally no match for the eldritch horrors of Laird Barron's Imago Sequence — which, if you had to sum it up, you could describe in an extremely reductive manner as H. Lovecraft meets Raymond Chandler. Imago Sequence is a great read if mere noir isn't dark enough for you, and it has a peculiar humor all its own — Lovecraft's Great Old Ones become, in Barron's world, crotchety but plenty scary old people.

Modern horror's ultimate stylist, Ramsey Campbell started his career as a Lovecraft imitator before going off in his own direction. Specializing in the horror of cities, dirt, squalor and the general mind-shattering everyday degradations of urban life, Campbell creates a world in which there is no difference between our brutalist, lunatic buildings and their brutal and insane inhabitants. Strongest in his short stories, a massive selection of which are collected here, he writes from the point of view that our cities are haunted garbage heaps, and we're all just the ghostly, numb cadavers infesting their derelict ruins.

Contemporary Argentinian politics provide plenty of horror in Mariana Enriquez' story collection — crime, abandonment, corruption, drugs; Enriquez grew up in Argentina during the country's brutal Dirty War period and draws on it in her writing. But then the horrors begin to creep in from outside the boundaries of our own world — haunted houses, evil rituals, disappearances that seem political but prove Teenagers Tom and Del are miserable at their extremely grim boarding school — tormented by staff and upperclassmen alike — until a tragic fire halfway through Peter Straub's book leads them to retreat to Del's uncle's spooky house in the Vermont woods called, of course, Shadowland.

Uncle Coleman is a master stage magician and, to put it mildly, not a very nice fellow. And it turns out that the magic he is teaching Tom and Del has much more to it than just stagecraft. Also, at one point the Brothers Grimm appear, making for a truly warped fairy tale of a novel. Old-fashioned and very modern horrors collide, explosively, in Paul Tremblay's novel. As a teenager, Merry Barrett's older sister Marjorie, begins to display signs of mental illness, leading her parents to consult a priest, who recommends exorcism and who brings in a TV production company to make a reality show about the troubled family, with tragic consequences.

Years later, Merry begins to dig up the past, leading to what our reviewer Jason Heller calls a "bloodcurdling revelation The first horror novel to hit the best-seller list since Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca in , Ira Levin's trim, sleek thriller stapled eyeballs to pages with its passionate commitment to "going Throw in what most mothers suspect anyways — that their child is the spawn of Satan — and you've got true horror.

The Return of the Ritual

Precise, understated and without a single wasted word, director Roman Polanski cemented its legend with his scrupulously faithful blockbuster film adaptation. William Peter Blatty's novel — and William Friedkin's subsequent movie — became a cultural landmark, helping launch the horror revival of the late '60s and early '70s. Rewritten, reinvented, deconstructed and just straight up ripped off numerous times over the years, the original story of a single mother and her daughter possessed by a demon can sometimes edge over into melodrama, but mostly it's a "what happens next?

But the only thing that ties Stephen King's horror novels, nonfiction, young adult and mysteries together is his name on the cover. True believers became aware of this with 's "The Woman in the Room," a story inspired by his mother's death, but it was "The Body" that told everyone else King had more to say than "Boo!

Spock's Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care reassured nervous parents that their children were going to be just fine and that you couldn't hug them or love them too much.

Science fiction writer Jerome Bixby delivered the most economical reminder with his short story "It's a Good Life," since adapted into The Twilight Zone show and movie three times and into one episode of The Simpsons. A young boy gets everything he wants — or else he makes bad things happen with his mind, resulting in a town of helicopter parents who live in mortal terror of denying this little monster anything. The dark horse among the trinity of books that kicked off the horror revival of the late '60s and early '70s, The Other will never be as well-known as Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist because it lacks a hit movie version.

But just as The Exorcist owned the possession genre and Rosemary spawned a whole brood of satanic pregnancies, The Other gave us a graduating class of homicidal children and evil twins. The story of identical twins living on an idyllic farm, it slowly descends into madness involving drowned babies and hidden pitchforks. Night Shyamalan-worthy twist and told in dense, poetic language, it's a hammer wrapped in velvet.

The Troop brings that old urban legend about tapeworm diet pills to body-horrific life in a story about a group of PEI Scouts whose camping trip on a nearby island is rudely interrupted by an emaciated stranger Trapped on the island after the parasite takes their scoutmaster, the boys must survive however they can. Written under the pen name Jessica Hamilton, this is a classic tale of a sociopathic young girl with powers far beyond the natural. Elizabeth — perceptive, detached, ruthless — becomes obsessed with an apparition in an antique mirror, a beautiful woman who says she is a distant relative — and after Elizabeth gets through with her murderous agenda, pretty much her only relative.

Stylish and nasty, Elizabeth will make you look twice at any mirrors you may pass. Grief and loss are truly, gruesomely haunting in Chesya Burke's short story about a mother unable to let go of her ghostly daughter and a daughter desperate to save her mother from the horrors she has brought on herself. Burke makes the pain of loss physical and malevolent, and her writing feels like riding in a car at night, watching strange things flicker at the side of the road. The book that named this category — a generation of children were scarred by Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Not so much because of Alvin Schwartz's stories themselves, which are certainly creepy but nothing to look under the bed about. No, it's Stephen Gammell's "ugh get it off me" illustrations, in all their skin-crawling scribbly watercolor blot glory, that haunt everyone who ever found this in their school library as a kid. Gammell or get out. If you were a kid in the '90s, chances are you read at least one volume of R.

Stine's long-running and immensely popular Goosebumps series. Not, perhaps, the scariest books on this list — Stine has frequently said he avoids real terror — they're still a great way to warp budding young readers into a lifelong love of horror. Also, Slappy the Dummy was extremely creepy, I don't care what you say. Daniel Kraus' book pays lip service to the hoary old story of a young boy who loses his mother and is sent to live, and bond with, his estranged dad.

Only this time out, Dad is a squatter who lives in filth, and he and his son bond over his job: Learning the best ways to yank gold fillings out of corpses and how to remove their rings, the two learn to love and appreciate each other while going facedown into rat nests and cracking open coffins full of liquefying corpse-meat.

Taking every societal norm — cleanliness, honesty, not desecrating the dead — and setting it on fire, this is literally the most anti-social book ever written. Young Corinne La Mer doesn't believe in Jumbies at first Author Tracey Baptiste draws on her own Trinidadian heritage for this darkly fantastical duology that mixes mythology, folklore and the real-world horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Trafficking in the kind of American Gothic perfected by Ray Bradbury, John Bellairs' three books set in the fictional Michigan town of New Zebedee are lonely and charming and shot through with a sense of creeping damp and creeping doom.

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Sort of a Harry Potter for less sporty boys, they star chubby Lewis Barnavelt, who has been banished to live with his Uncle Jonathan after his parents die in a car wreck. Uncle Jonathan is a wizard. Living with him means that Lewis will probably die. Simultaneously comforting and creepy, the New Zebedee books, with their scratchy illustrations by Edward Gorey, scarred children throughout the '70s and '80s.

After a series of traumatic events, seventh-grader Harper Raine — half-Korean and half-white — moves to a new house her friends say is haunted. An evil spirit gets its hooks into her younger brother, and Harper has to break through to her repressed memories of the trauma in order to free him — with the help of her grandmother's knowledge of Korean tradition.

Spirit Hunters is a genuinely scary read, full of ghosts and gore and family trauma. Neil Gaiman's tale of a young girl who steps through a strange door and finds a magical new family is charming But then Coraline realizes her other mother and father aren't going to let her go home. When year-old Kit arrives at the Blackwood School for Girls that's not an ominous name at all , she knows right away that there's something dark, something wrong about the strange old house.

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