20. Ring (1998)
Towards the end of the 20th century, 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. 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.
19. The Phantom Carriage (1921)
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. Sjöström also plays the dissolute antihero, condemned to be the spectral vehicle’s driver unless he can mend his ways.
18. The Student of Prague (1926)
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. This evil doppelganger runs amok until Veidt confronts it in a split-screen climax.
17. Nosferatu (1922)
FW Murnau commandeers a variety of in-camera effects for this vampire masterpiece. Flipped negatives, 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.
16. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Raise a glass to Jim Krut, who died in August but who will forever be remembered as “Helicopter Zombie” in George A Romero’s undead classic. Thanks to the magic of splatter makeup maestro Tom Savini, he shambles into frame – and gets the top of his head sliced off by a spinning rotor.
15. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
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. Finally, his penis turns into a giant drill and destroys a coffee table.
14. The Invisible Man (1933)
James Whale’s adaptation of HG Wells’s novel owes much to the sardonic tones of Claude Rains, whose face is only briefly glimpsed in his Hollywood debut. John P Fulton’s special effects show the actor unwrapping bandages from his head to reveal – nothing!
13. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931)
Fredric March won the best actor Oscar for his performance in this violent, sexy pre-code adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella. 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.
12. Eyes Without a Face (1960)
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. Georges Franju’s eerie arthouse horror was dismissed on its release, but is now hailed as an influential masterpiece.
11. The Exorcist (1973)
The pea-coloured puke popularised the term “projectile vomiting”, and the deleted “spider-walk” became legendary before its restitution. But the signature effect in William Friedkin’s film is Linda Blair’s 360-degree head rotation, an effect at once ludicrous and horrifying, thanks to Dick Smith and Marcel Vercoutere’s lifesize animatronic dummy.
10. The Birds (1963)
The climbing frame, the schoolchildren, the gas station are impeccable set pieces, but the attack on Tippi Hedren in the attic is particularly terrifying. Much of the impact was achieved by editing, but some birds were attached to her clothes by nylon threads, and one of the beaks nearly took her eye out. The scene took seven days to shoot; Hedren described it as “the worst week of my life”.
9. Eraserhead (1977)
David Lynch’s first full-length feature is set in an industrial hellscape, where Jack Nance, he of the tumbleweed hair-do, ends up having to look after a chittering mutant baby. The creature, designed by Lynch himself, was reportedly made from an embalmed calf foetus with added working parts, and was ceremonially buried in a secret location after production wrapped.
8. The Omen (1976)
Graphic decapitation goes mainstream in a special effect supervised by John Richardson. Photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) stoops to retrieve the Daggers of Megiddo, the only weapons effective against Damien the Antichrist – and is beheaded by a sheet of glass sliding off a runaway truck. Warner reportedly kept the severed head until his divorce, when his ex-wife claimed custody of it.
7. The Howling (1981)
Joe Dante’s werewolf satire, 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 Wallace before pulsating air bladders transform him into a beast before our very eyes. Take a bow, Rob Bottin, making his solo special effects debut.
6. The Fury (1978)
John Cassavetes, darling of American indie cinema, found Brian De Palma’s film “degrading”, but his villain’s comeuppance is so satisfying you wish Rick Baker’s effects could have been retroactively applied to the same actor’s character in Rosemary’s Baby as well. One of the psychic teenagers the scumbag has been trying to control zaps him with her full telekinetic force and kaboom! He explodes!
5. Society (1989)
Brian Yuzna’s body-horror satire unmasks the upper classes as shapeshifting entities who literally feed off the proletariat. The film climaxes with an orgiastic “shunt” in which posh partygoers merge into an orifice-invading mass not unlike Salvador Dalí’s Great Masturbator, surreal effects courtesy of Screaming Mad George.
4. Scanners (1981)
There is no shortage of mind-boggling effects in the early films of David Cronenberg, but his sci-fi thriller about warring psychics provides one of the most memorable. One telepath’s demonstration of his ability is hijacked by a more powerful scanner (Michael Ironside) who makes his head explode. Dick Smith and Chris Walas packed a plaster skull with “leftover burgers”, then blasted it with an out-of-frame shotgun.
3. An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Rick Baker won the inaugural best makeup Oscar for his work on John Landis’s horror-comedy (with a budget three times that of The Howling). As Sam Cooke’s Blue Moon plays on the radio, David Naughton stares aghast at his hand turning into a werewolf’s paw. As his skeleton painfully reconfigures itself, his shrieks of agony turn into a howl.
2. Alien (1979)
The rest of the cast knew something was about to happen, but didn’t know precisely what, so when a critter erupts out of John Hurt’s chest, their shock is almost as extreme as the audience’s. For the money shot, Hurt’s torso was replaced by a mechanical one packed with compressed air and animal entrails, with puppeteers hiding beneath the table. Director Ridley Scott designed the creature, Roger Dicken constructed it and sci-fi cinema would never be the same again.
1. The Thing (1982)
A shapeshifting alien infiltrates a US research station in the Antarctic, sporadically erupting into displays of special effects that have yet to be equalled. Take another bow, Rob Bottin, who riffs on elements of human and animal anatomy in surreal sculptures that are simultaneously repulsive and beautiful. In one of the highlights, a geologist’s head separates from his body, sprouts spider-legs and tries to scuttle away. Palmer the pothead (David Clennon) says what we’ve all been thinking: “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding.”
