Watch Eight Horror Films from the 1970s

It’s time to celebrate Halloween, so here are eight horror films, all from the 1970s. If you prefer to observe Halloween the science fiction way, you’ll want to check out The Scary Cold War: 1950s Science Fiction Films.

The Exorcist (1973)

Panned by a review in The New York Times, The Exorcist is based on a best-selling novel by William Peter Blatty. (You can read the review here.) It’s about a movie star mother (Ellen Burstyn) who’s so desperate to save her possessed 12‐year‐old daughter (Linda Blair) that she enlists priests (Jason Miller and Max von Sydow) to perform an exorcism. The demon they’re up against is a “potty-mouthed, vomit-spewing, blasphemy-happy entity” that audiences find repugnant. The Exorcist was a big hit and it defines the modern possession movie.

Messiah of Evil (1973)

In Messiah of Evil, a young woman searches for her missing artist father. Her journey takes her to a strange Californian seaside town governed by a mysterious cult of zombies. I haven’t seem this film, but a Times reviewer says “It takes place inside a movie theater, where over the course of several brilliantly directed minutes a young woman is devoured in front of the screen by a slowly creeping hoard of demons. . . The film melds boho fashion and depraved supernatural horror in a way that’s feminine, mesmerizing and lurid. There’s no other horror film quite like it.”

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Some find The Texas Chain Saw Massacre sickening, but others — the movie reviewer Vincent Canby for one — call it “harmless in a way that I’m not sure that most contemporary horror films are,” and “almost chaste by the standards of today’s horror films.”  One take: “It’s about a deranged family that kills off young people who stop at the wrong house in nowhere Texas.” A second take: “On a balmy summer afternoon, five youths fall prey to a butcher in a mask made of human skin and his cannibalistic family, leading to a night of absolute terror.” I guess you’ll just have to watch it and decide for yourself!!

The Omen (1976)

In The Omen, a diplomat and his wife (Gregory Peck and Lee Remick) begin to fear their young son, Damien, is the Antichrist. The film was a box office hit that kicked off a franchise, casting Damien into a synonym for a devil child.

Carrie (1976)

Carrie, a horror thriller by Brian De Palma, is based on a Stephen King novel. Carrie White, played by Sissy Spacek, is a shy, friendless teenage girl who is sheltered by her domineering, religious mother (Piper Laurie). She unleashes telekinetic powers after being humiliated by her classmates at her senior prom, creating a fiery hell for the high school bullies who made her life miserable.

Halloween (1978)

In Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis plays a high schooler who gets stalked on Halloween night by an escaped lunatic named Michael Myers. The horror includes a masked killing-machine villain, a strong-willed girl next door, creatively depicted deaths, and touches of dark comedy. The movie has made its money back more than 200 times, earning it the title of the most successful independent horror movie of all time.

The Amityville Horror (1979)

The Amityville Horror is based on the real-life murders of a Long Island family in 1974. James Brolin and Margot Kidder play parents whose tranquil suburban home descends into a ghastly house of horrors, immune to priestly interventions. A reviewer on YouTube says: “one of the most iconic classic horror films of all times, full of suspense, haunts, and psychological moments, that put the most sane individual to the limit, truly frightening, an unforgettable horror.” The film was a box office smash, putting fear into audiences still reeling from the horrors of The Exorcist.

Suspiria (1977)

According to The New York Times, Suspiria is from the Italian horror genre known as Giallo, but the genre’s purists disagree. Nevertheless, according to the film reviewer, Erik Piepenburg, Suspiria is extravagantly macabre and impossibly chic. Per his review “Jessica Harper plays an American ballet student at a prestigious European dance academy, where she’s tortured by phantasmic occurrences rendered in Giallo’s signature visual style: speedy zooms, jewel-toned lights, grisly deaths involving glass. The score . . . sounds like what demons would dance to as flames engulf an Italian disco.”

Have a favorite?

Horror is not my preferred genre, so I may have missed your favorite. If I did, be sure to list it in the comments.

Here are some other Cold War posts that highlight the season.

A Red Scare Halloween is another movie post.

Commie Mummies

Happy Halloween!