Published September 28, 2006 12:00AM
Welcome to Your Nightmare
Aaahh, October, the month Hollywood unsheathes the knives, fangs, and psychos to spike the adrenaline and send us running to Mommy. Here, in the spirit of the season, we pick five favorite spine-chilling flicks that take classic horror to the outdoors. From realistic to ridiculous, they're all but guaranteed to leave you trembling in your Tevas
Wolf Creek
The Shining (1980)
The Shining
The Fog
The Birds
Stanley Kubrick’s take on cabin fever elevates Stephen King to the sublime: Isolation-craving Jack Nicholson moves family into empty Colorado hotel, gets possessed by evil spirits, acquires vacant stare, and terrorizes loved ones with an ax. Love that mountain air!
The Fog (1980)
Forget the baby-sitter stalkfests; instead, pop in director John Carpenter’s campy, atmospheric follow-up to Halloweenstarring pro screamer Jamie Lee Curtisabout a coastal California town haunted by a malicious mist and a bunch of undead shipwrecked sailors.
The Birds (1963)
With a constant barrage of winged killers dive-bombing poor Tippi Hedren, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic about nature’s inexplicable ransacking of a small town gives new meaning to the term “bad-hair day.” Think When Animals Attack on EPO.
Wolf Creek (2005)
Words you don’t want to hear when you’re on the run in the Australian outback and a psycho bushman is bearing down on you: “I’m going to do something now they used to do in Vietnam. It’s called making a head on a stick.” Eeesh.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Call it the birth of reality TV. With its jittery camera, homemade props, and shoestring budget, this one plays on our worst fears of dark woodsand makes camping seem about as much fun as a knife-throwing contest with Jason Voorhees.