This summer, boycott the Michael Bay remakes and check out these underappreciated gems of the genre.

1. Return of the Living Dead

Due to creative disagreements, the celebrated 1968 film Night of the Living Dead spawned two separate sets of sequels. The first, by director John Romero, include Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead and are generally better known. And if you’re looking for serious zombie movies that deal with (and occasionally, hit you over the head with) social issues, they’re acceptable. But if you’re looking for a movie about a bunch of 80’s punks fighting surprisingly frightening zombies to the tune of the Cramps, then the other sequel franchise is the way to go. Return of the Living Dead is the first of these sequels, based on a novel by Night of the Living Dead screenwriter John Russo.

Despite being a critical and box office success when released, this movie was almost forgotten until a fan campaign to release the DVD, which finally came out in 2001. One of the film’s claims to fame (apart from a brilliantly gratuitous striptease scene from 80’s horror queen Linnea Quigley, who then remains inexplicably naked for the rest of the movie) is that it was the first English-speaking movie to feature talking zombies. So the next time you hear a zombie or zombie impersonator exclaiming “BRAIINS”, remember that they have this movie to thank.

Unfortunately, the sequels to this sequel – all four of them – don’t live up to Return of the Living Dead’s incredible promise. But since they are still ongoing (the last one came out in 2005), who knows? Maybe it will happen one day.

2. Night of the Demons

Night of the Demons is another largely-forgotten 80’s horror movie featuring the often-topless Linnea Quigley. A sweet, virginal girl (not Linnea, obviously) is taken by her jock boyfriend to a party at a house supposedly built on cursed ground. So far, it sounds like something you’d see in an SyFy original movie, and to be fair, the acting is for the most part pretty terrible. But still, the movie is familiar enough to be fun, while still original enough to be interesting and even shocking. The ‘sweet girl to badass transformation’, so common in horror from Nightmare on Elm Street to Friday the 13th, is unusually awesome in this film. And you’ll never guess who comes out alive.

On top of this, Night of the Demons also contains a scene that singlehandedly sustained the goth movement for another 10 years:

And most of all, like Return of the Living Dead, Night of the Demons walks the fine line between taking itself too seriously and descending into outright camp. Oh, and did we mention the nudity?

3. Chakushin Ari

Unfortunately, Japanese horror movies tend to be either lumped together in mediocrity, or judged by their American remakes. After The Ring came out, Japan began to selectively export only horror movies that were similar in tone, resulting in the understandable view that every Japanese horror movie was all about slowly advancing female ghosts and not much else. Chakushin Ari (One Missed Call) was popular among J-Horror fans when it was released in 2003 but pretty much overlooked by mainstreamers, except for those poor souls who witnessed its 2008 American remake. We’re going to just pretend that the remake never happened, and move right on.

Chakushin Ari isn’t one of those feel-good horror films where you can rely on guaranteed teenage nudity and survival of the good people to tide you through. The director, Takeshi Miike, also made the 1999 horror film Audition, which should give potential viewers some hint of the tone. The plot, about a group of Japanese youngsters who begin to receive phone messages from their future selves, soon steps away from the normal J-Horror clichés and spins off into Miike’s famous near-psychotic idiosyncrasies. The Japanese have a real knack for seamlessly blending the ‘old-fashioned’ paranormal with modern technology, and that talent really shines in this movie.

4. Hausu

Although this film is also Japanese, it’s hard to classify Hausu as J-Horror in any way. In fact, it’s hard to classify Hausu as anything. This 1977 film is virtually unknown outside of the hardcore cult fans, and is guaranteed to be one of the most bizarrely wonderful things you’ve ever seen. If you thought the Japanese were weird after watching Chakushin Ari, well, this one makes Miike’s work seem like Astro Boy.

Basically, Hausu is about a group of high-school girls who decide to spend their school holidays at a secluded house with a mysterious older woman. It’s also about a director exploring the outer limits of cinematic visual effects, in a time period long before CG came along and ruined everything. Although the use of effects for their own sake does not usually end well, here the sheer talent involved makes it work. The result is a cross between an extended horror-themed video clip and the LSD flashback you might experience after eating expired sushi in a Tokyo diner. Except neither of these will probably feature an oddly realistic scene of somebody being eaten by a piano.
Watch it alone and allow yourself to be swept along. And for maximum effect, don’t watch the trailer first – it gives away all the major scares.

5. Near Dark

Kathryn Bigelow might have recently won an Oscar for The Hurt Locker, but this 1987 film of hers was a box office disappointment. Bigelow was still married to James Cameron when she made Near Dark, and while that experience was apparently stressful enough to make her turn to horror filmmaking, at least it allowed Bigelow to re-assemble most of the cast of Cameron’s movie Aliens.
So Near Dark turns out to be like one of those fanfictions where the writer gets a bunch of characters from a movie and puts them in an entirely different setting – in this case, in a vampire clan in the Southwest of the late 80’s. Only, unlike the majority of that kind of fanfiction, it doesn’t suck. Despite its relative obscurity, Near Dark’s “Vampire Western” style has had a wide influence on modern horror, from Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects to TV’s Supernatural.

Like basically every good movie ever made before 2005, this movie is due for a remake, so be sure to see it before it is retroactively tainted. As an additional ignominy, the DVD was recently repackaged to make the movie look more like a version of Twilight. But don’t worry. Near Dark is pretty much the anti-Twilight: there’s no sparkling, flowery meadows or castrated vampires for miles around. And if there were, don’t worry: Bill Paxton’s character would kill them off quickly.