In 1999, Stephen King found him­self con­fined to a hos­pi­tal room “after a care­less dri­ver in a mini­van smashed the shit out of me on a coun­try road.” There, “roar­ing with pain from top to bot­tom, high on painkillers,” and sure­ly more than a lit­tle bored, he popped a movie into the room’s VCR. But it did­n’t take long before its cin­e­mat­ic pow­er got the bet­ter of him: “I asked my son, who was watch­ing with me, to turn the damn thing off. It may be the only time in my life when I quit a hor­ror movie in the mid­dle because I was too scared to go on.”

The movie on King’s boot­leg tape (“How did I get the boot­leg? Nev­er mind how I got it”) was The Blair Witch Project, Daniel Myrick and Eduar­do Sánchez’s ultra-low-bud­get hor­ror pic­ture that sent shock­waves through the inde­pen­dent film world at the end of the mil­len­ni­um.

Though nobody seems to talk much about it any­more, let alone watch it, King’s appre­ci­a­tion has endured: he wrote the essay about it quot­ed here in 2010, and you can read it in full at Bloody Dis­gust­ing. That same site has also pub­lished a list of fif­teen hor­ror movies King has per­son­al­ly rec­om­mend­ed, Blair Witch and beyond.

The list below com­bines King’s picks at Bloody Dis­gust­ing, which lean toward recent films, with a dif­fer­ent selec­tion of favorites, with a stronger focus on clas­sics, pub­lished at the British Film Insti­tute. “I am espe­cial­ly par­tial – this will not sur­prise you – to sus­pense films,” the author of Car­rie, Cujo, and It writes by way of intro­duc­tion,” but “my favorite film of all time – this may sur­prise you — is Sor­cer­er, William Friedkin’s remake of the great Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear. Some may argue that the Clouzot film is bet­ter; I beg to dis­agree.”

• The Autop­sy of Jane Doe (André Øvredal, 2016)  “Vis­cer­al hor­ror to rival Alien and ear­ly Cro­nen­berg”
• The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduar­do Sánchez, 1999)
• The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980)
• Crim­son Peak (Guiller­mo del Toro, 2015)
• Dawn of the Dead (Zack Sny­der, 2004) “Snyder’s zom­bies are, it seems to me: fast-mov­ing ter­ror­ists who nev­er quit.”
• Deep Blue Sea (Ren­ny Har­lin, 1999)
• The Descent (Neil Mar­shall, 2005)
• Duel (Steven Spiel­berg, 1971) “His most inven­tive film, and stripped to the very core.”
• Les Dia­boliques (Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) “He out-Hitch­cocked Hitch­cock.”
• Final Des­ti­na­tion (James Wong, 2000)
• Event Hori­zon (Paul W.S. Ander­son, 1997) “Basi­cal­ly a Love­craft­ian ter­ror tale in out­er space with a The Quater­mass Exper­i­ment vibe, done by the Brits.”
• The Hitch­er (Robert Har­mon, 1986 and Dave Mey­ers, 2007) “Rut­ger Hauer in the orig­i­nal will nev­er be topped, but this is that rar­i­ty, a reimag­in­ing that actu­al­ly works.”
• The Last House on the Left (Den­nis Iliadis, 2009)
• The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007)
• Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957) “The hor­ror here is pret­ty under­stat­ed, until the very end.”
• The Ruins (Carter Smith, 2008)
• Sor­cer­er (William Fried­kin, 1977)
• Step­fa­ther (Joseph Ruben, 1986)
• Stir of Echoes (David Koepp 1999) “An unset­tling explo­ration of what hap­pens when an ordi­nary blue-col­lar guy (Kevin Bacon) starts to see ghosts.”
• The Strangers (Bryan Berti­no, 2008)
• Vil­lage of the Damned (Wolf Ril­la, 1960) As far as “British hor­ror (wrapped in an SF bow), you can’t do much bet­ter.”
• The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015)

Though clear­ly a movie fan, King also shows a will­ing­ness to advo­cate where many a cineaste fears to tread, for instance in his selec­tion of not just Sor­cer­er but sev­er­al oth­er remakes besides (and in the case of The Hitch­er, both the remake and the orig­i­nal). He even choos­es the 2004 Dawn of the Dead — direct­ed by no less an object of crit­i­cal scorn than Zack Sny­der — over the 1978 George A. Romero orig­i­nal.

But then, King has always seemed to pride him­self in his under­stand­ing of and root­ed­ness in unpre­ten­tious, work­ing-class Amer­i­ca, which you can see in his nov­els, the var­i­ous film adap­ta­tions of his nov­els that have come out over the years, and the sole movie he wrote and direct­ed him­self: 1986’s Max­i­mum Over­drive, about machines turn­ing against their human mas­ters at a North Car­oli­na truck stop. King now describes that project as a “moron movie,” but as he clear­ly under­stands, even a moron movie can make a pow­er­ful impact.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen King Rec­om­mends 96 Books for Aspir­ing Writ­ers to Read

Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Mar­tin Scors­ese Names the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

How The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari Invent­ed Psy­cho­log­i­cal Hor­ror Film & Brought Expres­sion­ism to the Screen (1920)

Watch the Cult Clas­sic Hor­ror Film Car­ni­val of Souls (1962)

“Did Scors­ese make the best movie of each decade since the ’70s?” asks GQ’s Zach Baron in a recent pro­file of that long-lived auteur. “Prob­a­bly not (I think his case is weak­est in the first decade of this cen­tu­ry), but you could argue it, and many peo­ple have.” And indeed, you may well find your­self believ­ing it after watch­ing the video above, also pub­lished by GQ, in which Scors­ese him­self dis­cuss­es a selec­tion of fea­tures from the past half-cen­tu­ry of his career, the ear­li­est of which, Mean Streets, was a break­out project for both its young direc­tor and even younger star, a cer­tain Robert de Niro, in 1973.

Scors­ese’s lat­est, Killers of the Flower Moon, opens next month as not just anoth­er of his many col­lab­o­ra­tions with de Niro, but the first Scors­ese film to fea­ture both de Niro and Leonar­do DiCaprio. “We were acquaint­ed with each oth­er when we were six­teen years old,” the direc­tor says of de Niro in the GQ video. “He expe­ri­enced what I expe­ri­enced grow­ing up” in rough-and-tum­ble New York neigh­bor­hoods like Lit­tle Italy and the Bow­ery, and thus “knows who I am and where I came from.” Hence the trust with which Scors­ese took de Niro’s rec­om­men­da­tion of DiCaprio in the ear­ly nineties: “You got­ta work with him some­day.”

That some­day came in 2002, with Gangs of New York, after which the Scors­ese-diCaprio pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ship would mature to bear addi­tion­al cin­e­mat­ic fruit with projects like The Depart­ed and The Wolf of Wall Street. At this point it has become a par­al­lel enter­prise to Scors­ese-de Niro, which can be traced from The Irish­man, which came out in 2019, back through the likes of Good­Fel­las (though it stars the late Ray Liot­ta), Casi­no, The King of Com­e­dy, and Rag­ing Bull — a pic­ture that, along with oth­er brazen­ly ambi­tious Unit­ed Artists releas­es like Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la’s Apoc­a­lypse Now and Michael Cimi­no’s Heav­en’s Gate, Scors­ese now sees as mark­ing the end of “the pow­er of the direc­tor.”

In “new Hol­ly­wood” era of the nine­teen-sev­en­ties, Scors­ese remem­bers, “things were wide open, and we went in and took it like the bar­bar­ians at the gate, and we trans­formed what­ev­er we could, but they caught us.” Still, since then he’s “nev­er stopped work­ing for any notice­able amount of time,” as Baron puts it, though in recent years he’s been giv­en to rue­ful com­ment about the artis­tic and eco­nom­ic dynam­ics of his indus­try and art form. As for the state of the world in gen­er­al, he makes an equal­ly grim diag­no­sis with ref­er­ence to his and de Niro’s best-known col­lab­o­ra­tion, Taxi Dri­ver: “Every oth­er per­son is like Travis Bick­le now.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Mar­tin Scors­ese Directs a Movie: The Tech­niques Behind Taxi Dri­ver, Rag­ing Bull, and More

The Decay of Cin­e­ma: Susan Son­tag, Mar­tin Scors­ese & Their Lamen­ta­tions on the Decline of Cin­e­ma Explored in a New Video Essay

The Film­mak­ing of Mar­tin Scors­ese Demys­ti­fied in 6 Video Essays

What Makes Taxi Dri­ver So Pow­er­ful? An In-Depth Study of Mar­tin Scorsese’s Exis­ten­tial Film on the Human Con­di­tion

Mar­tin Scors­ese Explains the Dif­fer­ence Between Cin­e­ma and Movies

Scorsese’s The Irish­man in the Con­text of his Oeu­vre – Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #29 Fea­tur­ing Col­in Mar­shall

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.