Tananarive Due

During the social upheaval of the 1960s, George A. Romero created a genre that terrified America with a vision of the dead eating the living—an end to life as the nation had known it. And don’t overlook the social canny: Imagine how scary it must have been to suddenly have a black man in charge! Groundbreaking horror images (a cannibal child!) and social commentary make this movie a genuine classic.

Hubby came across this Japanese-language horror movie via internet research in 1998 and ordered it from overseas before anyone but hard-core horror buffs had heard of it. The third-generation videotape (yes, it was a videotape) was so poor that we couldn’t read the English subtitles—and we still couldn’t stop watching it, getting the crap scared out of us. Horror that needs no language.

This Spanish-language film, produced by Guillermo do Toro and directed by J.A. Bayona, was 2007’s prize find by my husband and writing partner, Steven Barnes, who is a bloodhound at sniffing out good horror. As the mother of a toddler, this visually evocative film pushed my every button, whisking me from fears to tears. The only thing scarier than the unknown, apparently, is learning the truth.

This movie helped inspire me to write my first horror novel, The Between, which is also about the rocky road to accepting mortality. Some of the chilling effects (blurred head shaking) were brand new, the horrid hospital looked exactly the way all hospitals FEEL, and Tim Robbins left us a haunting and beautiful example of how to bravely climb those light-drenched stairs.

Maybe it was the Rolling Stones’ “Time is On Our Side.” Maybe it was the unstoppable demon who could jump from person to person—or to a cat!—with simply a touch. But Denzel’s unfailing verisimilitude gives this sleeper a high creep-out factor in a rare supernatural role I wish he would embrace more often.