The Thing
Dawn of the Dead (Orig)
Return of the Living Dead
Alien
The Grudge, (Orig), as I can put Jaws into multi-genre.
If I have to remove Alien for being SF then The Evil Dead.
Interesting for both lists had no slashers included. I wonder if it's because they don't do well with re-watching?
Mind you never been a fan of the genre.
I had an interesting exchange recently on The Evil Dead fan site, a younger poster mentioned something along the lines that the Ash vs Evil Dead TV show had probably been cancelled because it had been relegated to only being broadcast through the STARZ channel (an un hip channel apparently in the States) so it had suffered because of that because "old people just won't
get Evil Dead") .. I had to remind him that old people (people over the age of 45)
were the original Evil Dead fans
I was too young to learn about and watch Dawn until I'd seen Day and wanted more .. crap blue zombie and poster paint red blood make up aside, it was genuinely atmospheric and a product of its time ..
I'm a huge Return fan, I still have the VHS tape that I managed to talk our school teachers into playing on a school trip on a coach when we all went on a field trip to London in the 80's ..
I was too young to appreciate ALIEN so it dragged a bit for me the first time I saw it, a solid stone cold classic for sure but it didn't scare me ..
The Grudge (orig) was creepy as hell the first time I saw it but the endless imitators including little girls in dirty long white dresses with their long dirty hair combed over their faces have ruined it for me now ..
The 'torture porn' label started (to the best of my knowledge) after the SAW films and that whole sub genre .. I suppose we could also pop culturally rewind that a bit to when we looked forward to Jason Vorhees and his Mum's body counts and story line character development was secondary: The Burning, Sleepaway Camp, The Prowler, My Bloody Valentine etc etc .. the difference to me was that they were a bit more tongue in cheek than the endless depressing dirty rooms that the jigsaw ripped people up in, stalk and slash was more thrilling than torture porn ..