Underrated Horror Movies: Overlooked Classics and Cult Oddities

A woman climbs out of a river after a car crash, walks into town without a scratch, and takes a job as a church organist. Nothing about her life feels right afterward. That is the premise of Carnival of Souls, a 1962 feature made in Kansas by a director of industrial films, and it has unsettled more midnight audiences than plenty of studio blockbusters. It is also a perfect place to begin a list of underrated horror movies, because so many of the best ones were made far from the center of the business, cut by distributors, or simply released into silence.

My rules for this list: no film that already dominates the usual “greatest horror” rankings, a spread across eight decades, and a reason for each choice beyond “it’s creepy.” The general list of underrated movies on this site deliberately leaves horror out, so there is no overlap.

Nine underrated horror movies at a glance

A note on Messiah of Evil: it was shot starting in 1971 but did not premiere until late 1974, so you will see it dated differently in different places. I’ve used the production-era date that most references give.

Black-and-white shadows

Isle of the Dead (1945)

Producer Val Lewton built a small unit at RKO in the 1940s that made atmospheric horror on modest budgets, and Isle of the Dead is one of the least discussed of his films. Mark Robson directed, and Boris Karloff plays a Greek general during the Balkan War of 1912 who becomes stranded on an island where plague breaks out. The fear here is less a monster than the panic that sets in when a frightened group starts looking for someone to blame. Karloff, playing a rigid, disciplined man slowly overwhelmed by superstition, gives one of his more interesting performances outside the monster roles he is remembered for.

Night of the Demon (1957)

Jacques Tourneur had directed Cat People for Lewton, and he brought the same instinct for suggestion to this British production adapted from M. R. James’s story “Casting the Runes.” Dana Andrews plays an American psychologist who arrives in England to debunk a cult leader played by Niall MacGinnis and finds his skepticism under attack. The producer insisted on showing the demon on screen, which has been debated ever since. In the United States it was released in a shorter version as Curse of the Demon. Track down the full-length cut if you can, and pay attention to a séance scene that turns sharply funny before it turns frightening.

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Herk Harvey spent most of his career making educational and industrial films at the Centron company in Lawrence, Kansas. For his one feature, he cast Candace Hilligoss as Mary Henry, the survivor of that car crash, and played the pale man who keeps appearing to her himself. The film’s most famous location is the abandoned Saltair pavilion on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, a vast, decaying resort that does half the atmospheric work. It was released on the drive-in circuit and largely forgotten, then rediscovered through television broadcasts and later screenings. Its organ score and empty spaces have influenced filmmakers for decades, and you can feel its DNA in a lot of later horror that never credits it.

The strange 1970s

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

Paramount released John D. Hancock’s film about a woman recovering from a breakdown who moves to a New England farmhouse with her husband and a friend. Zohra Lampert plays Jessica, and much of the film unfolds through her uncertain inner voice. Is the pale stranger staying with them a threat, or is Jessica relapsing? The film never fully answers, and that is its strength. It is quiet, autumnal and patient, with the slow, creeping effect of a ghost story told by someone you are not sure you can trust.

Ganja & Hess (1973)

Writer-director Bill Gunn was hired to make a Black vampire film and instead made an experimental drama about addiction, religion and class. Duane Jones, remembered from Night of the Living Dead, plays an anthropologist who becomes dependent on blood after being stabbed with an ancient dagger, and Marlene Clark plays the woman who joins him. It screened in Critics’ Week at Cannes in 1973. Its producers then sold it to a distributor that released a heavily cut, rescored version called Blood Couple, which Gunn disowned. His original cut survived at the Museum of Modern Art, and a restoration made with MoMA and The Film Foundation has given it the attention it deserved. Spike Lee remade it in 2014 as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus.

Messiah of Evil (1973)

Before they co-wrote American Graffiti, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz directed, wrote and produced this odd little film about a young woman searching for her artist father in a California coastal town whose residents are turning into something else. Its distribution history is a mess: it surfaced under several titles, including Dead People for a 1980 re-release. What survives the chaos is a set of genuinely eerie sequences, especially one in a supermarket and one in a late-night movie theater, plus painted murals that make every interior feel like a trap. It is uneven and sometimes baffling, which is part of its cult appeal.

Later hauntings

The Changeling (1980)

Peter Medak’s Canadian ghost story stars George C. Scott as a composer who moves into a large old house after his wife and daughter are killed in an accident and begins to hear something in the walls. Trish Van Devere and Melvyn Douglas co-star. There is little gore; the scares come from sound, a child’s ball bouncing down a staircase, and a slowly uncovered mystery. It won Best Motion Picture at the first Genie Awards, Canada’s national film prizes at the time, yet it rarely appears in conversations about the great haunted-house films. It belongs in them.

Session 9 (2001)

Brad Anderson co-wrote this film with Stephen Gevedon and shot it inside the disused Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts, a real building whose corridors no set designer could have improved. A small asbestos-removal crew, led by Peter Mullan with David Caruso among the team, takes a rushed job there, and one of them finds a set of recorded therapy sessions. It was one of the early features shot on 24p high-definition video, and Uta Briesewitz’s cinematography uses the format’s cold clarity well. USA Films released it to a tiny box office. It built its reputation afterward, through word of mouth.

Lake Mungo (2008)

Joel Anderson’s Australian feature is presented as a documentary about a family whose teenage daughter drowns, and the strange images that appear in photographs and video afterward. It premiered at the Sydney Film Festival in 2008 and reached American audiences through the After Dark Horrorfest in 2010. It is less a shocker than a study of grief, and the scariest thing in it lasts only a few seconds. Fans of found-footage horror often discover it late and wonder why nobody told them about it sooner.

What these films share

Almost every film on this list was either made outside the major studios or treated by a studio as a minor release. Several were recut, retitled or barely distributed. That pattern runs through horror history, and it is why so many of the genre’s best titles became midnight movie favorites rather than first-run hits. Horror on a small budget tends to rely on sound, location and suggestion, and those age better than effects that were cutting-edge for a single season.

If you are programming a night of these, pair them by mood. Isle of the Dead with Session 9 makes a strong double bill about places that infect the people inside them. Carnival of Souls and Lake Mungo both deal with the line between the living and the dead, sixty years apart. Several of these titles may be found through public-domain archives or licensed services, and restorations of the older ones have improved considerably.