The Masque of the Red Death
Smart, sinister, colorful (back to this in a minute), nuanced, expansive, repellent, beckoning, dastardly, placating, and inspiring, Roger Corman’s 1964 The Masque of the Red Death isn’t only the apotheosis of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, but of mid-1960s horror as well.
The Changeling
For all the freaky poltergeist activity and vivid visions of murder to come, The Changeling (1980) dispatches its most abysmal horrors in its opening minutes, when its protagonist witnesses the deaths of his wife and child under the wheels of a truck, in the sort of scene that inevitably impacts older viewers more profoundly than younger ones.