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Top 5: Movies So Scary You Forget to Breathe

Theater Studies Professor Neal Bell Talks About His Favorite Horror Movies

Schreck.jpg
Max Schreck as "Nosferatu" | Source: Wikimedia Commons

Top 5

Neal Bell is on the faculty in Duke's theater studies department, where he teaches a course on horror movies called "The Dramatic Monster."

A fan of the genre, Bell has given serious thought to what makes a good horror movie.

In this, the debut of Duke Today's new "Top 5" feature, we give you his five favorite horror flicks.

Professor Bell, take it away:

1. Nosferatu. "In his unauthorized version of Bram Stoker's novel, director F.W. Murnau created the scariest Dracula in cinema history. Tall and wizened, horribly rat-like, unknowable, the very opposite of romantic and as inescapable as a recurrent nightmare."

2. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. "Probably the purest version of paranoia ever put on film, as a sleepy little '50s California town is slowly taken over by the soul-less alien versions of us!"

3. Psycho. "In this great meditation on loneliness, Hitchcock shreds the conventions of traditional narrative (the protagonist always survives, at least until the end, right?) and leaves the audience alone in the dark, terrified that anything can - and probably will - happen."

4. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. "Director Tobe Hooper shoots a Texas landscape that's vast, beautiful and uncaring, as a group of clueless teens go on the ultimate bad road trip."

5. [REC]. "The best of the recent 'hand-held' camera horror flicks, this Spanish-language movie traps a television crew in an apartment building where a nasty virus is turning the tenants into zombies. The building is quarantined; no one can escape as the virus spreads. The last 20 minutes, as the few survivors make their bloody way to the attic, is so terrifying you nearly forget to breathe."