John Carpenter’s 1982 classic, starring a very hairy Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, and an exploding dog head. Well, it doesn’t so much explode as it peels back like a self-opening banana, revealing a glistening, snarling Lovecraftian horror full of snaking tubes and hissing malevolence. This is only the fourth- or fifth-most horrifying and unnerving thing in the film, which is a tidal wave of unrelenting paranoia so effective it took most people a good decade-plus to get over their initial revulsion and (correctly) rate it as one of the best horror films ever made. by Bobby Roberts