This is a list of obscure horror movies—my list, to be precise. As for you? I can see it now: You sit in front of the computer screen, your face dimly lit. It’s 2:37a.m. and your girlfriend (mom?) pokes her head down the stairs and asks when you are coming to bed. “Not now… someone is wrong on the internet!” You ponder the relative rareness of second person narrative as you think of clever ways to express your dislike for someone else’s opinion.

No matter. These are horror movies that are damn good and fly a little further under the radar than The Exorcist. The goal was to pick ten that rarely make an appearance on everyone else’s Top 10 Obscure Horror lists because it gets boring reading about the same fifteen films recycled over and over again and then argued about ad infinitum. Next time I might just write a Top 9 list so your OCD mind will feel as incomplete as it did when your little brother lost the rocket to your J-Slot Boba Fett action figure.

10. Pin (1988)

It is obvious to anyone that if you were a doctor with a see-through anatomically correct doll you would use it to teach your daughter the details of her abortion. It is even more obvious that this type of parenthood might result in an unusual childhood. Such a childhood may include your son naming the doll Pin, believing it is alive, and using it to creep the Hell out of anyone who goes near your sister.

9. Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)

Several horror movies deal with epidemics in the future, but only one of them is a musical dealing with an epidemic of mass organ failure. Not to worry, because in the year 2057 GeneCo will sell you new organs. As we know, loans are only made so the borrower can default. If you default on your liver loan from GeneCo they send the repo man out to cut it out of you. With Nivek Ogre, Sarah Brightman, Paris Hilton, and others this is predatory lending with slightly better terms than your current mortgage holder.

8. The Mist (2007)

“How can a Stephen King story make it onto an obscure movie list?” Shut up, that’s why. For a Stephen King story directed by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) this was a bit of a box office dud. The reason it makes the list is because it follows the 1980 novella almost to the letter. The monsters are fantastic, the townsfolk are as creepy and aggravating as rural gets, and it has the classic military-experiment-gone-horribly-wrong theme. The biggest change from the short story is the ending. When Stephen King read the script he loved the new ending so much he refused to let a studio touch it if they considered changing a word of it. After shopping it around to several studios that refused to touch it because of the ending the movie was made, released, and the ending is worth every penny. In the realm of horror movie endings it is an obscurity to find one so powerful.

7. Begotten (1991) [WATCH FULL FILM HERE]

This film is a black and white masterpiece. Horrific images of human pain and suffering are used to depict the biblical story of creation. These images are shot in reverse black and white and then re-shot in black and white to eliminate all middle tones. The resulting film is as contrasting as it is unsettling. Without the benefit of dialogue the viewer is left to feel and infer. Watch this one.

6. Cigarette Burns (2005)

Cigarette Burns is John Carpenter’s addition to the Masters of Horror collection. It is the story of a film, Le Fin Absolue du Monde, which was so deeply disturbing that the audience at its premiere rioted violently, resulting in four murders, several mutilations, and an insane film critic who lives the life of a recluse. This is the holy grail of horror films, the one we all want to see. A collector wants to see it so badly he pays a handsome price to recover the only print of the film, long thought to have been destroyed. Think Ninth Gate with worse acting but better imagery. In fact, the lead does his best the entire film to pretend he’s a brooding Leonardo DiCaprio, but we’ll forgive John Carpenter for his complete inability to direct actors in exchange for his mastery of graphic violence and scenes of random absurdity.

5. Vampyr (1932)

Recently released as a Criterion Collection, it is much easier to get a good copy of this film. A classic of classics, Vampyr was conceived to be a silent film, and so contains many of the stylistic elements of the German expressionist films of the day. To keep costs down the film was independently financed with virtually no professional actors and shot entirely on location in Courtempierre, France. The result was a film that feels more real than the soundstage films of the time. All the elements of a horror classic are present: a dark forest, a dark castle, a dark inn, and dark creatures called vampyrs. Not to be confused with vampires, vampyrs lure the innocent into committing suicide and serving the Devil.

4. Midnight Meat Train (2008)

Vinnie Jones once again dons a suit to portray a psychotic killer, except this time from the mind of Clive Barker rather than Guy Ritchie, the witty dialogue of a Ritchie film being replaced with the brutal gore of Barker’s nightmares. We discover Jones is a butcher who likes to take the late train to find his victims. Bradley Cooper plays a photographer who is feeble-minded enough to follow him around in search of the perfect shot. Adapted from one of Barker’s stories from the first of his Books of Blood, this is easily among the best.

3. The Devil’s Backbone (2001)

Guillermo del Toro made a little-known masterpiece before attaining international fame and glory with Pan’s Labyrinth. If you liked Pan’s Labyrinth you will love Devil’s Backbone. An unexploded bomb lands in the plaza of an orphanage, orphans are terrorized at night by the ghost of one of their dead, and an old bearded gentleman tried to keep the peace during the Spanish Civil War. Sneaking into a kitchen at night to fill up a water jug has never been more intense in any film I’ve ever seen, and the tension in the darkly lit corridor scenes is top notch. It is del Toro’s finest.

2. Frontière(s) (2007)

Something very unsettling is happening to the water supply in France, as it is now the new Japan in the horror scene. Rather than make torture porn (Hostel, Last Resort, Saw 37, need I go on?) Xavier Gens brings us a story, with characters… and then those characters kill and get killed. But with such finesse! Some thieves run away and meet their comeuppances by staying with a family of Nazi cannibals. Unlike Hostel this film is not for the weak as Gens procures a film worthy to stand among the best from the heyday of grindhouse.

1. Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975)

Marquis de Sade is generally regarded as the sickest man to have ever lived. Luckily for us that man wrote a metric ton of filth. Even luckier, Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini and writer Pupi Avati turned some of that filth into film. Salò is a depraved, perverse, sexually sadistic, wretched film that manages to be amongst the most controversial while still barely touching upon the absolute degeneracy of de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. (Yes, he was that sick. The man was responsible for the word sadistic, after all.) Instead of telling the story of morally corrupt libertines in France it moves the setting to the last moments of Mussolini’s regime in Italy and a group of morally corrupt libertines who abuse, rape, torture, and execute teenage boys and girls. The film has been banned, unbanned, then re-banned again in numerous countries, most recently rejected in Australia in 2008 when the film was remastered from the original negatives (get this version from the British Film Institute if you can.) As of today only 17 countries permit the availability of an uncut DVD rendition. Some would argue that it is not technically a horror film. This is all well and good, but I would like to force them to eat feces and have sex with fascists to see if they do not think that to be horrific.

Honorable Mentions: Session 9; Bug; Suspiria; [REC]; Nightbreed; Cannibal Holocaust; I Bury the Living; Audition; Cemetery Man; Alice, Sweet Alice