MoFo Top 100 Horror Movies: The List

Dead of Night is the original horror anthology film and still delivers the goods, with sparkling acting, a taut script and a large house in the country providing a perfect setting for chills and thrills, which are masterfully held off until the striking ending. The framing story of the architect dreaming about coming to the house and knowing almost everything which will happen is a great way to pin all the subsequent stories which range from the humorous (the golfing ghost) to the incredibly eerie (the ventriloquist and his dummy). If you haven't seen this, you owe it to yourself to remedy that and see where many classic horror scenarios come from. Michael Redgrave gives an awesome performance as the ventriloquist.

The Stepfather was not a moneymaking film, but it quickly developed a huge cult following, and my friends, family and I are all happy to be card-carrying members of the cult. If you like straight horror films, thrillers or flix which are very self-aware about all their blood, gore and sex (without reducing themselves to straight camp), The Stepfather should be right up your alley. As with most cult films, the more times you watch it, with the more people in the room with you, the more you'll probably appreciate it. In fact, the hardest thing for me to decide on was a rating to give the film. Depending on my mood and who I'm with, I can give the flick anywhere from to , but I decided that a rating of is appropriate after 30 years of mostly oblivion and a recent mass release to a newer generation.

The Stepfather is about a man (Terry O'Quinn) who desperately wants the American Dream and does everything he can to seek it out. Now, in this character's mind (he's called Jerry throughout most of the film), if he has to destroy his latest imperfect family to seek out a better one, he has no problem with that. Jerry does seem to realize what he's doing most of the time, but there are other times where he seems to have completely blocked out his violent past in his pursuit of trying to create the perfect family. Jerry basically has no background. We never learn about his childhood at all, but we do know that he apparently has no criminal record or has ever been part of the military since no one has a record of his fingerprints. Jerry is a good salesman though, so that allows him to pull up stakes, move and find a new job very quickly because he is very good at what he does. He can sell real estate and insurance equally well, especially since he's so proud of helping out so many families by doing so.

After a highly-memorable opening scene where Jerry leaves his latest family, we see him a year later living very happily with his new wife Susan (Shelley Hack) but not so pleasantly with his teenage stepdaughter Stephanie (Jill Schoelen) who seems to irrationally blame Jerry for the death of her father. Stephanie has a father figure she likes in the form of her psychiatrist (Charles Lanyer), but Jerry refuses to meet with the doctor even after Stephanie gets expelled from high school for inappropriate behavior. Meanwhile, the brother (Stephen Shellen) of Jerry's last wife is on a crusade to get the local press and police to reopen the murder case and begins his own investigation into who Jerry could possibly be if he repeats his previous modus operandi. As things come to a head with Jill and her burgeoning sexuality, Jerry seems about ready to snap and move on to greener pastures to find a more perfect family.

The Stepfather rises up to the cream of its genre for many fortuitous reasons. The entire cast is earnest but Terry O'Quinn gives one of the best genre performances ever. Even after we see his incredibly-destructive side, he comes across as an empathetic villain. On top of O'Quinn's scary sincerity, he has several chances to garner needed laughs when he gets that gleam in his eyes and says something as innocent as "Are you OK, sweetheart?" Donald E. Westlake's script is a model of the rise-and-fall school of plot development, as well as the slowburn build-up. Things take their sweet time to come to a boil, but what a wonderful boil they become. Joseph Ruben, who made several thrillers in the middle of his career and claims to hate scary movies, did his finest, most-controlled work on The Stepfather and walks a thin line between out-and-out thrills and yell-at-the-screen laughs. The Stepfather was an audience participation film when I watched it several times at the theatre in the '80s, and it still seems like a participation film today in my own living room. It contains many memorable lines of dialogue and gestures and facial expressions by O'Quinn for all to groove to and pass on to their unsuspecting friends. Long live The Stepfather and hopefully it will not disappear again now that we have the DVD release to enjoy over and over again.