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"Let the Right One In" (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

A sweet, dangerous love story between a teenage drinker of blood and a prepubescent boy, lonely, much-bullied and full of fury. Feral and amoral, the girl-vampire is touched by human loneliness that mirrors her own. Playing out in wintry Stockholm streets dark with what seems permanent night, this movie takes its bloody time, constantly surprising us with imaginative images of horror, like carmine splashes on snow or a roomful of maddened cats, turned savage by the scent of a tainted human. There's gore and terror galore in this Grimm fairy tale, but the terrible tenderness that binds an outcast Hansel and Gretel can't help but bewitch you.

Other recommendations:

- "Lifeforce" (Tobe Hooper, 1985)

- "Dance of the Damned" (Katt Shea, 1988)

- "Nadja" (Michael Almereyda, 1995)

GHOSTS

"Carnival of Souls" (Herk Harvey, 1962)

This no-budget ghost story out of Kansas is a classic, never failing to raise the short hairs. From the moment the film's bland, blond protagonist lurches out of a river covered in mud, reality begins to decay. Like "Night of the Living Dead," "Carnival" mines terror out of the mundane, so that its every black-and-white image glows with a kind of eerie, toxic phosphorescence. Even the retro quality of early-'60s period behavior and locations (drag racing on back roads, everyday life in a Heartland town, the abandoned carnival pavilion out on the salt flats) contributes to the dreamlike, dissociated state into which the film's lost soul (and we) slowly and inexorably sink.

"Beloved" (Jonathan Demme, 1998)

The specter that haunts this adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel is the long, dark shadow of slavery's history in America. But it takes flesh-and-flood form when an infantile, almost bestial, creature crawls out of swamp muck, covered with buzzing flies. This broken thing, stuttering, grunting, slobbering, insinuates itself into a post-Civil War black family and begins to suck the life out of them. Thandie Newton deserved an Oscar for her superb performance as Beloved, the sexually omnivorous "vampire" whose delicate beauty masks grossest appetite.

"The Orphanage" (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2007)

From the moment a wife and mother returns to the creepy orphanage where she grew up, she's haunted by memories from the past, as well as present weirdness. Out in the dark, a swing creaks as though a child has just jumped off; her own son, in fragile health, has made friends with a boy who shouldn't exist; and then there are those worrisome bones out in the lime kiln. For a while "The Orphanage" plays like a superior haunted-house flick, but it soon ratchets up its emotional charge, becoming a celebration of maternal love so powerful it gifts a woman with the courage and will to breach the gates of death. Think of a grown-up, much darker take on Wendy, Peter Pan and the lost boys.

Other recommendations:

- "The Frighteners" (Peter Jackson, 1996)

- "Soft for Digging" (J.T. Petty, 2001)

- "The Dark" (John Fawcett, 2005)

ZOMBIES

"Dead Alive" / "Braindead" (Peter Jackson, 1992)

Jackson often lards his horror with gross-out comedy, but still delivers the goods when it comes to images of archetypal dread. A momma's boy beaten down and figuratively castrated by his horrific dam is forced into manhood when practically everyone in his hometown turns zombie after being bitten by a savage Sumatran rat-monkey. Savor taboo-flaunting scenes like Lionel in the park, battering an undead infant into submission as horrified dowagers look on. Lick your chops during the orgy of communal feasting -- a gorefest that beggars belief -- while our hero takes on a primally terrifying monster of motherhood.

"I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain" (Andrew Parkinson, 1998)

A low-budget zombie flick of shocking originality, this one's a companion piece to David Cronenberg's brilliant remake of "The Fly," another exploration of the tragedy of incurable, flesh-disfiguring disease through horror-movie metaphor. An ultra-ordinary fellow bitten by an injured woman he tries to aid is soon driven to consume human flesh. The day-by-day chronicle of his truly awful descent into physical decay and dissolution is punctuated by interviews with folks who knew him, even loved him, before he fell "sick." Horrified, nauseated, we watch as he kneels over a corpse, eating bits of flesh from its face; masturbates while holding a snapshot of the woman he loved, until that part of him is gone as well; tries to nail the putrefying parts of his body back together. Not for the squeamish.

"Land of the Dead" (George Romero, 2005)

Romero's at the top of his game in "Land," typically lacing a wicked-scary zombiefest with acid commentary on contemporary life in these United States. What's left of humanity has holed up in a consumer's paradise, an island-fortress under permanent siege by the "stenches." The movie looks more and more prescient in its portrayal of an America populated by folks bent on amusing themselves to death as though good times would never end -- and we all know where that fiscal philosophy has landed us! Romero even takes apart the kind of mindless patriotism that casts other nations as bit players in our drama of manifest destiny: In "Land," the Fourth of July becomes a bloody Independence Day, as the disenfranchised, hungry dead overrun the citadel of high-living consumers. How's that for a metaphor with teeth?

Other recommendations:

- "White Zombie" (Victor Halperin, 1932)

- "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" (Bob Clark, 1972)

- "REC" (Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza, 2007)

What are your favorite, not-so-well-known horror movies? Share them with us at heymsn@microsoft.com

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