Hellraiser (1987)
The highly praised horror writer Clive Barker established himself as the Luis Bunuel of the grindhouse circuit with this tale of a gory love triangle involving Larry, a wimpy husband; Claire, a desperate housewife; and Frank, a former bad-boy studmuffin who is slowly reconstituting himself as a human being, one blood-drained victim at a time. The idea of a woman recreating her lover from blood and memories is as poetically gruesome as anything imagined by Franju (Barker has clearly spent some quality time with Eyes Without a Face) but the film earns its place in the splatter hall of fame as the debut of the Cenobites, a demonic foursome with rather advanced ideas about what constitutes a good time — "No tears, please, it's a waste of good suffering" is not a line you'll find in The Joy of Sex. The numerous sequels, which Barker did not direct, are of no interest, though Barker himself has produced and directed other worthwhile movies (Candyman, Lord of Illusions).

An American Werewolf in London (1981)
The fact that it runs out of gas before the big climax keeps this John Landis item — his last good film, really — from making the Top 10, but the first hour is loaded with enough genuine scares, original plot twists and inventive black humor to keep it at the top of the also-rans. David Naughton, previously a pitchman for Dr. Pepper, plays a strapping Yank who loses his best friend and a few quarts of blood during a nighttime attack on the moors of England. We all know what comes next, but Landis gets us there with considerable style and an inspired subplot based on the idea (probably concocted, but I'm not a student of Larry Talbot lore) that a werewolf's victims must wander in limbo until their murderer dies. Landis clearly had no idea of how to end the story, so he covers his tracks with a Blues Brothers style demolition derby. Too bad, Landis — you coulda been a contender.

Alien (1979)
The opening scenes, with their bizarre half organic-half mechanical vistas, and the eponymous monster (all brilliantly designed by Swiss head case H.R. Giger) have been plagiarized and imitated by countless other horror movies, and for a very good reason — they're creepy as hell, and striking enough to disguise the otherwise pretty conventional storyline, in which the crew of a spaceship must repel an alien boarder that is picking them off one by one. The second half of the film, in which dumb people constantly put themselves into dumb situations where they can easily be killed, is a second-rate haunted house story with Dolby-enhanced screaming, but that first half — and the justifiably famous "chest-burster" scene — is still something to see.