So, I'll take the 1978 Dawn of the Dead for the slow-moving zombies and something else besides — it's one of the most unusual horror movies ever made. Instead of the standard setup-scare, setup-scare pacing, Romero opens with a sustained vision of the country collapsing into anarchy, during which some of the most heroic people suddenly kill themselves out of horror at what the world has become. A quartet of refugees — two National Guardsmen, a television traffic reporter and her lover — escape their city in a helicopter and, after a long flight, touch down on the roof of an enclosed shopping mall. The horror story becomes an ingenious survival tale as they figure out how to seal off the mall, then it changes again into a blackly funny satire as they wallow in their consumer paradise. And yet the dread continues to build, and when looters force their way into the mall, bringing with them the ravening zombie hordes, it's almost a relief to see the last survivors return to the sky. Dawn of the Dead is crudely made by today's slicked up standards: the makeup often looks amateurish, the music is lousy and some of the scenes could have used better direction. But Romero hit on something different here, a mood and deep-seated sense of wrongness with the world that makes the film more impressive than a lot of scare flicks with better production values.

Re-animator (1985)
Though nominally based on H.P. Lovecraft's story cycle "Herbert West: Re-animator," the amount of gore in this blackly funny adaptation would have had the old Providence recluse cowering under his bed. Jeffrey Combs earned an eternal place in cult-star heaven as an ambitious medical student who invents a formula that makes corpses spring to athletic life. Director Stuart Gordon and his screenwriter Dennis Paoli got their start in Chicago's Organic Theater Company, and they certainly live up to the name here. They also come up with a truly memorable villain: a man who carries his own severed head in a tray of blood, and tries to woo the heroine in one of the most outrageous love scenes in recent memory.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
The funny thing about most serial-killer flicks is how reassuring they are. Evil geniuses like Hannibal Lecter and his numerous imitations (from Se7en all the way down to Saw) are about as far as you can get from grubby lowlifes like Gary Heidnik or Ed Gein, who were able to carry on their killing sprees for years not because they were so fiendishly smart, but because they preyed on society's invisibles and designated victims — prostitutes, poor women, the mentally handicapped — and were just smart enough to exercise minimal caution. Even so, it's amazing to see how often they were captured through sheer dumb luck — a random traffic stop that reveals a body in the trunk, a loud argument that brings in the police at an inopportune moment. Which is why this low-key film stays with you long after you've been able to shake off splashier Grand Guignol exercises. Henry (John Rooker, in a career-making performance) kills people at random because he's bored, or angry, or finds himself in a complicated situation and decides that violence will make everything simpler. He's not very bright, but he has enough low animal cunning to vary his methods of murder, and he knows the anonymity of city life (the film is set in the scummier areas of Chicago) will work to his advantage as long as nobody connects the dots of his bloody trail. Writer-director John McNaughton is tremendously restrained with his exploitation movie material: most of the killings take place off camera, which makes the scenes of full-on violence — particularly the destruction of a entire family in their own home, captured on a camcorder for repeat viewings — all the more disturbing. Naughton's script — thrown together and filmed on the run after a video store operator offered him money to make a quickie exploitation flick — was very loosely based on the life of Henry Lee Lucas, who later recanted many of his confessions. It really doesn't matter: Lucas' confessions may have been fictional, but Henry is fiction that feels entirely too real.