Cineworld Horror Season is delivering terrifying goodies this October – after all, who can resist the opportunity to experience scares on the big screen? We're bringing back a collection of retro classics and recent gems, several of which are being treated to gleaming 4K restorations. And best of all, tickets are just £5.
We've rounded up several classic horror scenes that you need to experience all over again.
1. The prom massacre from Carrie (1976)
Brian de Palma's uniquely operatic style is well-suited to Stephen King's heartbreaking and horrific story of teen angst gone awry. Sissy Spacek is brilliantly ethereal and delicate as outcast teen Carrie White whose oppressive upbringing under her puritanical mother (Piper Laurie) has led to ignorance about the development of her own body.
De Palma's bold style emphasises a bold Freudian colour palette and inventive use of split screen to drive home Carrie's nascent telekinetic powers, which appear to be linked to her adolescent development. The director enlists every cinematic trick in the book during the infamous finale when Carrie's prom date gives way to a cruel prank involving pig's blood, and the subsequent slaughter of everyone in the room.
The sequence encapsulates why Carrie is one of the best King adaptations. It places character front and centre and although what we're watching is horrific, there's a sense of style that makes it horribly arresting, underpinned by the empathy present in Pino Donaggio's lush score.
2. The fountain of blood from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Hands up, who forgot that Johnny Depp got his big break in this eighties slasher movie classic? The late Wes Craven invests his signature intelligence and insight into what might otherwise be a standard boogeyman story, exploring the nebulous grey area that exists in our minds between dreams and reality.
It's from these dreams that Robert Englund's iconic, blade-handed Freddy Kreuger springs, ready to kill hapless, horny teens in their sleep. It says a lot about Englund's performance that he makes such a big impact in a brief amount of screen time. Craven spends more time building sympathy for our teen protagonists who appear to be paying the price for their parents' transgressions several years earlier.
No one suffers more than Depp's Glenn who is sucked into his own bed and regurgitated as a voluminous mass of blood in the film's most famous sequence. It's one of many striking images that underline Craven's fascination with life, death, sexuality, the id and the ego.
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3. The reverse bear trap from Saw (2004)
No one could have foreseen that the relatively unassuming horror Saw would give birth to a billion-dollar franchise ranging over several years and 10 moves (the 11th is due for release in 2025). The first film is more discreet in its use of gore than the sequels are: what we get instead is a tricksy psychological shocker that scrambles its timeline to wrong-foot us about the nature of the elusive Jigsaw killer John Kramer (Tobin Bell in the role that would come to define his career).
That said, Saw cuts deep when it has to. The film's most famous sequence involves Amanda (Shawnee Smith) who finds herself in a reverse bear trap that threatens to split her head open should she not retrieve the key from the stomach of a comatose man. Director James Wan's hyperkinetic editing makes palpable her sense of panic and of course, the sequence is important in terms of wider Saw lore, introducing Billy the puppet and Amanda's eventual simpatico relationship with Kramer.
4. The rules of zombie survival from Zombieland (2009)
Who says all horror films have to be intensely serious? The genre is often at its most fascinating when deploying horror tropes for both visceral and humorous effect, challenging our emotional preconceptions as to how to respond. Director Sam Raimi once said that horror and comedy are closely related, and Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland very much continues in this vein, taking an irreverent look at survival amid a zombie apocalypse.
The casting is key here. Jesse Eisenberg is in prime nebbish form as our central character who frequently breaks the fourth wall to explain how he has managed to survive the ravening hordes. Eisenberg is well-supported by the aw-shucks likeabilty of Woody Harrelson's gung-ho cowboy, Emma Stone's grounded love interest and Abigail Breslin's teenage snark.
5. The demonic pop-up book from The Babadook (2014)
Horror is often at its best when it's subtle. Geysers of gore and ripping body horror all have their place, but one cannot underestimate those skin-prickling moments that speak to some dark psychological corner of our brains. Enter Jennifer Kent's acclaimed chiller The Bababook, which was lauded on its release for fusing monster movie trappings with an intense and ultimately moving story of family grief.
The movie is akin to a Russian nesting doll, revealing layer upon layer of subtext as Essie Davis' washed-out, widowed mother attempts to look after her disturbed son (Noah Wiseman). The unexpected appearance of a pop-up book called The Babadook then portends the arrival of something horrible, which can tear these two lost souls apart, or reconcile them amid terrifying duress.
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