There are several ways a movie can age poorly. For one, there’s the film’s construction. CGI and, to a lesser extent, practical effects will end up showing their age over time. Even Jurassic Park is less impressive in a visual sense now than it was in the early ’90s. And that’s an example of a movie that has still retained the vast majority of its power. Not every effects-driven movie is half as lucky. Then there’s a film’s content; we’re currently in an age where many mentalities and words of decades past have now been rightly deemed relics that don’t belong in a modern world.
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What follows are movies where just about everything about them still works today. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that, even 50 or so years later, these movies work even better now. Their themes are still impactful and, in one case, a worldwide pandemic and people’s reactions to it have made the theme and narrative become only more relevant.
3) The Crazies
While the remake is still arguably a hair superior to the original, George A. Romero’s The Crazies has proved itself timeless. The only thing that hasn’t aged better than anyone could have expected is its title.
In The Crazies, we follow the residents of a small town as they’re quarantined in the wake of exposure to a military biological weapon. It’s a virus that makes people become violent, even to the point of homicidal. The residents turn on one another, regardless of whether they’re affected by this virus. That’s one element that makes The Crazies relevant now because, as we saw with the whole mask debate during the coronavirus pandemic, turning upon one another is exactly what people do. And, at the risk of becoming too political, its whole core plot thread of martial law is a fear felt by a substantial section of the US population at this point.
Stream The Crazies on Shudder.
2) The Exorcist
The Exorcist is one of the few perfect movies out there. It is truly the scariest film ever made, thanks to its emotional resonance, the power of its performances, the build-up of the possession, and visual tone. We are forced to believe that Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil is having her soul torn apart just as we’re forced to believe her mother is helplessly watching and desperately scrambling to get her daughter’s pain to stop.
And in that latter point is where The Exorcist is timeless. On one hand, iconic visual moments like the 180-degree head turn have aged quite well, but what hasn’t aged at all is the story of a mother’s struggle in a battle where she cannot determine the outcome. There have been so many exorcism movies over the years, especially recently, e.g. The Exorcism with Russell Crowe last year and The Ritual with Al Pacino this year. Each one of them, even the better ones like The Exorcism of Emily Rose, helps cement just how moving and sublime William Friedkin’s 1973 masterpiece remains.
Rent The Exorcist on Amazon Video.
1) Black Christmas
Bob Clark directed not one but two of the very best Christmas movies, and they couldn’t have been any more different. The first one was Black Christmas, which, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween, was instrumental in the creation and burgeoning popularity of the slasher subgenre. The second one was A Christmas Story, which has remained a family favorite to this day.
This is the ultimate sorority house scary movie, with tense scene after tense scene, punctuated by phone calls that raise the hairs on your neck. It manages to be one of the most thoroughly frightening films without showing much on screen, either, and it’s in that regard that the film has aged quite well. There aren’t many practical effects here to age poorly; it’s primarily tone and a horrifying reveal about where the killer is. Those aspects can’t age, and they’re as effective now as they ever were.
Stream Black Christmas on Prime Video.
What ’70s horror movies do you think have gotten better over time? Let us know in the comments below!
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