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An early success in a filmmaker's career is wonderful; for one thing, it means it's a bit easier to keep making movies! Yet that also creates a daunting challenge, especially for horror filmmakers, because audiences expect more thrills and chills with each successive picture.
The great horror directors have risen to the challenge of topping themselves, often more than once over their careers, but they've avoided simply increasing the supply of blood and gore. Rather, they have explored different avenues of creating suspense, resulting in masterful works that have stood the test of time, as these examples prove.
The Evil Dead became an underground sensation in the early 1980s, as much for its violent excesses as for its whacked-out star Bruce Campbell. Since then, Raimi has topped himself by introducing other elements into his horror pictures, making Darkman a raging thriller and Army of Darkness a very funny historical epic. Arguably, however, Drag Me to Hell represents the director's finest work, a concisely told fairy tale with a very dark sense of humor.
The late great filmmaker burst onto the scene with the highly disturbing The Last House on the Left in 1972, topped himself by delving deeper into the mind with 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street, and then did it again with Scream in 1996, a self-aware shocker that nonetheless proved to be quite frightening for first-time audiences.
The director hit the horror jackpot with Halloween in 1978, and then topped himself with his superbly suspenseful remake of The Thing in 1982. He continued to make a variety of movies, including horror titles, but didn't truly top himself again until 1994's magnificently paranoid In the Mouth of Madness, a mind-blowing sojourn that is intensely unsettling.
Right out of the gate, Romero tapped into the zeitgeist with Night of the Living Dead, which introduced zombies to modern audiences in 1968. His Dawn of the Dead upped the ante in 1978, providing savage and timely social commentary. While 1985's Day of the Dead was very good, Romero topped himself with 2005's Land of the Dead, which again fused acute social commentary with a violent zombie thriller.
The filmmaker emerged from Canada with an amazing run of body-horror fright flicks -- Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome -- that topped each other in grisly succession. But his version of The Fly set a new standard as a gory psychological thriller. Cronenberg continues to make haunting movies, but outside the boundaries of the horror genre.
