It’s a rare thing when a PG-13 horror movie actually stands out for its ability to evoke fear. The rating was invented in response to authentically chilling movies like “Poltergeist” and “Gremlins,” which lacked the gore or nudity to earn an R, but still clearly weren’t the all-ages fare suggested by their PG ratings.
But over the years, the rating has come to mean “embarrassing compromise,” at least in the world of horror; in a genre that’s particularly vulnerable to formula and low but very specific audience expectations, garnering the compromise rating usually means the filmmakers had to water down their content for a young audience, and the results are often halfhearted, vapid, or muddled. These five are the terrifying exceptions:
5. Mama (2013)
“Mama” pours on the shocks and shivers by giving audiences plenty of face time with the wizened, twisted titular monster, which adopts two young girls and becomes murderously jealous of anyone else who gets near them. It keeps the language clean and the violence more suggested than seen, and given the child protagonists, there isn’t much focus on sex. Instead, the attention is all on atmosphere and dread—and eventually, grief.
4. The Last Exorcism (2010)
In a rare occurrence for a found-footage-style film, the mundane scenes are the ones that really work. Before a charlatan preacher discovers that the latest in a series of phony possessions is actually real for once, he proudly regales the camera with outrageous tales and tricks of the trade. And even when he does encounter a real monster, he goes through all the cheesy staging without missing a beat, setting up a tense, funny juxtaposition between the harmless situation he assumes and the alarming one, about which he’s oblivious.
3. The Sixth Sense (1999)
Before M. Night Shyamalan devolved into hysterical self-parody, he proved himself to be a master of mood, tension, and atmosphere with “The Sixth Sense,” a fright flick about the tense relationship between a boy with a curious gift and a psychologist with a dark secret. Nearly everything about the movie has been reproduced to the point that it’s kitschy, but at the time, Shyamalan proved it was possible to make a genuinely terrifying film with little actual violence or profanity.
2. Drag Me To Hell (2009)
Here’s a clear case of a director modifying his natural instincts for ratings purposes. Given the story of a gypsy curse that unleashes the forces of hell on a mousy loan officer, the Sam Raimi of 20 years earlier would have unleashed the geysers of blood that coated “Evil Dead II.” Instead, the Hollywood hitmaker opted to make “Drag Me To Hell” every bit as bugfuck as the Evil Dead movies, but he replaced the blood with general intensity, often in the form of breakneck camera moves. Even so, the lack of blood in sequences like one in which the gypsy woman attacks the banker teeth-first in a parking deck does nothing to blunt the impact of Raimi’s style of slapstick horror. It cleverly abides by the letter of a PG-13 rating while ignoring its spirit.
1. The Ring (2002)
For a lot of American filmgoers, “The Ring” served as the first mainstream, accessible look at the J-horror tropes that have since been co-opted time and time again: the jerky, unsettling erratic movements; the dripping, rotting ghost with the curtain of slimy wet hair; the discordant soundtrack; the implacability and inevitability of evil. Those tropes have never again been as effective, largely because “The Ring” uses them so effectively.
Director Gore Verbinski runs “The Ring” like a tight ship, moving briskly from setting up the urban legend story about a mysterious killer videotape to showing its fatal handiwork, then cycling back to the setup part with new victims, so viewers can spend the whole film anticipating what awaits them. The film—one of the few cases of a foreign-film remake that’s smarter, meaner, and more effective than the original version—has its share of jump-cuts and sudden shocks, but it’s most effective at evoking breathless, choking dread.
