In anticipation of Halloween, we asked two professors and two staff members to share their favorite horror films.
Nancy Schiesari, professor, Department of Radio-Television-Film
Growing up with a father who loved Edgar Allan Poe, Schiesari was introduced to her No. 1 thriller when she was eight.
- Pit and the Pendulum by Roger Corman (1961)
- Killer Shrews by Ray Kellogg (1959)
- Grizzly Man, a documentary by Werner Herzog (2005)
Ed Radtke, assistant professor, Department of Radio-Television-Film
![Ed Radtke](http://news.utexas.edu/sites/news.utexas.edu/files/oncampus/images/stories/2009/Ed-Radtke_2.jpg)
Admitting he’s not into horror flicks as much as he used to be, Radtke still had plenty of thrillers to share.
- The Haunting (the original) by Robert Wise (1963)
- Rosemary’s Baby by Roman Polanski (1968)
- Silence of the Lambs by Jonathan Demme (1991)
- The Exorcist by William Friedkin (1973)
- The Shining by Stanley Kubrick (1980)
- and the obligatory B movie Texas Chain Saw Massacre by Tobe Hooper (1974)
Laura Schwartz, head librarian, Fine Arts Library
![Laura Schwartz](http://news.utexas.edu/sites/news.utexas.edu/files/oncampus/images/stories/2009/Laura-Schwartz_2.jpg)
Schwartz immediately named her top horror flicks, and two seemed more than enough for her.
- Rosemary’s Baby by Roman Polanski (1968)
- Halloween by John Carpenter (1978)
Christopher Palmer, Radio-Television-Film specialist and videographer, Office of Public Affairs
![Christopher Palmer](http://news.utexas.edu/sites/news.utexas.edu/files/oncampus/images/stories/2009/Christopher-Palmer_2.jpg)
- Carnival of Souls (1962) — This chilling black and white classic explores the world of the living dead six years before George Romero’s pivotal zombie film Night of the Living Dead.
- The Evil Dead (1981) — Before directing A Simple Plan (1998) and the widely popular Spider-Man movies, Sam Raimi took a small film crew into the woods to shoot a low budget grindhouse masterpiece.
- Suspiria (1977) — The Italian horror master Dario Argento slowly builds deep atmosphere and razor-sharp tension using rich colors and surreal composition set in an eerie European ballet academy.
- Candyman (1992) — Clive Barker takes the violent history of American slavery and applies it in the modern world of poverty and crime of Chicago’s infamous housing projects Cabrini-Green.
- Cemetery Man (1994) — Also know as “Dellamorte Dellamore,” Rupert Everett stars as the groundskeeper of a particularly strange graveyard in which every buried body springs back to life as a reanimated corpse. Everett’s character, Dellamorte, is responsible for killing the dead and reburying them a second time.
Watch a video of professors reading their favorite spooky passages.