50. Vampyr (1932)
Dir Carl Theodor Dreyer (Julian West, Jan Hieronimko, Sybille Schmitz)
49. The Beyond (1981)
Dir Lucio Fulci (Katherine MacColl, David Warbeck)
48. Kwaidan (1964)
Dir Masaki Kobayashi (Tatsuya Nakadai, Rentarô Mikuni, Michiyo Aratama)
47. Les Diaboliques (1955)
Dir Henri-Georges Clouzot (Véra Clouzot, Simone Signoret)
46. The Devils (1971)
Dir Ken Russell (Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave)
45. Deep Red (1975)
Dir Dario Argento (David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi)
44. Hour of the Wolf (1967)
Dir Ingmar Bergman (Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann)
43. The Tenant (1976)
Dir Roman Polanski (Roman Polanski, Isabelle Adjani)
42. Peeping Tom (1960)
Dir Michael Powell (Karlheinz Böhm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey)
41. The Evil Dead (1981)
Dir Sam Raimi (Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss)
40. Carnival of Souls (1962)
Dir Herk Harvey (Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger)
39. The Descent (2005)
Dir Neil Marshall (Shauna Macdonald, MyAnna Buring, Natalie Mendoza)
38. Possession (1981) (YASSSSSSSS)
Dir Andrzej Zulawski (Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Heinz Bennent)
37. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Dir Don Siegel (Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter)
36. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Dir Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez (Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, Joshua Leonard)
35. Dead of Night (1945)
Dirs Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer (Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers, Ralph Michael)
34. Eyes Without a Face (1959)
Dir Georges Franju (Edith Scob, Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel)
33. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Dir Wes Craven (Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon)
32. Cannibal Holocaust (1979)
Dir Ruggero Deodato (Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen)
31. Martyrs (2008)
Dir Pascal Laugier (Mylene Jampanoi, Morjana Alaoiu)
30. Frankenstein (1931)
Dir James Whale (Colin Clive, Boris Karloff, Mae Clarke)
29. Cat People (1942)
Dir Jacques Tourneur (Simone Simon, Kent Smith)
28. Let the Right One In (2008)
Dir Tomas Alfredson (Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson)
27. Videodrome (1982)
Dir David Cronenberg (James Woods, Sonja Smits, Debbie Harry)
26. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Dir (James Whale (Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Elsa Lanchester, Ernest Thesiger)
25. The Changeling (1979)
Dir Peter Medak (George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas)
Old fashioned in the best sense of the phrase, Medak’s oft-neglected supernatural thriller uses pure cinematic technique to scare the hell out of us. The magisterial Scott plays a well known composer who, following the death of his wife and son in a road accident, takes up a teaching job in Seattle and moves into an eerie, haunted Victorian house. Even the most hackneyed scenes, such as a séance in which a scribbling medium attempts to contact the unquiet spirit of the murdered boy, are staged with consummate skill and emotional conviction. Guillermo del Toro maintains that the best ghost stories all have an undertow of melancholy. That’s certainly true here.
24. The Birds (1963)
Dir Alfred Hitchcock (Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor)
Along with ‘Psycho’, this loose spin on a Daphne du Maurier novella marked Hitchcock’s main foray into horror territory. ‘The Birds’ sees pernicious flocks of birds follow a metropolitan, San Franciscan blonde (Tippi Hedren) to a sleepy coastal town, and it’s these winged creatures that terrify as Hedren fights to resist being pecked to death. Hitchcock often scares by suggestion as crows appear on telegraph wires and the noise of them becomes increasingly intense – but he also shows full-on, unsettling aerial attacks, and the special effects for these scenes still endure. Psychologically, ‘The Birds’ is perhaps not Hitchcock’s most fully realised film, but it’s certainly one of his most open as we are left to wonder why, exactly, Hedren’s fledgling romance with Rod Taylor and his claustrophobic relationship with his mum (Jessica Tandy) inspire such avian terror. Just imagine those birds in 3D.
23. The Fly (1986)
Dir David Cronenberg (Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis)
David Cronenberg’s delirious reimagining of that old story of a scientist whose experiments with teleportation lead to a nasty genetic mixup, ‘The Fly’ isn’t just one of the very finest horror movies, it’s also one of cinema’s great tragic romances. Charming, tentative and beautifully written, the initial relationship between leads Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis harks back to the screwball romances of old, which only makes Goldblum’s ensuing physical and mental degradation all the more horrifying to behold. In Cronenberg’s hands, this genetic disease becomes a forceful metaphor for everything bad you can imagine, from cancer, Aids and ageing to lost love and inexplicable heartbreak. Beautiful, sickening, exhilarating, savage, inspiring and inspired, ‘The Fly’ is humanist cinema at its most non-human, and a master filmmaker’s finest hour.
22. Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)
Dir FW Murnau (Max Schreck, Greta Schröder)
The film that made it all happen, Murnau’s loose, unofficial adaptation of Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ may not have been the first horror movie (that honour probably goes to George Meliés’s ‘Le Manoir du Diable’) but it’s certainly the most influential. So many keynotes of the genre emerge fully formed here: the use of light and shadow, threat and tension, beauty and ugliness, a man in grotesque make-up threatening an innocent girl. And what’s remarkable is that it remains a deeply unsettling piece of work: Schreck’s contorted performance, not to mention that hideous, batlike make-up, may be the film’s most iconic image, but the plague-of-rats scene is deeply unnerving too – we can only imagine how it must have seemed to audiences emerging from the First World War.
21. Freaks (1932)
Dir Tod Browning (Olga Baclanova, Harry Earles)
A horror film? Try a tender, humane tale of love and betrayal. Director Tod Browning had himself run away from school to join the circus. And in ‘Freaks’ he assembled a cast of ‘sideshow freaks’ (they’re also fine actors) to tell the story of beautiful trapeze artist Cleo (Baclanova) who marries midget Hans (Earles) for his money and poisons him. Browning sketches life on the road with tremendous affection and humour: take the man who marries one Siamese twin but can’t stand her sister (‘I’m not having my wife lying in bed half the day with your hangover!’). What makes ‘Freaks’ a horror film is its disturbing, macabre ending, as the ‘freaks’ chase Cleo and her strong-man lover through the forest – though of course the real horror here is the cruelty of the so-called ‘normals’. ‘Freaks’ was banned in the UK for 30 years until the mid ‘60s.
20. The Omen (1976)
Dir Richard Donner (Gregory Peck, Lee Remick)
Films about Satan and his minions remain popular for a number of reasons, but a key one must be the fact that, when depicting the infinite power of the Devil, filmmakers can get away with just about anything. ‘The Omen’ is chock full of creepy business: the weird nanny and her rottweiler sidekick, the zoo animals behaving erratically, the young lad on his tricycle bumping his mother over the banister, the church lightning rod spearing the priest where he stands, and of course cinema’s most iconic beheading scene, shown from multiple angles in juicily slow motion. Like many classics of the genre, Donner’s first feature wasn’t especially well received by critics at the time, but it’s remained a mainstay on late-night TV and ‘best of horror’ lists.
19. Evil Dead II (1987)
Dir Sam Raimi (Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry)
In which Bruce Campbell reveals himself to be the Fangoria generation’s answer to Buster Keaton. ‘The Evil Dead’ had humour but it was still, at heart, a video nasty: that tree-rape scene tended to kill the chuckles. But in ‘Evil Dead 2’, the fact that Raimi and Campbell had begun their career alternating between horror shorts and Three Stooges knockoffs paid massive dividends: this is without doubt the most successful blend of horror and comedy, and a classic in either field. The breakthrough moment comes midway, as Campbell’s own hand is possessed by an evil spirit, leading to some of the most jawdropping slapstick imaginable (and a peerless Hemingway gag). But Raimi never forgets to keep the blood flowing: limbs fly, eyeballs explode, and you don’t even want to know what goes on in that woodshed.
18. Audition (1999)
Dir Takashi Miike (Ryo Ishibashi, Eihi Shiina, Jun Kunimura)
The best Japanese horror film of the modern era, Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and John Landis have all confessed to being freaked out by ‘Audition’. Encouraged by his teenage son and best friend, a film producer stages a fake casting session, interviewing beautiful young woman for the imaginary role of his new wife. Smitten with the modest, mysterious Asami (Eihi Shiina), he later discovers that she is a disturbed victim of childhood abuse, with some serious trust issues. The textured relationships are subtly convincing, as the film builds inexorably towards its unbearably painful climax, which involves skilfully deployed acupuncture needles (‘Kiri, kiri, kiri, kiri’) and a limb-sawing wire. An astonishing achievement, particularly as it succeeds in preserving a degree of empathy for its beautiful but sadistic femme fatale.
17. The Haunting (1963)
Dir Robert Wise (Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson)
‘The Haunting’ is the quintessential haunted house movie: Martin Scorsese even rated it his number one scariest film. Anthropologist Dr Markway (Richard Johnson) is investigating paranormal activity at a tombstone of a gothic pile in New England. The house was born bad, so the story goes – the wife of its first owner dropped dead moments before setting foot in it. The doctor has brought along two young psychic women, boho free-spirit Theo (who has one of the choicest wardrobes ever, designed by Mary Quant) and repressed Nell, who is the main attraction as far as the ghosts are concerned. Director Robert Wise executes a masterpiece of the power of suggestion. We never see a ghost, but the face of the devil Wise’s camera makes out in the ornate carving of a wooden door is more scary than anything make-up or effect could rustle up.
16. An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Dir John Landis (David Naughton, Jenny Agutter, Griffin Dunne)
What’s always been most striking about John Landis’s lycanthropic thriller is the brilliant way it veers from comedy to gruesome terror and back again, in the blink of an eye. Figure in the services of make-up supremo Rick Baker, some of the most inventive shocks imaginable (those zombie Nazis!) and a dynamite selection of moon-related FM radio classics (not to mention Jenny Agutter’s face), and there’s no wonder it placed so high on this list. Horror parody was always going to be a doozy for Landis, given that he’d previously made such classic funnies as ‘The Kentucky Fried Movie’, ‘Animal House’ and ‘The Blues Brothers’ – but there’s no doubt that ‘American Werewolf’ is his crowning achievement.
15. Carrie (1976)
Dir Brian De Palma (Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving)
She wasn’t the favourite to play ‘creepy Carrie’, but it’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Sissy Spacek (looking like she’s stepped into the ‘70s from another time altogether) in the role. Stephen King got the idea for the novel, his first, in the girls’ locker room of a college where he was working as a caretaker. Teenage girls can be pure evil and it’s in a locker room that we meet Carrie, who’s just had her first period and is being told to ‘plug it up!’ by the mean girls. Carrie’s secret is that she has telekinetic powers, which are about to wreak an apocalypse at the school prom. As for the pig’s blood scene, it doesn’t matter how many times you watch it, you’re willing that bucket not to drop. Spacek gamely offered to be covered in real pig’s blood, but in the end was drenched with a mix of syrup and food colouring.
14. The Innocents (1961)
Dir Jack Clayton (Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave, Pamela Franklin)
It has been pipped to the honour of best British horror (only just, mind) by ‘Don’t Look Now’. But ‘The Innocents’ has still got friends in high places. Martin Scorsese called it ‘beautifully crafted and acted, immaculately shot…and very scary.’ The story is adapted from Henry James’s 1898 novella ‘The Turn of the Screw’. Deborah Kerr plays governess Miss Giddens, employed to look after the orphaned niece and nephew of a wealthy man (Michael Redgrave). The children behave like little angels. But why has Miles been expelled from boarding school for being a bad influence? Miss Giddens becomes convinces that the children are possessed by the spirits of dead lovers, the former governess, Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop), and ex valet Quint (Peter Wyngarde). Are they? Or are these the fantasies of a never-been-kissed governess? Films rarely pull off the ambiguous ending anything like as satisfyingly. Little wonder Truffaut called it ‘the best English film’ after Hitchcock left for America.
13. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Dir George A Romero (Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Marilyn Eastman)
Modern horror cinema started here. Romero’s low-budget nightmare movie blazed a trail for all those to follow, including Wes Craven (‘The Last House on the Left’), David Cronenberg (‘Shivers’), Tobe Hooper (‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’) and Sam Raimi (‘The Evil Dead’). With its radically subversive approach to generic conventions, uncompromisingly nihilistic social vision and Vietnam War-inspired political anger, this groundbreaking zombie movie broke the rules and trampled on taboos. Holed up in an isolated farmhouse, Barbara and a small group of fellow survivors are besieged by an ever-swelling tide of shambling undead flesheaters, whose dietary habits are portrayed in gory, visceral detail. Romero later expanded his apocalyptic world view with ‘Dawn’, ‘Day’ and ‘Land of the Dead’; but these sequels never matched the gut-wrenching, nerve-shredding intensity of this game-changing début.
12. Don't Look Now (1973)
Dir Nicolas Roeg (Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie)
It’s the flirtation with the supernatural and, of course, that startling ending (when the mysterious little figure in the red coat finally – outrageously – shows its true face) that have propelled Nicolas Roeg’s ghostly, beautifully photographed and tenderly acted adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s short story to a place so high on this list. But however much Roeg leans on signs and suggestions of occult behaviour, the real horror of his film is the deeply felt horror of grief and how it warps our perceptions of the world. It’s there from the very beginning when Donald Sutherland discovers his young daughter drowned in a lake in his garden, and it’s there as Sutherland and his wife (Julie Christie) travel to Venice and try to keep even a loose grip on life and their relationship. Disturbing and brilliant.
11. Jaws (1975)
Dir Steven Spielberg (Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss)
It starts like any other let’s-get-it-on teen movie, at a late night beach party. Boy meets girl. They slink off to skinny dip. She runs ahead, throwing off her clothes, splashing into the water... only to be pulled under screaming. Welcome to the tourist island of Amity. ‘Jaws’ broke box office records, but the production had been such a disaster the crew renamed it ‘Flaws’. The shark looked fake, the effects were terrible. Spielberg made a virtue out of necessity in the edit, switching the focus to the actors’ reactions: most chillingly after the shark strikes on a crowded beach. Parents have scooped up their children, all but one mother, a look of blind terror on her face. For some cinema lovers, the biggest horror story of all is that with his game-changing big hit, Spielberg inadvertently invented the popcorn blockbuster.
10. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Dir George A Romero (Ken Foree, Gaylen Ross, David Emge)
Now that’s he’s become a one-man zombie factory (with steeply diminishing returns), it’s hard to remember that George Romero was, at first, dubious about the idea of making a sequel to his 1969 game-changer ‘Night of the Living Dead’. But with his most personal project (and, perhaps, his masterpiece), ‘Martin’ (see No. 87), failing miserably at the box office, Romero decided to bite the bullet – and reinvigorated his career in the process. Though ‘Night’ changed the face of horror, this is the film he’ll be remembered for: the wildest, most deliriously exciting zombie flick of them all, and the movie which pretty much defines the concept of socially aware, politically astute horror cinema. Its influence has been felt in every zombie film since (and even on TV in ‘The Walking Dead’), and it remains a near-flawless piece of fist-pumping ultraviolence.
9. Suspiria (1976)
Dir Dario Argento (Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci)
Its violent set-pieces staged with baroque extremity and heightened further by Goblin’s clamorous prog rock score, ‘Suspiria’ influenced directors from John Carpenter through to Darren Aronofsky, whose ‘Black Swan’ explicitly references Argento’s first fully fledged horror film. American dance student Harper’s arrival at a German ballet school coincides with a shocking double murder. Amid a hothouse atmosphere of adolescent hysteria, hints of occultism give way to the revelation that the school’s tutors are part of an ancient witch’s coven. By using colour filters and forced lighting, the Mario Bava-influenced Argento pushed the artificiality of the old fashioned Technicolor stock to extremes, creating a cinema of pure visual and aural sensation.
8. Halloween (1978)
Dir John Carpenter (Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis)
John Carpenter doesn’t put a foot wrong in this seminal hack ’n’ slasher. From the opening scene of young psycho-in-the-making Michael Myers greeting his parents with bloodied knife in hand to his inevitable return to wreak more havoc a decade later, ‘Halloween’ ticks every box. The opening sequence is a masterclass in how to unsettle nerves. Utilising the then new Steadycam system, Carpenter was able to give us a perspective from the killer’s point of view. To say it ups the creepiness to new heights is an understatement – it’s watch-from-behind-the-sofa terrifying. But Carpenter didn’t stop there: making full use of his musical talents, he also wrote the main theme, an ‘Exorcist’-style piano ditty that sets the teeth on edge. For me, this is unquestionably the most visceral, terrifying and tense film in this poll.
7. Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Dir Roman Polanski (Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon)
It’s hard enough moving into a flat and trying to start a family without having to wrestle with the enveloping suspicion that your new neighbours might be satanists dead-set on parenting a demon child via you. This is the intelligent, subtle face of horror, as Polanski limits the specifics to a minimum and keeps us guessing as to how much is going on merely in the mind of Mia Farrow’s character as she comes to believe she’s been impregnated by a creepy bunch of well-to-do Manhattanites with a connection to the occult. There are some more explicit key scenes – a potential nighttime rape and a chilling climax – that serve to get right under our skin without making the whole premise seem ridiculous. Farrow and Cassavetes’s performances as a couple disintegrating serve Polanski well in his attempt to make the potential alienation of everyday family life feel horrific, and the faux-naive score, evoking lullabies, makes the whole affair feel doubly creepy in the most heady way possible.
6. The Thing (1982)
Dir John Carpenter (Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley)
Time travel has many enticing possibilities, but one of the most enjoyable would be to travel back to 1982 and tell John Carpenter that his new movie would someday score sixth place in a list of the 100 best horror movies – even beating his own iconic ‘Halloween’. Like many future horror classics, ‘The Thing’ was hated on first release, dismissed as an ‘Alien’ clone more interested in pushing the boundaries of SFX than in character or tension. It was a disastrous flop, and threatened Carpenter’s once unassailable reputation as the king of the new horror. It’s hard to imagine now: with the benefit of hindsight (and, more importantly, repeat viewings), ‘The Thing’ has emerged as one of our most potent modern terrors, combining the icy-cold chill of suspicion and uncertainty with those magnificently imaginative, pre-CG effects blowouts.
5. Alien (1979)
Dir Ridley Scott (Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm)
‘Nothing happens for 45 minutes,’ a studio boss sniped to Ridley Scott about ‘Alien’, failing monumentally to get that its opening is menacing as hell. Aboard the commercial spaceship Nostromo, the crew answers a distress signal from a nearby planet. That it’s so natural – they drink coffee, bitch about overtime – only adds to the suspense. Of course, we’re all waiting for the ‘chestburster’, who makes his entrance at around the one-hour mark. Scott filmed the scene in one take, not telling his cast exactly what to expect as John Hurt thrashed about on the table, convulsing in spasms, about to give birth to HR Giger’s infant alien creation. ‘Alien’ had been pitched to the studio as ‘“Jaws” in Space’. Later writer Dan O’Bannon openly admitted, ‘I didn’t steal “Alien” from anybody. I stole it from everybody!’. Horror films have been paying ‘Alien’ the same compliment ever since.
4. Psycho (1960)
Dir Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh)
Alfred Hitchcock was a restless innovator, and ‘Psycho’ gnawed at the edges of taste and decency by being way ahead of its time: the combination of the film’s independent, criminal and sexually forthright young blonde (Leigh), its slasher scenes and its lone male perpetrator (Perkins), crazed and motivated by a disturbing family background, gave the film a modernity that sets it apart from most of Hitchcock’s films both before and after. ‘Psycho’ deserves a place so high on this list for its influence alone: its legendary shower scene still shocks, but at the time such brutal bloodletting, albeit suggested via the trickery of Hitchcock’s camera and editing and the power of Bernard Herrmann’s score, was groundbreaking and immediately copied. ‘Psycho’ kickstarted a shift in the appetite of mainstream audiences for experiencing the extreme and inspired other filmmakers to exploit gore with less high-minded motivations ever since.
3. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Dir Tobe Hooper (Gunnar Hansen, Marilyn Burns)
There are horror films which bend the boundaries of the genre, which deal with the psychological, the suggested or the subtly thematic – and then there are the sheer, in-your-face, terrifying horrors which threaten to drain your body of sweat and lock your jaw shut forever. This is one of the latter. There have been sequels and remakes and plenty of pretenders looking to steal the film’s terrifying demonisation of those strange folk who live in the woods with a link to the local abattoir, but this is where it began. Its methods are basic: innocent kids (a guy in a wheelchair! A blonde girl!), a creepy house in the forest, nighttime chases through the trees, the sound of the chainsaw, the killer’s mask… This is high-energy peril, right up until the frenzied final scene on the road as dawn arrives. Simple and sick.
2. The Shining (1980)
Dir Stanley Kubrick (Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall)
The scariest moments in ‘The Shining’ are so iconic they’ve become in-jokes: Jack Nicholson leering psychotically from posters on the walls of student bedrooms everywhere... ‘Here’s Johnny’. Even so, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of execution and claustrophobia still retains the power to frighten audiences out of their wits. Nicholson is Jack Torrance, a writer working as a caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains over winter. Stephen King, on whose novel the film was based, was famously unimpressed. The problem, he said, was that ghost-sceptic Kubrick was ‘a man who thinks too much and feels too little’. He resented Kubrick for stripping out the supernatural elements of his story. Torrance is not tortured by ghosts but by inadequacy and alcoholism. And for many, it’s as a study of insanity and failure that makes ‘The Shining’ so chilling.
1. The Exorcist (1973)
Dir William Friedkin (Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow)
By the ’70s, horror had divided into two camps: on one hand, there were the ‘real life’ terrors of ‘Psycho’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead’, films that brought horror into the realm of the everyday, making it all the more shocking. On the other, there were the more outrageous dream-horrors popular in Europe, the work of Hammer Studios in the UK and Mario Bava and Dario Argento in Italy, films that prized artistry, oddity and explicit gore over narrative logic. The first film to attempt to bring the two together was ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, but Polanski’s heart clearly belonged to the surreal. The first to achieve that blend with absolute certainty was ‘The Exorcist’ – which perhaps explains its position as the unassailable winner of this poll.
In cutting from the clanging bazaars of Iraq to the quiet streets of Georgetown, in blending dizzying dream sequences with starkly believable human drama, Friedkin created a horror movie like no other – both brutal and beautiful, artful and exploitative, exploring wacked-out religious concepts with the clinical precision of an agnostic scientist. And make no mistake: whatever its creator may say, ‘The Exorcist’ is most definitely a horror film: though it may be filled with rigorously examined ideas and wonderfully observed character moments, its primary concern is with shocking, scaring and, yes, horrifying its audience out of their wits – does mainstream cinema contain a more upsetting image than the crucifix scene? That it still succeeds, almost four decades later, is testament to Friedkin’s remarkable vision.
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What are some of your favorite horror films? Anything they left off?