1976 gave horror Carrie and The Omen, and those two got the box office, the awards, and the permanent place on every cult-horror list ever written. Fair enough. They earned it. But underneath them was a whole second shelf of movies that flopped, got retitled two or three times, ran afoul of somebody’s censor, or simply baffled everyone who wandered into them. Those are the ones that refused to go away. They got passed around on bootleg tapes, rescued by boutique labels with names like Mondo Macabro, and argued about by people who will absolutely corner you at a party and talk your ear off.
All five below turn 50 in 2026. One was made by a guy in his own hometown, about his hometown’s worst year, and Ryan Murphy later got his hands on it. One is a Jodie Foster performance almost nobody has seen. One is so upsetting that Spain barely knew what to do with it. And one is about worms. Let’s go.
A storm knocks power lines into wet Georgia soil. The soil is now electrified. This drives several million bloodworms into a homicidal frenzy, and they come up out of the ground to eat a small town. That is the entire movie. It is magnificent.
Director Jeff Lieberman has said the idea came out of an acid flashback, which tracks. What lifts it above its own logline is a young Rick Baker doing early creature work years before he started collecting Oscars, plus the frankly inspired decision to give the worms an audible scream. Worms do not scream. These ones do, constantly, and it is the best bad idea in 1970s horror. It later got the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, which for a movie like this is less an insult than a knighthood. Free on Tubi and Pluto TV.
A new kid arrives at a high school where three bullies run everything and decides to do something about it. Then the film turns into something much stranger than the revenge picture you signed up for, because the moment the bullies are gone, the survivors start behaving exactly like the bullies did.
Almost no adults appear on screen until the finale. That is a deliberate choice by Dutch director Rene Daalder, and it turns the whole thing into political allegory wearing a drive-in exploitation costume. Danny Peary canonized it in Cult Movies 2, it ran midnight screenings for years, and anyone who has seen Heathers will clock the DNA immediately. Daalder reportedly hated the score his producers forced on him so much that he refused to watch his own film for roughly thirty years. Free on Tubi.
An English couple holiday on a small Spanish island and find it populated entirely by children. The adults are gone. The children are not upset about this. The title is a question the film spends ninety minutes daring you to answer, and it never once lets you off the hook. Before any of the fiction begins, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador opens on an extended montage of real newsreel footage of children as casualties of twentieth century war and atrocity. It reframes everything that follows as an argument rather than a gimmick, which is why some viewers call this the most serious film on this list and others find it completely indefensible. Both camps have a point.
Serrador only ever made two features, and this was the second. It reached the US retitled Island of the Damned, presumably so audiences would think of Village of the Damned. Rent or buy on Prime Video, currently the only way to see it in the States, which is its own kind of credential.
Jodie Foster, thirteen years old, in the same year she made Taxi Driver, playing a girl living alone in a Maine house whose poet father is always upstairs and never quite available. Martin Sheen is the neighbor who keeps inventing reasons to drop by. What is in the cellar is the plot, and it is better found than explained. It premiered at Cannes in 1976 and then took its time reaching theaters, which is part of why it vanished. The other part is that nobody could agree what it was. It is barely a horror film. It is a chamber piece about a child defending her own life with whatever is in reach, and it unsettles precisely because it never raises its voice. It won Saturn Awards for Best Horror Film and Best Actress anyway.
Foster refused the brief nude scene the producers wanted. Her older sister Connie stood in, uncredited, the same way she had on Taxi Driver. Foster has said since that she fought them and lost, and that what bothered her most was knowing audiences would assume it was her. Free on Tubi.
In 1946, someone in Texarkana attacked eight people across about ten weeks and killed five of them. He wore a hood made from a sack. He was never caught. Thirty years later, Charles B. Pierce went home and made a movie about it, in Texarkana, casting around nineteen local residents, a short drive from where it actually happened.
That gives the film a flat documentary strangeness no budget could manufacture. It also produces one of the most bewildering tonal decisions in horror history, because Pierce cast himself as a bumbling comic-relief patrolman named A.C. “Sparkplug” Benson in a film about real murdered teenagers. The city threatened legal action over a poster tagline claiming the killer still walked the streets. The tagline stayed.
That sack hood also beat Jason Voorhees to the look by four years, since Friday the 13th Part 2 would not arrive until 1981. Texarkana has screened the film most years around Halloween at Spring Lake Park, near one of the murder sites, which is either a lovely local tradition or deeply unsettling depending on your relationship with your hometown.
Then in 2014, Ryan Murphy and Jason Blum produced a follow-up that is not a remake but a meta-sequel, set in a Texarkana where the 1976 film exists and a new killer starts restaging its murders. Orion Pictures came back from the dead specifically to release it. Reviews were mixed. It grossed $120,459. Somewhere in that sentence is the entire economics of horror remakes. Free on Tubi and The Roku Channel.
