8. The Amityville Horror (1979)
Driven by a marketing campaign playing up its supposedly truthful bona fides, this haunted house tale became a significant leftfield success during the post-The Exorcist horror boom of the late ‘70s. Based on the book by Jay Anson, it depicts the supernatural harassment experienced by the Lutz family upon moving into an old house in Long Island that had previously been the site of a grisly mass murder. Of course, critics have long dismissed Anson’s book as a hoax, but that didn’t stop the movie from becoming a horror classic, spinning off numerous lesser sequels and inspiring a 2005 remake from Michael Bay.