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In regards to why the zombies feed on brains, there is an official explanation is a quote from Return of the Living Dead’s writer and director, Dan O’Bannon, who suggested that the undead felt the need to feed on the brains of the recently living because it somehow made them feel better by easing their pain.
Night of Living Dead (1968, directed by George A. ...
62
The movie Event Horizon (1997) features a crew investigating the return of an experimental FTL ship. The original crew used an artificial black hole as part of their drive tech, and went crazy when they crossed the event horizon, cueing much clawing of eyes from sockets and eating of flesh.
Some of the original crew experiences are accessed & shown as ...
39
"Not of this Earth" (1957)
Roger Corman's 1957 film included, among other things, a flying alien shaped like a lampshade that lands on Dr. Rochelle's head and kills him, with blood pooling out. A fuller synopsis may be found on Wikipedia.
34
The Shadow of Chikara (1977)
Two former Confederate captains set-out to recover diamonds hidden in the mountains of Arkansas but a native spirit named Chikara is said to protect the sacred mountains against intruders.
The review at Moria Reviews gives a bit more of a description:
At the end of the American Civil War, the dying Virgil Cane tells ...
34
I believe you are looking for the SCP Foundation stories.
Operating clandestine and worldwide, the Foundation operates beyond jurisdiction, empowered and entrusted by every major national government with the task of containing anomalous objects, entities, and phenomena. These anomalies pose a significant threat to global security by threatening either ...
31
Fantasy story circa 60s
"Pig", a 1959 short story by Roald Dahl, has its own Wikipedia page.
The boy's parents die when he is a baby
Thus, when he was no more than twelve days old, little Lexington became an orphan.
and he is raised by his vegetarian grandmother in an isolated rural setting.
She was his great-aunt:
And thus it was that the infant ...
27
It sounds like The Brothers Grimm:
The scene below specifically has a boy being eaten by a horse. NSFW (obviously)
27
I think this might be Charles Stross's "A Colder War", available to read linked from Wikipedia and the author's website.
The main viewpoint character, Roger Jourgensen, is a CIA analyst who writes up a report on the state of both the U.S. and Soviet governments' occult research for incoming President Ronald Reagan. This report attracts the ...
24
This sounds very much like "A Walk in the Dark" by Arthur C. Clarke.
It's not written in the first-person, but the third-person perspective includes the protagonist's thoughts. Robert Armstrong is on a planet on the edge of the galaxy, stuck between "Camp IV" and "Port Sanderson" when his tractor breaks down. Since it's only four miles to Port Sanderson, he ...
23
Could this be the low-budget B-movie "Star Wars"?
In a scene near the start, several people on a spaceship are attacked by a large cyborg. Several of the crew then use an escape pod.
23
Pretty sure this is Teenage Monster (1958).
In a 19th century town in the American Southwest, young Charlie Cannon sees a meteorite crash in the desert. While exploring the crash site, he is exposed to mysterious rays emanating from the meteorite that cause him to begin aging rapidly. His mother, a gold prospector named Ruth, hides him and the town believes ...
22
It's The Spider by Hans Heinz Ewers. I read it in an anthology called The Weird edited by Anne and Jeff Vandermeer.
22
This sounds like Species. About 35 minutes into the movie, there is a scene quite similar to what you have described.
The alien substance in the Species scene I am thinking of is not really spiky. I would have described it as more goo-like or visceral. However, maybe you have misremembered slightly.
Species is a 1995 movie, so slightly earlier than what ...
22
"Soft" by F. Paul Wilson
Can be found in a number of horror fantasy anthologies, including Masques and Soft and Others. See the link above for a full list of places the story has been published.
I was lying on the floor watching TV and exercising what was left of my legs when the newscaster’s jaw collapsed. He was right in the middle of the usual plea ...
22
The Taste of Starlight by John R. Fultz, published in the Lightspeed: Year One magazine in 2011.
You can read the full story here, but here's a brief summary from fullofwords.com:
The Taste of Starlight tells the story of a doctor on a seven-year interstellar mission to a far-off colony. A systems malfunction causes his cryopod to open early, and he ...
21
This is probably The Faculty. From the Wikipedia summary:
Casey returns to the gym, where Marybeth reveals herself to be the queen, having faked taking the test earlier. She attacks Stokes, who is stunned at the revelation. Casey and Stokes flee to the swimming pool where Stokes is injured and infected. Zeke and Casey go to the locker room, where Marybeth ...
21
This is "Swarm" by Bruce Sterling, a story set in the Schismatrix universe. It was published first in 1982, in the April edition of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel, a shaper (one of the two factions in the Schismatrix universe, the other being the mechanists) arrives on an asteroid, where another shaper, Galina ...
21
This is almost certainly one of the Phantasm movies. The thing you describe is called a Sentinel. The sentinels are usually silver spheres that fly through the air, approach the head of a person, then two prongs come out to stick into the front of the forehead. Then the drill comes out and drills through the front of the forehead, actively pumping out blood ...
21
Feels like The Langoliers from a Stephen King Book
On a red eye flight to Boston from LA 10 people wake up to a shock.
All the passengers and crew have vanished. When they try to contact
the ground they make no connections. They land the plane only to
discover that things haven't changed. But its like the world is dead.
No one is there, the air is ...
20
This sounds like Leviathan to me a 1989 deep sea mining horror movie.
Underwater deep-sea miners encounter a Soviet wreck and bring back a dangerous cargo to their base on the ocean floor with horrifying results. The crew of the mining base must fight to survive against a genetic mutation that hunts them down one by one.
The alien/creature came from a ...
19
I found it. Shadowzone, from 1990. I kept looking for 80s movies but was just short, lol. It did have an underground lab and alternate dimensions, but it wasn't hibernation or cryogenics but experiments in deep sleep conciousness that caused the rifts.
19
I think the story is "Gray Matter" By Stephen King. It was published in Night Shift in 1978.
From Wikipedia
The story, told from the perspective of an older "local" man, begins as he is sitting around at a convenience store with a group of his friends during a heavy snowstorm. A young boy runs in, deathly afraid. The men recognize him as ...
19
This sounds like "Bulk Food", a short story by Peter Watts and Laurie Channer, first published in On Spec in 1999. Watts indeed has a PhD in zoology, and worked at UBC's Marine Mammal Unit. The story is set in a near-future world in which humans have learned to communicate with killer whales, an event called "The Breakthrough".
The ...
18
It's not from a movie, but rather from a haunted house created for 2011 Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood, go to around 3:08 in this video:
(found it by doing a reverse image search on the gif along with the search term "movie", which took me to this metafilter thread where someone identified it)
18
Episode of The Outer Limits entitled "Production and Decay of Strange Particles".
Researchers wearing hazmat suits perform experiments in nuclear physics. They inadvertently create a nuclear life form. It invades the hazmat suits, filling them with lightning and enslaving the researchers.
Episode is apparently loosely based on Edmond Hamilton's short story ...
18
This sounds like the famous "tree rape scene" from the 1981 film The Evil Dead. It was the first of the trilogy of humorous horror films made directed by Sam Raimi and starring Bruce Campbell as Ash.
17
This sounds like Demon Seed, a novel by Dean Koontz made into a movie of the same name.
17
This has to be the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton!
The sprawling narrative deals with a far future where humanity wages war against past souls flooding back into the land of the living via possession (Al Capone and Fletcher Christian are among the returnees). Hamilton's future is expansive and primarily optimistic, with huge sentient space-...
17
This is The Faculty (1998).
The film features a prominent American football scene
And you get to see the brain slugs entering someone and taking them over on multiple occasions (warning: NSFW - gory)
16
That is probably Prince of Darkness from John Carpenter.
IMDB article: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093777/
Alice Cooper had a short appearance in the film.
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