All this stuff was either foundational to my interest in the hobby, or it's something that gets my imagination going. It's stuff that I love, and with any luck this list will keep growing.
Books/Short Stories:
- The Art of the Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Game (Weis, 1985)
- The Slithering Shadow (Howard, 1933)
- The Tower of the Elephant (Howard, 1933)
- Rogues in the House (Howard, 1934)
- At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft, 1936)
- Red Nails (Howard, 1936)
- The Hobbit (Tolkien, 1937)
- The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1954)
- Dune (Herbert, 1965)
- Blood Meridian (McCarthy, 1985)
- House of Leaves (Danielewski, 2000)
- Southern Reach Trilogy (VanderMeer, 2014)
- The Fungus (Knight, 1985) (this one is, objectively, pretty bad)
Movies/Shows:
- Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
- The Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa, 1958)
- Yojimbo (Kurosawa, 1961)
- Sanjuro (Kurosawa, 1962)
- Jason and the Argonauts (Chaffey, 1963)
- Lord of the Flies (Brook, 1963)
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone, 1966)
- The Hourglass Sanitorium (Has, 1973)
- The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
- Sorcerer (Friedkin, 1977)
- Phantasm (Coscarelli, 1978)
- Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)
- Clash of the Titans (Davis, 1981)
- Dragonslayer (Robbins, 1981)
- Heavy Metal (Potterton, 1981)
- The Keep (Mann, 1983)
- Conan the Destroyer (Fleischer, 1984)
- The Black Cauldron (Rich, Berman, 1985)
- The Goonies (Donner, 1985)
- Red Sonja (Fleischer, 1985)
- Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
- Big Trouble in Little China (Carpenter, 1986)
- Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988)
- Willow (Howard, 1988)
- Army of Darkness (Raimi, 1992)
- Captain Ron (Eberhardt, 1992)
- Cabin Boy (Resnick, 1994)
- The Descent (Marshall, 2005)
- Old Joy (Reichardt, 2007)
- House of the Devil (West, 2009)
- Valhalla Rising (Refn, 2010)
- A Field in England (Wheatley, 2013)
- As Above, So Below (Dowdle, 2014)
- The Hateful Eight (Tarantino, 2015)
- Don't Breathe (Álvarez, 2016)
- The Void (Gillespie, Kostanski, 2017)
- Annihilation (Garland, 2018)
- The Terror (Multiple, 2018)
- Us (Peele, 2019)
- Green Knight (Lowery, 2021)
- Barbarian (Cregger, 2022)
- The Northman (Eggers, 2022)
- Scavengers Reign (Bennett, Huettner, 2023)
- Delicious in Dungeon (Miyajima, 2024)
- The Company of Wolves (Jordan, 1984)
Games:
- Zork Trilogy (Infocom, 1980-82)
- Enchanter Trilogy (Infocom, 1983-85)
- Wishbringer (Infocom, 1985)
- Beyond Zork (Infocom, 1987) I learned to read to play Infocom games.
- The Lurking Horror (Infocom, 1987)
- Quake (id Software, 1996)
- Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996)
- Everquest (Verant Interactive, 1999)
- Silent Hill (Konami, 1999)