True confession: when celebrity deaths come in threes, as with Ingmar Bergman, Bill Walsh, and Tom Snyder yesterday, I like to imagine the deceased shooting each other in a three-way standoff, like at the end of Reservoir Dogs.

I’m sure much will be written this week about the moral seriousness and stark aesthetic of Bergman’s work, but I’ve always considered him, in addition, to be one of the most effective directors of horror movies ever to sit behind the camera. His movies absolutely terrify Mindy–she won’t watch them. I’m not talking about existential horror either, dull Calvinist angst about an absent God or whatever. I mean real, visceral, shrink-back-in-your-seat horror.

Anybody’s who seen Hour of the Wolf knows Bergman can do horror, and trivia buffs might recall that Wes Craven’s first film, The Last House on the Left, is a remake of Bergman’s medieval revenge fable The Virgin Spring. But, in fact, nearly all of Bergman’s great films use horror tropes in chilling and unforgettable ways.

Wild Strawberries is usually remembered as stodgy and cerebral, but what about that overwrought dream sequence at the beginning, with the thumping heartbeat and the empty streets and the overturned coffin? It even ends with a kind of zombie attack. (I bet this is the only Bergman obit to use the phrase “zombie attack,” unless that turns out–in a shocking twist!–to be the great man’s cause of death.)

Cries and Whispers has another oppressively eerie zombie scene that makes me think Stanley Kubrick saw it a few times before he made The Shining. Even Fanny and Alexander, which everyone seems to think of as a cozy childhood memoir, has all that craziness in the creepy puppet-shop.

Now that he’s gone, it’s inevitable that Bergman will be reappraised, and I bet at some point he’ll get back the hipster cachet he had from the mid-1950s up through the mid-’70s. But, frankly, I’d rather see him re-appraised not alongside Dreyer and Tarkovsky, but with Hitchcock and John Carpenter and Sam Raimi. He was one of the greatest, and most underrated, scaremeisters in film history.