Posted on 11/23/2004 9:31:31 PM PST by John Robertson
What's your favorite horror movie...and why? What fried your hair, and still makes it jump if you get a little too tired and you remember a sequence or two from something that scared the stuff out of you.
I've always dismissed horror movies as a waste of time, but the older I get, the more I realize they must serve some function--some cathartic function--because they are an enduring genre, and each generation likes to find its own favorite scary movies. Heard a commentator saying the other day, the reason the country is so preoccuppied with horror films right now is, it's a horror we can "handle," versus the real, terrorist kind of horror.
The Fog was a good one. Scary, and it had Jamie Lee Curtis (who I'm not-so-secretly in love with).
Salem's Lot (1st minieries) was scary.
The Night Stalker (Darren McGavin) was good, too.
Blasphemy! Say no more, purge these thoughts from your mind and re-watch it! ;-)
I'm just kidding. But I do think Alien is a masterpiece. Saw it last year in a theatre. It was the first time I had seen it, and I thought it was amazing.
Anyway, I'm not well caught up in my horror films. "Suspiria" is very, very scary. The original "Vanishing" (the Dutch version, not the American remake) isn't so terrifying as it is unsettling. It all seems so real, and the ending is just a knockout. It's not a twist, just one of the most mentally disturbing endings I've ever watched.
The scariest movies I ever saw wered documentaries..."The Exorcist" and "Devils Advocate". For suspense that scared me was De Niro in "Cape Fear"..."Look at us councelor, 2 lawyers just working it out."
My dad told me that when he was a kid he went to see the original silent Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney, Sr. Scared the pants off him so much he remembers it to this day.
Not a movie per se but the episode of twilight zone where the little girl was lost in a dimensional hole in the wall behind her bed..... I couldn't sleep for weeks after that. have not enjoyed Horror flicks since.....albeit those SciFi Theater 2K Robots are my favorites for the funny horror/sci fi oldies !
Little Girl Lost - 3/16/62
A girl falls through a portal in her bedroom wall and into another dimension. Her father has a pshysicist friend who finds the portal, the father enters the closing portal and pulls her back out in time.
I love Creature from the black Lagoon (my 6 year old girls like the "pretty lady").
Blair Witch Project was great. I think you need to have spent a few nights out in the woods alone to truly appreciate it.
As for what defines something as horror, well, it's hard to say. Consider The Silence of the Lambs. It is essentially a mystery and a very dark drama, and yet the mere presence of Hannibal Lecter qualifies it as a horror film in many eyes.
Another example is Psycho. All the characters are human, but it's never called anything but a horror film.
These two films feature no supernatual qualities. And even though other films that are more obviously horror have human villains who aren't supernaturally or demoniacally influenced, Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter, behind all their disturbed, murderous actions, exude human qualities towards some choice people they meet in their films. So what makes them horror? I guess, like any other horror villain, they are unpredictable. You have no idea what they'll do next, and you can only sit and meet your fate. That differentiates them from a psycho in a typical thriller, and perhaps makes them more disturbing. They are up close and personal, you actually know them as characters, and they do things that, well, horror villains do.
Pet Semetary.
Rosemary's Baby still gives me the creeps.
Any devil movie gives me the creeps.
Carpenter's "Thing" was more faithful to the story than the 1951 original, and I think both should be remade. The 1951 version was scarier to me. I have it on DVD and, along with "Them!" and the 1954 "War of the Worlds" watch it to death.
Anyhow, both films intentionally satirize the mid-sixties culture of hipness, and both star a nerdy type guy who gets his revenge on all the cool types who make his life miserable. And, to me, both are a howl, not scary but fun to watch over and over.
Paying ten bucks to see a movie and it ends fifteen minutes in isn't my idea of a good time...plus there were more where he came from.
Jennifer Eight.
Glad you answered him - methinks he missed the point of the movie.
I don't understand why people hate it either. It was a really good flick. Humorous, sad, suspenseful, and a good message.
Alien and I particularly liked the scene of Sigourney Weaver climbing into that deep sleep thing at the end of the movie. Man, was she hot in those days.....
Exactly. That's why I found it scary, OOH, when she crawled out of the TV...
The Excorsist was my all time scariest movie. Still won't watch it and will flip off the TV when they even run commercials. At the time it came out I was 20. I quit listening to the radio, especially at night to avoid hearing that damn Tubular Bells song that was in it that the radio's played all the time.
I just don't care for anything about demon possision.
Becky
There was one scene in this old haunted English house nestled on the white cliffs of Dover where the door to living room suddenly flew open and a faint mist floated in. This was all before big time special effects, and this was a black and white movie, too.
I'll never forget that scene because I was in the neighborhood theater with my mother, and we both screamed and hugged each other.
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