What's Your Favorite Horror Movie?

11.24.04 | JohnRobertson

[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.

[woofie]

The owl was scary to me

[Chad Fairbanks]

Bwaaaahahahahahaha I LOVE that movie.

[Axenolith]

How about when that damn blood lit off out of that petri dish when Russells character puts the hot wire in it!

[Chad Fairbanks]

Who?

[raygun]

Roger that: Rosemary's Baby. Eeeh-Yep.

[BJungNan]

Back to School (I hate horror movies).

[DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet]

Chad started it. : )

[Chad Fairbanks]

Suuuuure. Blame me... No, really, I mean it. Blame ME. ;0)

[MistrX]

Eraserhead is just plain weird.

[Arkinsaw]

Phantasm scared me pretty good way back when.

[ken5050]

Serious question...not to detract from some funny comments..Would you care to elaborate/expound on the definiton of the "horror " genre. I'm not that into film, per se, but it seems to me that more than half of the films listed here wouldn't be defined as "horror"..Best example is Jaws..to me, very scary film.. I saw it in Florida the weekend it opened..For the next week..nobody went in the ocean ..yet is it really a "horror" flick?

[null and void]

"The owls are not what they seem" - the Log Lady

[DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet]

I believe you meant to say, "01000010 01101100 01100001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101 00001101 00001010. ;0)"

(Okay, okay, I'll stop. LOL)

[muleskinner]

Alien...stoned...I was in shock the whole rest of the weekend.

[ezo4]

exorsist
texas chainsaw massacre (first one) (i wrote manicure at first- what the heck???)

[DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet]

Then there was "Blue Velvet". David Lynch is some kinda creepy.

[Chad Fairbanks]

I don't think "Horror" can be defined as a specific Genre, personally, as there really can't be one all-defining thing - I think "Horror" is more of an emotive thing - perhaps even primal...

But that's just me :)

[BigCinBigD]

Interesting point. Is "The Thing" horror of Si-Fi? I say Horror because of the setting. Was Star Trek First Contact a horror film? Or an Action film? Think about the plot. You have these "monsters" (Borg)killing people to possess their body's. Like Zombies only with flashing lights.

[Kommodor]

The original "War of the Worlds" made me hide in the kitchen.

I did peek around the corner occasionally, though.

I think I was all of 7-8 at the time........

The whole eye thingie coming through the house looking for the people. Ick!

[drjimmy]

I was about 9 years old and my mom and sister went to the movies to see The Sound of Music. My older brother and I weren't interested in seeing a musical, so we went to the theater next door and saw The Black Cat. Big mistake. This is an obscure mid-1960s version loosely based on the Poe story. The scene where the woman gets the axe in the forehead has stayed with me for the past four decades.

Putting Brian DePalma and Stephen King together in 1976 produced one of the great horror flicks of all time: Carrie. I think everyone in the theater went airborne out of their seats when the arm came out of the grave and grabbed Amy Irving at the end. This might have been one of the first horror films to use the "just when you think it's over" trick ending. Very effective.