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.

[MarkL]

This was not a movie but who remembers Night Stalker, the made for tv movie. That was suspenseful and scary.

It was a movie, and later a TV series, starring Darren McGavin, the father from "A Christmas Story."

Mark

[backhoe]

The Black Cat (1934)
... finally in RKO producer Val Lewton's The Body Snatcher (1945) with Karloff in a ... combined
Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat, but Ruric's ...
www.filmsite.org/blac.html - 28k - Nov 22, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages

[DTA]

THE DEVIL IN WHITE HOUSE

Directed by: George Soros
Starring:Hitlery Clinton

Music score: Barbra Straisand

This is so scarry, you get chills even without the movie being made.

[SuzanneWeeks]

well I was LOL


Suz

[JusPasenThru]

I haven't read all the threads yet, so I might have missed this one. The Chorus Line was one of the most frightening movies I'd ever seen, especially when Cary the dancer says, just when you think the movie is mercifully coming to an end, "Can I say one more thing....?"

[Billthedrill]

Oh, I'd forgotten that one. Let's Scare Jessica To Death is one of the creepiest movies I've ever seen. The last scene in the rowboat with only her eyes showing - if I'da been there my eyes would have been right next to hers. Brrrr!

Other favorites - The Last Man On Earth scared me so badly I had to leave the theater (at 10). Alien and The Exorcist, of course. The Legend of Hell House was particularly atmospheric, and Roddy McDowell was scary as all git out. I still like to watch that near Halloween.

But my all-time favorite - not because it's scary, just my favorite - is Theater of Blood. You get to see Vincent Price and Diana Rigg (yum!) do Shakespeare and some of the most hysterically funny murders on screen. Totally over the top, and it looked like a blast for the actors to make. Robert Morley being force-fed poodle stew through a funnel...whoa...

[rightinthemiddle]

You're right. But it gave me an excuse to bring her up.

[pro libertate]

One more. There is a movie called, "The Town that Dreaded Sundown." It's based on a true story of a hooded killer who went on a killing spree in Texarkana, Arkansas post WWII. I was watching this late one night when I still lived with my parents. After it was over I could see a white hooded figure on our deck through the curtains. It turned out that my mom had a sheet hanging out there to dry and forgot about it.

The movie itself is actually pretty good, but I'll always remember it for what happened afterward.

[rightinthemiddle]

I also posted Jeepers Creepers.

I don't even like horror films...can't get into them. But, for a movie with a teens in trouble storyline, the demon character in Jeepers Creepers is scary.

Not so scary the second time around.

Forgot to mention The Omen.

[stbdside]

"Beast from Haunted Cave" - had the ugliest, creepiest looking monster, a cobweb covered spider-like thing.

[raygun]

Its good, but I think its way over-rated. I thought the prequel to Silence of the Lambs (Manhunter - based on the novel The Red Dragon) was much much better.

[raygun]

"I'll close my eyes and make you go away."

[mict42]

Aliens

[MayflowerMadam]

The Exorcist. Left me sleepless for a solid week. While growing up, friends and family who were foreign missionaries told stories of their dealings with demon possession on the mission field. Seeing it up close and personal on the big screen was just too scary for words!

[Squantos]

Awww come on them lil sarcastic robots are funny !

[BobS]

Hellraiser II - Hellbound

[libertylass]

John: Sorry I'm late getting to this post, but it depends on what kind of horror flicks you like. I'm a lover of scary, haunted house, types of films so "The Changeling" with George C. Scott is my all time favorite. The Exorcist terrified me when I saw it at the ripe old age of 21 in 1975. I still have a hard time watching that one.

http://www.cinemusic.net/reviews/2002/changeling.html

Another great thriller is "The identity" which is from last year I believe. More of a "who's doin' it, keep ya' guessing" type of movie with a group of folks that were drawn to an out of the way motel in Nevada during a flood. Very good actually.

And of course "The Entity", from the 70's, is a great incubus/demon ghost story. This actually happened to a woman in San Pedro, California, not far from where I live. I have the true documentary of her ordeal.

Last, but surely not least, is a documentary off of Discovery or A&E called "A Haunting in Connecticut" and another called "A haunting in Georgia." Both very good and VERY frightening.

Hope this helps. I think I'll pull out my old VHS videos this long weekend.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING FOLKS. BE SAFE.

[Darkwolf377]

"My point was. How many farms have you ever seen without at least a shotgun? Rabid animals and other critters are not persuaded by strong language."

Considering they had spaceships the size of football fields I think antagonizing them with a shotgun would have resulted in the aliens just landing on the farmhouse and squishing them all--THE END!

Second. The aliens are killed by water? So they land on a planet 3/4 covered with the stuff? They run around at night across lawns? What's on a lawn in the early morning? Dew? What's dew? Water?"

Consider the size of space. Consider that after being fought off with water, the aliens pack up and take off. Consider they didn't have suits to protect them from water. Obvious conclusion: This is a space-going race that needed food, so they stopped at the most likely local source, and NOT some invasion force heading to Earth particularly. That source was not going to be a perfect source of food, but they obviously nEEDED to grab people for food, and then when they were fought off they went away (the end implies the aliens were gone for good).

Consider that if the human race were to travel the stars and ran out of supplies, they couldn't simply turn around and go home--they'd have to go to the planet closest to them that had SOMEthing they could use for sustencance.

And seeing how any human could be killed by several inches of water in the bathtub, saying they wouldn't come here because water is deadly to them means we should all be packing and heading off, eh? No--like the aliens, we simply stay away from harmful contact with water.

"All the TV coverage is the Mexico situation? There's ships over DC and new York and CNN covers Mexico? The secret to killing them is discovered by the Arabs?"

Uh...yeah. I don't get your point--the secret to stopping them MUST be an American?

It was a silly movie.

Whatever, it was a SciFi Twilight Zone type movie--i.e. the science fictional elements were not there to explore such issues but as a set-up for a moral battle. Just as the Twilight Zone episodes were all about karma, this was about playing out the battle between belief and faith, coincidence and purpose. I don't think the director was trying to convince us that this is what a real alien would be like, he was using everything to add to his main point. And in this day and age, a scifi movie about faith in God isn't silly, not to me, at least.

[justshutupandtakeit]

The Exoricist for me. My buddy claims he wasn't frightened as much by the body of the movie as he was by the hospital scenes when they are examining the little girl.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Freeper vs. Zombie I'll take the Freeper.