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.
You may not get much repeat business, but you never heard any complaints.
(Sorry, just channeled Vincent Price for a moment.)
'The Man From Hope'
My dad lived through those battles in northern France (not DDay though), and carried shrapnel in his back for the rest of his life. I guess I just connect too much with the picture...
Yeah, I bought 2 dvd's. One for me and one for our son. He's a Marine in Iraq. They watch dvd's on a laptop and he requested a copy because his sand buddies had never seen it.
The scene where Janet Liegh finds Norman's mother's skeleton in the basement is one of the scariest images on film. Anthony Perkins was wonderfully creepy as Norman, and the final shot of him a tthe end, where his mother's personality has taken over completely, and he's just sitting there, staring straight ahead...nobody did suspense like Hitchcock.
I liked "Coma" too. There's another movie called "Targets" that was made by Peter Bagadonovich back in the late 60's, it was about a kid who shoots at people on the freeway with a rifle. Vincent Price had a cameo as an aging horror film star.
Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein
I can't remember the name of it, but it was on when I was a kid. It had Tom Tryon in it, I think, and was about these pods that took over people. That was back when Michael Landon was in "Tom Dooley" and they fixed little plastic dinosaurs in poses and made movies of them fighting each other - scary though not horror - I can't remember the name of the dinosaur movie either.
Two on a Guillotine--With Vincent Price 1964 I think...truly scary, I had to sleep with my arms over my head so they wouldn't be able to put my head thru that hole...
The Haunting--the original B&W version...my brother, Dad and I all wound up in the Parents bedroom to finish watching it. The door bending scene and the hand thru the wall....wooooooo
Amityville Horror--no explanation needed
Taking Lives--On DVD, recent one with Angelina Jolie, first time I actually "yelled loudly" according to my wife...
G
Close. Good FX. But then, I wasn't sitting right in the front row in a theatre with a 40 foot tall screen when I saw "Poltergeist" like I was when I first saw "Alien".
Another movie that did me in but good was a British film made in the early to mid 80's called "Threads". It was about nuclear war and its devastating after-effects going several years after the event. Not so much creepy or gory, but just an overwhelming sense of dread and hopelessness.
"Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" was one that I awoke to playing in the middle of the night on Halloween when I was about 8 or 9 years old and had to watch. Too scary for me to turn away and too scary to let me go back to sleep. I rented it a few years ago and found it incredibly cheesy, with its hippy protagonists and all.
"Alien" has been talked to death here, but deserves another mention.
And rather strange perhaps, but "Eyes Wide Shut" creeped me out to no end. Something about secret societies and all, plus the fact that you know every one of those idiots wearing the masks voted for Clinton.
The Haunting is my all time fav too.
As for favorite horror film, it depends. For scariest, it's a tossup between The Exorcist and Alien. If it's just a little scary, Poltergeist is very good. If it's on MST3K, The Brain That Wouldn't Die was Mike Nelson's debut, and that is probably the funniest one they ever did.
Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and FilmTales of horror, so popular in modern literature and film, originated in the sexual decadence unleashed by the French Revolution. In a compelling new study of horror from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to modern Hollywood, one of America's most original critics shows that the moral order, when suppressed, reasserts itself as an avenging monster in the midst of the chaos and suffering of cultural revolution.
As the Age of Reason gave way to the Terror, not only in Paris but in Mary Shelley's own life, the first monster of the modern imagination was born. Like much of the English literary class, Shelley's family-including her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her husband, Percy-had embraced the French Enlightenment, throwing off old restraints on sexuality. The result of their ruinous dissipation was Frankenstein, in which Shelley's monster rises in repudiation of the very rationalism that produced it.
The next monster to appear as moral decay spread from revolutionary France was the vampire, Frankenstein's rationalist fascination with electricity giving way to the romantic myth of blood. Jones follows the progress of horror from Victorian England and Bram Stoker's Dracula to Weimar Germany and Murnau's classic film Nosferatu. Bringing his account to the end of the twentieth century, he shows how the Western imagination has responded to the explosive force of the sexual revolution with horror of unprecedented intensity. In the Alien series and other contemporary horror films, the culture of abortion and pornography has unwittingly spawned a new and terrifying breed of avenging monster.
Tea Cups at Disney World BUMP.
Heh, heh...
This will date me, but when I was a young kid, Creature of the Black Lagoon gave me the creeps.
Later, Psycho freaked me.
Still Later, Exorcist
LOVE "The Brain that Wouldn't Die". We actually saw it pre-MST3k when we were kids.
Ha
Also some movie from my childhood that I know the name but it's escaping me at the moment.
There's a woman who has a ring that she plunges into the necks of men and drinks the "serum" to keep her youth (the ring came from Africa). She does this whenever her age begins to show. At the end she plunges the ring into a woman (the handiest person) and the "serum" has the opposite effect and ages her!
I think one of the creepiest scenes in a movie is when the dead kid was scratching at the window asking to be let in. I think that was "Salem's Lot". "Children of the Corn" was scary too. "Creep Show" had a creepy scene with cockroaches bursting out of a man. Just thinking about that one is giving me goosebumps.
I've seen a handful of slasher movies. I can't stomach them. They just seem to be pointlessly mean-spirited. "Night of the Living Dead" is the creepiest movie that I've ever seen, but it's ultimately pointless as well.
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