Top 20 horror movies
Nov. 18th, 2017 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beer_good_foamyAfter I posted about horror movies all throughout October, shadowkat posted her list of 20 favorite horror movies. Not to be outdone, I thought I'd do the same, so here they are in no particular order.
This isn't necessarily a list of the best horror movies; there are some I think are absolute masterpieces that, for one reason or another, don't belong on my list of personal favourites, and some on this list that are definitely flawed but are close to my heart anyway. Also, I limited each director to one movie, or I could easily fill 20 spots with just Cronenberg, Romero, Raimi and Carpenter. I could probably just as easy make this a top 40 to be honest but I need to stop somewhere.
House AKA Hausu (Nobuhiku Obayashi, 1977)
Hausu is the ur-J-horror, predating Ringu by 20 years. It's also utterly, completely, wonderfully insane. Five unlikely-named girls go to the countryside to visit the aunt of one of them, and things quickly get... weird. Mere words cannot explain how weird. Look at the clip below; that's just scratching the surface. This may well be the greatest movie ever made, all categories.
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
Do I really have to explain this? The funny thing is that Alien is pretty much a straight-up remake of any number of 1950s B-movies, complete with a guy in a rubber suit playing the monster... but plays it so deadly serious, and creates such a perfect claustrophobic thriller, that it feels like an entirely new beast. The sequel is more fun, but this one single unstoppable monster is far more scary than an army of them.
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
I used to agree with Stephen King: Jack Nicholson is obviously a psycho right from the get-go, there's no question that he'll try to kill his family before it's over, so there's no tension in the movie. Then I watched it again after years of not touching it, realised I'd watched it the wrong way around, and was terrified. While King's Shining is about Jack, Kubrick's is about his son Danny, who knows from experience that his father will snap and hurt him simply for being a kid, that there is nothing he can do about it, and that he's trapped in this world he doesn't understand (all those corridors leading nowhere) with only the monster itself for protection. The Shining is a stone masterpiece.
Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008)
A woman shows up on the doorstep of a normal, middle-class family, brutally murders them all, then calls her girlfriend and tells her through tears that she's found the people who kidnapped and tortured her as a child. They go down into the basement to find evidence, and... Martyrs is almost impossibly violent, but the violence serves a purpose, picking over the idea that there is something noble and transcendent in suffering, that victimizing others can be justified. In a way, it's a dark, evil cousin of Cabin in the Woods. In every other way, it's definitely not.
Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, 1968)
I go back and forth on whether this or Dawn of the Dead is the best of Romero's movies. Right now I feel like Night; a short, sharp shock in no-budget black and white that turned everything about monster movies on its head and single-handedly invented the modern zombie movie in the process, and still works both as a horror movie and as an (unintended) political allegory 50 years on. As Roger Ebert put it at the time: "The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying."
The Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986)
Young man picks up a hitcher. Hitcher starts killing everyone they come across. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Rutger Hauer gives very good psycho, and the movie is a master class in showing just enough to make us fill in the blanks ourselves (not unlike Texas Chainsaw). Once you've seen the scene with the two trucks, you'll never again drive past a truck stop without speeding up a bit.
The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)
THE most perfectly claustrophobic movie ever made, but also a rare example of a horror movie where the characters actually feel real, where the conflicts between them feel like the ones friends develop over years and are forced out when put in an extreme situation. It's a brilliant drama - that scene of Beth telling Sarah that "the worst thing that's ever going to happen to you has already happened" gets me every time - but the setting inside a dark cave makes it almost unbearable. Just make sure to watch the British cut, that ending is heart-stopping.
Häxan AKA Witchcraft Through The Ages (Benjamin Christensen, 1922)
I love how Häxan pretends, with an absolutely straight face, to be an educational documentary on medieval superstition as an excuse to show as much depravity as was morally and cinematographically possible in 1922, with some incredible special effects for its day, and then manages to make a point at the end that still works.
The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979)
Hard to pick between all of Cronenberg's body horror movies, but this one about a man who discovers that his estranged wife is going to a mad doctor who's helping her birth murderous goblins is so full of both goo and ideas that it wins out. So 70s it hurts, but you'll never look at preschoolers in winter clothes the same way again. Why yes, Cronenberg was going through divorce and custody battle at the time, why do you ask?
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
In the VHS age, this was the non plus ultra of horror movies. Almost nobody I knew had actually seen it since it was as close to banned as was possible at the time, and whatever copies you could find were heavily censored. When I finally got to see it in full, I was first surprised by how little actual onscreen gore there is ... and then terrified by the mood it creates, that stinking sticky sweaty impossible-to-escape hellride where nobody, even the monsters, are in control. I love this movie, and I have the crossover fic to prove it.
Braindead AKA Dead Alive (Peter Jackson, 1992)
The movie that made Peter Jackson, and it's as far from the hobbit movies as you'll get. It supposedly still holds the world record for amount of fake blood used in one scene. And yet the big takeaway is how funny it is. "Your mother ATE MY DOG!?"
Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002)
I love a lot of the late 90s/early 00s J-horror (Ju-On: The Grudge and Audition in particular) but Dark Water still stands out to me (the remake less so). A divorced woman moves into the only flat she can afford with her daughter, trying desperately to make ends meet and prove herself a fit mother, but the water stain in the corner keeps growing and reality keeps getting soggier... It's scary, but it's also so very sad.
Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935)
The best sequel in movie history, compared to the original? Maybe. Frankenstein is still really good, and you can tell that the Hays Code got implemented between them, but Bride piles so much into its 75 minutes; the monster gets to be the protagonist, and we really feel for him by the time the Bride shows up... and, of course, immediately sees him as the monster he still is. Sometimes there's no good ending, but Karloff's final scene here is still incredible 82 years on. "Yes, go, you live! ...YOU stay! WE BELONG DEAD!"
Let The Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
Again, a horror movie that manages to be first and foremost a really good drama, and the fact that it's set in a very social realist version of the Sweden I grew up in just makes it worse. Yes, it's a monster movie (vampires are monsters; they make monster movies about them), but it's also about two kids clinging to each other in a world where they're left to fend for themselves as best they can. Plus, it's just beautiful.
Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
The most classic of the horror movies Val Lewton produced in the mid-40s before his all-too-early death. Some parts of Cat People haven't aged well, but the way the entire movie is centered around society's condemnation of female sexuality, and the way Tourneur keeps building suspense without showing anything, make it both still relevant and, if not still terrifying, then at least spooky and kinda beautiful.
The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
Is this even a horror movie? I'm not entirely sure. But the ending definitely is, and I do love endings that rip out the rug from under both the viewers' and the characters' feet and show that they've been in the wrong story the whole time, even though it tells us everything up front. The horror setting here just seems so fun, so damn pastoral, until you get to the ending and you're forced to decide which side is actually justified, and if it even matters. Just avoid the horrendous remake and you'll be fine.
King Kong (Merian Coooper & Ernest Schoedsack, 1933)
Yes, it plays on some pretty racist tropes, but I still love the clash between the monster horror story - the way Kong simply eats people, whether they deserve it or not - and the way the movie calls out the assholes who decide to capture, display and kill him for profit without caring who gets hurt (quick, name the hero of the movie? Thought not, but you remember Kong). Four remakes and counting, nobody's come close to the original.
Return of the Living Dead (Dan O'Bannon, 1985)
It's gory, it's hilarious, it's rock'n'roll, it's exactly what you'd expect a zombie movie set among 80s LA punks to be. Return is the forerunner to most of the horror comedies of the 80s and 90s, up to and including Buffy (the movie AND the TV series). If you've ever wondered why zombies eat brains, this is why. All together now: "SEND MORE COPS!"
The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981)
Like Night of the Living Dead and Braindead, proof that all you need to revolutionize the horror business is a camera, a house in the middle of nowhere, and a bunch of nobodies willing to work without union supervision (at one point, Bruce Campbell literally fires a shotgun with live ammunition at the hand-held camera). I love all three (four if you count the TV series) installments, but the original is still my favourite.
In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter, 1994)
Yes, I pick this over both The Thing and Halloween, even though both are probably better movies. But no one's captured Lovecraft better than Carpenter does here, and the latter half of the movie where Sam Neill's character gradually descends into a pure nightmare, and it becomes impossible to tell where the character's madness ends and the "real" world of the movie begins, is truly unnerving.
shadowkat posted her list of 20 favorite horror movies. Not to be outdone, I thought I'd do the same, so here they are in no particular order.This isn't necessarily a list of the best horror movies; there are some I think are absolute masterpieces that, for one reason or another, don't belong on my list of personal favourites, and some on this list that are definitely flawed but are close to my heart anyway. Also, I limited each director to one movie, or I could easily fill 20 spots with just Cronenberg, Romero, Raimi and Carpenter. I could probably just as easy make this a top 40 to be honest but I need to stop somewhere.
House AKA Hausu (Nobuhiku Obayashi, 1977)
Hausu is the ur-J-horror, predating Ringu by 20 years. It's also utterly, completely, wonderfully insane. Five unlikely-named girls go to the countryside to visit the aunt of one of them, and things quickly get... weird. Mere words cannot explain how weird. Look at the clip below; that's just scratching the surface. This may well be the greatest movie ever made, all categories.
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
Do I really have to explain this? The funny thing is that Alien is pretty much a straight-up remake of any number of 1950s B-movies, complete with a guy in a rubber suit playing the monster... but plays it so deadly serious, and creates such a perfect claustrophobic thriller, that it feels like an entirely new beast. The sequel is more fun, but this one single unstoppable monster is far more scary than an army of them.
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
I used to agree with Stephen King: Jack Nicholson is obviously a psycho right from the get-go, there's no question that he'll try to kill his family before it's over, so there's no tension in the movie. Then I watched it again after years of not touching it, realised I'd watched it the wrong way around, and was terrified. While King's Shining is about Jack, Kubrick's is about his son Danny, who knows from experience that his father will snap and hurt him simply for being a kid, that there is nothing he can do about it, and that he's trapped in this world he doesn't understand (all those corridors leading nowhere) with only the monster itself for protection. The Shining is a stone masterpiece.
Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008)
A woman shows up on the doorstep of a normal, middle-class family, brutally murders them all, then calls her girlfriend and tells her through tears that she's found the people who kidnapped and tortured her as a child. They go down into the basement to find evidence, and... Martyrs is almost impossibly violent, but the violence serves a purpose, picking over the idea that there is something noble and transcendent in suffering, that victimizing others can be justified. In a way, it's a dark, evil cousin of Cabin in the Woods. In every other way, it's definitely not.
Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, 1968)
I go back and forth on whether this or Dawn of the Dead is the best of Romero's movies. Right now I feel like Night; a short, sharp shock in no-budget black and white that turned everything about monster movies on its head and single-handedly invented the modern zombie movie in the process, and still works both as a horror movie and as an (unintended) political allegory 50 years on. As Roger Ebert put it at the time: "The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying."
The Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986)
Young man picks up a hitcher. Hitcher starts killing everyone they come across. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Rutger Hauer gives very good psycho, and the movie is a master class in showing just enough to make us fill in the blanks ourselves (not unlike Texas Chainsaw). Once you've seen the scene with the two trucks, you'll never again drive past a truck stop without speeding up a bit.
The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)
THE most perfectly claustrophobic movie ever made, but also a rare example of a horror movie where the characters actually feel real, where the conflicts between them feel like the ones friends develop over years and are forced out when put in an extreme situation. It's a brilliant drama - that scene of Beth telling Sarah that "the worst thing that's ever going to happen to you has already happened" gets me every time - but the setting inside a dark cave makes it almost unbearable. Just make sure to watch the British cut, that ending is heart-stopping.
Häxan AKA Witchcraft Through The Ages (Benjamin Christensen, 1922)
I love how Häxan pretends, with an absolutely straight face, to be an educational documentary on medieval superstition as an excuse to show as much depravity as was morally and cinematographically possible in 1922, with some incredible special effects for its day, and then manages to make a point at the end that still works.
The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979)
Hard to pick between all of Cronenberg's body horror movies, but this one about a man who discovers that his estranged wife is going to a mad doctor who's helping her birth murderous goblins is so full of both goo and ideas that it wins out. So 70s it hurts, but you'll never look at preschoolers in winter clothes the same way again. Why yes, Cronenberg was going through divorce and custody battle at the time, why do you ask?
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
In the VHS age, this was the non plus ultra of horror movies. Almost nobody I knew had actually seen it since it was as close to banned as was possible at the time, and whatever copies you could find were heavily censored. When I finally got to see it in full, I was first surprised by how little actual onscreen gore there is ... and then terrified by the mood it creates, that stinking sticky sweaty impossible-to-escape hellride where nobody, even the monsters, are in control. I love this movie, and I have the crossover fic to prove it.
Braindead AKA Dead Alive (Peter Jackson, 1992)
The movie that made Peter Jackson, and it's as far from the hobbit movies as you'll get. It supposedly still holds the world record for amount of fake blood used in one scene. And yet the big takeaway is how funny it is. "Your mother ATE MY DOG!?"
Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002)
I love a lot of the late 90s/early 00s J-horror (Ju-On: The Grudge and Audition in particular) but Dark Water still stands out to me (the remake less so). A divorced woman moves into the only flat she can afford with her daughter, trying desperately to make ends meet and prove herself a fit mother, but the water stain in the corner keeps growing and reality keeps getting soggier... It's scary, but it's also so very sad.
Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935)
The best sequel in movie history, compared to the original? Maybe. Frankenstein is still really good, and you can tell that the Hays Code got implemented between them, but Bride piles so much into its 75 minutes; the monster gets to be the protagonist, and we really feel for him by the time the Bride shows up... and, of course, immediately sees him as the monster he still is. Sometimes there's no good ending, but Karloff's final scene here is still incredible 82 years on. "Yes, go, you live! ...YOU stay! WE BELONG DEAD!"
Let The Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
Again, a horror movie that manages to be first and foremost a really good drama, and the fact that it's set in a very social realist version of the Sweden I grew up in just makes it worse. Yes, it's a monster movie (vampires are monsters; they make monster movies about them), but it's also about two kids clinging to each other in a world where they're left to fend for themselves as best they can. Plus, it's just beautiful.
Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
The most classic of the horror movies Val Lewton produced in the mid-40s before his all-too-early death. Some parts of Cat People haven't aged well, but the way the entire movie is centered around society's condemnation of female sexuality, and the way Tourneur keeps building suspense without showing anything, make it both still relevant and, if not still terrifying, then at least spooky and kinda beautiful.
The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
Is this even a horror movie? I'm not entirely sure. But the ending definitely is, and I do love endings that rip out the rug from under both the viewers' and the characters' feet and show that they've been in the wrong story the whole time, even though it tells us everything up front. The horror setting here just seems so fun, so damn pastoral, until you get to the ending and you're forced to decide which side is actually justified, and if it even matters. Just avoid the horrendous remake and you'll be fine.
King Kong (Merian Coooper & Ernest Schoedsack, 1933)
Yes, it plays on some pretty racist tropes, but I still love the clash between the monster horror story - the way Kong simply eats people, whether they deserve it or not - and the way the movie calls out the assholes who decide to capture, display and kill him for profit without caring who gets hurt (quick, name the hero of the movie? Thought not, but you remember Kong). Four remakes and counting, nobody's come close to the original.
Return of the Living Dead (Dan O'Bannon, 1985)
It's gory, it's hilarious, it's rock'n'roll, it's exactly what you'd expect a zombie movie set among 80s LA punks to be. Return is the forerunner to most of the horror comedies of the 80s and 90s, up to and including Buffy (the movie AND the TV series). If you've ever wondered why zombies eat brains, this is why. All together now: "SEND MORE COPS!"
The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981)
Like Night of the Living Dead and Braindead, proof that all you need to revolutionize the horror business is a camera, a house in the middle of nowhere, and a bunch of nobodies willing to work without union supervision (at one point, Bruce Campbell literally fires a shotgun with live ammunition at the hand-held camera). I love all three (four if you count the TV series) installments, but the original is still my favourite.
In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter, 1994)
Yes, I pick this over both The Thing and Halloween, even though both are probably better movies. But no one's captured Lovecraft better than Carpenter does here, and the latter half of the movie where Sam Neill's character gradually descends into a pure nightmare, and it becomes impossible to tell where the character's madness ends and the "real" world of the movie begins, is truly unnerving.
