So, suffice it to say, I loves me some horror movies. If you don't, you're weird. Thanks to Netflix Instant Stream, I've been watching a lot of shitty horror movies, and I got the idea to write up my top ten favorite horror movies. These aren't necessarily the best horror movies ever made, but my personal top ten, and really, that's all that should matter to you. As far as criteria, I'm avoiding any sci-fi horror, like Alien, and also drama with horror elements like The Silence of the Lambs and Seven (sorry, I'm just not comfortable with typing SE7EN as a movie title). If I were opening it up a bit, the three movies listed above would surely make the list - in the future, I'm going to do a list of favorite movie characters of all-time, and rest assured, Buffalo Bill/Jamie Gumm will make the list - as would Zodiac, but this isn't really a list about heady drama. I'm keeping it to strictly genre efforts.
Without further ado... A list completely unimportant to the world at large:
I like Rob Zombie. I like his music, and I appreciate his cinematic enterprises. But I love The Devil's Rejects. I remember seeing Zombie in concert when I was 16, and he showed a video of House of 1,000 Corpses whilst playing the song of the same name. I was in awe of the gore in the clip. I couldn't wait to see the movie whenever it was finally released. Then I saw it. And it was a pile of shit. It didn't make any sense, and the acting was so campy that I just couldn't get into the movie at all. And Dwight K. Schrute was turned into a merman. And a hulking Terminator-looking thing went apeshit for a while. And Chris Hardwick - from MTV's Singled Out show (a personal fav when I was a kid... whatever) gets killed. So, when I saw the trailer for a sequel, I rolled my eyes and figured that Zombie was a helluva musician/performer, but he just didn't get film. But a weird thing happened: the reviews were all pretty glowing, so I sacked up, and saw the movie in theaters.
It was one of the most disturbing mainstream movies I'd ever seen, and some of the sequences were a tad hard to watch, not because of the violent content, but because of the violent subtext; this family of misfits raised the question of nurture - could you grow up in a murderous household and not be a murderer? Could you also, while heinously murdering innocent coeds, develop a lot of love and attachment to human life? Zombie focused on those questions in this creepy flick, and the answers aren't easy to digest. Do you feel bad for Otis and Baby, because this is what they've been made, or do you hate them because this is what they've always been? There is also an interesting subplot concerning vengeance, in which the protagonists (or is it antagonists? Zombie, you heady bastard, you!) are tortured by a cop-gone-rogue. Zombie does what so many smart horror movies do - they ask you questions you're afraid to ask yourself, but it doesn't provide you with any answers. Oh yeah, and it's creepy as hell, too.
I always saw this movie case at the video store growing up, but never really gave it the time of day, because it looked so fucking weird. Finally, I relented when I learned what it was about: a pathetic mama's boy who tries to take care of his zombified mother after she's bitten by a Sumatran Rat Monkey. Peter Jackson directed this oddity before he hit paydirt with his Lord of the Rings opus, and his trademark off-kilter sense of humor really shines, especially during a dinner table scene in which two zombies kinda-sorta start fooling around with one another. At the time of it's creation, it was the bloodiest movie of all-time, and it shows. It's still incredible, given the financial constraints, what the film does, and the low budget even plays to the film's strengths. With a big studio backing it, there is just no way that Jackson could have gotten away with all of the crap he does here. It's an insane movie, and I have a hard time finding the words to due it justice. So, I'll just go with this:
The climax involves a whole helluva lot of zombies and a lawnmower. 'Nuff said.
8.) Texas Chainsaw MassacreI'll never forget the first time I saw this movie. I was 15, and it was a Friday night. My parents were out of town, and I decided to stay up all night and watch this creepy flick, and the Evil Dead trilogy. After watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I shrugged and thought to myself, 'I don't see what all the fuss is about.' Then, I got the stupid idea to set up our old computer in my room so I could "write a screenplay." So, I headed down to my basement and started rummaging around in the back room for our old Compaq that operated on MS-DOS. While I was down in the basement, I heard a weird noise, and I looked into the dark shadows and got supremely freaked out. I don't know why, but I pictured Leatherface's fat ass running straight at me, and I ran upstairs as quick as I could, then tried to watch Evil Dead and get the image of a disgusting Leatherface out of my head.
Very few movies have ever actually scared the shit out of me, and this is one of them. I didn't think so at the time, but just a while after it ended, the movie snuck up on me, and burrowed it's way into my psyche. After seeing the movie so many times now, I feel that it's due to it's amateurish direction from Tobe Hooper, as it looks more like a documentary than a feature film. I mean that as a compliment, as the lack of a legitimate score makes the murders even more creepy, as the screams from the victims aren't hidden behind anything. It's just screaming, and while I can understand that it gets old after a while, it's also very creepy, as Leatherface hangs some unsuspecting girl on a meat hook. And the dinner table scene? I don't know if I've ever seen anything quite so demented in my entire life. This movie was ahead of it's time in so many ways, and it is still influential in cinema today (look two spots up to see a great imitator...). Any time a movie can creep me out - even the 15 year old version of me - I've got to pay respect to that. And Texas Chainsaw Massacre scared me more than just about any other horror movie I've ever seen.
7.) Dawn of the DeadZombies, like Hansel from Zoolander, are sooo hot right now. They have reached a new level of popularity in our culture, thanks to the TV show The Walking Dead, and weird parody books like The Zombie Survival Guide and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But - and this is where I show how dorky I am - I have loved zombies for about as long as I can remember. The primary reason is because of George Romero, who was at one time an amazing storyteller and also the creator of the zombie genre. As I mentioned above, great horror movies ask us interesting questions, and Romero went through a phase in his film career when all the questions he asked us were in the form of zombie stories. Great horror movies use their stories as subversion, as a way of saying more about our lives than we sometimes think they're capable of. Dawn of the Dead is just such a flick.
The movie starts off with a scene in a ghetto apartment complex, and Romero quickly shines a light on race issues in the '70's - you know, post-Civil Rights when everything was supposed to be equal - and he heavy-handedly hammers home the point of the separation between social classes. It's a startling reintroduction into the zombie landscape he created with Night of the Living Dead ten years earlier, and he doesn't let up. A few survivors eventually make their way to a shopping mall, and Romero shifts his focus away from race relations to humanity's obsession with consumerism. It's all great stuff, an amazing blend of horror and social issues. The climax is absolutely stunning, as the survivors are put into harm's way not from the hordes of undead outside the mall, but rather fellow survivors; this serves to show that humanity's worst enemy is, more often than not, humanity itself. So much has been said about this classic that I don't think I can say much else without stepping on someone else's toes, who have said it much better than I could ever hope. Either way, this is a perennial Halloween experience for me, and it's one that I will always hold dearly to my heart.
6.) A Nightmare on Elm StreetOkay, so not all horror movies are required to have some sort of genius subtext. Sometimes they just have to be fucking creepy. And there have been very few characters created in film over the last 30 years than Freddy Krueger. Sure, he quickly devolved into a catchphrase-spouting caricature, but when he first appeared? He was one creepy mother-shut-yo-mouth. Freddy Krueger was a child molester who was burned to death, only to come back somehow to haunt his murderer's children in their dreams.
Wes Craven created Krueger, and wisely chose to present him as a nightmarish boogeyman, an individual who tormented his victims when they were their most vulnerable - while they were sleeping. Krueger's home - sleepytime - is something that is unavoidable, and is a universal fear. How many times have you wondered whether or not you could die in a dream, and then die in real life? I know it's been at least once.
Then there are the death scenes, which are forever stuck in my mind - there's the scene when Johnny Depp is swallowed by his bed, and a geyser of blood explodes from it, the scene with John Cusack's ex-girlfriend from Better Off Dead, in which she is flung around a bedroom... It's all so creepy and just-on-the-edge-of-impossible that it sticks with you. And I haven't even mentioned the scene in which Nancy is sleeping and Krueger emerges from the wall to observe her. It's a shame that Krueger devolved into such an unmenacing individual, and it's even more shameful that the remake last year was a huge pile of shit. But we'll always have this baby to look back to.
I wondered for a few moments what constituted horror movies, and I wondered if a lot of humor would disqualify any movies that I would choose. But then I decided to do whatever I wanted, as I knew my editor (me) wouldn't give a hoot. So there was really no way in hell that From Dusk 'Till Dawn wouldn't make it. I watched his movie every day during the summer of 1996, and I have a feeling that it is one of the primary reasons I am the way I am today. It's directed by Robert Rodriguez, with a script from Quentin Tarantino. Really, what's not to love? Oh yeah, it also has some of the best dialogue in a movie ever, up to (but definitely not including), "Everybody be cool. You be cool," "Come on, Sex Machine!" "All right vampire killers... Let's kill some fucking vampires," and a monologue that uses the word "pussy" roughly 287 times in thirty seconds.
The movie is just incredibly ridiculous, and the plot can be succinctly summed up: a pair of criminals and their hostages hang out in a Mexican strip club for the night, but it turns out that the strip club is operated by vampires. That's basically it, and it is supremely amazing. The set pieces include horribly humorous special effects, and a Mexican bar band whose instruments are made of human body parts(!) - words really can't capture the insanity on display here, and as the years roll on, I find myself loving this flick more and more. The flick served as an introduction of sorts to Tarantino, and it features George Clooney before he was, y'know, George Clooney. There's nothing about this movie I don't love, and that even includes Juliette "Is-She-Actually-Kinda-Retarded?" Lewis.
This movie is just genius. It really is. There's no other way to truly describe the flick, and to do so would be an insult to the movie itself. Horror was in such a sad state in the mid-90's - maybe as bad as the current horror genre is - that it desperately needed some sort of shot in the arm. Well, Wes Craven thankfully decided that the only way to fix an ailing genre was to completely turn it around. He decided to create a horror movie that was self-aware; it's characters knew the ridiculousness inherent in slasher-flicks, and they were aware of the "rules": Don't say shit like, "I'll be right back," don't have sex if you want to survive, and always be prepared for "one last scare." Scream was my first introduction to post-modernism (I have since fell in love with the literary genre), and also a neat bit of meta-fiction. It certainly didn't hurt that it was funny as hell, too.
But it would all be for naught if it wasn't at least, a little bit, scary. The opening scene certainly succeeds at that, with Drew Barrymore answering her telephone unsuspectingly (I sure hope she sends Craven an awesome Christmas Card every year for salvaging her career), only to have the person on the other end of the phone be a twisted maniac obsessed with horror movies.
What follows is a brisk tale that involves more than a couple high schoolers skewered and disemboweled by a weirdo in a Ghostface mask. Sure, the sequels ("These days, ya gotta have a sequel!") met with varying degrees of success - Scream 2 and Scream 4 were both pretty great, but Scream 3 made me want to dig out my own eyeballs - but this movie reinvented the horror genre for a whole new generation, and it made sure that it would never be the same again. It's just a shame that someone, somewhere, got the stupid idea to remake a bunch of Japanese horror movies into absolute shit, and someone else got the stupid idea to start the Saw franchise. While Scream's success has largely been forgotten now thanks to PG-13 crapfests and torture porn, I'll never forget this masterpiece for what it was - a smart, funny, and pretty damn scary horror movie.
Anybody living outside of Haiti had no idea what a zombie was in 1968. Sure, I'm being hyperbolic, but it's pretty true - outside of Haitians, zombies were largely unknown. Until George Romero showed up. And the zombies he created weren't like the hypnotized zombies in Haitian lore; these things were recently-deceased flesh-eaters who could only be put down by effectively destroying the brain. Romero will never, ever, ever, ever be forgotten for creating the zombie subgenre, and even though it's been 43 years since he started it all, nobody has ever come close to making a better zombie movie.
I'm a fan of unknowns in horror. I don't like knowing why a serial killer is deranged and I don't like knowing why zombies are walking the Earth. It's unimportant exposition. It's scarier not knowing. And Romero uses that to his advantage, not ever letting us know why the dead have risen and are now munching on brains. Instead, he focuses on a select group of survivors - surprisingly led by a black man - who take refuge in a farm house while the dead try to break their way inside. Early on, Romero unleashes a standard zombie-flick trope, that is still used heavily today - it's not really the zombies we need to worry about, it's the fellow survivors. People are capable of a lot of dastardly shit, and when the dead rise up, well, you can only expect the bad apples to turn really rotten. The subtext of having a black man as the de facto "leader" of the survivors takes on incredible power at the end of the film, as Romero basically asks the audience, "Can even the apocalypse get people to stop acting like dickheads?" with the obvious answer, "Nope."
I firmly believe that Night of the Living Dead was a product of it's time. It was made in 1968, right near the end of the Hippie movement. Individualism was a very important aspect of counter-culture society, and Night of the Living Dead was made for the counter-culture. For individualists, the zombie hordes becomes the most menacing thing imaginable - a group of hundreds of individuals all exactly the same, with the exact same thing on their minds (BRAINS!!!) trying to "recruit" you to be just like them. I am of the mind that all zombie movies are ultimately about society at large trying to subvert you into becoming just like them, and it all started thanks to Romero and his crazy ideas about some flesh-eating weirdos.
Any movie that single-handedly creates a genre of film which features copious amounts of fornication, big-breasted coeds, and psychotic masked men on the hunt of blood is certainly a flick that I'm going to be a fan of. My love of zombie movies has been well-documented thus far, but the slasher genre has got to be a close second. There's a really good chance that, if not for zombie movies and slashers, I would have spent my time growing up playing varsity sports, hooking up with hot babes at discos, and getting voted "Most Likely to Have Three Children by Graduation" by my classmates. Good thing that didn't happen! Instead, my weekends were dominated with trips to video stores and watching stupid teenagers get all sortsa murdered by psychopaths in hockey masks and such. The probability of me siring illegitimate children stayed at a healthy .0078% thanks to slasher flicks, and that can only be a good thing, right? So what if it also kept the possibility of me ever seeing a naked woman in reality at the same low odds?
The first, and best, slasher ever is still one of my favorite movies of all-time. Everyone knows who Michael Meyers, the crazed psychopath from Halloween, is. He's a voiceless, faceless being who murdered his sister at a young age, and then escaped from an insane asylum years later to return home. I don't love this movie because of some intelligent subtext, or the high-class of acting; nope, I love it because it is about nothing more than a crazed psycho stalking teenagers and killing them. A lot of critics hold this from being a masterpiece because of how it treats the teenagers - as oversexed dullards who lack the most common of senses. That, ladies and germs, is why I love the damn thing so much. Without Halloween, who knows if I ever would have been able to experience great cinematic moments like a big-tittied blonde running naked through the woods, or a teenage girl being slammed against a tree in a sleeping bag by Jason Voorhees? While the Friday the 13th series arguably perfected the slasher genre (no movie franchise ever did a better job of exploiting teenage girls in death scenes), Halloween gave birth to it all, and for that it will always have a spot in my heart.
The best part of it all, of course, is Michael himself. Nobody knows why he's evil. Nobody knows why he wants to stab a dork dressed as a ghost to the wall and then wear the ghost costume to go kill the naked girl upstairs. Nobody knows why he wants to eviscerate Jamie Lee Curtis. And nobody cares. He's got one goal, and one goal only. And sometimes, that's all you need in a horror movie, so long as it's done well. Also, the movie has one of the best theme songs of all time, competing with The Exorcist for esteemed title of "This-Song-Makes-Me-Want-to-Shit-My-Pants." Like so many other great horror franchises, the story of Michael Meyers quickly went to hell (and not the scary one, the stupid, un-fun one) with horrendous sequels that don't add anything of consequence. Of course, the franchise was remade a few years ago (by Rob Zombie), and while the remake - and the sequel - wasn't hugely disappointing (I actually quite enjoyed them, but I'm a sucker for horror, after all), nothing can compete with the original.
This wasn't even a debate.
What do you get when you mix vampires, an amusement park, a greased-up saxophonist, the Coreys, and a kick-ass soundtrack (Cry Little Sister still rocks)? You get The Lost Boys. Of course, The Lost Boys could never have been made in another decade - it is certainly an '80's movie, but that is one of the reasons it is so awesome. It features ageless bad-ass vampires who sleep all day and party all night (in addition to drinking blood, of course) dressed up as punk-rockers and have an underground lair with a giant Jim Morrison poster. Please tell me how I'm not supposed to love this movie?
And I haven't even gotten to the cast yet. There's Jason Patric (at his most devilishly handsome) as Michael, the new guy in town who accidentally becomes a kinda-sorta vampire by trying to fit in with the cool crowd. There's Corey Haim as his dorky little brother with an obsession with comic books (sounds like me...) and an awesome dog named Nanook. There's Kiefer Sutherland as David, the uber-cool vampire. There's Jamie Gertz as the smokin-hot Star, who Michael wants to bone (and, as an aside, she served as my first ever real-girl crush, taking the torch from the animated April O'Neil). There's Corey Feldmann as one half of the Frog Brothers, dudes who run a comic book store and moonlight as vampire hunters(!). The movie has a cast to kill for, as seemingly everybody in the damn movie has met with some sort of fame. Even the dude who's not Ted from the Bill and Ted series of movies is in it (his name is Alex Winter, but I figured nobody knows his real name but me), and the grandpa from Blossom. I'm sure there have been better casts in movies before and since, but there is something unavoidably cool about this cast, and it makes the movie all the more enjoyable. I'm sure that when the film went into production, Charlie Sheen was snorting a line of coke off of a prostitute's hindquarters and was cursing Joel Schumacher for not including him in this masterpiece.
The movie isn't really "scary," but it counts as horror because of the subject matter. Mostly, it's just super-cool and fun. There's only one real scene that counts as "creepy," and that includes Chinese food, worms, and maggots. There's also a decently cool scene that involves a Buff Bagwell-type and his lady friend (who is reading a "Sad Sack" comic book) getting the roof of their car ripped off, then being pulled into the dark night sky, but nothing that will keep you up at night. The scene in which Bill from Bill and Ted gets killed garners the most suspense, but again, you're not going to have nightmares over these vampires. Maybe sex-fantasies, but that's it. Now, these vampires aren't pussified like the Twilight douches - they don't glisten like diamonds, don't look like they have irritable bowels, and actually kill people - but they're not overly scary in presentation.
Just watch the fucking movie.
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