EW has a list of the Scariest Films Of All Time up, and for once, I can't really find much fault with any of their choices. Classics all of them. Here's the rundown, in (seemingly) no particular order:
- The Shining
- The Exorcist
- The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
- The Silence of the Lambs
- Jaws
- Halloween
- Psycho
- Se7en
- Rosemary's Baby
- Poltergeist
- A Nightmare on Elm Street
- The Thing (1982)
- The Evil Dead
- Carrie
- Night of the Living Dead
- The Omen
- An American Werewolf In London
- Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
- The Hitcher
- Lost Highway
Now, I've never seen The Hitcher (I know... shame on me), but I've heard it's scary enough. I'm not a big fan of The Omen, but I do love the hanging-nanny bit. I'm not going to argue with Poltergeist because... clown doll... man tearing off own face... yikes... even though the film's a little too slick. And I need to see Lost Highway again, but I wasn't all that big a fan of it the one time I did.
The Blair Witch Project really should've made it, though. And Audition. And Ringu. And Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).
I can understand they're not including Requiem For A Dream since it's not really seen as a horror movie, but as I said earlier today, I don't think there's been a scarier movie made in quite some time. Just because there are no homicidal maniacs or extraterrestrial-head-spiders, doesn't mean it's not horror.
But otherwise... mostly agreement.
I'm especially happy to see Se7en included, because that's a film I remember leaving the theater after in a complete stupor. Gywneth's.... head??? Trauma. I know a lot of people disagree, but it got me, and it still does every time. I'd also argue it's the most gorgeous looking film in their list, and that that only adds to the horror of it. The lovingly detailed everything (this is a film that revels in the details - the room of air fresheners, the bucket of vomit and waste under the fat man), the gloriously slick sheen of depravity... usually I'm all about a horror film being grainy and gritty a la Texas Chainsaw or Henry, but Se7en was so slick, so pretty in its presentation of atrocities, it was chilling.
It's odd that they chose the first Evil Dead, I think that Evil Dead II is actually much better, but then Part One is more of a straightforward horror film, while the second begins to get really slapsticky. And the first one does have the fairly explicit infamous scene of rape-by-treebranch. Can't forget that!
I'm about as big a fan of Hitchcock as one gets, but I'm beginning to wonder about Psycho's eternal placement on these lists. Blasphemy, I know. It's the same with Citizen Kane on Best Movie Ever lists... the film itself has sort of been swallowed whole, devoured by the culture it spawned, and while it's hard to argue with their greatness, they're just so... a part of everything that came afterwards, they've lost some of their power. For me. I've seen Psycho sooo many times and I know it from beginning to end and everything it introduced to the genre has become so integral, it's hard to imagine anyone actually being scared by it anymore. It may just be a problem of my own perspective. But I, for one, would like to see a list without it.
You know what Hitch film still freaks me out? Frenzy. It's hateful and cruel, and filled with completely unlikable, unattractive people who do horrible things to each other. There are no fanciful motives - it's all ugliness. It's so unlike the majority of his work, it makes me uncomfortable. And unlike most people who say he'd lost his touch by the age he was when he was making it, I think he knew exactly what he was doing, which was raging. It's an angry, hateful movie, expressing his anger at the system that was abandoning him and the women who'd spurned him and anger at himself for his own inner frustrations, with his weight and his age and his sexual repression. Everything he'd once turned into visual poetry was now just eating through, leaving a nasty shell of itself behind.
- The Shining
- The Exorcist
- The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
- The Silence of the Lambs
- Jaws
- Halloween
- Psycho
- Se7en
- Rosemary's Baby
- Poltergeist
- A Nightmare on Elm Street
- The Thing (1982)
- The Evil Dead
- Carrie
- Night of the Living Dead
- The Omen
- An American Werewolf In London
- Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
- The Hitcher
- Lost Highway
Now, I've never seen The Hitcher (I know... shame on me), but I've heard it's scary enough. I'm not a big fan of The Omen, but I do love the hanging-nanny bit. I'm not going to argue with Poltergeist because... clown doll... man tearing off own face... yikes... even though the film's a little too slick. And I need to see Lost Highway again, but I wasn't all that big a fan of it the one time I did.
The Blair Witch Project really should've made it, though. And Audition. And Ringu. And Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).
I can understand they're not including Requiem For A Dream since it's not really seen as a horror movie, but as I said earlier today, I don't think there's been a scarier movie made in quite some time. Just because there are no homicidal maniacs or extraterrestrial-head-spiders, doesn't mean it's not horror.
But otherwise... mostly agreement.
I'm especially happy to see Se7en included, because that's a film I remember leaving the theater after in a complete stupor. Gywneth's.... head??? Trauma. I know a lot of people disagree, but it got me, and it still does every time. I'd also argue it's the most gorgeous looking film in their list, and that that only adds to the horror of it. The lovingly detailed everything (this is a film that revels in the details - the room of air fresheners, the bucket of vomit and waste under the fat man), the gloriously slick sheen of depravity... usually I'm all about a horror film being grainy and gritty a la Texas Chainsaw or Henry, but Se7en was so slick, so pretty in its presentation of atrocities, it was chilling.
It's odd that they chose the first Evil Dead, I think that Evil Dead II is actually much better, but then Part One is more of a straightforward horror film, while the second begins to get really slapsticky. And the first one does have the fairly explicit infamous scene of rape-by-treebranch. Can't forget that!
I'm about as big a fan of Hitchcock as one gets, but I'm beginning to wonder about Psycho's eternal placement on these lists. Blasphemy, I know. It's the same with Citizen Kane on Best Movie Ever lists... the film itself has sort of been swallowed whole, devoured by the culture it spawned, and while it's hard to argue with their greatness, they're just so... a part of everything that came afterwards, they've lost some of their power. For me. I've seen Psycho sooo many times and I know it from beginning to end and everything it introduced to the genre has become so integral, it's hard to imagine anyone actually being scared by it anymore. It may just be a problem of my own perspective. But I, for one, would like to see a list without it.
You know what Hitch film still freaks me out? Frenzy. It's hateful and cruel, and filled with completely unlikable, unattractive people who do horrible things to each other. There are no fanciful motives - it's all ugliness. It's so unlike the majority of his work, it makes me uncomfortable. And unlike most people who say he'd lost his touch by the age he was when he was making it, I think he knew exactly what he was doing, which was raging. It's an angry, hateful movie, expressing his anger at the system that was abandoning him and the women who'd spurned him and anger at himself for his own inner frustrations, with his weight and his age and his sexual repression. Everything he'd once turned into visual poetry was now just eating through, leaving a nasty shell of itself behind.
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1 comment:
Evil Dead is RIGHT!!!
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