50 Best Horror Films

Inspired by Johnny Bacardi (and also because lists are easy and fun and tend to generate a lot of comments), I'm going to take a stab (HA!) at the 50 Best Horror Films list that's been going around.

Let me say right off the bat: I think the list, which comes from a Metro.co.uk poll, is questionable. Saw, the fifth best horror film ever? Kindly remove your heads from your asses, good sirs and madames of Metro.co.uk.

But as many omissions and odd rankings as there are on this list, there are also a lot of good choices. I love horror, and I love lists, and I love bolding the items I have seen/heard/read/consumed on any given list, so here we go!

1.The Exorcist. William Friedkin (1973)
2.The Shining. Stanley Kubrick (1980)
3.Alien. Ridley Scott (1979)
4.The Silence of the Lambs. Jonathan Demme (1991)
5.Saw. James Wan (2004)
6.Halloween. John Carpenter (1978)
7.A Nightmare on Elm Street. Wes Craven (1984)
8.Ring (Ringu). Hideo Nakata (1998)
As Johnny B. did, I have to insert the caveat that I've only seen the American version. He didn't count it, but I am! Close enough, says I! Ha! Take that, purists!
9.The Wicker Man. Robin Hardy (1973)
10.The Omen. Richard Donner (1976)
11.The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock (1963)
12.The Thing. John Carpenter (1982)
13.Lost Boys. Joel Schumacher (1987)
14.Dawn of the Dead. George A Romero (1978)
15.The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Tobe Hooper (1974)
16.Jaws. Steven Spielberg (1975)
17.The Blair Witch Project. Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez (1999)
18.An American Werewolf in London. John Landis (1981)
19.Se7en. David Fincher (1995)
20.Poltergeist. Tobe Hooper (1982)
21.The Amityville Horror. Stuart Rosenberg (1979)
Wow, all the way to 21 before we get to a film I haven't seen! And it's a surprising one -- to me, at least. I was going to bold it before I actually stopped and thought about it. Somehow, I never have seen this one. Weird. I will, though, I will: late '70s - early '80s is my favorite era of horror films.
22.Candyman. Bernard Rose (1992)
23.Scream. Wes Craven (1996)
24.Carrie. Brian De Palma (1976)
25.Friday the 13th. Sean S Cunningham (1980)
26.Final Destination. James Wong (2000)
27.The Evil Dead. Sam Raimi (1981)
28.Hellraiser. Clive Barker (1987)
29.Hostel. Eli Roth (2005)
30.Salem's Lot. Mikael Salomon (2004)
Oops. I was counting this one at first, thinking it was the 1979 Tobe Hooper version. But no, it's the recent Rob Lowe version. Dang!
31.The Descent. Neil Marshall (2005)
32.The Hills Have Eyes. Wes Craven (1977)
33.Wolf Creek. Greg McLean (2005)
I started watching this one on cable a while ago, and got bored and changed channels. I guess all the good stuff takes a while to get to.
34.Misery. Rob Reiner (1991)
35.Rosemary's Baby. Roman Polanski (1968)
36.Child's Play. Tom Holland (1989)
37.The Orphanage. Juan Antonio Bayona (2008)
I've heard of this film recently, and that it's supposed to be scary as hell. It's going on Netflix!
38.The Entity. Sidney J Furie (1981)
I almost forgot I had seen this movie. This is the one where Barbara Hershey gets felt up by a ghost, right?
39.Nosferatu. FW Murnau (1922)
40.Night of the Living Dead. George A. Romero (1968)
41.House on Haunted Hill. William Malone (2000)
42.The Haunting. Robert Wise (1963)
I watched part of it on Turner Classic Movies the week of Halloween. Still haven't seen all of it, but I liked what I did see.
43.It. Tommy Lee Wallace (1990)
Great book, but that mini-series looked cheesy as hell. Was it actually any good?
44.Audition. Takashi Miike (1999)
Amazingly, still haven't seen it! Must correct that.
45.The Changeling. Peter Medak (1980)
46.The Mist. Frank Darabont (2008)
And wow, that's five in a row I haven't seen. I'm a little surprised and disappointed in myself.
47.Suspiria. Dario Argento (1977)
48.The Vanishing. George Sluizer (1993)
I know that I have to see this one. Just haven't gotten to it yet.
49.Shutter. Masayuki Ochiai (2008)
Never even heard of this one. And it stars Joshua Jackson? Wait, are they fucking with me? They're fucking with me. This can't actually be any good, can it?
50.Planet Terror. Robert Rodriguez (2007)

So that's 39 I've seen on this list. (Okay, 38 if you want to disqualify the Ring remake.) Not bad!

So what's missing that should be on here? Johnny B. suggested Bride of Frankenstein, which is a big yes. How about any of the classic Universal horror pictures? And why The Birds but not Psycho? I might throw in a couple more zombie flicks, like 28 Days Later or Shaun of the Dead. Oh, and I'd swap Evil Dead with Evil Dead 2. What else? Maybe Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer? Last House on the Left? Re-Animator? And where the hell is Cronenberg's The Fly? Or Peter Jackson's Dead Alive?

Anything else I'm missing? Or do you just want to brag that you've seen more than I have? Comment away!

Herschell Gordon Lewis double feature

Late Halloween night Turner Classic Movies ran the two earliest "gore" films from Herschell Gordon Lewis, which I TiVoed. I've seen a couple of Lewis's films, but never these: Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!. I finally got around to watching them yesterday. Well, not watching so much as fast forwarding to the gruesome parts.

Blood Feast, the first and most infamous of Lewis's gorefests, is about an Egyptian caterer who hacks off an assortment of body parts from various women so that he can eat them and make sacrifice to his Egyptian goddess... well, something like that. The script doesn't make a damn bit of sense. It's completely incompetent, as are the acting and directing; the whole film is difficult to enjoy, or even sit through, even from a campy, ironic POV. But the gore: oh my!

The brutal, explicit violence in this film is every bit as shocking and disturbing as what you might see in one of the so-called "torture porn" releases of the past few years, such as the Saw or Hostel franchises. In fact, it's more disturbing, for a couple of reasons. For one, it was released in 1963, a full forty-five years ago, and has the look of its era, a look which I associate with a more innocent brand of filmmaking, a look similar to, for example, early color episodes of Dragnet, a look in which it is jarringly incongruous to see a man rip a woman's tongue out by the root. And two, due to the incompetence of the script and direction, there is next to no suspense, characterization, or any other attempt to disguise the fact that the film exists purely for the exploitation of grisly violence perpetrated against women. The movie opens with a woman coming home and getting ready to take a bath. She has no dialogue; she interacts with no one. A radio report warns of a criminal on the loose in the area, which suffices entirely for the build-up. And then all of a sudden a dude is cutting out her eyeball and chopping off her leg in the bathtub. The blood is copious; bone and gristle are luridly on display. And it is on display purely for the sake of being on display, serving no purpose other than to titillate, as did the nudity in Lewis's earlier "nudie-cuties."

Now, don't think I'm complaining or judging. At least, I'm not judging the violence or titillation. More titillating violence, that's what I always say! It's the overwhelming ineptitude of the entire film's production that is more offensive to me. If you're a fan of horror, this is a milestone you'll probably want to see at some point. But you might want to see it the way I did: finger on the fast forward button, skipping long stretches of static and poorly-framed shots, painfuly bad acting, and agonizingly dull and ludicrous writing.

Two Thousand Maniacs! at least has going for it a clever story: the Southern town of Pleasant Valley (pop. 2,000, of course) was destroyed by Union soldiers during the Civil War. On the centennial of that massacre, the locals divert unsuspecting Northerners into town, and the entire population exacts their gruesome revenge. At the end, the town disappears, with the promise that it will return to do the same in another 100 years.

The violence is once again copious and explicit, but this time there is a modicum of character development and set-up before the blood begins flowing. The acting and directing, sadly, both remain atrocious. Also, there's an acoustic folk trio, for some reason. I kept my thumb on fast forward through most of this film, too.

Were these films worth seeing? No. They're very bad, of interest only for their place in horror history. As a horror buff, I had that interest. If you don't: man oh man, avoid these movies.