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Oct. 21st, 2007 @ 09:46 am top ten horror
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The top ten horror movies

There is a single criterion here: these are the movies that scared me the most, or creeped me out, or unsettled me, or otherwise made it difficult to sleep, and did so intentionally (which leaves out Sleeping Beauty). Young Frankenstein, though it uses the genre and is one of my favorite movies, is not on this list. I'm not worried about what the finest movies are that happen to be horror movies; I am rating only the creep factor.

Poltergeist. Despite my disclaimer, this is not only one of the movies that has scared me the most, it is one of -- maybe THE -- best-made movies of the genre. I've talked about it at length, the way Tobe Hooper's chaotic and inherently unfair world haunts an otherwise Spielbergian family, in just the same way that the Indian burial ground haunts the housing development. This is that rare thing: a brilliant horror movie in which the intelligence adds to the scariness instead of apologizing for it. As long as I don't watch it more than a couple times a year, I always find something in it that I hadn't thought of before, or that I can think of in a new light. Even the sequels are a little more compelling than most churned-out horror sequels, if for no other reason than that they remind you of the first.

Ju-On: The Grudge. Third movie in the original Ju-On series, but the first two were made for TV. I still don't know why the remake -- directed by the original creator! remade faithfully! -- is so much less interesting, but I maintain my theory that the original attracts me the way it does because it's subtitled and the scary things so frequently happen in the background or the edges of the screen -- and keeping my visual focus in one place enhances that. This is the ultimate movie for instilling "oh my God I'm going down the basement steps in the dark, did I just see something out of the corner of my eye?" paranoia.

Paperhouse. You'll notice a trend here, movies that make my list because of a line or two, or that I sum up that way. Ben Cross's anguished, angry "I'm BLIND!" when he's just a distant but approaching silhouette, that is essentially why I rented this movie six or seven times as a kid. Plus, a hammer is a scary weapon.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. One of the only movies on this list to be included simply because it is so relentless -- and is the only one of that subset to be so stark as well. Chainsaw played a lot of tricks you can only play once, and the moody dimly lit remake seems to miss the point that there is something fucking scary about a teenage girl running across sunlit rural Texas lawns being pursued by a freak with a chainsaw.

Candyman. Introduced -- or at least put a name to -- "urban legends" for a whole lot of people my age, and the use of mirrors, naming, and repetition is especially compelling in a way that Clive Barker has a flair for. Having grown up hearing several well-known "and then he killed her" urban legends that I accepted at face value, this was a pretty powerful movie for me to see at age ... what, 13 or something, right at the age where you are very receptive to the idea that you have been lied to.

Saw. Like Chainsaw, this is a movie that makes the list for making me wince. I wish I had seen it in the theater, but alas. In any case, it has a lot of the same claustrophobic appeal as a movie like Cube, combined with a new application of horror's penchant for black and white contrasts (instead of the good/evil of virgin-vs-Jason, it's the sacrifice-vs-murder choices of Jigsaw's puzzles) and of the "the killer kills those who deserve it" trope. It's a fairly ingenious ode to horror, without patting itself on the back too much the way Scream does (I love Scream too, mind you).

Cabin Fever. The serial killer is a flesh-eating virus! Everything else plays out very like a maniac-vs-campers movie, which is what's so smart and playful about this gory, shiver-inducing, and sometimes stomach-churning movie.

Nightmare on Elm Street. I was, what, nine when this came out? The idea that there was a bad guy who could only get you when you were sleeping, and who was so frightening that people would cut their eyelids off to stay awake (I think that's from one of the sequels? but whatever) was immensely compelling, and made Freddy Krueger a much more unsettling villain that Jason, Michael Myers, Stepfather, the Children of the Corn, and the other bad guys of the 80s.

Lost Highway. I don't know why, but Patricia Arquette's "you'll never have me" in response to "I want you" has always given me chills. Still does. And it is, really, a movie about loss and being lost. Maybe Lynch's most unsettling movie, despite (or because of) lacking the over-the-top villainy of Dennis Hopper or the sensory assault of Wild At Heart.

Alien. Arguably the only monster movie on the list, as well as the only science fiction horror (though I think the insistence on explanation in many ghost stories and haunted house movies, the obsession with causality, is as much a part of science fiction as space ships are). Alien was the first movie I was not allowed to go see. Everyone who knows me has heard me complain about the time my older cousin went to see a Red Sox game while I was stuck with my less-older cousin seeing The Black Stallion (silver lining: first time having Dr Pepper), but around that same time I was also barred from going to see Alien, which after all was rated R, and I was like 5. Oh, how I shook my fist.

As a teenager, renting this and Aliens, I liked the sequel more -- and was dumbfounded at what a disappointment Alien3 was, the first one we were old enough to see in the theater. But Alien is the creepy one. Claustrophobic, moody, the first movie I'd seen -- and still one of the few -- to remind us that being out in space would be eerie, at least as much as being in a big creepy house. The sequels follow much the same course as those to Friday the 13th and the other slashers -- the focus becomes the fascination with how kewl these bad guys are, and all the kewl stuff they can do and how you totally can't kill them because like they totally activated their anti-killing force field way before you even thought about trying to kill them -- but the original is solid, and even Aliens is a good action movie.

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Notable no-shows on the list: Hitchcock (love him, but he doesn't scare me), serial killer movies (I think only Silence of the Lambs would even qualify for an honorable mention -- I used to have the Hannibal Lecter stand-up from the video store in my bedroom, but we moved shortly thereafter and it disappeared in storage), zombie movies (I just couldn't think of one that stood out as something that'd scared me, especially once I realized there was a good chance the first one I saw was Savini's Night remake), werewolves and vampires, body horror, out-and-out cinema of anxiety (Paperhouse and Lost Highway are very close, though).
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