Awesome David, great list! Thanks for sharing, this is exactly why I wanted to do this. Find some new stuff to watch instead of knowing what to avoid. The Tenant, Repulsion and Suspiria are all excellent. I still have to get around to watching Island of Lost Souls, Black Xmas, Alucarda, Evil dead trap, and Shivers. Thanks for reminding me. Keep them coming! Oh and ultrakaiju an AWIL pub crawl could be lots of fun.
^ Have you seen Skolimowski's The Shout? What a bonkers ride that one is. More people need to see Alien Prey, too. I just love Norman J. Warren. Man, so many more came flooding to the front of my mind as soon as I clicked Submit... Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now Donald Cammell's Demon Seed and White of the Eye* Harry Kümel's Daughters of Darkness Andrzej Żuławski's Posession Eckhart Schmidt's Der Fan Richard Franklin's Patrick Giulio Questi's Death Laid an Egg Vicente Aranda's The Blood Spattered Bride George Romero's Martin Erle C. Kenton's House of Frankenstein Teruo Ishii's Horrors of Malformed Men... I need to stop. EDIT: I can't not mention William Girdler's Day of the Animals and The Manitou. I just can't. *Not exactly horror, but there's plenty of murder and the like. Edited so that it will be slightly less annoying to read.
"The Witch" feels a lot like it was directed by Ben Wheatley, but it wasn't. "High Rise" felt to me a lot like a David Cronenberg film, but it was directed by Ben Wheatley. I'm so confused!
I'll throw a list out there for the heck of it. This would be my Top Ten Classics: 1. Eraserhead* 2. Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy" (Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, The Tenant) 3. Halloween (OG) 4. The Thing (OG) 5. Alien 6. American Werewolf 7. The Evil Dead (OG) 8. Videodrome and/or Shivers 9. Suspiria 10. Phantasm *Yes, I consider this horror, and yes it will top any list I create because it's my favorite film of all time. Guess there's not much out of the ordinary here. But these are the films I can go back to again and again. I've got some new movies that could make up a whole other Top Ten at least.
Original "Thing" is The Thing from Another World. I think it's a safe bet that Mark's talking about the one with Keith "Reverse Giraffe" David in it. You've seen Der Fan, Greg? I feel so much less alone now!
Just giving him a hard time. Yeah I'm a big fan or der fan. Had an import copy on dvd for years. Always trying to get people to watch it. With this celebrity culture it still holds up.
I don't think I could possibly choose favorites. I've always had trouble with favorites... Never really had a favorite color because every color looks a certain way when paired up with other colors, just like every movie is so different, arg! I have to say though, I really loved The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and American Werewolf in London. I didn't see either of them until the past year or so. (I know, it's sad) TCM was absolutely bonkers, and nowhere near as mindlessly gory as the title suggested. AWiL was just such a wild ride with really impressive special effects, makeup, and prosthetics.
I like reading lists but can never really make one, two favorites would have to be Ghost story and Salems lot. If I ever did a list those would be right up the top.
Ah, since I brought up prosthetics and effects, I just remembered... The first Hellraiser! I absolutely loved the first movie, it was so crazy and disgusting with all of the KY Jelly flesh goo. Pinhead is probably one of my all-time favorite villains, he's just a complete creeper. Second movie was alright, but it all went horribly downhill afterwards. I watched some more anyway... I think I stopped after the movie that my boyfriend and I jokingly called "Hellraiser in Space". So bad.
I can never make lists either... Ill just add some that I dig. elm st.3 (such a fun one, and has its own vibe to me), cabin fever, the blob (80s ver.), wolf creek, ghoulies, house of the devil, children of the corn, wickerman (OG, is it even horror? ), Are you afraid of the dark? (TV series, probably the best kids show ever created and I still watch it often on dvd)
^^ OG Wicker Man definitely classifies as horror imo! Hated the ending to Berberian Sound Studio the first time I saw it, but once I got over it not being a straight-up giallo homage like Amer I started loving this bizarre little film. More Lynch than outright "horror", though. No point repeating everyone else's excellent lists, so I'll just add some titles that haven't been mentioned yet: Jigoku Burnt Offerings Zeder A Tale of Two Sisters The Island (HK) Freaks Who Can Kill a Child? Just Before Dawn The House with Laughing Windows Viy or Spirit of Evil
With all this talk about the Thing, I thought it might be worth mentioning Scream Factory is doing a collector's edition of John Carpenter's version with a TON of great stuff: https://www.shoutfactory.com/film/film-horror/the-thing-collector-s-edition
That is pretty great news. The Thing and Alien are two films I have always wanted to see an outfit like Criterion or someone tackle a very proper restoration of, with correct colour timing, cut scenes, etc., fixed up. Yes, they have been released inordinate amount of times on various media, but we ever so rarely get a definitive version. Which is annoying, because that is just what makes them release more and more 'versions.' *well that, and money, naturally. Anyways, thanks for the notice Chris. Here's hoping SF does an amazing job on the BD.
That movie messed me up big time as a kid. Watched it again a few years ago and it was still just as scary. That ending is the stuff of nightmares. I loved the early Hellraiser stuff. I was always amazed that Clive Barker did a pinhead story in the 80's and nothing for the next few decades but not long ago he finally finished the book called The Scarlet Gospels which is the return and finale of the Pinhead. Wonderful horror story. I am done with my copy if you'd like it. I generally read books and give them to someone else to enjoy.
Absolutely! I'd love to give it a read. I have to confess, I've only read Clive Barker's first two Abarat books a loooong time ago... Did a double take when I started getting into horror movies and realized that Clive Barker was more than just a young adult book author! And sorry for a slight derailment, but has anyone ever tried to start up a SB book exchange? I think that would be so darn cool, especially since media mail is pretty reasonable. (Oh, and Grats on 666 posts.)
We have a long-neglected book thread: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=24350 You should maybe bump that and see if we can get a swap meet going!
Derail continued... My favorite YA horror writer is definitely Kelly Link: Of course, she's probably the only YA horror author that I've read! A friend of mine handed me her Magic for Beginners a few years ago and within the week I was buying used copies for everyone I know!
A great book I got from the library, remember those, is called Out of the dark by Ursula Curtiss. Its the novel that the film I saw what you did from 1965 is based on. Different enough from the movie to keep it interesting. It's from 1954 and a bit pricey to buy so that's why I went the library route.
Just watched Rigor Mortis. Another movie that leaves me wondering "why?!?" I enjoyed it. It was really different from anything I've ever seen up until this point. It centers around an apartment tenement and a "hopping vampire," aka a jiangshi. (The closest way I can explain it is a reanimated corpse with rigor mortis, so it can't walk, only hop.) But the end... Another disappointment. Spoiler Basically, it's insinuated that the entire movie took place in the main character's head during his last moments as he hung himself. What did any of you think of the ending? It just kind of made everything pointless to me.
I hate to be that guy that is always coming here with the contrary opinion, but I didn't really enjoy Rigor Mortis. I thought the set up for it was much better than it lived up to, and in that it just felt too disjointed, like they wanted to incorporate too many different elements into the story, but the end it all felt disparate and never pulled you in to a single narrative that the audience could follow or care about. As for those types of endings, it can be hit or miss, but generally I have to agree with you, it is a cop out when not used effectively. Similarly with TV shows that end up being a dream sequence or some such thing. You end up going through a complicated story, see things happen to the character, but then in the end it meant nothing, so you kind of feel like what was the point/why even bother. Some time-travel stories suffer this as well, when things get inevitably 'reset' at the end. So, while I didn't really feel that worsened this particular film, I can appreciate your feelings on it, Maddie.
I enjoyed Gong Tau much more than Rigor Mortis, because it kept true to the spirit of the originals instead of trying to modernize them. Re-watched Bob "Saddest Career Ever" Clark's excellent Dead of Night aka Deathdream recently - highly recommended and eerily relevant.
I thought the end to Rigor Mortis had a lot to do with the idea that what we perceive to be the after life is our afterlife, ie we create our own hell. Or it was the idea of the pituitary gland releasing dmt at the point of death and therefor creating a hallucination at death.
Time for another installment of 'For the love of Pete, please skip this movie'. This time, the offending film was How to Save Us. Honestly, I have so little to say about it, because it will just be a waste of text. It's a very low budget film, which is completely fine, but also fails to deliver absolutely anything redeeming; story, acting, message.... nothing. Please don't waste your time. There are some mixed reviews on IMDB, but this movie is not even remotely in the so bad it is good category, or is entertaining schlock; it is just a terribly uninterested and poorly executed thing which takes a lot of effort to dredge through. It really feels like it might have been written by a 10 year old. At one point one of the main characters takes a Power Glove, 'attaches' some stuff too it (involving an old cellphone), and then uses his mom's necklace/amulet (containing her 'soul', because, of course ) to power it. I hesitate to even mention this, because, like me, you might be thinking That sounds amazing! Alas, it is very, very much not that. Do not trust any positive reviews you read for it, and give it a chance; I wish I had not.
