The Top 25 Horror Films to Date: Wrapping It Up

FINAL UPDATE, June 10, 2007
Well, we've gone through another one of these lists, and Im wrapping it up based on everyone's comments. I don't know that i am totally satisfied with my, ahem, I mean, our list, but it is our list, and this really cannot go on and on forever, can it. I mean, we have to finish it. Like the great horror movies, they come to a close.

Um, wait, actually alot of them have sequels. And remakes. So maybe thats not the best analogy. But just jump down to the bottom of the entry, you can find the last bunch. And then, you can lemme have it on all the omissions.

YET ANOTHE UPDATE, June 2, 2007
Its the nite before the tenth PictureStart Film festival and I am just getting used to having my mac back. I've been on a slow PC all week long, and now I am back among the 21st century dwellers. Anyway, need to respond to some of these comments, and bring the list up to date.

DONT GET LAZY, WE"RE NOT THERE YET.
I've succumbed to some other subgenres including Aliens and The Thing on the list, as well as action/adventurer/natural monster movie Jaws, which is arguably the best movie on the list.


SECOND UPDATE, May 28, 2007
Wow, so we have a lot of respondents, including one, John, who nearly wrote his own blog on horror. It kind of raises the issue of what qualifies as horror (at least for the very minor purposes of this survey). Horror has many sub-genres, including monster movies, slasher, ghost/supernatural, torture, and comedy, to name a few. There are also the thriller horror crossovers, like Se7en and Silence of the Lambs and perhaps the Omen (listed below, but maybe more horror, if only judging by the amount of gore in that movie vs. its contemporaries)and the Exorcist. I guess when I was thinking of this, while I thought about the old Universal horror stuff, and the old monster movies, I wasn't necessarily considering that sub-genre. Nor was I particularly considering other related genre movies like Tod Browning's Freaks, or action/sci-fi movies like James Cameron's great Aliens, or monster action like Blade, and straight thrillers like Diabolique, which I saw when I was seventeen or eighteen, and which my father always described as the scariest movie he had ever seen. I guess where one draws the line is somewhat arbitrary.

Do Lon Chaney and more importantly, Bela Lugosi, belong on this list somewhere. Yeah, of course (not that they care), but that again raises the issue of where to draw the line. Lugosi is one of the godfathers of horror. But movies like Phantom of the Opera, to me, dont really feel right on this list. Great, influential in effects, acting technique, maybe even music (though I believe it would have been performed live, no?), yes, but horror, not so sure.

Anyway, with the obvious issue of arbitrariness now out in the open, lets update the list a bit.

FIRST UPDATE
My mac is broken (ugh, took it to apple in soho today, waited forever so that they could send it back - i should have it back in a few days or a week (maybe ten???) but if my computer skills (or for those of you who know me, my email response time) is less than stellar, well, now I have an excuse) and Im working on my ass-old PC.

The updated list from your write-ins is below. And I may up it to 30, because it appears I may have bit off more than I can chew. And just cuz your suggestion didnt make it in yet, doesnt mean it wont, I am just conserving space for the time being.

Cool thing about the list, it makes a good netflix or to watch list for aspiring horrorphiles.
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So by request, I was asked to write a blog about the best horror movies ever made (before I started making em, right- maybe I’ll make one some day that can be on the list). I didn’t really do anything about the request, and I certainly know a bunch about horror, but would not consider myself an authority at all. I’m no Eli Roth (haha, wink wink).

What we did before here was to let people make their comments about the best teen movies of all time. Given my immersion in the horror world over the last six months or so, seems like a good time to make a new list, a horror list. I went to the horror Fango Con in Burbank this past Sunday, to hang with Bob Kurtzman, special fx wizard and the director of upcoming films like Dimension Films’ Buried Alive, and the independently produced The Rage. Bob is an authority on horror, and his work shows it. He’s also a great guy and I think we’ll be working together for a long time, or at least I hope so.

So anyway, now I am sitting in my little hovel in Hollywood, and having grabbed a bunch of DVD’s from the main house, I’ve been focusing on watching horror in preparation for Digger and Slaughter. So because of this, I have the first two (lets go for twenty five) entries, films I watched yesterday and today, for the list. Lets get the list (and blood) flowing.

1. Psycho – An original. Groundbreaking, and a film that has been copied from so much, in films considered classic themselves, like Silence of the Lambs, Dressed to Kill, and this next film…
2. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – Toby Hooper’s classic horror oevre. I remember watching it at age 13 or 14 in Garden City. Middle of summer, late nite, everyone else was asleep. After the girl got hung on the hook by Leatherface, I proceeded to close every window on the first floor and lock em. Remarkably, there is next to no gore or blood in this movie. Other than a few rotting corpses, its all done by suggestion.
3.Halloween- Simply one of the best, and deserving of a top stop on any list. Back story goes that Moustafa Akkad approached John Carpenter after seeing Precinct Thirteen and told him that he wanted him to write and direct a movie about babysitter murderers. Carpenter and Debra Hill sat down and wrote Halloween in three weeks, on spec. They made the movie, and history, for about 300K (1979 style or whenever that was, maybe 1978).
4.Scream - One of the great scripts, one that took an overwraught genre and turned it on its head. Not the craziest about Neve in the role, but no one is perfect. Totally reinvigorated a dying (nopunintended) genre.
5. The Shining- The definition of scary. If you've seen it, you know what I mean. If you haven't why are you sitting there.
6. The Exorcist - The thinking man's (or woman's) supernatural horror thriller. Maybe not as gory as some of the entries on the list, but cemented into the minds of everyone who saw it. Created a sensation when it was released, with lines around the block, becoming one of the original blockbusters (without the bloated budget). Hopefully, Friedkin's return to the genre, Bug, will hold a candle, but I digress.
7. Suspiria - Considered by many to be Dario Argento's masterpiece for your more erudite horror fan, cant leave out the foreign entries, which brings us to...
8. The Ring (Japanese version)- the start of the japanese horror remake brigade, with The Grudge, which we making slaughter happily understand.
9. The Omen (original) - Gregory Peck and Lee Remick in another child-oriented supernatural thriller, with Richard Donner at the helm. The original is really good, a point made more clear when you watch the remake (which has its moments, mostly involving Mia Farrow and Pete Postelthwaite).
10. Night of the Living Dead - One of the groundbreakers in low budget horror and the godfather of Zombie movies.
11. Nightmare on Elm Street - The house in the first one was recently for sale in LA. Thanks, I will keep renting. Pirates on Elm Street, anyone (Johnny Depp's jump to movies from tv - and another Wes Craven entry).
12. Evil Dead - while i prefer its comedic sequel (remake), one of the standard bearers in no-budget horror, complete with arborial rape.
13. Alien/Aliens - Ridley Scott sci-fi horror (yeah so I guess the parallel works) with Sigourney running around in her underwear while we all wonder if the cat has the alien inside of it. And action horror sequel, from the sequel-meister James Cameron, with great performance from Weaver (Oscar-nommed), Bill Paxton and Paul Reiser.
14. Jaws - By proclamation, this great movie is a horror movie, for purposes of this list. A masterful piece of cinema, not just belonging on the great horror movies list (as if), but on the list of the great American movies.
15. The Thing - John Carpenter's 1979 remake classic with another great alien monster that had some unbelievable effects and more of his go to guy, the incomparable Kurt Russell.
16. Dawn of the Dead (2004) - Widely considered, here and elsewhere, a modern horror masterpiece, better than the recent Rodriguez entry in Grindhouse.
17. Poltergeist - Still the subject of a raging debate as to whether this is a Tobe Hooper movie or a Spielberg movie (answer is, probably both), has some of the great spooks and plenty of gore for the bloodhounds.
18. Manhunter - Michael Mann directing William Petersen and Brian Cox, with great villany and support from Tom Noonan as the toothfairy. Perhaps not as well knownm as the other entries on the list, and unfairly so. A great movie. Which brings us to...
19. Silence of the Lambs - I couldn't justify not including Jonathan Demme's scarer while including Michael Mann's movie which covers most of the same ground. I have to admit, I don't know why Mann's feels more horrific than Silence, maybe its the lower budget. Perhaps neither of them belong on the list, I don't know, but I love them both and enough of you said they belong.
19. American Werewolf In London - A great exercise is horror/comedy that works, because its scary and never lets up, and the Rick Baker gore factor is in full effect.
20. Carrie - There is nothing quite as terrifying as a high school girl without a date for the prom. Not one of my personal favorites, but
21. Salem's Lot - Yet another Stephen King entry. I saw this movie, and I cannot remember much about it except for the vampires having a very scary, cool look. Anyway, Heidi, now its on here. So shuddup.
22. Hellraiser - Great villains, another that isnt quite one of my favorites, but got seconded a few times, (or thirded? fourth-ed?), and Pinhead rulls. So lets do it. And it gets Clive Barker on the list.
23. Saw, which began the huge horror resurgence in the last seven to ten years and set the initial baseline in torture/horror.
24. The Amityville Horror - Original scarer was not a movie, it was a part of the average kid's consciousness after it came out. One of the best uses ever of the "Based on a True Story" marketing hook of all time, and a darn scary movie killed by terrible sequels (and a doughy remake).
25. Frankenstein - Needed to have some classic old school horror, and Boris Karloff somewhere on this list.

So Many Honorable Mentions: Friday the 13th (very much a genre creator), Hostel, From Dusk Til Dawn, House of A Thousand Corpses and The Devil's Rejects, The Grudge, Curse of the Catpeople, Freaks, Prom Night, The Fly (Cronenberg), Re-Aminator, Murnau's Nosferatu, The Wolf Man (Lon Chaney version), Murder in the Rue Morgue, The Grudge, The Phone, Ichi The Killer, High Tension, Magic (which I absolutely love and is scary as fuck), The Birds, Evil Dead II/III/ Bubba Ho-Tep), Phantasm, The Blair Witch Project, The Eye, The Sixth Sense (which I really like but leave off the list cause I dont really consider it horror, and many consider it a gimmick movie) and Jacob's Ladder (another great great, is it Horror entry) and Angel Heart (yet another, left off maybe for more than this, but a fascinating, stylish, although flawed entry from Alan Parker), Masque fo the Red Death, Braindead (aka Dead Alive), Blade, Misery, 28 Days Later, Hell Night (a personal fave for no particular reason)I Walked with a Zombie, Diabolique (again left off as I can't really consider it horror), King Kong (1933), Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, Cujo, Candyman, and April Fools Day.