Hm. I don't know how coherent my choices are, but here goes:
Star Wars - Nothing beats the fact that this is one of my earliest childhood memories. I mean, I had to have been maybe all of 3 years old at the time. The Star Destroyer coming overhead scared me to death, and I had to make my aunt take me outside... where I sat at the theater doors, watching Stormtroopers blasting away until the usher told us we had to go back in & close the doors or leave.
I went back in. And I'm so glad I did.
The Fox and The Hound - Yes, an honest-to-goodness classic Disney flick. Again, I saw this when I was young, and I missed some of the anti-racism message of the film... but I
got the idea of what it means to be an outcast, and what friendship really is.
The Howling - This was my first real introduction to horror films. I was a Cub Scout (junior version of the Boy Scouts, for those who don't know), and we were having a sleepover at the meeting house. The older boys put this on after dark and I was scared witless. I remember peeking out of my sleeping bag, then hiding in it when the really nasty bits happened (and the older guys joking about it, of course!). I've still got a soft spot for werewolves now, and the film still holds up despite all the years. Again, the idea of being outcast or denying who you are hits a strong note for me, but the overall horror still holds true throughout.
Hellraiser - I picked up this film as a rental, because A) I had heard good things about Clive Barker and B) some friends wanted to go see the latest release in the series later that week. I'd never seen such a
smart horror movie before. The little metaphysical concepts, the way different concepts tie together (blood, family, death, debts...), it all just meshed so beautifully with the terrible idea of beings who simply aren't human in their thinking about pleasure and torture.
Lord of Illusions - Another Barker film, I really consider this his masterpiece of film. Even moreso than
Hellraiser, he blends so many metaphysical concepts with very human emotional & psychological ideas, while still giving us an action packed and exciting story. I was saddened that his idea of turning it into a series didn't pan out with the studios.
Bram Stoker's Dracula - I had grown up seeing the old classic movie monsters on TV, and had read the original novel so many times I knew the pace of the story by heart. But, until this film, I had never seen any classic novel translated so closely to film. Yes, it took liberties... but this was the first time the overall
story had carried over into the film without judicious changes. In addition, the beautiful sets, use of color and makeup, together with the costume & set design, showed me that it was possible to take a classic novel and turn it into an entertaining film
without hacking it to bits.
Nosferatu - When I began taking German in college, I found a growing interest in the classics of German silent cinema. The early
Expressionist films produced by Germans after WWI were a stark difference from the movies coming out of America and France at the time, echoing the devastation wrought on the country after the war. And this film really showcases the innovations those early directors invented. While its certainly a rip-off of the Dracula novel, it also blends some distinctly German concepts of vampires into the mix, and placed a lasting "look" for monstrous vampires into our culture. Plus, some of the camera effects were incredibly advanced for the time, outpacing the developments in the rest of the film industry by decades.
Se7en - Okay, so horror movies really speak to me. And this... this was sheer brilliance. It not only brought a well-known concept in murder mysteries (seven deadly sins killer) to its logical extreme, the plot managed to keep twisting and turning until the climax where everything finally comes to an incredibly powerful end. Plus, it did something most horror films forget: it made us
care about the characters, so that when something bad happens, it actually has meaning.
Ghost in the Shell - Yes, my introduction to anime. Though some of the American voice-acting was poor (and they screwed up the CGI bits for our release), I was amazed by the quality of the animation, the complexity of the story and the sheer fact that this was unlike any other animation I had ever seen before. It was bloody, racy, evocative, beautiful and really managed to evoke a feeling of being involved in the setting.
Perfect Blue - As much as GitS impressed me with what animation could do, this film impressed upon me what live-action films
can't do. Many of the scenes would have been impossible (or at least prohibatively expensive) to film with actors. And they simply would not have
looked right with actors. Its a film that's so deeply involved with the mind and imagination that only animation could really capture the depth of the hallucinations experienced by the protagonist as the story progresses.
Unbreakable - While I saw the ending of
The Sixth Sense coming just by watching the trailers, this film's ending hit me as a complete surprise. Shyamalan did a brilliant job of telling a story while completely misdirecting the audience, which lead me to dismiss my assumption about the ending... until the last scene where it turns out to be
true. And it was done so beautifully, I felt it was the natural conclusion of the story, rather than a cheap fake-out.
The Blair Witch Project - The film really broke a lot of ground in many ways, some of which have nothing to do with the movie itself. This movie showed just how important the Internet could be in hyping up an audience & getting the word out. It showed just how easily one could create a movie that was both cheap and still entertaining (while riding the coattails of the emerging "reality TV" concept). Finally, it did one thing that turned it from a mediocre docu-horror into a full-fledge supernatural scare: they took one casual mention from the first 15 minutes of the film, and turned it into the pivotal moment of the climax, tying the whole thing neatly together in a single moment.
This film was one of only a few that left me too scared to sleep that night, all because of that ending moment. n.n;;
