Best Horror Movies of All Time

[Guest 85555]

Some movies kind of touch on it (Sunshine almost hits on it, before devolving in the final act). Event Horizon does it, and so does Annihilation. But the problem is that cosmic horror necessarily invoked the truly incomprehensible, which is easier on the page than on the screen.

Very much agree with this

 

[Guest 85555]

A) They do.

B) Lovecraft is a lot more influential to TTRPGS specifically, and thus likely to be discussed on this forum (c.f. the miniatures I just painted and posted pictures of over on the "Fighting the Grey Tide" thread).

C) Perhaps it wasn't your intent, but your post seems like an attempt to minimize Lovecraft's racism and misogyny, which are extremely pertinent to his work and thus relevant to the discussion.

I am not particularly eager to get into this topic again as it tends to get very emotional. I think people to reduce him to the racism, and often inflate it, but I also think it was definitely there (I just don't think everything in Lovecraft needs to be read through that lens and I don't think his views were so unusual for the time). And there is a lot of disagreement at large and in these threads about Lovecraft and Racism, how central that is to his work, how much people are minimizing his racism, or the racism of his times (but there are more charitable views of him, like you have with Joshi for example). People are going to read the same text, same accounts of his life, and come away with different impressions of its meaning and his personality as a human being. We probably aren't going to solve that particular issue in this thread though. This is a conversation we have had many times and I haven't seen the dial moved on any front. And it probably isn't worth derailing a perfectly good halloween movie thread where all of us are largely having a good time.

 

[Guest 85555]

Some movies kind of touch on it (Sunshine almost hits on it, before devolving in the final act). Event Horizon does it, and so does Annihilation. But the problem is that cosmic horror necessarily invoked the truly incomprehensible, which is easier on the page than on the screen.

Just another thought on this, since Event Horizon is clearly inspired by it. But Hellraiser in a way got me more on the cosmic horror front, not in the uniquely lovecraft way, but because the horror seems to be that all the grounding of your morality in the world is meaningless, and that you actually occupy a cenobite paradigm (I tend to see the cosmic stuff in Lovecraft that works, working because it is a kind of horrifying paradigm shift)

 

[Bohandas]

Event Horizon and Hellraiser both make me think of Warhammer 40000 (Event Horizon is the Warp and Hellraiser is Slaanesh)

 

[MGibster]

Event Horizon and Hellraiser both make me think of Warhammer 40000 (Event Horizon is the Warp and Hellraiser is Slaanesh)

They cribbed from the same sources I think. I’ve met people who thought Dune’s God Emperor was a 40K ripoff.

 

[Bohandas]

Does the weird edgy 2017 Power Rangers movie count as horror? In addition to the series' standard kaiju, that one also features Rita being dredged out of the sea like a lovecraftian artifact, stealing people's vitality to restore her youth like the (1999) mummy, and ranting creepily about how she killed the previous yellow ranger

They cribbed from the same sources I think. I’ve met people who thought Dune’s God Emperor was a 40K ripoff.

What source was Hellraiser drawing from?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

They cribbed from the same sources I think. I’ve met people who thought Dune’s God Emperor was a 40K ripoff.

That’s the same kind of stimulus that got me to start my “Metal School” thread. I encountered too many younger metalheads who didn’t understand that Black Sabbath was the main taproot of all things metal.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

What source was Hellraiser drawing from?

From what I understand, Barker was tapping into his own 1970s experiences with countercultural/underground sex- specifically (and obviously) BDSM.

Literary influences- if any- evade me.

 

[MGibster]

What source was Hellraiser drawing from?

Mostly the memoirs of my dating life. Uh, er, I mean, I was mostly referring to Event Horizon. Yeah, that's it. That's the ticket.

That’s the same kind of stimulus that got me to start my “Metal School” thread. I encountered too many younger metalheads who didn’t understand that Black Sabbath was the main taproot of all things metal.

I've introduced some elements to games I'm running only to have a player say I got it from Warhammer 40k. No, you whippersnapper, you. I stole it from something older than Warhammer 40k.

 

[Autumnal]

What source was Hellraiser drawing from?

A bunch of the folks Lovecraft praises in Supernatural Horror In Literature: fin de siecle Decadents, Symbolists, and like that Fans of grotesquerie who influenced Giger, and Giger. William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Bruno Schulz and Thomas Bernhard. Experimental filmmakers back to Luis Buñuel and Chris Marker; maybe further, if he had access to work by Eadweard Muybridge; the Brothers Quay and Jan Švankmajer (oh wow, he’s still alive at age 90!), Damien Hirst and Mark Romanek. They’re all part of the cultural stew that shaped folks like Barker and Ligotti in the ‘80s and ‘90s.