Best Horror Movies of All Time

Snarf Zagyg

Notorious Liquefactionist
Supporter
Slips more into post apocalypse sci-fi, which doesnt mean horror is excluded, but doesnt come to mind as a horror flick itself. That said, nothing is as terrifying as Cormack McCarthy's The Road if we are going down..ugh...that way ;) .

I think that there is a real difference between horror as a genre and, um, the terror of your fellow humans realistically portrayed.

There are some movies (such as The Road) that are great movies, and that are worth watching, and yet ... I don't need to return to.
 

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Snarf Zagyg

Notorious Liquefactionist
Supporter
Given I was a kid when I first watched it, it totally went over my head.

Same. The only thing I noticed when I watched it as a kid was Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet.


....this may be why "Parenting Tips: Let the kid watch whatever while I get my drink on," was not a successful best-seller by Mama Snarf.
 


Is there a word for movies like Carrie and Willard where much of the part that would usually be the horror part is cathartic because the victims are terrible people whose harassment is what caused the killer to snap?
 

Bedrockgames

I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
Is there a word for movies like Carrie and Willard where much of the part that would usually be the horror part is cathartic because the victims are terrible people whose harassment is what caused the killer to snap?

I am thinking back to carry but I don't remember it feeling very cathartic. It made sense, but she was also killing people who didn't deserve it. However I don't know if there is a word but revenge horror seems like an appropriate label. And people getting killed in horror movies because of their bad moral character is definitely a think in all kinds of horror
 

Bedrockgames

I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
Also cathartic violence is a term I have seen used for lots of movies. So maybe that would be it (you see it a lot in discussions about martial arts films, especially ones based on revenge)
 

Evaniel

Filthy Casual (he/him)
Offhand, my tops are probably pretty typical for the milieu: The Shining, Alien, and The Thing.

That said, my favorite at the moment might be Us. I know it doesn't get the love Get Out does, and I'm puzzled by that. I find it to be a deeply disturbing movie with its own dream logic. That is, I know it doesn't make sense in any rational way, but man, that movie speaks to my nightmares--like, directly.
 


Autumnal

Bruce Baugh, Writer of Fortune
Grave Encounters - for all of its corniness, I think that came from the fact they were modelling those 'ghost hunter shows' Discovery puts out, but I enjoyed it.

Yellowbrickroad - about an American town that was removed from maps and classified after the townfolk watched a screening of The Wizard of Oz in 1940, got up as one, walked to the trailhead, and disappeared into the woods of New England. As is prone to happen, the government decides to declassify the town and trail, so some people decide to make a documentary about it.
these are two of my favorites. In Grave Encounters, that moment where they break open the front door and see what’s beyond it is perfect. There’s no glitzing it up, no portal flow or shimmer, nothing but the bald of reality of something that can’t be there but is.

Yellowbrickroad renders the effects of sound in visual terms as effectively as any movie I can think of. Also, go back to the first scene and pay attention to what we can see and hear of the guy in the office there. Not a generic government guy.

Is there a word for movies like Carrie and Willard where much of the part that would usually be the horror part is cathartic because the victims are terrible people whose harassment is what caused the killer to snap?
Sure. “Horror”. :) or if you want some academic terminology…in his book Weird Fiction: A Genre Study, Michael Cisco borrows from Deleuze and Guattari to write of minor and major modes in weird fiction (and literature generally).

Major modes end up reinforcing the status quo: Ebenezer Scrooge becomes a better person but not a crusader for any serious social change.

Minor modes shake the status quo loose and don’t put the pieces back when they’re done; even when the incursion of the story ends, people can’t live the way they did. Hellraiser, Alien + Alien 3, and the original three Living Dead movies push the surviving characters and/or the world at large over an abyss you can’t climb back out of.

What’s interesting is that a monster killing people who really have coming it can work in either mode, depending on how they go about it. When the story tends toward “see, you should have been a nice regular person”, that’s major. When it heads toward “the monster is also a person who’s owed accommodation and respect too”, that’s probably more minor.

Cisco goes into this over many many pages, and Deleuze and Guattari at many more. This is an entirely inadequate summary.
 
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manodogs

Bringer of Snacks
I'm not a category-type person (all those sub-genres confuse me), I just wanted to be sure I wasn't OT for the thread. The Hidden, for what I think is a really good example, has that They Live! vibe and plot, but there's so much sci-fi to it that I don't feel comfortable referring to it as Horror. I get that it's not supposed to be (sci-fi), but there really are a lot o Horror elements to it - just not as many as there are sci-fi.

Misery is another puzzler, since the Horror of it is really more in the mind. No doubt being kidnapped and hobbled is scarier than hell, but there are no supernatural elements, no one defies death, nor do any other Horror tropes make an appearance. Drama or Horror? I don't really care, and it makes a good discussion (which I enjoy because I've learned a lot from this thread alone!), but I could definitely see where anyone might choose one or the other (Drama or Horror). In the book, the hobbling is a bit more severe, taking it from a creepy drama about the dark side of fame directly into Horror territory. And, IIRC (and I may well be wrong, sorry), ol' Annie, our nummmmmberrr whan fannnn, takes a few to the chest and keeps on ticking.

Book=Horror, no doubt; movie=???

To be fair to other posters, without the gore, Carrie would have been sci-fi. Without the gore and stalking, I Spit on Your Grave would have been a Drama instead of a revenge flick. Sorry, I love horror and even run a blog on stuff just like this, so I'm enjoying the conversation. I apologize if I hijacked it or got OT.
 

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