Best Horror Movies of All Time

[Bohandas]

I'm at the point where the only thing I find scary in any horror film is when it all gets blamed on an innocent character (ie. Nightmare on Elm Street 1, Final Destination 1, Evil Dead 2). Everything else in the genre is just so over the top goofy it's impossible to take it seriously. Even stuff that's based on real events, like the sub-genre of horror films inspired by Ed Gein (Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Texas Chainsaw Massacre), are based on freak occurences so rare that they might as well be fictional.

EDIT: Ok, occasionally it's possible to take things so far into the bizarre that it loops around and becomes scary again - Twilight Zone, Jorge Borges, Junji Ito, and Clarke Ashton Smith accomplish this some of the time, but none of that is movies

 

[Autumnal]

I agree very much about the merits of defining things loosely. Arguments about boundaries are less likely to be interesting and rewarding than discussions about the various neighborhoods toward the centers of things. As a Roger Ebert wrote, “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it’s about it.” How is this story about its themes, and the modes of horror? What influences does it have, what does it do with them, and what influence has it had on others? This stuff can get where,s nd the journey is a lot more fun. Fundamentally, I don’t really gets us to decide that work X must or must not be in set Y.

 

[Greg K]

I've had people tell me Alien isn't a horror movie while others have argued it isn't science fiction and I can't say any of those conversations have been particularly interesting.

I never understood that position given that Sci fi horror is an actual thing that traces back to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (Gothic Horror/ sci fi) and then to writers like H.G. Wells (e.g. The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man) follwed by writers like Lovecraft (e.g. Re-animator), and then the explosion of sci fi horror movies in the 1950s.

 

[VashVet]

Just got back from Resident Evil. It was excellent. Truly felt like a video game come to life with some fantastic jump scares, comedy, and some clear winks to fans of the games throughout the movie but in such wonderfully subtle ways that never distract.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The old Universal Pictures monster movies are generally considered horror and they aren't scary either

That’s why I specified “trying to be scary”, which is less subjective. Those movies definitely tried, and in there time, succeeded.