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kleinbl00  ·  1620 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What's a good HORROR movie?

The horror gold standard is The Exorcist. Noting has come close before or since.

One must see Night of the Living Dead in order to appreciate how far and how stupid we've come in zombie culture; NOTLD is very much a social satire about how we have met the enemy and he is us and everything since is a masturbatory exercise of Elevator Effect backlash.

Hellraiser is gothic in ways few movies have been. It's also out there, weird, and horrific in a way that a Clive Barker version of Nightmare on Elm Street would be.

The Thing (the original) is pretty much what a decent zombie movie should be. All others pale in comparison. Aliens is pretty much what a decent zombie movie would be if the protagonists were heavily-armed soldiers.

The Thing From Another World is much closer to John W. Campbell's version of Who Goes There and is very much an early '50s horror. You won't understand it as a conventional horror but it gets the point across.

Tetsuo The Iron Man is probably the ultimate body horror film.

If you haven't seen Blair Witch Project you should. It's influential. It loses something when you don't see it in theaters. It's still gimmicky. Compare and contrast with Paranormal Activity which is basically BWP without having to go into the woods.

Screamers is a surprisingly good "we're all alone out here" sci fi film. It owes a lot to The Thing except the bad guy is robots.

You should probably check out The Black Hole not so much because it's a horror film but because it definitely wasn't billed as a horror film. Don't look anything up, just find it, turn it on, and recognize this is the direction Disney was going before Eisner took over.

Orfanato and The Devil's Backbone are creepy in ways few movies are. I don't know that they're technically horror movies, but they strike a lot more horror notes than most schlock horror. Most schlock horror is bad special effects. Speaking of, if you'd like to go over the ouvre of the Not a Hypothetical films, PM me. They're terrible.

EDIT - I missed your Texas Chainsaw Massacre callout. You should probably watch Poltergeist because it's Spielberg doing Tobe Hooper when Tobe Hooper was too slow and ponderous to make Spielberg adhere to their "codirection" agreement.