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comment by kleinbl00
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.





user-inactivated  ·  1619 days ago  ·  link  ·  

No idea how I left out The Exorcist in my mulling over of movies.

kingmudsy  ·  1619 days ago  ·  link  ·  

NOTLD is a masterpiece, and I agree wholeheartedly. I wouldn't say everything since has been terrible, but I certainly can't think of counterexamples. I feel like the concept is rich enough to explore more than NOTLD did, so I feel like someone must have done it...But maybe you're right.

The Thing might be my favorite horror movie. The blood testing scene alone is such a fucking masterclass in tension building, and I've always loved the sound-design of the thing screaming when they get it outdoors.

Poltergeist is great, too. I have a hard time crediting Texas Chainsaw Massacre's success to Tobe Hooper's genius because of everything that came after, but I know I love the movie for what it is (even if he never managed to replicate the same feeling). I felt like the set design and camera work kept things feeling grounded...And the fact that the production was such a fucking nightmare to work on!

Adding Tetsuo The Iron Man, Screamers, and The Black Hole to my list! I haven't seen Orfanato or The Devil's Backbone either, so I'll slide around to them eventually. I'll PM you if I ever work through the recommendations I've already collected!

kleinbl00  ·  1619 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I've gotten into some pretty deep, pretty intellectual discussions about zombie movies. As a screenwriter, there's a point where you feel like shitting out a zombie movie. Probably because zombies are so fun - they play right into our anxiety in crowds, our road rage while commuting, and our general displeasure with "humanity" as a gestalt, regardless of how we feel about humans.

The thing is? "zombies" are basically Alzheimer's patients. They're slow, they're shambling, and they pose a physical threat only if there are a lot of them. So all of a sudden we have "running" zombies at which point it's basically just "fear of crowds". except they always have to be idiots, too. You can't write a zombie anything without it turning into "the zombies are handled, what shall we fight about for the other 2/3rds of the movie" because as movie antagonists go the only adversary worse than zombies is trees (lookin' at you, M Night).

Best zombie movie ever made is Aliens. Because the zombies are an actual threat. George Romero (who wrote "ghouls", not zombies) had ghouls as stand-ins for our hatred of humanity and our tendency to fuck each other over from the get-go. Since not enough people got it the first time, he set Dayn of the Dead in a goddamn mall. That dead horse was beaten in '78. Even that is a bad reading of a 1954 Matheson novel.

If I had any input I would put Orfanato at the top of your list, followed by The Devil's Backbone. The stuff I worked on is terrible in every possible sense and you will grow stupider by watcing it. And I say that as the only person paid to work on Birdemic 2 (who was also smart enough to leave his name off it).