p.s. Being a strict Kubrickian (is that a word?) by nature, I still maintain that The Shining is the best horror film ever.

I like Poe and kind of enjoy Lovecraft in smaller doses. But my "new" fav of this genre is Thomas Ligotti and mostly for just a couple of stories (like My Work is Not Yet Done). I like the fake undead kind of movies, Zombies and Vampires. But the movie that scared me the most as a child was.... Poltergeist! Yeah, I think I was too young for it at the time. I would agree that the Shining is among the best.

Poltergeist!

I wouldn't let my kids watch that. The nightmares would be too much.

Most of their friends watch Doctor Who... but we really think that some of the episodes are too scary for a seven-year-old. Why do parents seem to be in a such a hurry for their kids to be jaded pre-teens?

I don't recall being scarred by early exposure to horror movies: not that I was exposed to many, although as a child I did love to watch the old b&w horror classics: my very favourite being The Beast With Five Fingers. The things that genuinely scared me tended to be more prosaic: I recall being panicked by an alarmist news report about the vanishing ozone layer, for example. And I’ve always been squeamish about gruelling tales of true-life survival against all the odds… even now I would never choose to watch Alive! or other movies of that ilk.

With literature too, seldom has anything from the horror genre truly frightened me. One exception was Clive Barker’s debut novel The Damnation Game, which did indeed give me a few shivers when I read it, aged 18 or so. Of the half-dozen or so Stephen King books I read around the same time, I think only Pet Sematary affected me similarly. The one book, or rather short story, that has scared me more than any other is, bizarrely, Kafka’s Metamorphosis…

On preview, like safetyfork, I’m a great admirer of Ligotti, though there again I’m not looking to be frightened or disgusted: in fact I find a perverse comfort in his elegantly-written, near-nihilistic tales.

Peter Lorre, eh? I don't recall that film.

When I was about 12 or 13 I sneaked into a showing of The Exorcist with a friend and his much older sister- TALK about traumatized. Having never seen anything scarier than The Wizard of Oz, I thought I'd survived a trip to hell and back. What was worse, I couldn't tell my parents why I was so freaked out.

It put me off scary stuff during my early teens, but then I became a horror movie freak and it's still my favorite genre. (Saw and the like don't qualify as horror to me... that's just a gross-out contest.)

I like everything from the classy, old-school stuff to the grittier 70s horror, to really well-done modern horror. I don't like funny or campy horror movies. I like movies that actually do scare me, as well as ones that just kind of give you a delicious creepiness.

Movies that have actually disturbed/scared me a little bit:

Freaks
Hellraiser
Last House on the Left (the most relentlessly grim movie of Wes Craven's career)
The Hills Have Eyes (the BEST movie of Craven's career. The long scene when the mutants first attack the family's camper is the most intense horror scene I know of in a movie. The remake wasn't bad, either.)
28 Days Later


Other big favorites:

Night of the Hunter (one of the best films ever, IMO)
Dawn of the Dead (the original- I like all of Romero's movies, but this one is the best)
Black Christmas (the actual genesis of the slasher movie)
Phenomena and Suspiria (Dario Argento is a mad, mad genius)
Ginger Snaps (like many good horror movies, its rep is almost ruined by awful, awful sequels)
God Told Me To (maybe this is more of a thriller- it's hard to categorize)

I enjoyed the first two Scream movies, and Shaun of the Dead was brilliant, even though as I said, I don't generally like "funny" horror movies. I liked the American remake of The Ring better than the original (so sue me), and I won't say I enjoyed it, but I thought Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was well worth seeing, once.

This is a subject I could literally talk about all day, so I'll stop right here.

Remember when Billy Bob Thorton hosted that late-night monster movie/horror show? Yeah, I saw Slaughter High on there and I was never the same.

I also thought Carrie was really freaking scary. I guess I'm sort of a lightweight.

The Omen and all things catholic were scary as a kid, i remember having seen a clip of the original spiderwalking a la Exorcist and Amityville was close by. i remember the Fly's "Help Me" and things with Vincent Price as creepy.

I've never been able to get through the first fifteen minutes of Children of the Corn.

And Carrie scared me, too.

I don't much like being scared for no reason.

Though I love love love the Dawn of the Dead remake; the intro through the end of the credits is one of the best fifteen minutes of film ever put together.

Does anyone remember in the Cronenberg Fly movie, when the bad guy's in the heroine's apartment, and says (as I recall, twenty years later), "I was in the neighborhood, feeling a bit scummy, so I dropped by for a shower?" I loved that.

I saw The Exorcist when I was about 14, and it didn't scare me at all. But when I saw it again a couple of years ago it scared me half to death.

But by far the creepiest movie I've ever seen is the original Dutch version of The Vanishing (Spoorloos).

There was an American version made a few years later by the same director, starring Keifer Sutherland, which was given a different (Hollywood) ending. The ending of the original Spoorloos actually kept me awake all night in a state of terror.

I loooooove The Fly.

[after an unsuccessful test of the telepods]
Ronnie: The World will want to know what you're thinking.
Seth Brundle: Fuck! is what I'm thinking.
Ronnie: Good... The world will want to know that.

But by far the creepiest movie I've ever seen is the original Dutch version of The Vanishing (Spoorloos).

Oh yes! I saw that at an arthouse cinema when it first played here... I never think of it when I think of horror movies, for some reason, but it was VERY horrifying. It's one of those that gets creepier the more you think back on it.

I still can't watch The Exorcist. Tore me UP. I was 21, saw it on video, on a first (and last!) date. . .then slept in the living room of my new house-mate type house for three nights. Which it turns out, was down the block from the lot where the events that Blatty based the book on actually occurred. (Lot empty, Catholic Church still owns, as far as I know.) Something about loosing all self-hood, LOOKING like you, but being controlled by another. Just too much.

Ones I like, that go right up to the edge but not quite beyond are The Shining, Angel Heart, and The Believers. Of those, The Shining is the only really great movie, but the others give me the thrills then just get ridiculous at the end.

Remember when Billy Bob Thorton hosted that late-night monster movie/horror show?

Don't you mean Joe Bob Briggs? I definitely watched his show, which I much preferred to the schlockier USA Up All Night, hosted by Gilbert Godfried.

I've been making it a point to rent a lot of horror films during the month of October (it's kind of my Halloween tradition), and it's always a bit disappointing how much utter crap the genre has to offer. I'll usually discover a gem or two, however, which makes it all worthwhile. Last year it was The Haunting.

This year's hands-down winner: The Innocents, a 1961 take-off on "The Turn of the Screw" that is truly dark and deeply unsettling.

I was 13 when my dad took me to see Alien. We’d both read the book already, and has seen some previews, so we had some idea of what to expect. Mostly I remember how special it was to do something with just me and Dad—he worked a lot, and I had an older brother, so I didn’t get a lot of alone time with him. One thing we always did together was to watch old movies on late-night TV, just me and him watching old Buck Rogers reruns, Night of the Lepus and Gargoyles and Willard and Ben. We had a great time discussing the differences between the book and the movie, and I remember him telling me not to tell Mom too much about the blood and gore. A secret from Mom! Fantastic.

Fast-forward about 25 years. Dad has died recently, and I come across the video Crispin Glover made for the re-make of Willard. I’m watching this bizarre, utterly weird video with tears in my eyes, really understanding for the first time that the one person in the world that I’d want to share this with is gone. Later, I went to see Willard, and there was this dad sitting in front of me with his 13-year-old kid—I’m seriously tearing up as I write this. A lot of the tears are happy, though, re-living the memories of that time, remembering the special bond I had with Dad, the shared delight in weirdness that I think I’m passing along to my daughter.

Dad gave me a copy of the complete works of Poe on my 15th birthday, and I've recently written here about introducing my daughter to it. That's my family legacy, I guess.

Better Glover video link.

And chuckdarwin, American Werewolf in London is the only horror movie I own; I watched it when I was at home, sick, on Monday. I've considered letting my daughter watch it with me, but I think she's still a bit too young.

The first horror film I remember watching was The Changeling. It scared me half to death, especially as my dad lived in an old house with clanking pipes. I had trouble sleeping there for ages.

The Fella recently asked co-workers at Hip Local Videostore (sadly, not its real name) for submissions for the Halloween edition of the weekly newletter. The topic: Five Films That Scared Me. Having written more than my share lately, I demurred, but here's my list, for the first time anywhere!

- Spoorloos. Excruciatingly paced, suffocating mundane terror.
- The Blair Witch Project. We staggered from the theater saying "It wasn't scary, just disorienting," meanwhile jumping in alarm at every twig snap.
- Mulholland Drive. Only two brief moments of galvanizing shock, but that's plenty, as it turns out.
- Dead Ringers. Scary ob/gyns. GAH!
- Funny Games. I couldn't breathe. Haneke plays dirty.

Though I love horror movies and creature features, the films that have affected me more deeply aren't horror movies for the most part. Odd.

Though I did have a nightmare about that moment in The Ring six months or more after seeing it. The movie didn't scare me, but the image stayed with me.

I've seen all of those but Funny Games, Elsa... that sounds rough! Now I gotta see it.

It's absolutely not a horror movie, BP, but it's horrifying. I had some notion what I was in for when I put in the DVD and my partner, who had seen it already, went into the other room and closed the door. He could not see it again.

And though I am loathe to break the flow of a film once it's rolling, I had to hit pause at one point and catch my breath. It made me quite sick from anxiety.

The only other film that's ever caused me to hit pause just to catch my breath was Audition, and that was purely to control my gag reflex.

Kiri kiri kiri kiri kiri kiri!

For anyone who's curious but doesn't want to risk spoilers, here's the (spoiler-free!) thumbnail review of Funny Games I wrote a few months ago for The Fella's newsletter:

At their luxurious and quiet summer home, a family finds themselves trammeled by two disarming but disquieting young men... and then the story begins to unfurl its vile tapestry. Director Michael Haneke, known for his provocative oeuvre, claims this is the single film he made intentionally to provoke. And provocative it certainly is, with a stomach-churning dispassion that, by contrast, makes the moments of action (many of them off-screen) so horrifically galvanizing.

Funny Games is all about conventions and complicity; it self-consciously examines cinematic violence and suspense, and the contract between filmmaker and viewer as collaborators in atrocity. Games require rules, and the film is obsessed with rules, but be warned: Haneke doesn’t play fair.

I think American Werewolf is the most heart rending documentary I've ever seen.

≡ Click to see image ≡

[photo taken today]

For whatever reason, I'm not big on horror movies. I like cheesy type movies, I remember watching "Laura, Queen of the Damned" at a slumber party when I was about 11 or twelve. Parts of it were scary then, probably ho-hum now.

But when I was 12, I saw a movie while visiting my dad in California. For the life of me, I don't know the name. It was in black and white, it involved a creepy, huge old house, a sealed fireplace, and a young couple. They unsealed the fireplace, even though the old caretaker told them not to, and little green men (they were green in the remake, made sometime in the 60's or 70's - saw that one too, still don't know the name) would come out to haunt the woman. In the light they would scatter like cockroachs. They killed a friend of the couple by pulling a wire across the top of the stairs and tripping him. The husband thought the wife was nuts, the doctors drugged her, but when the husband went to speak to the old caretaker, the little green men came to get the wife. She weakly tried to fight back, flashing a camera at them until she dropped it. The husband just missed saving her as they took her into the basement. For years after seeing this movie (twice!) any glowy light in my room would raise the hair on the back of my neck and send me under the covers.
Does anyone else remember this movie?

Dudes! How can ANY of you not list Eraserhead in your Creepy Canons? That movie flat out fucked with my head for decades.

That dinner with the chicken? The woman in the radiator?

Still for my vote the all-time creepiest movie ever made.

Second, I vote for a tie between the Exorcist and Gummo.