The Haunt Of Fear: ILX Top 100 HORROR Movies Poll Results Thread

"Maria's going on an ICKNIC and she's bringing apples, bananas, children and DEATH!"

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83. PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
Peter Weir, Australia, 1975
(220 points, 7 votes)

Hanging Rock is the most boring overrated place on Earth. And people actually go out of their way to come here and see it. And it costs a fortune to get in.
― Autumn Almanac (Autumn Almanac), Sunday, February 6, 2005 6:58 PM (7 years ago)

I remember writing an essay about this years ago at university, all about the alien wildness of the landscape - although what struck me last night on seeing it again was the relentless personification of nature - all those creepy shots of rocks looking like heads and more precisely all those cave entrances designed to look like vaginas, like the shot in the first post. Nature = human, human = wild and uncontrollable = nature.
― armchair theorist, Friday, August 6, 2004 5:14 AM (7 years ago)

Never considered voting for this either. It delivers unease rather than horror.

love hanging rock, but i didn't vote for it b/c i don't think of it as a horror film (for reasons similar to why i don't think of curse of the cat people as horror).

it is a lovely film, though.

found Picnic at Hanging Rock to be rather dull tbh

i will also back HOME MOVIE, its not bad at all.

this message is hugely appealing and somewhat horrifying but also not really a horror movie message in my brain, more of a crushing reality message than anything else.
Nature = human, human = wild and uncontrollable = nature

but mostly hanging rock is filed under "women, dresses" in my brain

Picnic was the last thing I cut! I kind of feel that it works as a horror, but it's a very subtle one, and its mystery side is pretty strong... it's such a beautiful film, though. If I felt certain it was a horror it would've stayed on my ballot.

btw with all my frothing abt pontypool i forgot the greater evil potential in this poll, which is people shoehorning 6 goddamn david lynch films into it. IT BEGINS

Also, I wanted to make room for a couple of silly films at the bottom of my ballot as I was worried I was getting too canonical, ha.

PICNIC always reminds me of FORTRESS (1985). Remember that horror-movie ending with the jars? YIKES.

wai u no like david lynch?!?

i like him! but there is no way in hell that FWWM is a horror film.

:/

Phase IV is pretty horrifying as a picnic movie.

actually i will go ahead and say it - i dont think any of his stuff is horror, with the possible exception of inland empire and lost highway. and i had forgotten that he dominated a bunch of the yearly horror polls, so i should have known better, but the possibility (dont have the nom list in front of me) that he could have more films in the top 100 horror poll than any other director is kind of infuriating.

parts of fwwm are 800 times more terrifying than a loy of stuff that's placed and will place.

near dark my #28. saw it during its original + brief theatrical run, was blown away. so many great scenes, the bus station, the bar scene, the motel shootout. also: jenny wright.

saw picnic at hanging rock during its revival in the 90s after years and years of anticipation and didn't like it very much. I dig the last wave a lot more, tho that does have some colonial black-man-as-boogeymonster issues.

also cosign on all the home movie love. didn't vote for it but it's one of the creepy high points of the last decade, something I always recommend to folks who don't dig the extreme horror trend.

Eraserhead is so a horror. I'd count Inland Empire, too. Not seen Lost Highway, don't think any of his others are horror. FWWM is on the verge.

FWWM is one of maybe three Lynch films that, while perhaps not straight horror, I have a hard time understanding why anyone would expend much energy rejecting as horror. Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr., Lost Highway...fair dos. They have horrific elements, but could easily be argued away as Not Horror. But FWWM, Inland Empire, Eraserhead...c'mon, dude.

i didnt vote for fwwm but more because i was trying to do not do more than two movies per director

i think i may have done three cronenbergs

http://fpscinema.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/fire-walk-with-me7.jpg

i also think eraserhead would qualify as a horror film (it's about Lynch's own horror at his becoming a father after all!). anything else is kind of a stretch, i would agree.

omg you didn't

sorry, i dont mean to be a dick about this, its just something that irks me. and horror is whatever for whoever, but every time someone says their favorite horror movie is eraserhead i tend to think hmmmm maybe you should watch some actual horror movies then

haha sorry dudes, xposting there

Peter Wier! Sigh, these unseen movies are breaking my back.

my ballot has several two-fers (including Cronenberg) so i can't complain about anyone else doing same.

Guess Lynch needed more zombies and chainsaws.

PS: Pretty sure I voted for four Lynch things (one of which I know with complete certainty won't show up). Sorry, jjj. Although I guess these poll results could wind up being your own personal horror movie, so that's exciting, yeah?

i guess to me theres a difference between strange and shocking images (the whole lynch eye of the duck deal) and horror. guy behind the dumpster moment in mulholland drive is scary as hell, like jump out of your skin scary but that doesnt make a horror movie.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lq77si5C8H1qaumu7o1_500.jpg

hanging rock, described as a mesmerising, brooding landscape without a solution, sounds like my thing

I think the reason why Lynch is so effective for me as a "horror" filmmaker is that he delivers on the dread and awful, disassociative moments that are a large part of what I love about horror but that straight horror films so often fail to deliver.

a real-life chick looking like a cross b/w a younger Madonna and a old-timey mutton-chop-whiskered baseball player would scare the living shit outta me, that's for true.

re: david lynch, it's kind of inevitable that he'll be all over this thing since he is one of our greatest living directors and he is preternaturally good as creating atmospheres of total terror. plus some of his films wouldn't place in any other genre poll.

I don't classify him as horror generally, tho I did vote for eraserhead, partly because I grew up reading about it in books about horror films. at the time I think a lot of his fanbase were horror fans. and it is a waking nightmare after all.

yeah lynch does dread, unease, dream-logic, terror in the face of awe, despair, and even shocks too well for me not to consider him a horror director.

I think the ambiguity of Hanging Rock in a way is what makes it horror (though admittedly of a ruminative sort). The lack of resolution, all of the things implied but unsaid. I didn't have any problem including it on my list.

Like, Lynch makes horror films for adults.

(Countdown to villagerswithpitchforks.jpg in 3...2...)

I was thinking about this yesterday because of witchfinder general actually - I'm not sure what exactly makes it a horror film, but I can't see it getting traction in any other poll, so why not?

David Lynch often draws upon a similar old-school expressionist visual style that a lot of (old-school) horror films also draw up. that's not conclusive proof of Lynch being a horror film-maker (lest we think that john ford's the informer and woody allen's shadows and fog are also LOL horror films) but it does lend itself to seeing Lynch as using horror-film elements in his films.

Basically I'm feeling jjusten on this one. There is a feeling to me that Lynch on here (multiple times, especially) takes space from "real" horror films (even though that's a can of worms I can barely imagine containing) rather than films containing horror moments. Can films be horror films by sort-of accident? Open question.

also, i consider eraserhead and blue velvet to be as much comedy films as horror films ... so blah blah blah.

That might be a fun list: "Horror Films That Weren't Intended as Horror Films." (Potential nominee: The Garbage Pail Kids Movie.)

i mean i'd argue carpenter, hooper, romero, craven, cronenberg, maybe even polanski and kubricks more central to modern horror-as-horror, but at the same time i dunno where else i'd slot lynch.

several films yet to place are unquestionably comedy and horror

eraserhead is one of the few movies I've seen that delivers oodles of heebie-jeebies and actual hair-standing-on-end sensations.

I didn't vote straight "movies that frighten or terrify" but that was definitely a factor, because there have been so few that have successfully affected me this way

eraserhead also delivers laughs (I think intentionally) but that doesn't disqualify it for me

delivering laughs is a non-issue for me, some of the best horror movies of the 80s were also comedies

Sybil!
http://www.caringforourchildrenfoundation.org/wp-content/plugins/rss-poster/cache/0d815_article-2049789-0E66491200000578-56_468x286.jpg

I just want to put in an early fingers-crossed for Let's Scare Jessica to Death. Surely we can all agree on that, right?