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

"Steven Spielberg's first movie proved no PIT STOP! He was in it for the LONG HAUL!"

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81. DUEL
Steven Spielberg, USA, 1971
(224 points, 8 votes)

is DUEL steven spielberg's best film?

does anyone else think this? i just saw it for the first time tonight and was pretty blown away. the concept sounds ridiculous (a horror movie that takes place entirely in broad daylight on a highway), but it totally works. the shot of the truck in the tunnel when its demonic-looking lights suddenly come on is one of the scariest things i've ever seen in a movie. there's no explicit suggestion that the truck is supernatural, which makes that moment all the more unnerving.
― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Monday, June 20, 2005 4:37 AM (6 years ago)

It always cracks me up that the most intelligent movies of Spielberg's career were his first.
― miccio (miccio), Monday, June 20, 2005 6:13 AM (6 years ago)

"Duel" was a promising, good, disposable B-movie.
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, June 21, 2005 11:08 AM (6 years ago)

my list seems pretty equal in its human lunatics, monsters, unexplained supernatural phenomenon, technological mishaps, appearances by the devil, unreliable pov, and who-the-hell-knows craziness.

i wonder when polanski's /the tenant/ will show up.

Not until the final day of the rollout, if there's any justice in this world.

never bothered with Duel

zombies appeal to us on multiple levels - body horror, direct manifestation/confrontation of our own mortality, revulsion of rot and decay, fear of being consumed

duel is pretty great but im still surprised.

yeah theres a reason that the zombie trope has never really died in the last 40+ years, theres just a lot more you can hang on zombie movies than say werewolf movies. i cant remember the name of it for the life of me, but there was a very strange sad movie out in the last few years that basically centered around a couple where one of them was becoming zombified over the course of the film, and it was pretty devestating. probably french or belgian, lemme look through my watched queue

70s TV movies are almost their own subgenre, and if they are going to be repped at all in this poll duel is a good candidate. either that or killdozer.

of course I'm going to give emily + eric a ration of shit if salem's lot places :)

the ghost to my mind is the scariest of the classic supernatural beasties. the ghost is scary because it is the unknown. the ghost isn't the guy in the sheet or the transparent lady, it's the sense of malevolent presence, the nameless terror that seized you in the dark when you were a kid, the shape glimpsed in peripheral vision that vanishes when you turn to face it, the fluid border of reality where that shadow might be a shrieking face or maybe just a chair. that, to me, is scary, is what horror movies are all about. doesn't matter whether you want the terrifying unknown to collapse back down into what seems "rationally possible" or whether you want it to open onto fantastical impossibilities (i want the latter). the essence of terror, to me, is what cannot yet be identified or fully perceived. therefore, the ghost.

i have more of a director fetish than a particular horror trope fetish. except maybe that i like a bit of humor (intentional or otherwise) to leaven the mood a bit.

Exciting new theory: truck in Duel was a zombie. Kept on coming, wouldn't die. No? OK, fine.

though if i had to pick a horror beastie, i'm probably most partial to (pre-Twilight) vampires b/c they be so bad-ass.

yeah looking at my list it seems director (or total conception) trumps idea/subgenre/theme for me.

High-five to the other 7 people who voted for Duel!

maybe this is a thread/poll of its own, but which of the following canonical supernatural spookshow shit is the scariest to each of you?

As I feel I've probably repeated ad nauseum in various horror threads, I think my number one horror trope is when the bindings of the sane world are loosened, be it a shared reality breaking down across the board or the more subjective tableau of watching a protagonist's sanity crumble (or a protagonist who thinks his/her sanity is crumbling). Off-kilter ambiguity that makes the viewer question the nature of the reality being presented will get me just about every time.

also, a childhood filled with The Count from Sesame Street and Count Chocula might've also inured me to the charms of the undead.

xpost

This is a lot of the reason why Lovecraft might be my favorite horror author.

I'm not sure a truly scary vampire film exists. Would love to hear what I'm forgetting, though.

Ditto Jeepers Creepers. Really great while they were being harassed on the road, Duel-style. Turns to poop after monster reveal. xpost

^^^ oh man, this. First half so good, second half so bad.

thinking about what is likely to place in the top 10, it's going to be a pretty even mix of monsters, ghosts, demonic possession, and stabby mcstabbersons

i have more of a director fetish than a particular horror trope fetish. except maybe that i like a bit of humor (intentional or otherwise) to leaven the mood a bit.

^^^cosign

though it's plenty scary, i think of duel as a suspense thriller, not really as a horror movie. would say similar of picnic at hanging rock: it's an occult-tinged mystery that only briefly pushes into "scary movie" territory. not that anybody else is wrong to see them as proper horror films, just that i excluded them not for not meeting my personal criteria. love them both, fwiw. would vote for the former in a thriller poll, and the latter in mystery and maybe even fantasy (though it's pushing that boundary even harder than it is horror).

near dark is great and i regret not voting for it.

stabby mcstabbersons

LOL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lBRf0UgjFc

xp - don't underestimate the alluring power of rituals and cults...

insanity and utter nihilism are the scariest things in the world to me, nothing supernatural ever comes close, although i do love the atmosphere of supernatural horror, and when supernatural stuff gets really weird and abstract, e.g. david lynch, it explores the psychological at least as much as the otherworldly. just throwin in my two cents.

great job with the poll, i didn't vote, but following the results is really fun.

I'm not sure a truly scary vampire film exists. Would love to hear what I'm forgetting, though.

let's scare jessica to death, nosferatu, near dark, and - I know I'm in the minority on this - 30 days of night

salem's lot, duh

maybe my claim that lynch is a specifically-dedicated horror filmaker strikes some as strange, but i think of eraserhead, fire walk with me, lost highway, mulholland dr. ("drive" or "dream"?), and inland empire as full-blooded horror movies. the only other film he's made from his own screenplay is blue velvet, one of the scariest, funniest and strangest thrillers ever made. the films he's made from other people's stories are generally less horrific, but with the exception of the straight story, they've all got their moments. he even injected surreal, atavistic horror shit into dune.

and having rewatched it a couple years ago, I was surprised to see how well fright night stood the test of time

xp

best i can figure out, i tend to like expressionist-/atmospheric-style horror films than more "realist" stuff. kinda ties into my tastes in general, made my poll a bit heavier on stuff that many might classify as "suspense" instead of "horror," and since this is a stylistic choice on the part of the director it ties into my director fetish.

"When Werner Herzog talked of CHAOS, HOSTILITY and MURDER, he was really just reading aloud from my MASQUERADE BALL Evite!"

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80. NOSFERATU: PHANTOM DER NACHT
Werner Herzog, West Germany, 1979
(226 points, 8 votes)

Based on what little I've seen, it seems to consist of Nosferatu just casually shooting the shit with people and hanging out.
― Darin, Wednesday, June 16, 2010 5:36 PM (1 year ago)

I've soured a bit on Herzog after reading the essay in Granta on the making of Nosferatu. Something like 16,000 rats died miserable deaths in order to get a couple of shots.
― milozauckerman (miloaukerman), Sunday, August 14, 2005 6:52 PM (6 years ago)

I cut duel at the last minute. Glad to see it place.

speaking about director fetishes LOL ... Phantom der Nacht was #10 on my ballot, lol Herzog-stan i be.

it does strike me as weird that jjjusten will strenuously argue against lynch as a horror director and then stan for cremaster 3 tho

started to get bummed that I didn't vote for herzog's nosferatu after the discussion upthread, thx for covering for me guyz

jjj moves in mysterious ways, a pontypool to hate, a rubber to love

herzog's nosferatu doesn't do much for me. kinski's great, and the locations/production design are fantastic, but as a movie, it's kind of inert.

only negative i can think of re Phantom der Nacht: Klaus Kinski may've been the prototype for the dreadful emo-vampire that now holds sway in the hearts of so many teenage girls these days.

p sure that came from columbine

emphasis on "may"

sorry, that sounded glib. i meant that fetishizing/elevating/romanticising death-lite has always been a thing, but its conflation with adolescent ennui is to me a very '90s trope

I'm fine with ghosts, zombies, aliens, stabbers, and stalkers. I just want to have a little time to build up tension, believe on some level in the impending terro--enough to sustain it through the shock boo moments--and not be handed some key that explains everything.

Like, Alien would have sucked if it was the exact same movie, but there was some guy in the end who was all I made this in my lab and summoned you here to find it because humanity is a dick

there are exceptions to the unexplained. obv there is no one metric by witch to judge any genre

goth predates the 90s, remy

I love rubber! But is suffers from some of the same problems as pontypool.

i voted for "duel" pretty high on my ballot - it's so bare-bones/no-nonsense. talk about horror movies without a mythology/explanation, the whole story is just "protagonist pisses off antagonist, antagonist tries to get unproportional revenge." i love it.

man you guys really don't like talking about the actual movies that are placing huh

also really like that you don't see the "bad guy" in duel at all

n/a, remind me -- how did the protagonist piss off truck driver? Did he cut him off or something?

(except his boots i think)

yeah iirc he cuts him off

apparently (per wikipedia) he just passes the trucker a couple of times?