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

Seeing movies like this whose existence I'm barely aware of pop up in the results is a lot of why I love these polls.

So much stuff I've never heard of on this list! Love it when ILX delivers on tasty obscurities.

I always sort of put Jessica and Season of the Witch into the same category in my mind, it's like valium horror. The look is hazy and soft, but the movie is weird and cold, like the world.

Nice comparison! (Tho I admit to liking the Romero movie more.)

such an inappropriate title for the movie, unfortunately

watching "witchfinder general" for the first time right now btw

faith in poll restored, let's do this

69. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer

"Valium Horror" -- great term!

Ok, Britishers, last night I sat down and watched the only movie on this thread I hadn't heard of -- #74, Threads -- and I Have Opinions.

First off, for those of you who were forced to watch this in school, you have my deepest condolences. This knocks the shit out of the U.S. equivalent, The Day After, and features about 9 or 10 images that I cannot believe were foisted upon the general public. The charred baby, of course, but for me the most alarming image is the hand sticking out of the rubble with each fingertip on fire. But is it a horror movie? I think so -- after all, it clearly was made to scare the shit out of everybody and has virtually no other narrative purpose (in fact, it has almost no sensible narrative at all, which kinda aligns it with the Lynch discussions upthread).

In conclusion, if you like watching burnt people puke until they die, this is the movie for you.

Still haven't watched that since it was originally shown on TV, much as I love horror I'm not aure I can face it again.

Everyone at school the next day was talking about the woman wetting herself

yaaaaay jessica. it was low on my list but i'm happy it placed. a downer movie in both senses of the word.

btw threads is on google video in one big chunk and perfect fot a lovely spring day

jessica is one of those movies from my childhood that scared the bejesus out of me, but unlike a lot of others, it did it again when I caught it on TV at 2am in college, and then again when it came out on DVD a few years ago. I didn't rewatch it for the poll, instead just scanned a few highlights and it's still economically ubercreepy.

not a perfect movie by any means, but the formal problems somehow make it more disturbing and nightmarish. its great strength is in not holding the viewer by the hand, we're just shown things and asked to make connections. as the movie progresses those things become more and more troubling. like rosemary's baby, we're never quite sure if the main character is bonkers, and it works as a metaphor for madness. I'm also a huge fan of horror in everyday life and the coda where jessica desperately tries to escape her fate is as effective as similar scenes in carnival of souls. the conclusion doesn't seek to resolve anything, we're left as adrift as the main character, but it doesn't feel unfinished or unsatisfying, just chilling.

we're never quite sure if the main character is bonkers

I'm starting to feel like this is a shared trait amongst almost all of the horror films that I genuinely love.

I see Jessica was shot in Old Saybrook CT, which has a rail station I have spent a fair amount of wait-time in.

embarrassed i haven't seen jessica yet, been meaning to for years

I'm going to be watching Let's Scare Jessica to Death in about an hour. That kind of 70s low budget horror is like catnip to me. I also really wish I had voted in this poll.

I was thinking about Carnival of Souls too -- character is disturbed, no one knows why, you figure it out, the end.

you figure it out = it is up to you to figure it out, not "you successfully figure it out"

looks like John Hancock made quite a splash as a theatre director in the '60s. His second film, Bang the Drum Slowly, is based on a celebrated baseball novel, and has some of the weakest game simulations ever.

Not to mention Michael Moriarty, one of the weakest human simulations ever.

This is a poll where I'm happy to be on the outs. I love the movies I voted for, but outside the boring obvious winners, and possibly some of the classics, I don't imagine I'll see many of my movies place. But that's OK, because I realize that I'm not a total horror fan. There are certain things I like, but the genre is so broad.

What I love about horror movies: artists have a pass to do all kinds of experimental and outsider stuff and find a audience (dometimes a large audience), though ometimes the stuff I love is buried under a mountain of crap and digging for the pony becomes tedious.

But this genre is so huge and diverse that I, not a propper horror fan, still had trouble narrowing down my initial 200+ selections.

^difficulties typing

"In the early 1990s, Rupert Everett MORTE'RD corpses! In the AWFUL AUGHTS, he just only shot WITHERING GLANCES at everyone!"

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7229/7221144570_57613dbd66_o.jpg

69. CEMETERY MAN [aka DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE]
Michele Soave, Italy/Germany/France, 1994
(288 points, 8 votes, 1 first-place vote)

Cemetery Man was almost the perfect movie for me at the time - it combined inappropriate zombies and Sartreian existential angst.
― my display name is an honor student at ilx high school (sarahel), Friday, September 18, 2009 7:34 PM (2 years ago)

It was sad that he kept fucking up getting the girl, and then at the end when he realizes that there is nothing outside of town.
― my display name is an honor student at ilx high school (sarahel), Saturday, September 19, 2009 1:11 AM (2 years ago)

Not to mention Michael Moriarty, one of the weakest human simulations ever.

Someone whose success (limited as it has been) has always confounded me. He always, always seems like he's right on the verge of some kind of psychological implosion. Used to good effect in a number of Larry Coen movies, though.

Nice.

Love Cemetary Man, totally forgot to vote for it. I don't get the appeal of Jessica, at all.

Another last-minute cut. Great movie.

Ok, Britishers, last night I sat down and watched the only movie on this thread I hadn't heard of -- #74, Threads -- and I Have Opinions.

First off, for those of you who were forced to watch this in school, you have my deepest condolences. This knocks the shit out of the U.S. equivalent, The Day After, and features about 9 or 10 images that I cannot believe were foisted upon the general public. The charred baby, of course, but for me the most alarming image is the hand sticking out of the rubble with each fingertip on fire. But is it a horror movie? I think so -- after all, it clearly was made to scare the shit out of everybody and has virtually no other narrative purpose (in fact, it has almost no sensible narrative at all, which kinda aligns it with the Lynch discussions upthread).

In conclusion, if you like watching burnt people puke until they die, this is the movie for you.

― The Thnig, Friday, May 18, 2012 10:41 AM (7 minutes ago)

I made this point on the voting thread, but the primary thing keeping me from classifying threads as a horror film is its social conscience. I disagree that it has no narrative purpose - it was meant to shock and horrify ppl into *action*. the threat of nuclear destruction was very real in the 80s. two superpowers were massively stocked with enough weapons to destroy the world several times over, and if you had little faith in human beings' ability to curb their self-destructive impulses it was terrifying - but not terrifying in an immediate sense, it was a low level throb, a constant background hum of distress (the minutemen's "paranoid time" is prolly the best snapshot of the time).

the goal of films like threads and the day after were to get the populace to demand disarmament, to shock them out of complacency (and apparently to scare the crap out of british school children). in my mind the closest analogue is pixote, about the horrors visited on children of poverty in brazil. it is equally as bleak and horrific as threads, but its larger purpose is to bring attention to an issue.

when I saw threads as a kid in the US, it was on PBS, not chiller, and it was in the context of political protest, a blunt scream against the madness of mutually assured destruction. today the threat is no longer palpable, so we can view threads as a horrorshow, an entertainment. I understand, but for me the impact will always be associated with the political condition it was designed to address.

xxp the most recent thing I saw Moriarty in was an episode of "Masters of Horror" where he hammed it up unbelievably. I mean enough to take me right out of the episode, and it was about competing serial killers.

Okay, I don't know Cemetery Man at all.

Threads was too low, should've been top 10 for sure. And yeah, I agree with EdIII that it totally has a narrative purpose - similar to The War Game, it was an anti-nuclear tract. If anything, I think that such a narrative drive is made TOO obvious at times, rather than not obvious enough.

Glad to see Let's Scare Jessica To Death place even though I haven't seen it - all my proper horror buff friends are big fans.

In the summer of '87 I unironically started a local chapter of the Children's Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament with flyers and meetings and everything, but the only people to show up were my two friends, but I was not at home when Thnig watched Threads :(

but but but

Glad to see Henry place--brutal movie and the quotes Eric selected have it right--but that was the last serial killer movie I ever needed to see. That didn't stop me from watching American Psycho, which is a different sort of animal all together.

I made a very specific decision not to watch Threads based on all the comments that it's way worse than The Day After and the, oh, five to eight years of anxiety that The Day After engendered after seeing it as a kid.

Cemetery Man has been on my "need to watch" list forever. I would have watched it during the Sick Times Horror Marathon yesterday, but it is only available on DVD.

Strangely, I have definitely seen Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and... I can barely remember it. I must have been drunk.

Oh, no doubt Threads had a purpose. But taken just at face value (not that I'm sure why'd we do that), it's mostly absent of coherent narrative in any traditional sense of characters, conservations of elements, structure. Either way, pretty potent stuff.

I'm guessing people who like Cemetery Man also really like Evil Dead 2. I could do without it, but, again, happy enough to see it here.

Okay, I don't know Cemetery Man at all.

I find this shocking - more commonly known as dellamorte dellamore in europe?

the primary thing keeping me from classifying threads as a horror film is its social conscience.

This seems like kind of an arbitrary disqualifier. Not to single you out, but some people in this thread have voiced fairly conservative ideas about what horror is or what it should or should not do. Which I think are probably pretty common concerns and are a large part of the reason why so few filmmakers attempt to make horror films that break the mold. I personally see no reason why a having a social conscience should disqualify a film as horror. But, hey, it's all subjective at the end of the day.

I made a very specific decision not to watch Threads based on all the comments that it's way worse than The Day After and the, oh, five to eight years of anxiety that The Day After engendered after seeing it as a kid.

I'm apparently just gonna keep harping on this: TESTAMENT! TESTAMENT!!!! I don't know why it's so unfairly and consistently overlooked when people discuss horrifying nuclear-age films! And I'm so sad that it looks like it isn't gonna show up in these results despite the many, many points I threw its way. Truly one of my all-time most dread-inducing movies.

I saw Testament, too, but I think I was already too scarred by The Day After. (That's not commentary on the quality of either movie, just the way it worked out.)

what I'm saying is that the ppl who made threads weren't trying to give you a horror thrillride. if you're saying the intent of the filmmakers is a non-issue as long as the sum effect disturbed and horrified you, then why not vote for pixote, midnight express, apocalypse now, titicut follies, boys don't cry, etc.

xps

"If there's a KYUA for CYST, I don't want it!"

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7104/7221144694_2085e56e12_o.jpg

68. CURE [aka KYUA]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 1997
(289 points, 9 votes)

Cure was my favorite. it made me paranoid that i was being hypnotized.
― Fetchboy (Felcher), Tuesday, January 23, 2007 12:40 AM (5 years ago)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa = zzzzzz
― Alex in SF, Tuesday, August 18, 2009 7:47 PM (2 years ago)

it is um... extreme
it's kind of Noir. The most famous movie it's like is Seven, but more noir than that.
― A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, November 4, 2004 3:32 PM (7 years ago)

nice. cure didn't land on our shores until '01, I remember reading hoberman's writeup for it in the voice and being instantly intrigued...

http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-07-31/film/fear-eats-the-soul/1/

Yay Kiyoshi Kurosawa! Haven't seen Cure yet. ;_;

there are plenty of horror films with a social conscience wtf. quite a few more are going to show up here, I reckon.

xp

there's a difference between a horror movie with a social conscience and a film of social conscience that is horrifying

which is...?

tho assisting Eric in this endeavor has been rewarding on multiple levels, I have to say I'm a little ashamed at how few of the placing pre-1960s, Asian & European genre essentials, in addition to other misc. cult obscurities, were on my radar at all before recently - the holes in my genre familiarity being compounded as I've searched out imagery from these films and discovered how incredible a lot of it is. LSJTD & Cemetery Man are the latest examples of this (I really dig the photography of both, for almost completely different reasons), though the same could be said for much of what has placed thusfar. If nothing else, once the dust settles, my Netflix queue will be spoken for for some time!