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

I'm with carl agatha on Martyrs. Been on my radar forever but I'm scared to see it. Shocked to see it ranked so high; I'm re-evaluating my fears. I'm going to assume there's no chance of Hostel showing up on here.

I'm not necessarily anti-Hostel (it was OK), but imo Martyrs so outclasses the films perceived to be its peers, in terms of art and intelligence, that it doesn't deserve to be mentioned alongside them.

The American Vanishing is one of the worst remakes ever.

Them is great, and really scary/intense. Inside is ridiculous. Human Centipede, more ridiculous. Martyrs is just a pretentious hodgepodge of vague philosophy. The profound "reveal" at the end is so lame. I can't imagine someone not finding fault with it, though I can easily imagine people finding reasons to like/appreciate it.

yeah, unless you're a hardcore distress junkie I just don't recommend martyrs. I love it, I think it's perfect, but it's not for everyone. it doesn't resort to cheap tricks like sexual violence or leering psychos or killing animals, but it will raise your blood pressure, bum you out, then wink at you as it sashays out the door. it's pretty telling that it gives jaded folks like jjjusten pause.

but you know, it's only a movie... it's only a movie... it's only a movie

Martyrs, I will concede, had potential, but like Inside - or even High Tension - it goes a little too far. It's undisciplined (unlike, say, Wolf Creek, which is also unpleasant, but focused).

contenderizer I was very impressed w the way it seemed to just abandon p much all conventions of narrative storytelling but did so in a way that was deliberate and crucial, as opposed to, say, Cube where it was just "hey let's just do this cool idea w/o trying to deal w coherence". Incoherence (or really just how yr left in the dark for so long and evn after the ending) w/in Martyrs is utilized extremely skillfully and it felt like a very fresh and unique approach to filmmaking. Though because of that, it's also kind of a one-time-use thing: you open it, you consume it, and it's done. There's little point in rewatching it unless you're with people who haven't seen it, and the more you know about the plot beforehand the more the purpose of watching the film is defeated.

Yeah, but it's not like some crazy twist occurs, where you can watch people around you react with some sort of shocked a ha! moment. And even as far as OTT goes, it falls so short of that (impossible) goal - the top, as it were. It's just floating there in this weird horrible purgatory, so close yet so far.

Re: torture porn, once we were getting free Showtime & I turned to it at a prime-town hour, like 8pm, and it was some mainstream torture porn movie and was featuring a recognizable actress lashed to a table and being forced to drink a smoothie of blended-up body parts by having a funnel shoved into her mouth. Can't remember the movie or the actress. But it really drove home again how screwed up violence/sex limits are in American media. I mean, imagine what the porn equivalent of that scene would be, presented at 8pm for all the kiddies.

High Tension was just a stupid movie with a horribly flimsy gotcha!-ending that makes p much no sense and comes off as super-gimmicky in a way that Martyrs is skillfully crafted enough to transcend.

Yeah, but it's not like some crazy twist occurs, where you can watch people around you react with some sort of shocked a ha! moment. And even as far as OTT goes, it falls so short of that (impossible) goal - the top, as it were. It's just floating there in this weird horrible purgatory, so close yet so far.

I think that's the point exactly, though. It refuses to tell you a lot of stuff that viewers are trained to expect.

High Tension would have easily made my list if not for having the dumbest, most ill-advised (and totally unnecessary!) twist ending ever. srsly, what a shame

martyrs is an intelligent film, but not an intellectual one. I don't find it particularly pretentious, it doesn't speak down to the audience or put on any airs that it is more than what it appears to be. if you read an interview with the director, he comes off as very down to earth and clear-eyed about what he's doing, and, for a french filmmaker, doesn't strike me as pretentious at all.

Martyrs is insultingly awful. I threw a ton of points at my own pick for the best of the new-Euro horrors (Belgium's Calvaire) but I gather that has absolutely no shot.

re: martyrs

yeah, unless you're a hardcore distress junkie I just don't recommend martyrs.

agreed. here's something I said on another thread that described my not exactly pleasurable experience while watching martyrs:

my imagination (and dread!!) was running wild the whole time. plus, the film does a lot to disorient the viewer as well. there's almost a... psychedelic?... quality to watching some of this stuff.

more or less, this is the appeal for me. it's a powerful film imo. it was just shy of my top 10.

am I right in thinking that the American version of The Vanishing changes the ending and thereby ruins it?

Not seen the remake but from what I hear this is very much the case, yes.

Well, to get a little spoilery here - SPOILERS:

When the big reveal turns out to be a secret society investigating the relationship of pain-prompted epiphany as a gateway to the afterlife, then my pretentious-meter goes a little red. At least Hellraiser is campy about (if we're honest) a similar idea.

Calvaire is good! And it has the greatest dance scene. (You read that right.)

xpost

Come to think of it, if Martyrs actually didn't tell you what was going on, I would have liked it more!

And even as far as OTT goes, it falls so short of that (impossible) goal - the top, as it were.

this is another thing I like about it - obv there are far more horrific things that could have been depicted in martyrs, and have been depicted in plenty of other horror films. but martyrs just gets under your skin so successfully, it's all due to craft.

btw if Mel Brooks appears in the next 55 slots I will rev up my chainsaw.

re: more french stuff

them (ils) is really awesome and one of the most effective scary movies I've seen. but my advice would be not to watch it if you live alone!! caught it when I still did and found it tough to shake all kinds of nasty home invasion thoughts. :-/

hate, hate, HATE high tension.

still fuming over the ending almost a decade later, lol

...as opposed to, say, Cube where it was just "hey let's just do this cool idea w/o trying to deal w coherence". Incoherence (or really just how yr left in the dark for so long and evn after the ending) w/in Martyrs is utilized extremely skillfully and it felt like a very fresh and unique approach to filmmaking.

that's an interesting point, but i'm not sure i understand it. cube, it seems to me, is a perfectly coherent film that doesn't feel a need to explain what's going on at the big picture level. the small-scale details make sense, though, and nothing violates the film's general sci-fi "realism". martyrs is similarly stingy with the top-down info (how, exactly, was all this arranged?) and never seems 100% credible, but it's nowhere near so narratively incoherent as, say, fulci's the beyond or lynch's mulholland dr.

Yeah, a point in Martyrs favor is that it is not this surreal, stream of consciousness orgy of violence. It's pretty methodical. Almost ... surgical.

Man, I hate Cube. All of the Cubes.

Martyrs is insultingly awful. I threw a ton of points at my own pick for the best of the new-Euro horrors (Belgium's Calvaire) but I gather that has absolutely no shot.

calvaire was one of my very last cuts, and in retrospect i regret not throwing some points its way. i love it, but had too many sentimental favorites i just couldn't let go of. the one representative of "new french extremity" i did save room for was claire denis' trouble every day, which got one of my top 10 slots.

It's pretty methodical. Almost ... surgical.

lol

I mean I love Cube and it's incoherence too, but with Martyrs it was more of a plot device of sorts where with Cube it was just a shrug. They used their lack of explanation in very different ways and Martyrs was a lot smarter about it.

tl;dr option: M was my #1 and I don't give a fuck if it's not horror. Also, genre is more a perpetual activity than a thing per se, more a verb than a noun

I am the first-place voter for M and I have no interest in proving its status as a horror film. I only voted in this because jjj asked me to. And not only did he muck up his ballot with post-classical caca but now he's on vacation during the genre bloodbath?!?!? For shame! :) So I just voted for what I thought were the greatest films listed in the noms and figured the very fact that a film was nominated was genre justification enough for me. Took about 10 mins. if even that. In fact, I did it so quickly that I forgot another greatest film of all time contender Night of the Hunter and also Vampyr so I'm glad the latter has shown up. Sorry, Carl. With me, you would've placed way higher. So if you want to hear why M might be the greatest film of all time, I'll oblige. But if you want to know why it's a horror film, forget it. I don't even like the genre (although really it's the serial killer film that I hate).

I do think that the arguments about boundaries in this thread (and others like it, I presume) reveal a misunderstanding about genre because genre is more a perpetual activity than a thing per se, more a verb than a noun. As Rick Altman puts it, "genres must be seen as a site of struggle among users" (in Film/Genre, p. 99). Or here's a juicier quote: "Whereas no critical discourse, however prestigious and oft repeated, can become part of Hamlet, even the lowliest of genre critics cannot help but contribute to the genre itself" (84).

So when Edward says "there's a difference between a horror movie with a social conscience and a film of social conscience that is horrifying" and then Deric says "if the audience reacts to a film as if it were a horror film, it should qualify as a horror film at least as much as the rote garbage that's only accepted as horror," it's necessary to determine how they're using genre and the value of their approaches. Edward privileges production when he conceives of genre and Deric privileges reception. But to better grasp the discursive (language-like, argumentative) nature of genre, the goal is to incorporate as wide a variety of genre uses as possible.

So Edward's statement is "right" given how he uses genre. But Larry Cohen uses genre differently. Any interview with him makes clear that he conceives of It's Alive as a film of social conscience that is horrifying rather than a horror movie with a social conscience. I'm not privileging Cohen's voice over Edward's. Rather, the genre lies somewhere in between, within the conversation. Similarly, if someone pisses their pants to Threads, then it's a horror film to Deric. Sure, no prob. But if you watched me watching The Long, Long Trailer, I guarantee you would've thought I was watching a triple feature of Martyrs, Inside, and Henry rather than a supposedly light and breezy Desi and Lucy comedy. In short, the applicability of these approaches shift depending on user and context.

And the same applies to greatness and masterpieces and all that. Masterpieces are waaaay a discursive formation as Saint Foucault once told me in a bathhouse in New Orleans. Stevie D might think there's a way to distinguish between the most enjoyable films and the greatest (he really doesn't think this but let's humor him) but there's no hard and fast rule that could determine the distinction. In fact, the very idea that great and favorite can be distinguished is meant to hide the self-interest behind proclaiming greatness.

Man, I hate Cube. All of the Cubes.

yeah, not a cube fan. did like the part where that one guy got cut up into little person cubes. otherwise meh.

http://www.tcj.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/McCheese-Picasso.jpg

I tried to watch Cube II the other day and it was sooooooo terrible. The first is so poorly overacted that it's hard to enjoy, too, for that matter.

"genres must be seen as a site of struggle among users"

this is true of a great many things, for instance ILX threads

Idk, I enjoy a lot of banal and mediocre things that I'd have a hard time calling great

Thx KJB, that post pretty much justifies all the preceding hue n cry. (And hopefully obviates more.)

Man, I know it (obviously) has its defenders here, but I finally was able to sit through "Witchfinder General," and, huh, I don't get it. Just lots of people riding horses back and forth and occasionally burning someone at the stake. Did it have a plot? Because if so, I totally missed it.

(However, now I'm listening to Witchfinder General's "Friends of Hell," and it is awesome)

Also I will acknowledge that Satantango is a great film but there are abt 10,000 other films I will pick before I choose to rewatch it.

Sorry, Carl. With me, you would've placed way higher.

Took me about ten very puzzling seconds to figure out you weren't talking to me.

Thanks for that, KJB. A vast improvement of what I was trying to say earlier. Genre application seems so subjective to me that it's hardly worth arguing about too much. But that doesn't mean it isn't fun to do so.

And thanks for the Kupperman panel, contenderizer. I knew the "hating cubes" thing reminded me of something.

lol another snake n bacon fan!

xp

Re: torture porn, once we were getting free Showtime & I turned to it at a prime-town hour, like 8pm, and it was some mainstream torture porn movie and was featuring a recognizable actress lashed to a table and being forced to drink a smoothie of blended-up body parts by having a funnel shoved into her mouth. Can't remember the movie or the actress. But it really drove home again how screwed up violence/sex limits are in American media. I mean, imagine what the porn equivalent of that scene would be, presented at 8pm for all the kiddies.

― The Thnig, Friday, May 18, 2012 5:21 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Although I haven't seen it, I recognize this as "Captivity" starring Elisha Cuthbert of "24" fame. And my understanding is that this movie tries to engage in a super duper plot twist and falls flat on its face. The movie was also infamous for a controversy involving its billboard advertisements.

see, Stevie, that's why I have concluded Satantango is not a great film (after a 2nd viewing this winter).

Ohhh yeah, I remember those billboards. They were pretty awful.

Also, KJB, re: favorites and masterpieces, I pretty consciously avoid any overt attempts at objective "quality" when I put together my ballots for these polls largely because, as you mention, there's an inherent subjectivity lurking behind all attempts to present one's own take on The Greatest Anything. All I can root for in good conscience is the stuff that has affected me personally and then try not to give too much of a rip whether it has more detractors than proponents. I'll be the first to recognize that my picks don't usually align with the canon or general critical approval, but I really don't care as that was never my intention in the first place.

That is a healthy attitude.

Idk, I enjoy a lot of banal and mediocre things that I'd have a hard time calling great

there's often a certain amount of back-and-forth on GOAT threads about whether or not it makes sense to distinguish between things that are "genuinely great" and not-great things that one happens to like for whatever reason. i think it does make sense to consider the distinction, but not to be bound by it.

call me an idiot, but i enjoyed haute tension more than inside or martyrs. i even liked the conclusion, despite the fact that it's patently ridiculous. there's a long point-of-view shot near the end in which the protagonist follows a half-seen car down a foggy road at night while romantic dreampop music plays. i realized during this shot that i was watching something deliberately unrealistic, that the film was trying to make a virtue of dreamlike atmosphere, of heightened and evocative incoherence. having grasped this, i wasn't asking for the ensuing wrap-up to make much sense; i just wanted it to be colorful and interesting. it was, so i was satisfied.

stepping back, i realize that my take on the film is personal and may have nothing to do with the filmmakers' intent. maybe it's just generic slasher movie with a dumb twist ending that i manufactured a "poetic" justification for. even if that's true, it doesn't matter to me and doesn't affect my evaluation of the film. my personal experience of it is enough to justify my fondness for it. if i'd liked it enough, i'd have voted for it, and i wouldn't have worried a bit about whether or not it's truly great enough to merit the inclusion.

^ redundant, i guess, in view of what deric just said

did want to thank KJB for this paragraph, the best thing anyone's said about genre itt (emphasis mine):

I do think that the arguments about boundaries in this thread (and others like it, I presume) reveal a misunderstanding about genre because genre is more a perpetual activity than a thing per se, more a verb than a noun. As Rick Altman puts it, "genres must be seen as a site of struggle among users" (in Film/Genre, p. 99). Or here's a juicier quote: "Whereas no critical discourse, however prestigious and oft repeated, can become part of Hamlet, even the lowliest of genre critics cannot help but contribute to the genre itself" (84).

That said, I'm always trying to take in positive critical takes on various things to gauge what might be worth a look-see, so (as I said before) I'm always happy to see ILX poll results that are surprising and filled with things I haven't seen/heard of/read. 'Cuz I largely trust the intention and thoughtfulness underlying y'all's taste, even if my tastes don't always align with those of the ILX massive.

Rick Altman was my advisor in college.

And he was HORRIFYING!!! There, better?

Actually, a big project of mine in Altman's class was analyzing the sound effects of the Leslie Neilson segment of CREEPSHOW. aaaand scene.