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

Possession's insanity frequently falls on the side of funny too, purposefully I imagine. I like the scene (from the screen cap actually) when they're having this brutal argument in the streets and a truck comes rolling through with cars on the back that come unleashed and go smashing across the street. They stop arguing and Sam Neil just walks off and kicks a soccerball around with some kids for a moment.

haha.

Recorded "Possession" off TCM a few weeks back. Haven't watched it yet, but reckon I will tonight. LTROI is amazing. Let Me In almost as good.

I still haven't seen LTROI (which I will rectify) but I really enjoyed Let Me In

i "respect" it for being so aggressively out there and unique, not for being "smart" or whatever. it's definitely art of some sort.

xposts

QUOTES

Is the recommended-quality version of CoS streaming/available for download anywhere for European people too, without fiddling around with proxies?
I really doubt this clusterfuck of license negotiations will be solved during my lifetime.

Possession's insanity frequently falls on the side of funny too, purposefully I imagine.

Yeah, I mean some of that stuff is just outright goofy at first. Like Heinrich's wild gesticulating while he's talking to Sam Neill. But after a minute or so of that, it feels like the product of a diseased mind. There's so much stuff like that in there, these offhand moments where the tone shifts without reason and it momentarily feels like the tension is letting up a bit but, when considered in the larger context, it's just...disturbing.

This is rocketing to the top of my must-see list. Plus that screencap!

yeah I'm def going to check this out

The best thing I can recommend re: watching Possession for the first time is go in blind. The less you know, the better. Alternately, see it how I first saw it: post-LTR breakup, drinking Jamison straight from the bottle. Oddly appropriate.

I really, really wish I didn't have anything to do right now because I would totally rewatch Possession right this very minute. Oh, well. Nighttime is the right time, anyway.

Hopefully I will not have cause to see it post-LTR breakup, so I'll just be careful to skip any future discussion of it.

"I'd be LYNE if I said I ever dreamed this movie would place this high!"

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7100/7255248286_ed3f13768f_o.jpg

22. JACOB'S LADDER
Adrian Lyne, USA, 1990
(565 points, 17 votes, 4 first-place votes)

this movie is fun but really it does not make any goddamn sense at all
― Shakey Mo Collier, Tuesday, November 18, 2008 3:27 PM (3 years ago)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v48/w1nt3rmut3/GarfieldJacobsLadder.gif
― Dan I., Tuesday, November 18, 2008 2:48 PM (3 years ago)

jacob's ladder one of the few movies i found genuinely frightening

FOUR first place votes?!

(Yeah, my head spun a little bit from that one too.)

great movie.

HUH.

Boo.

one of those first place votes was me

this is my favorite movie of all time

that said lol @ four first places

Boo. Jacob's Ladder, the Boondock Saints and Donnie Darko of its time.

(I might be exaggerating a little)

omg I love Jacob's Ladder

sent me wayyyy down the rabbit hole on Project 112 and MKULTRA and all that creepy irl mindblowing shit too, which was a nice bonus

Hot dog, I'm happy to see this. When it comes down to my very top few votes, it ends up being the movies that serve well as horror films but also just plain move me. And JL is just filled with crushingly sad scenes. So beautifully shot, and what a great balance between a drama with extremely believable/sympathetic/complex characters and total surrealistic nightmare.

~controversial~ poll result

I love that Garfield

I stand by my original comment. The "it was all a dream"-style ending always struck me as cheap and lazy, not to mention nonsensical

Jacob's Ladder is one of those movies where all the disturbing visuals and odd atmospheric things under the surface stuck with me for days after first seeing it, much like The Shining or Exorcist

that said lol @ four first places

― jesus christ (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Wednesday, May 23, 2012 12:47 PM (2 minutes ago)

xpost Shakey I usually hate those endings but I disagree on this one. In JL they pull you soooooo deeply into his life, into his paranoias and hallucinations that the ending is almost a relief, somehow? I dunno, it really moved me. And scared the BEJABBERS out of me too.

it fascinates me a little that Lyne made this movie in the middle of a 10 year run in which his other movies were 9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal

I love that he made BOTH Flashdance and Jacob's Ladder.

every time I think of Jacob's Ladder, the phrase "house party dance scene" comes to mind and I cringe a little

this film makes me understand why/how people become horror buffs, but it's far enough removed from the splattergore that has come to define the genre that I can actually embrace it

In JL they pull you soooooo deeply into his life, into his paranoias and hallucinations that the ending is almost a relief, somehow?

YES. It's like allowing him mercy: please, let this tortured soul go. It's hardly in the same category of the end of Boxing Helena, y'know?

I honestly never thought of it as a horror movie but I guess it's kind of 'a personal horror', and I'm happy to see it get so much love ITT

it fascinates me a little that Lyne made this movie in the middle of a 10 year run in which his other movies were 9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal

― some dude, Wednesday, May 23, 2012 11:52 AM (8 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Some of that shows through in the freaky dance scene.

for years i would get this movie confused w/ Lorenzo's Oil, and then even when i started watching it at first i thought it was just a Nam vet movie, so part of my enjoyment of it was the total surprise/confusion

I think there are several disconnected levels going on in the movie; obv there is the intramovie extended fantasy where all of these conspiracies and torturous events were psychic manifestations of dude clinging to life and trying to make sense of what happened to him, but there was also a metatextual extramovie angle re: the testing of battle drugs on our soldiers, and I think the confusion/inconsistency arises from trying to make the two fit together when I think it's supposed to be more that one is supposed to set the stage for the other and Tim Robbins' character never REALLY finds out what happened to him before he dies.

the atmosphere of jl *is* great. i'm always down for sad horror movies too.

my problem with the ending is that positing that the majority of the film's narrative was a hallucination raises more questions than it answers. As he was dying, he hallucinated information he could not possibly have known, including the explanation for his hallucinations (the chemist), Danny Aiello, his surviving platoon-mates having hallucinations, etc.? It's just... waht? There's plenty of good stuff in the film, but I felt kind of betrayed by its sloppy construction. The ending is like the scriptwriter going "omg look! What's that over there?" to the audience and then running away

xp

Confession: I always used to get Jacob's Ladder confused in my head with Flatliners.

Does someone grow a snake tail in this one?

The dance scene: classic.
The ice-water bath scene: classic.
The girls singing "Wait a minute, Mr. Postman" as he delivers mail: classic.
The nightmare hospital surgery sequence: classic.
His name being Jacob and the drug being called "the Ladder": dumb, but I forgive it.

Wow. I voted for Jacob's Ladder in the middle-ish of my ballot, but this placing is a surprise!

What Maurice Jarre did for the film is underrated even by film score nerds...

lol @ Flatliners. so bad.

LTROI is amazing. Let Me In almost as good.

They're totally worth watching back to back, or on successive nights. I like them about equally. Very different strengths.

Anyone ever read the much-longer original screenplay for this? Much more political, lots about Jacob trying to get the government to fess up to what the did in the war, culminating with a scene of him on courthouse steps, doused in gasoline, threatening to set himself on fire.

Elizabeth Peña: classic