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

The crappy claymation rat-monkey, the zombie baby, the aforementioned shotgun gag, the zombie that is just a head from the eyes up getting kicked around the floor, everything in this is so, so, so, so great.

DJP you would probably love it too.

it's definitely too gross for some. my wife enjoyed the beginning and still bailed when the mom's blister popped during the love scene

btw i want people who declaimed "shaun of the dead" but are happy about "dead alive" placing to write a post justifying, at length, this dissonance so i can pointedly ignore it

i voted for both, my conscience is clear

Ditto.

i love both but only voted for Dead Alive, Shaun feels like such an ilx canon movie that it was going to place too high no matter what

Great great movie. could've stopped making movies here and Jackson's rep would have been secure imho.

we all know it's because one is popular and recent and the other is older and a cult movie so don't waste your fingerskin

JL: Totally forget to include that one, so add about 25pts to its surprisingly good result, very good and subtle build-up in the first half.

if anything jackson's rep would be more secure if he stopped making movies here imo

(I know n/a is talking about the exact inverse of ppl like me but...)

The reason why I loved Shaun but can't even face the idea of watching D/A has everything to do with the grossout factor. Why does a horror comedy have to be as gross as humanly possible for it to be good?

btw i want people who declaimed "shaun of the dead" but are happy about "dead alive" placing to write a post justifying, at length, this dissonance so i can pointedly ignore it

lol is this directed at me? Shaun of the Dead does maybe a quarter of the things Dead Alive does, and half as well.

I skipped Braindead/Bad Taste in this poll, but I voted them high in the comedy poll, very happy about one or both of them making it...

Yeah, I totally love and voted for both Shaun and Braindead.

if anything jackson's rep would be more secure if he stopped making movies here imo

tbf he did follow this with what I consider his best movie, Heavenly Creatures

The grossness in Dead Alive is so cartoonish though.

Jacob's Ladder, wtf is wrong with you people?

^^^

And, um, Braindead is a hilarious, fast-paced gorefest and the Shaun of the Dead is a slow-to-mid-tempo mild-chuckling barely-earning-its-15-rating not-really-horror film, so I don't see the similarity.

Fatal Attraction is a better horror movie than Jacob's Ladder imo

Why does a horror comedy have to be as gross as humanly possible for it to be good?

It doesn't, but it's all in the way this one doesn't just cross a line, it pole vaults over it.

The reason why I loved Shaun but can't even face the idea of watching D/A has everything to do with the grossout factor. Why does a horror comedy have to be as gross as humanly possible for it to be good?

I think you have a misapprehension about the gore. Like I said somewhere upthread, it's hugely gory just in terms of sheer quantity, but it's mostly really cartoonish and ott (kinda on par with the bloodshed in Kill Bill 1).

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.

OTM, including "Hot dog". Not my #1, but high on my ballot. It hooked me when I first saw it right after it came out on video* and it has completely held up since. I have a terrible vocabulary for film, but I love the photography and the tone, and the characters. This is yet another in a list of movies that REALLY made me want to live in NYC.

* 9th Grade: No movie theaters within a reasonable drive and no VCR, so when I visited my brother in NC, watching it was at the very top of my MUST-DO list.

I don't think anyone else has come close this bar of grossness in the subsequent 20 years, which is pretty impressive.

That said, neither Shaun nor Braindead make my ballot, but I'm not very into horror comedies.

i love that it feels more like slapstick than horror despite all the fluid, but pus is pus and some people just don't want to spend 2 hours looking at pus

Why does a horror comedy have to be as gross as humanly possible for it to be good?

well, this is THE joke, basically - to carry horror movie tropes to their most comical, cartoonish extremes. But it's not the gore in and of itself, a lot of the movie's appeal also stems from the sheer number of batshit ideas thrown at the screen: chasing a homicidal zombie baby around a park, a kung-fu fighting priest, the ultimate in freudian-castrating-mother-figures, etc.

xp

kinda on par with the bloodshed in Kill Bill 1

closer to Evil Dead 1, imho, but even sillier

er Evil Dead TWO

oh God aLMIGHTY, jACOB'S lADDER IS A PISSPOOR PADDED tWILIGHT zONE EP

I mean, NYC in Jacob's Ladder is all so muted and grimy and trashy and grinding, which I was attracted to, and cut with the feeling of sanctuary of their apartment, plus sweet human stuff like the girls on the street singing "Mr. Postman" made it seem like a magical place to live.

xp to myself instead of working

It is still one of my favorite movies.

Morbs you don't need to press Shift when you have caps lock on.

(as we tell our secretary OVER AND OVER AND OVER)

I love the subtle (?) body horror/monster stuff in Jacob's Ladder, e.g., the horn on the nurse at the VA clinic and the tail that the bum on the train pulls into his jacket.

Just forget about the end of JL if you must. That's why it's better on subsequent viewings. You don't all caught up on "Wha...? Was this a trick ending...?" and you just let yourself sink into the torn soul of this guy. Whether it's alternate realities or two different timelines, who cares, it cuts like a cleaver. Of course, if you don't like it, you don't like it.

Does Jacob's Ladder have someone being attacked by someone's GI tract, which is simultaneously farting? No? Then at least it placed below Dead Alive.

I think my real problem may be that there's no way Adrian Lyne made one of the top 25 anythings, ever.

I don't mind the "it was all a hallucination" aspect of the end, but I don't care for the way the explanation - in writing - undoes the mood it had going. xp

xxpost LOL!

"They're HERE, they're CLEAR, get used to it!"

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7072/7255248620_e01446f3f1_o.jpg

20. POLTERGEIST
Tobe Hooper, USA, 1982
(603 points, 23 votes)

the scene where craig t nelson is reading the Reagan book, while Jobeth Williams is getting high and talking about sleep walking into some guy's car. I love that scene
― Dominique (dleone), Sunday, January 14, 2007 9:47 PM (5 years ago)

that fucking clown doll in poltergeist gah
― Thu'um gang (jjjusten), Thursday, February 16, 2012 2:54 PM (3 months ago)

I will show mercy and not embed this image
http://www.thegreenhead.com/imgs/poltergeist-clown-3.jpg
― 鬼の手 (Edward III), Thursday, April 2, 2009 10:05 AM (3 years ago)

POLTERGEIST WAS PG ?????
― ☑ (Pleasant Plains), Friday, October 10, 2008 2:45 PM (3 years ago)

actually, since i've always considered (Spielberg) the unofficial director of poltergeist, i'll say poltergeist is his best film. cuz i love poltergeist.
― scott seward (scott seward), Monday, June 20, 2005 5:06 AM (6 years ago)

JL was written by Bruce Joel Rubin, who won an Oscar for an ever better film, GHOST

it's actually worse on subsequent viewings imho

xp

3 things you should know when considering my recommendation:

1) I almost universally dislike gore, with exceptions.
2) On a spectrom of comfortability with horror, I am probably equidistant between you and jjjusten
3) I love Shaun of the Dead. It didn't make my ballot for various reasons, but I'm happy seeing it place.

I LOVED Dead Alive. It was OTT and fun. I think you would actually think it is hilarious.

Poltergeist is my #4, not that I expected a top 5 finish for it, but I'm glad to see it in here!

Poltergeist was towards the bottom of my ballot. this placing seems a little high but whatevs.

The scene from which that screencap comes is one of my favorite movie jump scares EVAR.

Pillbox, your choice of screen grab from Let The Right One In is so brilliant that it's compelling me to wrestle with what I cannot stand about this genre.

And lo, mere moments later, this Tarkovsky quote EIII posted pinpoints what's getting under my skin: The aim of art is to prepare a person for death. Look, Andrei, I prepare for death every time I get into my car. Constantly facing an uncertain future, I know life is nasty, brutish, and short. I don't need horror films (and sometimes Tarkovsky films when I'm feeling snippy) to tell me that. In fact, I despise films like Hostel and Inside and The Descent (and Man Bites Dog and Funny Games) because they contribute to a nasty, brutish, and short life. Which means I despise them precisely because they work on me - they make me feel helpless and scared. But more so than I already do and there's the rub.

And then there's...that dog in the Let The Right One In screen grab. If there's a better snapshot of the nastiness of life, keep it to yourself. I won't be able to stand it. The dog's inability to intervene underscores the helplessness of the situation and adds to the sense of life as one long, nasty drip towards eternal unconsciousness. But where the pieceashit films listed above stop there, it will be the project of Let The Right One In to intervene on behalf of the brutalities that arise from its recognizable working class locale. In short, it tries to make life liveable rather than adding to its nastiness. It's no masterpiece and didn't even make my ballot. But that screen grab begs for another viewing.

Where this leaves Zulawski I couldn't say except to note that fans of his wall-to-wall screeching will get something out of Juan López Moctezuma's Alucarda. Also, this sounds like a plot synopsis for a wild meta Zulawski film: I've had a copy of (Possession) sitting in my hose [sic] for a year.

KJB, you are entirely too smart to hate horror.

Poltergeist is like 5 horror movies (ghosts! slime! hallucinations! vortexes! zombies! mean trees! clowns! evil corporations!) squashed into one, all of them good.

well to be fair to tarkovsky, I was being a bit cheeky in misusing his quote for my own sick ends