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

man that little thing is so GROSS!
<3

the brood/possession would make for a doozy of a marital strife dbl feature

I believe both were made in the wake of the dissolution of the respective directors' marriages.

yeah, and a messy custody dispute in cronenberg's case as well

Halfway through trouble every day and really hoping someone still awake can promise me that this gets less boring. Also another great reason to want to punch Vincent Gallo in the face.

Let that keep you going.

I liked trouble every day! it wasn't really scary but had nice soft focus and a great score.

Ok the next time one of you assholes gets on me abt torture porn, I am using this piece of shit movie as a defense.

Cleansing my palate (hopefully) with Amer

Halfway through trouble every day and really hoping someone still awake can promise me that this gets less boring. Also another great reason to want to punch Vincent Gallo in the face.

awww. i think i've been its primary defender around here, so sorry you didn't like it. nice photography, moody music & atmosphere, and some interesting ideas. it hit me right, what can i say? sure, vincent gallo was/is an annoying dork, but that didn't bother me much for whatever reason.

wouldn't be surprised if you didn't like amer, either. it's not unpretentious...

20 minutes in and my main problem with amer is that I didn't see it in time to give it a shitload of points in the horror poll. Blown away so far, this is incredible.

cool! nice bounceback from trouble every day anyway.

I voted for trouble every day but wouldn't recommend it without reservation - it's slow, it's arty, it involves looking at vincent gallo for long stretches of time - not for everyone obv, but worth checking out.

I like the lack of exposition, how the movie doesn't connect all the dots for you. and even tho I'm not a huge gallo fan, his performance works here, maybe for similar reasons as walken's in the dead zone? there's a natural freakishness that lends itself to the outlandish happenings. same goes for dalle I guess. when TED first came out I remember being struck by the combination of high-art cinematography and bloodsoaked grindhouse splatter. there have been a number of folks in france since who made careers out of that trick.

few who've handled the "high-art" end of that equation anywhere near as well as denis does in trouble every day, though.

agree that gallo was well-cast despite his oddity and deficiencies as a performer. and walken in the dead zone is a very apt comparison. they're both weirdly empty and inert characters, and creepy besides.

i also like that it's an entire film seemingly spun out from the mundane observation that "people who are kissing look like they're eating one other"

Watching "Repulsion" for the first time now, btw.

Caligari and Eyes Without a Face are on the Cinematheque's summer schedule here.

Watched The Gate (1987, Tibor Takacs) last night and totally loved it. Why isn't this movie better known? Total echt-80s YA horror with wonderful stop motion creatures and a great best friend character (who has a Venom denim on in his first scene but then a Killer Dwarfs denim for the remainder of the movie).

About as scary as Troll 2 if memory serves.

Never seen. Think it will always have a tiny spot in history for being the movie that topped the American box office the week Ishtar was released.

I would compare it to Troll 1 for scariness, but yeah, not scary except for a few moments. But the creatures are leagues, leagues better than Troll 1.

The Gate is definitely good fun, very YA, wouldn't have made my ballot but I do feel sorry for it being neglected by *everyone*.

Part of it is that I really, really miss stop motion creature effects and I didn't even know there were gonna be any in this. Made me v happy.

Saw Caligari with live accompaniment this afternoon, probably the first time since university. I can't remember if it made the Top 100 or not (and won't try loading the whole thread). I love the Caligari-to-Hitler subtext, and obviously it influenced countless horror films that followed. I think I prefer looking at stills from it to actually watching it, though. About 20% of the print I saw was tinted garish blue for reasons I didn't quite understand. Surprised Tim Burton hasn't remade it, with Depp as Cesare and, I don't know, Danny DeVito as Caligari. (The film was introduced by this guy, a magician, who was in a film class of mine 30 years ago. We filmed a script of his that depicted the Last Supper as a celebrity roast--it made me cringe at the time. I was nostalgic and wanted to say hi after the film anyway, but he'd cleared out.)

Don't give Burton "ideas."

Last night Thnig and I watched THE SPELL (1977), featuring the lovely Lee Grant and a young dull Helen Hunt. Perfect combo of Carrie and Season of the Witch, the home interiors are AMAZING (esp the kitchen) and it's also v short and all right here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmPuzCcWlN0&feature=related

i watched the wicker man the other day, on a big screen in high def. fucking amazing, and i've been a fan for decades. i kvetched some in this thread, saying that it had become overpraised, that it really only deserved the acclaim of other cult items, to finish somewhere in the middle of the pack, surprising the unaware. that was bullshit. it's brilliant.

a bit surprised, though, by how quick other posters are to condemn sgt. howie. he's an unlikeable anti-hero, a priggish fool, but i don't wish death upon him or see him as any worse than the cultists he investigates. howie's fate is monstrous, and the real villains of the piece are clearly lord summerisle and his followers. i love the fact that the film never really takes sides, though, either personally or spiritually.

If anyone's on Letterboxd, I've put this list up there and may do the same for the comedy/action polls:

http://letterboxd.com/ephender/list/ilxs-top-100-horror-films-poll/

Nice, thanks for that.

I watched The Seventh Victim recently, and absolutely love it. The male section of the dénouement made me laugh a bit for having such surety in values alien to me, but the Donne aspect was kind of devastating.

Also watched Near Dark. It is rubbish.

023. Possession [1981, 565 points, 17 votes, 2 first-place votes]
024. Carnival Of Souls [1962, 560 points, 20 votes, 1 first-place vote]
033. Freaks [1932, 475 points, 18 votes]
036. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1920, 467 points, 18 votes]
046. Eyes Without A Face [Les yeux sans visage] [1960, 371 points, 16 votes]
060. Vampyr [1932, 314 points, 8 votes]
061. M [1931, 312 points, 9 votes, 1 first-place vote]
074. Threads [1984, 251 points, 6 votes]
080. Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht [1979, 226 points, 8 votes]
088. The Seventh Victim [1943, 206 points, 6 votes, 1 first-place vote]
092. Onibaba [1964, 191 points, 7 votes]

So I'm sitting down to watch a few: Eyes Without a Face is just about perfect in terms of duration, measured performance, plot, the ending was a bit too cute but effective; Carnival of Souls was all about that score: the organ as an instrument of god as well as the devil and communicate the sheer dread; Threads isn't horror (i know i know yawn), more horrifying: anyhow the assembling of destruction via effects/photographs/staged crumbling landscape with that old 80s computer for narration of effects (the only electrical appliance that seemed to work in the end?) gripped, but I'm not sure about the dramatic strands -- they didn't work for me, apart from Ruth's daughter and her underdeveloped use of language. You had to laugh at the Industry? What Industry shouting off at the demonstration. In the end I thought Watkins' film was better at covering the same ground while also thinking this was amazing in its own right.

if that's your to-watch list, it is a pretty awesome group of films

Haha, okay, the only dramatic strand that works for you is literally the only thing I think Threads gets somewhat wrong: it moves from the known and realistic results of a very possible event, the MUNDANITY of a ravaged society (the helpless bureaucrats, the collapse of food distribution systems), the absolute devastation of not just one staggeringly huge thing but all the little fractures it causes, into a fantasised dystopia full of feral children that, I don't know, it just feels like it moves from social realism into hysteria.

There wasn't much of a balance between showing the collapse of relationships between people and the way they could also come together to support one another: it gives glimpses when it shows them working the land, but not much more. I couldn't figure out if Ruth was being helped by others during her pregnancy or not. At times she was with people, at others not so she ends up giving birth on her own. It tried to fit in too many of the effects of devastation but Ruth seemed to be used and discaded by the script on a whim.

One thing Threads works through is the bombing of Britain back to a medieval time. I didn't like feral children but the daughter's inability to ask for specific help in the final scenes, her loss of words...that touched a nerve. You see the collapse of the NHS but also of basic learning through that. It wasn't realistic, but it worked.

Guys I just saw Phantasm and whoa! SO horribly acted but yet so inventive and awesome!! That sort of intersection of supernatural + weird technology + gore, super stylized and with a heaping dose of psychedelia is just like omg, so so wonderful

though that shot from upthread of him lying on the ground in the alien wasteland was totally not in the copy of the film I saw. Deleted scene I guess?

it's been years, but i'd swear it is in the movie, when dude gets sucked through the tuning-portal. totally otm abt the "intersection of supernatural + weird technology + gore, super stylized and with a heaping dose of psychedelia"

I rewatched the scene where he gets sucked in twice; he just floated for like 10 sec before someone grabbed his belt and pulled him back through. Lasted maybe 15 sec? But I mean the orig cut was 3+ hours and there are sooooo many deleted scenes floating around, apparently.

Also some of the footage was reused in Phantasm IV

I'm pretty meh on Phantasm, but here's an interesting article on it: http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/raised-in-fear-phantasm-and-the-uses-of-enchantment

am LOVING this Zinoman "Shock Value" book at the moment

Yeah, it's really great.

also I like Phantasm a lot but yeah it makes no sense

xp

I think I like Phantasm in large part because it makes no sense. It's like a weird post-burrito dinner fever dream.

like centipede hz?

am the proud owner of this phantasm set:

http://p.playserver1.com/ProductImages/7/2/5/9/1/7/719527_300x300_1.jpg

haha wow

sweet!

Does the orb actually work?

so i just watched "Near Dark" last night thx to these results and i can now categorically say i have no idea what some of you see in that movie.

Yeah, seriously. It is a terrible film.