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

Mulholland Drive would have been an amazing opportunity to explore the ideas of Lost Highway in more depth over the course of a series, had it been commissioned. As it was, i think it just ended up being a really great opening episode with a lazy coda tacked on to the end to make it releasable that did nothing to advance what he's already said before.

Bah xxxp, beaten to it.

Morbs' Mulholland Dr. quote is 100% otm. Wound up fairly low on my ballot because it's tenuously horror-ish, but it's one of my all-time favorite movies, for sure.

If some of you guyz were in the film marketing biz we'd have more riots at the box office.

Mulholland is so much better than Lost Highway, regardless / in spite of its origin.

^ sorry if that was redundant. this is my hobbyhorse, and i will ride it.

naw this is a good point and tho we're coming from different angles I think we end up in the same place

Yeah, I'm with the 'not horror' crowd on Mulholland Drive. But not gonna piss and moan about it too much.

― emil.y, Friday, May 18, 2012 1:11 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same here ... though if i had placed it on my horror ballot it would've been ranked very high.

lol @ quoted Mullholland Dr exchange

great great movie and Morbz probably OTM but I didn't vote for it, it's less of a horror film than some of his other entries imho

Mulholland is a TV pilot with an "it was all a dream" tack-on finish.

― da croupier, Friday, May 18, 2012 1:07 PM (5 minutes ago)

and casablanca was a hackneyed story worked over by a hodgepodge of screenwriters scrambling to rush the movie into the theaters. in both cases the means of production doesn't amount to much when compared to the finished product.

*don't*

yeah, shaping up to be an "i voted for this!" kind of day. i guess arty angst horror is where my heart lies.

i consider mulholland dr. a horror film because, though it spends a lot of its time elsewhere, it slips in and out of a tone of dreadful anticipation - and because three of its most memorable moments (the dumpster, the visit to the cabin, and closing scene) are among the most terrifying things i've ever seen onscreen. the ending of a film strongly affects how i characterize it, overall, and the final seconds of mulholland dr. just about scared me to death the first time i saw them.

I think you mean a hill of beans

xpost

fwiw, it's mulholland dr. that made me start thinking of lynch as not just a guy who makes weird and sometimes scary movies, but as a full-on "horror filmmaker".

agree that mulholland dr is one of the greatest films of the 00s, maybe the greatest, but my "conservative ideas" about horror kept me from voting for it. it's a mystery, a thriller, a melodrama, a doomed romance, an examination of fantasy and illusion and filmmaking, and while it exploits some horror-type moments (most specifically the winkies scene) in toto it doesn't feel like a horror film to me.

it did not even cross my mind to vote for MD in this poll, tho Eraserhead & Inland Empire are such pure distillations of fear, dread & disorientation that they seem to fit the bill much more suitably imo.

it's funny to rewatch mulholland dr. and to see that the payoff to the infamous "winkies scene" is really just [SPOILER]a lady with some black gunk on her face stepping out from behind a dumpster[/SPOILER]. hard to understand what might have made it so incredibly terrifying the first time around. o, but it was! i remember being shit-scared. something kind of magical about that.

yeah it's his timing of sound and motion in the frame that makes it work

I remember watching that scene on repeat on DVD trying to break down the mechanics

thank god jjjusten is not here to see this

Lynch is a master of making the banal totally horrifying. he can make a dim lamp in a room seem like the most terrifying environment ever.

I have no problem seeing the Lynch films on here because I love them so much, but I definitely mentally categorize them more as Erotic Thrillers than Horror.

lol what was "erotic" about IE or Eraserhead

Lynch is no minimalist across the board or anything, but dude has the uncanny knack to make a relatively straightforward shot of a lamp or ceiling just totally menacing and evil. Yeah, sound design has much to do w/ that as well, I guess.

*ceiling fan

messed up babies are totally erotic

Lynch is no minimalist across the board or anything, but dude has the uncanny knack to make a relatively straightforward shot of a lamp or ceiling just totally menacing and evil. Yeah, sound design has much to do w/ that as well, I guess.

Surely a lot of this dread is just his ADD inclusions of hallways, empty doorways, and inanimate objects.

a lot of times there's this low rumble in the background of lynch films, after many years I realized it's v similar to the sound of a highway in the distance

Speaking of messed-up babies, that final shot of Threads... xpost

http://filmbalaya.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/66153-3.jpg

"Speaking of EROTIC THRILLERS, I love the scene when those cute little MONSTERS take in a MIDNIGHT screening of SNOW FRIGHT and the SEVEN PLAGUES!"

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7240/7221145170_5f9849bab9_o.jpg

64. GREMLINS
Joe Dante, USA, 1984
(299 points, 12 votes)

I admit, I'm not much of an admirer of Gremlins, but it's almost completely worth it just for the fact that it's such a blatant riff on the cuddly, sentimental style of producer Spielberg, who actually went to great lengths to defend Dante's vision.
― Anthony (Anthony F), Wednesday, September 15, 2004 7:35 PM (7 years ago)

I do hope this doesn't degenerate into a thread about Gremlins.
― Pete, Wednesday, November 21, 2001 7:00 PM (10 years ago)

Didn't vote for it, but I do love those little guys.

Nice! Did not include on my ballot because it plays almost as straight-up comedy to me now, but great to see it get some love here.

Not that there's not some genuinely horrifying shit in there, I mean the gremlins do absolutely kill several people, but still.

yeah this is a comedy

didn't vote for it

most horrifying thing in it is the santa/dead dad story tbh

I had to check my ballot on this one, because voting for Gremlins totally sounds like something I'd do, but I did not.

~milk duds~

Lynch is no minimalist across the board or anything, but dude has the uncanny knack to make a relatively straightforward shot of a lamp or ceiling just totally menacing and evil. Yeah, sound design has much to do w/ that as well, I guess.

yeah, i found the first section of lost highway almost unbearably unnerving, bill pullman in the apartment what with those long, dimly lit, almost static shots of yawning beige hallways, always with some eerie whooshing static in the background. nothing ever really happens there, but i just knew that something unspeakable was about to swim up out of that darkness, and that when it did, it would completely break my mind. i think that's lynch's best trick, btw. he gets across this idea, very familiar from nightmares, that the worst thing possible is about to be revealed.

then again, maybe i'm just a sucker for this approach. like i said upthread, the scariest monster, to me, is the one that has not yet taken shape - not the ghost itself, but the shapeless moment in which it seems (perhaps) to be appearing.

love gremlins, love the sequel even more, didn't vote for either

most clearly horror thing lynch has done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYB2FykZgkg

always thought that gremlins was too dumb to spend too much time thinking about.

gremlins is awesome, but yeah, i see it as a comical fantasy adventure with a few dark/scary spots.

When (SPOILER) Spike melts at the end, it freaking HORRIFIED and HAUNTED me as a kid. But, yeah, today it's a comedy.

~milk duds~

LOL. I still growl this sometimes.

Yeah, sound design has much to do w/ that as well, I guess.

absolutely

http://www.hark.com/clips/kdznxgrzft-milk-duds

I have a lot of love for mulholland dr but it ain't horror in my book. now inland empire otoh...

gremlins takes the malevolence of its creatures seriously enough that it works as horror, but it's def at the light end of the spectrum. that's ok, not everything has to be a gruelfest.

it definitely put some fear into me as a kid

well SOMEBODY must have voted for Gremlins..

It was def an integral part of my childhood movie-going experience and as such prob fundamental to my taste for horror in general, but I don't ever have the inclination to return to it for either laughs or scares tbh.

Yay, Gremlins! Another low-placer on my ballot but worthy of inclusion.