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

The Shining was pretty f. scary I reckon, the scenes in the shower, the twins, REDRUM. It gets to me.

Sterile? Hmm, I really don't get that. The snow and hotel are perfect. This is even before we speak of JN's performance.

I do agree that results so far have been, for lack of a better term, largely "high class". Not sure if that's a good thing or not.

I would've killed a man to get Tourist Trap on this poll.

xp yeah sorry - I agree best not to talk about films before they come.

It was only that I came to the thread and realised I hadn't voted when DNL came too early.

Would 'low-class' mean a lot more US-centric?

not really - see giallo and asian horror

Shame that Roeg had to go and and Shyamalan the ending.

feh, ending isn't the best thing about the movie, but it's great!

hey guys i basically lost the last two days because of the need to pay my rent. did i miss anything?

everybody keeps forgetting about it's alive, obvious top 5 lock

I think I've probably disagreed with you before on this jjj - I really like the situation where you've got 11 films competing for 10 spaces, and each entry ratchets it up further as to which one is going home with nothing (eg Lethal Weapon in the action poll). I'd have thought the horror poll would be best suited to this :)

Not telling anybody what to do but man I hate the part of the poll where everyone starts speculating on the top results, takes all the fun out of the rollout

― O_o-O_0-o_O (jjjusten), Mittwoch, 23. Mai 2012 00:45 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Especially in a genre where it's all about suspense!

Going through the upper ranks of my own list and mostly only having stuff left that either will not place anymore or classics that inevitably will occur, there is one single dark horse left in the race for which I will be really pleased to see it included at this point. It even was referenced upthread, by a rather spoilerish picture.

best thing abt Motel Hell imo is the VHS cover art

motel hell gots a number of best things about it:

head feeding system
pig mask
chainsaw duel
cheerful redneck murder couple
"meat's meat, and a man's gotta eat"

some damn scary shit very early on in The Shining but almost ALL the scary bits are in the opening 25 minutes (Danny screaming silently, the first sight of the girls, the blood emptying out of the elevator) after that it loses a lot of the scare factor and goes for thriller stuff and gags and walruses blowing old men in tuxedoes.

Blown By a Walrus: The Stanley Kubrick Story

also, Motel Hell was temporarily the nom-de-ILX for Alex in NYC.

re: The Shining - I was just on a Shining thread a few weeks ago and marveled at this post by difficult listening hour:

this movie is such a total goddamn masterpiece. for some unfathomable reason my parents let me see it when i was like 11, when yes i was wimpy enough to be seriously creeped out by the weird little girls but more importantly 11 enough to be bone-level shaken by STOP SWINGING THE BAT. GIVE ME THE BAT, WENDY. and by all the abusive-father fear in general (nb my father was upstanding but sometimes there were years my parents fought a lot and probably any kid who's ever seen his dad yell at his mom can queasily jive w/ this angle of the shining).

when i loved it as a kid/teenager it was for the situation, right, the ISOLATION and wendy's POWERLESSNESS and UNCERTAINTY -- it's neat how, even though wendy is an audience surrogate in the sense that she's the one who's probably subjected to the most terror throughout (the kid is big too sure but wendy has a whole layer of maternal fear for him as well as for herself, and plus she gets satanically yelled at by jack nicholson, reads his book, etc.) she's the only one in this haunted house movie who doesn't see any ghosts until the last ten minutes. i remember scoffing at the school that claims native-american-genocide overtones, but those are really there, honestly. and not just in secret-code clues in the pantry (lolest thing i noticed re: the pantry on this viewing was the little stack of snacks jack puts together after he's been locked in there, yelled GO CHECK IT OUT! HEHEHEHEEHEHEHEHE, etc.,: packet of oreos and some peanut butter. they should have put him in the meat locker scatman crothers demonstrates at the beginning and had him just tear into a raw ham.) jack's a blue-collar white guy with cultured aspirations who's feeling humiliated economically (SHOVELING OUT DRIVEWAYS, WORK IN A CAR WASH -- ANY OF THAT APPEAL TO YOU? -- this important+telling line comes right after probably the pinnacle of the OTT Jack LOLs, which is when he says IT IS JUST SO TYPICAL OF YOU TO START THIS UP NOW... JUST WHEN I AM REALLY IN TO MY WORK), and furthermore resents that what he at least hopes was an accident with his son's arm a few years ago has made it necessary for him to stop drinking and be really contrite and feel further unmanned, and is seduced on one level by an Evil Supernatural Power, in the form of a bunch of well-dressed whites having a perpetual power-drenched cocktail party in a luxury hotel built on a conquered graveyard (nice touch: "i believe they actually had to fend off a few indian attacks while they were building it!"); and on another level just by the ability, up there in the snow, to really show his family who's boss. he gets drunk on this nasty fantasy of privilege that's built on bones, and when the hotel needs to spur him on it suggests to him that he's not Man enough to do his job and that his son feels safer around an n-word than around his father. all that stuff's there even tho it's secondary; it's good reinforcement around the domestic psychodrama.

<3 the performances across the board, too. duvall is a total martyr; she spends the entire second half of the movie working in discrete, successive shades of panic. (she turns out to be super competent and nervy, but how sad is the part where she's had the presence of mind to bring the baseball bat downstairs but is so scared she can't remember what she wants to talk to her husband about?) jack reverts to his roger corman days, but without restraint; it's hilarious. (although morbz otm upthread singling out for warmth/depth the scene where he wakes from his nightmare, the last time in the movie he's halfway lucid.) finally, scatman crothers gets "larry, just between you and me, we got a very serious problem with the people taking care of the place. they turned out to be completely unreliable assholes."

― the "intenterface" (difficult listening hour), Thursday, March 15, 2012 4:08 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

everybody keeps forgetting about it's alive, obvious top 5 lock

Island of the Alive very nearly made it onto my ballot.

thanks for that DLH post, darin, great read

man i would so love it if Salem's Lot beats all the other King adaptations. it damn well deserves to IMHO.

i think you're forgetting about a little movie called...maximum overdrive

crikey i'd never even heard of that.

it wasn't a walrus, it was a bear!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmOoekbK6YI

also still kinda secretly hoping rawhead rex places ahead of candyman.

do you know why i said walrus? it's because the man in the mask is the spitting image of basically all 4 masks from The Beatles I Am The Walrus video mixed together.

i mean.. check it out

http://www.indiewire.com/static/dims4/INDIEWIRE/1a94009/4102462740/thumbnail/485x341%3E/http://d1oi7t5trwfj5d.cloudfront.net/0f/a21ae0698e11e19987123138165f92/file/magical-mystery-tour-03092012.jpg

http://livingwithanerd.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/the-shining-stanley-kubrick-jack-nicholson-bear-suit.jpg

somebody please shop them over the guy's lap

Discussion/debate will no doubt arrive in full force later, but the biggest problem I have with "The Shining" is similar to one of the many problems I had with "Black Swan:" if you're making a movie about someone going nuts, it doesn't help the narrative terribly to have them more or less nuts from scene one and nuttier from there on out. You need a before to make the after more effective, imo.

But yeah, pretty much everything not with Nicholson in it is pretty tense/spooky.

as a kid i didn't see jack as nuts-from-frame-one but then my dad was a lunatic asshole so those parts were some italian neorealism shit

motel hell gots a number of best things about it:

Don't forget little Rory Calhoun.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l9h8qvm28d1qdoghio1_500.png

Busy days at work for me during this rollout =/

My Netflix queue has ballooned in the last two or three weeks! I love horror movies and I can't believe how few I've seen and how many greats/classics I don't know. I need to stop re-re-re-re-re-watching Carrie and branch out.

i think you're forgetting about a little movie called...maximum overdrive Dreamcatcher

FIXED

Dreamcatcher Poopcatcher

fixed

hey guys, The Shining was disqualified for inducing disbelief w/ Jack-Shelley marriage

also y'know, Kubrick's worst

I think let the right one in is probably a lock as well. I'll bet it arrives in the next 5.

as a kid i didn't see jack as nuts-from-frame-one but then my dad was a lunatic asshole so those parts were some italian neorealism shit

Not quite "lunatic asshole" in my case, but otherwise sadly OTM. My dad was a huge fan of Jack in general and his performance in The Shining in particular and I'm pretty sure he inadvisably cribbed some mannerisms from that mess as if it were a "how-to" guide to bein' a dad/human being. And yet I somehow don't loathe the movie? Sigh...

also y'know, Kubrick's worst

ok you really need to elaborate here cuz there's no way I live in a world where Eyes Wide Shut or Barry Lyndon are superior to The Shining

Resisting... talking... about The Shining... until it... shows up...

Still, though, any movie that unfailingly incites everyone into howling fantods is doing something right.

EWS is creepier, and BLyndon stands with 3 or 4 other SK masterpieces

xp

BL is brilliant I didn't think that was controversial anymore

Annoyingly, I missed voting in this but I did want to throw some points to the original The Hills Have Eyes - endless source of "watch out for the mutants!" quotes for desert camping adventures.

motel hell gots a number of best things about it:

head feeding system
pig mask
chainsaw duel
cheerful redneck murder couple
"meat's meat, and a man's gotta eat"

and lol hippies!
I voted for it.

I also voted for Cathy's Curse and Island of Dr. Moreau and The 1977 Hills Have Eyes

Island of Dr. Moreau

Hells yes

Movies like Cathy's Curse make me realize how deeply people underrate Ed Wood's sanity and competence as a filmmaker. But, also, I love it?

Evil children movies fill me with such joy - especially the ones where the children are normal-looking/attractive (as opposed to demonically possessed Exorcist style).

The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut and Barry Lyndon are Kubrick's 3 best features and I claim your prize.

In any case, I'm sort of saddened by the movies that didn't get but 4 or 5 comments today.

what was the name of that fairly recent one with the children that infect each other with evil during the holidays? i think it was british. that was pretty good as far as evil children movies go.

I'm going to go ahead and start being sad that Child's Play will not place.

I'm hoping enough other ILXors share my love of The Omen

Couldn't keep up today. When someone gets a minute, please explain the Schindler's List joke to me. (Does it hinge on familiarity with Don't Look Now? I hope so--I haven't seen it for years and years, so that'll give me an excuse.)