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It's that time of year when the leaves fall, the nights get colder, and the Netflix queue fills up with stuff we don't normally go for.
Seriously, I'm not big on spatter/gore, but I like a good scare. Also, the occassional horror movie to give the MST3K treatment.
Some movies that really scared me or creped me out:
Dog Warriors - Werewolves in the Scottish wilderness, low-budget and amusing once you fiigure out what the heck everyone is saying.
The Haunting - No, not THAT one. The old black and white one, made in the 60s? Has some grand creep-out moments
Nosferatu - The original... Black and white, no sound, all the actors in WAY too much eyeliner. I seriously slept with the lights on after seeing it.
The Mothman Profecies - Okay, it was kinda dumb. It fell apart in the last act. But parts of it scared the bejebus out of me. Seriously. Ron made up a silly song "If I were a Mothman" (sung to the tune of "If I were a rich man") just to get me to giggle and lighten up enough to walk up the stairs (we have a LOT of windows...)
Movies that are called "Horror" but are unintentionally hilarious:
Warlock - We just recently rented this. Starring Richard E. Grant and Julian Sands, both refugees from reputable costume dramas. One can only assume it was better in 1989 than it seems now. Written by David Twohy back when he wrote under the name D.T. Twohy. The Effects are a hoot. It's a cheap rental, but watching Mr. Emerson spit out a guy's severed tongue? Priceless. Ah, Julian! What a waste of The Pretty.
The Haunting - The new one. Lots of famous people looking pretty while they do pointless stuff. Owen Wilson dies in an unusual way. They just explain too much. The ending is what? A daycare center for ghosts? I get the giggles just thinking about it
Wolf - Jack Nicholson makes a good monster. So does James Spader, for that matter. It's more fun than scary, and the ending is ambiguous. So they go off into the woods and... have puppies?
What do you reccomend veiwing to get into the spirit of the holiday?
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[Random Aside] If you look close during Wolf you can see a copy of Xenocide among the books on the bookshelf behind the guy at the desk.[/Random Aside]
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Besides that, I've seen....Arachnaphobia. And...some episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm not big on scary movies.
Oh, how could I forget: The Sixth Sense. I saw in the theatre six times and got nightmares every single time. I kept thinking that I was over that and I could see it without getting too scared. Nope.
I got it from Netflix recently and finally discovered how to watch it safely: turn on the subtitles and hit "Mute". It's still scary, but I can sleep afterwards because the music isn't haunting me.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Ohhhh! Let me be the first to second 'Nosferatu'. Max Schrek is scary!
I was a weird little kid and really loved the old black and white horror flicks (I grew up in the 70s and 80s). So my votes are for the classics: Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney), The Wolfman (Lon Chaney Jr.), Dracula (Legosi), Frankenstein (Karloff), and CFTBLagoon (don't know who played him).
More recently (and this isn't very) I was scared spitless by the vampire boy at the window in the original 'Salem's Lot'. And the first 'Nightmare on Elm Street' made me afraid to fall asleep. And this one doesn't fall into horror so much as drama, but 'JAWS' is one of the best movies ever.
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The Others - A great story with characters you actually care about and a nice twist ending.
Dark City - A spectacular mixture of horror, scifi, and noir. The special effects, cinematography, and set design rival Tim Burton's best works. Add in the delicious Jennifer Connelly and you have yourself a classic. (Rober Ebert's commentary on the DVD is also the best I've ever heard.)
Fright Night was a movie I enjoyed a lot as a kid. Now everytime I watch it I think, hey that's Mrs. Darcy!.Posts: 4116 | Registered: Apr 2002
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Almost any of Vincent Price's old movies would do, especially the Edgar Allen Poe ones. My favorite is Fall of the House of Usher, in part because it doesn't fall into the temptation of going for a few silly laughs like the other Poe movies -- it stays "on" the whole time. I also like The Pit and the Pendulum and The Black Cat.
Another great one is Wait Until Dark, with Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman alone in her home and being stalked.
I like the 8-hour TV movie of Stephen King's The Stand, but that's a big time commitment. The Shining is probably better, and a lot shorter.
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The Changeling was great, yeah. Pretty darn scary.
The Ring left me really messed up for like two weeks; a guy in his early 20s, scared of the dark. Awesome.
Nosferatu - the 70s remake is the version I've seen. Identical shot for shot, I believe. What an utterly fantastic take on the Dracula story - the sequence where the city is emptied due to the plague was stone cold.
The Grudge. Don't say the bed scene didn't give you a nightmare. If you deny it, I'll call you a liar.
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1.The Hellraiser series. I have the hugest crush on Pinhead.
2.The Evil Dead movies. Love them, love Bruce!
3. 28 Days later. I love a good infection/zombieish flick.
4.Night of the Living Dead movies. Even though zombies are the things that scare me the most and I get tons of nightmares for weeks afterwards.
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Pet Semetary - I've seen it dozens of times since I was a child and it never stops being scary
28 Days Later - yeah, great recommendation. Yay for zombie movies with social commentary!
Saw - After seeing this movie the first time, I was afraid to drive home by myself. After seeing it the second time, I went to bed with the lights on. Scary scary movie!
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The Grudge and The Ring are both pretty good. I think I was most frightened at Blair Witch though, because I couldnt believe a piece of crap like that was made!
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The Exorcist, Poltergeist I and II, Pet Cemetary (origional), and Carrie. I realize these are all predictable, but they're classics Posts: 106 | Registered: Aug 2005
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The Others is really well-done, costume and atmosphere and set wise, and even though I've seen it five times or more now, it still freaks me out every time!
I tend to avoid scary movies, though.
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Ooo! all good ones, most of them I have seen (and of those I've seen, I agree with everyone). I almost listed Fright Night as one I liked, too.
Valentine-- That movie scared me shite-less. I recently saw it again and wasn't as creeped out. But the skewwed reality really freaked me. Watter dripping UP! A guy Made of BUGS! Bruises that turn out be the sign that you're being annexed by EVIL. Okay, it was hokey, but it creeped my sh*t. I was never 'into' horror movies until college or after, and this one of the first ones I saw on video at college. Someone else had rented it.
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Oh, and Saw is sitting downstairs, still in its Netflix mailer. Have had for more than a week and haven't had the nerve for it.
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I also loved The Others and 28 Days Later, and The Ring totally creeped me out! (But not its sequel.)
I also liked Darkness Falls, even though it wasn't quite as good as the first ones I mentioned.
It doesn't really count as a horror movie, but I like Stigmata a lot.
House of a Thousand Corpses was just plain awful, and Wrong Turn was almost as bad, even though I like Eliza Dushku.
I haven't seen all that many "classic" horror movies other than The Exorcist, which makes me giggle now.
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Halloween (Probably the best theatrical, cheesy scary movie ever!)
Psyscho (I watched this when I was home alone, and sick, one day. Probably the worst decision ever. I was like nine. Scared me to death.)
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Not to digress, but pH, doesn't it look like from the trailers that they've turned Saw II into a teenage slasher? The original is one of the few movies that I thought should never have a sequel.
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The Village, if it actually counts as a "scary" movie. The Sixth Sense, ditto. The Saw, I just saw this one for the first time last night, and I liked it. I didn't really think it was scary though, just gross.
Honestly, I think those are most of the scary movies I've seen, I don't realy watch many.
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Bob, which Texas Chainsaw Massacre? The original was quite interesting, but it wasn't terribly horrifyingly scary, or at least not as bad as I thought it'd be. I've only seen snippets of the latest remake - I think there've been several others inbetween the two, right?
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Signs - This one kept me up for days. It's an hostile-alien movie that was clevery done so that you don't see the aliens throughout most of the movie but they still manage to be creepy to the extreme. It's sustained suspense which freaks me out a lot more than slasher horror films. (This also goes with Eruve's suggestion, The Sixth Sense, since they're both M. Night Shyamalan creations)
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Okay, we saw The Prophecy. Lots of really great actors inthat one. I love Christopher Walken as Gabriel, but in the back of my head, a voiice kept saying, "What eternity needs is more cowbell."
And Viggo as Lucifer? I thought I'd die. Posts: 9293 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Shanna: I guess it all really depends on how they handle it. I mean, they kept the whole puzzle-solving thing and the idea that the puzzle guy thinks that people should appreciate life.
But I don't know what they're going to do now that we all know who he is.
Unless he died already (since he was dying in the last one) and someone else has taken over.
I really hope they can keep it creepy and not slasher-like. Slasher isn't scary at all.
quote:but in the back of my head, a voiice kept saying, "What eternity needs is more cowbell."
That WOULD be Hell!
Back on topic, Signs freaked me out six ways from Sunday. There's this one part where... nevermind. But it scared me the second and third time, even though I knew what was coming. And the whole kid-with-asthma thing hit close to home for me. I remember my mom frantically telling me to keep breathing as we went 80 trying to get to the hospital in time for a breathing treatment to keep me from passing out.
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Oh, yeah. I totally had a pseudo athsma attacke just watching that. I used to have attacks like that as a kid, not quite that bad, but I remember the biofeedback crap, and, you know, struggling for breath.
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I loved Poltergeist, myself. When I watched it with my friends, we ended up in one big heap of people jumping into each other's laps and clutching.
Oh, and Bram Stoker's Dracula is hilarious. Unintentionally, of course. It is known as "the boob edition". Every single chance this director got, he slipped in a breast shot. If some one wore a nightgown, I guarantee it'll slip down and show a breast. Besides its general corniness. I mean, the tagline's "Love Never Dies".
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Okay, we recently saw Rose Red, which was crap. Padded with lots of atmospheric shots of spooky house-like things.
Then, suddenly, characters do irrational things for no reason, and the 'ghosts' turn out to ghost/vampire/zombies? or something. *blinks* Though Julian Sands is still hot, even when being devoured by a... carpet doberman ghost thingy?
Anyway, NEXT!
Warlock : The Armegeddon - We rented this one because the first one was hilarious in all the ways it tried to be serious. This one... I can only assume they were actually TRYING to be funny. The only thing it had in common with the first one was Julian Sands in black clothing (which I'm not complaining about). It was just a series of little vignettes that were set-ups for punchlines.
Frex, the Warlock's skin-map is drying out, so he picks up a hitchhiker. She makes a pass at him and is rebuffed, then starts fussing over her hair, "It looks terrible, doesn't it?" So he rips it off her head and says, "See for yourself." O_O It sounds gruesome, but the FX were so bad it was just funny.
It could not have been serious.
Next up, we have Tetsuo: The Iron Man which is supposed to be a truly disturbing Japanese film where a guy turns into metal. A caustic examination of the industrial age. Or something like that. We also have The Changeling which is reputedly one of the truly scariest movies lensed in the 80s. I look forward to seeing it.
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I don't like scary movies, so I haven't seen very many of them.
I liked The Sixth Sense, but my husband had to trick me into seeing it. I didn't know what it was about when he took me to see it for our date night. Yeah, it scared me.
But it didn't scare me nearly as much as The Village which we didn't catch in theaters, and so had to rent when it came out. I couldn't watch all of it. I had to stop watching when the flash of yellow cloak was shown under the watch tower. I still haven't seen the whole thing. I made my husband tell me all the rest of the movie, so I might be able to watch it now.
Not really scary, but wonderfully suspensful is Hitchcock's Rebecca. The story unfolds beautifully. It was on TCM the other night so I stayed up way too late watching it. Laurence Olivier was too gorgous as a young man. *sigh*
It's tradition...I always watch Arsenic and Old Lace this time of year. Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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It was low-budget, but I really enjoyed Ghostwatchers. I just found out on IMDB that there is a sequel that has a bigger budget but wasn't good.
Anyway, the original was good.
I didn't like the Village. Sure, it scared me a couple of times, but I found the big reveal at the end to be predictable. I think what spoiled the movie for me was all of the hype, and then it simply didn't live up to it.
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quote:Originally posted by Shanna: The original is one of the few movies that I thought should never have a sequel.
One of the few?
I can think of a lot of movies that should never have sequels. Unfortunately, many of them do have sequels.
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The Sixth Sense: I thought it was really smart and well done. 28 Days Later: The only way to get to sleep after it was to plan an escape route in case of zombie attach. Wait Until Dark: An old one, not a horror film but INCREDIBLY suspenceful.
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I've been told I need to see that one, the people who lived in my room last year agreed it was the scariest movie they've seen.
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