So since this is my first Halloween with a blog…and because I love horror movies so GOD DAMN much…I have decided to do a top ten list…I know I know, top ten lists are terrible and I hate them…come to think of it…let’s do away with that idea altogether. Instead…let’s do a top 13 list and laugh as all the retards out there searching for top ten lists go take a flying leap…
Oh and by the way…no real logic to this…just some movies I’ve seen lately, some that I haven’t seen in awhile and ones I think you should see now…ALL GREAT HORROR MOVIES…ALL GREAT HALLOWEEN MOVIES…all great things to make you puke in your popcorn!
13. THE LAST EXORCISM!
12. THE BLOB (The Eighties VERSION!)
When I was a kid this movie was perfect…a story where the bad kid wins, a town that should have listened and a very vicious version of the creature itself…horror should be vicious and the most of the death scenes in the movie are…also…the idea of the small town response to a mysterious threat is one of my favorite American ideas, a community of seemingly close neighbors forced to truly commit to “fellowship” in the defense of their home turf/normalcy. The best part of this is the end…a sinister vision of things to come: a disturbed and malformed religious zealot petting his little chunk of Blob-Hell.
11. HALLOWEEN 4
Halloween 4 is a favorite of mine. Again, small town America can’t escape its genetic ties to Michael Meyers…he is relentless, and the fact that he comes on Halloween, blending in to the back ground of costumed hooligans lends a butchers knife edge to a somewhat played out holiday…no one is safe on a night when we are supposed to be living life unsafe…but not THAT unsafe. By the way, Halloween is another perfect movies series, full of boobs, death, dark nights and horrifying histories. Again, the end is a turn of camera when you realize that Michael Myers brings trauma, in all its wonderful forms…some stay for the short term, physically wiggling until the knife bleeds the heart silent, and some stay forever, emotionally embedding in all who look, don’t look, participate…even watch.
10. NIGHT OF THE DEMONS
Night of the Demons is one of a handful of movies that I have watched more than 50 times…not because it’s particularly good, because it’s not, more like because when I watch it I am transported to every Halloween I wished I had been a teenager for: loose girls, mullets, goofy acting, and houses no one is supposed to be in…I love this movie…it soothes my soul you could say…it takes place on my favorite day, it has copious tits and ass, and violence, glorious violence…my favorite scene is when Lennia Quigley bones the “Prep” douche and asks, “Am I pretty?” Little does he know, she is infested with a demon, and also impregnated by her own lipstick?
09. DAWN OF THE DEAD
I love malls. I love ZOMBIES! I LOVE ROMERO!!!!
…I love realistic zombie movies that are set in malls and directed by Zombie geniuses and are filled with over the top special effects by the make-up mastermind, Tom Savini. The best dead movie by far…the truth of this movie is in the speed…fast zombies are great for cheap theatre thrills…but slow ones are excruciating…time ends up being just as threatening to the ‘survivors’ as the blood thirsty hunger of the undead…Time, enough time to do what humans do when confronted with a threat…think, ponder, assume and decide…or maybe wait…decision and indecision are equally detrimental in this movie…and in life?
08. PARADISE LOST PART 1 and 2
Not many things are scarier than real life fuckin wackoes…and nothing is more whako then the little town of West Memphis Arkansas, which by the way…I have been to. A little quaint burg where witch hunting still exists and the largest business is the Flying J truck stop…Please…if you listen to anything I say, listen to these words: WATCH THESE DOCUMENTARIES AND REMEMBER…that it can happen to you.
07. PHANTASM
This movie is a classic for me…one a series of classics really…all set in the doom and gloom of a cemetery, which is actually an inter-dimensional battle ground! The Tall Man is an evil force of nature…and the balls, the glorious steel orbs of brain drilling anarchy, are his pets…watch this movie in the dark, on VHS, and get close to the TV…
06. EVIL DEAD 2
I know I should be rating the Evil Dead in the top five but I am sure Ash will forgive me. If you haven’t watched the Sam Raimi ‘Dead’ trilogy then you need to stop reading this right now and GO GET THE GOD DAMN MOVIES!!! The Evil Dead franchise was unlike anything else when it came out: equal parts horrifying acid trip and laugh out loud ruckus. A cabin in the woods story, that happens to be driven by one of the most outrageous character actors to ever grace celluloid: Bruce Freakin Campbell! Without which, Sam Raimi would not exist…it is Bruce’s portrayal of a blue collar dimensional chainsaw wielding warrior who paved the way for Spiderman. Nobody deliver lines better then Bruce, he’s like a the horror Genres Arnold, a rhetorical artiste who can drip melodrama and rip zombie flesh at the same time, “I’LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL, I’LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL…swallow this…”
05. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD
Return of the Living Dead, takes off where Romero left off, and adds to the zombie mythology with humor and out of control situations. An eighties icon of midnight movie, this movie is made up wet sex, wet attitude and, wet zombies. But, what really makes this movie perfect for me, and why I have watched at least a hundred times, is the casting: they outstanding in their deft reading of not so deep lines…and all of it twists together to make a very very humane story of an inhumane night…not to mention, the zombies move with a purpose here, running even, tackling even, grabbing the CB radio and talking…ASKING, demanding…SEND MORE PARAMEDICS!!...send more brains…by the way…I feel like this could be the first time, the zombie focus on eating brains…an interesting spin on the ethos of the dead…why would a dead person crave brains?
04. THE EXORCIST 1
The exorcist is truly terrifying…and here’s why: something in your heart, in the hearts of all humans, fears death, but there is something we fear even more than death: demonic possession! When I saw this as a kid, I was already set up for failure due to the fact that my mother caught me trying to watch it and turned it off saying, you are not old enough for that movie! When I asked why, she just mumbled something about it being, evil? DING DING DING, nothing attracts me more then when someone tells me I can’t do something, especially claiming its EVIL! So after all these year, this is still one of the best movies ever made, and like all great movies, it is even a better book…believe it or not… WATCH THIS IN THE DARK PEOPLE…
03. THE SHINING
For anybody who has had a dick male figure in their lives, or has been exposed to a dick male figure, which unfortunately is everyone, the movie resonates. It is a story of a haunted house…but clearly, what fuckin scares the shit out of you, is the fact that the father is already a lunatic…drunk, alienated, defensive, and an alcoholic. He lashes out at the ones he ‘loves’, wrenching his sons arm, smacking his wife’s face…blaming every one for the role they play in distracting him from his life, keeping him from his life’s goals…he wants to be a writer…lol funny, but not so much when he types over and over again, clickety clack, tickety tack: all work and no play makes Jake a dull boy…then SMASHES his way through the bathroom door with an axe!!! This story is scary, but the reality of the emotions that a father may be fighting with...is terrifying!
02. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT
The absolute perfection of a rogue movie: made for nothing, silently advertised in a shadow box of mystery and allusion, great acting and an open ending that can be argued about. Even the camera is a bully, forcing you to participate, to distance yourself from the world in front of you, this idea of perspective is important and yet irritating, you want to grab the god damn screen and hold it in place and say wait! LOOK OVER THERE!!! This movie freaked me out, because I have been deep, deep, deep in the woods, and I have seen things from the past there…things covered up, and forgotten, things that might have been horrible when they existed…and who knows, what that means to exist…and who knows…maybe they aren’t…quite…dead…they aren’t quite gone…
1. THE THING (john carpenter)
The absolute best horror movie ever made.
Cold, isolated, trapped, and forced to face the fact that we are not alone…not in our base, not in our bodies, not even in our universe. Nothing has ever quite matched up to this movie for me…Rob Bottin’s effects, John Carpenter’s eerie score, a desolate, frozen, unfriendly, setting, the cocoon of characters forced to live, share, breathe, and die in the same, tight, dark, and unforgiving space…ALL of it comes together, and miraculously boils down to the most in your face, absolutely terrible, game of who is the murderer…who is human…
