1FF's Top 100 Horror Films

[Craig]

Excellently done Cas, very much enjoyed this.

Spoiler

Mines.
The Thing - One of my all time favourite films in any genre. A wonderful setting in Antarctica for a tense and gory story. As claustrophobic as Alien there should be more horrors set in the poles and they should start by green lighting an adaptation of a certain Lovecraft yarn.

Ringu - J-Horror aint my favourite tbh, but I recall this made quite an impression on me when I watched it, and I reckon the Japanese (and maybe Koreans) certainly have the edge when it comes to technological horror. Utilises the urban legend (something I'm quite obsessed with) perfectly and is by far one of the scariest horrors of the 90's.

Halloween - My favourite slasher film, a must watch every Halloween night, but it aint just blood and guts and screaming teens, it's as creepy and atmospheric as any film in the genre as a whole. As mentioned before, music is a vital part of any great horror film, and they don't come much more iconic that this one's soundtrack.

Rosemary's Baby - Absolutely fucking terrifying, imagine moving into an apartment block and it turns out all your neighbours, and indeed your husband, are devil worshipping nutters intent on helping Satan impregnate you, and they're all nice as pie. Her acceptance of it all at the end is one of the most depressing experiences I've had with film.

The Omen - Damien makes the kids in a certain of my other nominations look like playful little scamps don't he? quite similar to Rosemary's Baby in concept but more dealing with what might come after. As with all great horror it's the imagining of what if this was real that makes it so scary, and what could be more unsettling than the kid across the street being the anti-Christ? not fucking much I don't reckon.

As great as this was though Cas, I'm pretty sure The Birds (1963) was on my list.

 

[Smudge]

Good summing up of Halloween Craig. I remember when I was doing Media at 6th form we did a big thing on camera angles. Carpenter is the absolute master of creepy camera angles. Shooting someone through a window making you think someone else is watching for example. The Exorcist and Halloween are good films anyway, but they're also absolute dreams for any film student!

 

[Smudge]

I think this is very true. I watched The Exorcist in my early teens and couldn't work out what all the fuss was about. I watched it 10 years later and it shit me up.

Excellent film.

To follow up what I said about remembering the ban being lifted, I found this article.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1201445.stm

March 17th 2001 The Exorcist was first aired on UK TV. Definitely fits my timeline, as that was a Saturday night and I was 15. Wow...

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

LAST BATCH:

Spoiler: tldr

Mine #8. 1966. The plot is boilerplate gothic horror in a lot of ways, outsiders investigating mysterious deaths in a remote village, an aged curse, cowed locals... but there are interesting and subtle twists on the blueprint. As with all my favourite Bava's I'm much less interested in the narrative than I am the aesthetic, and all the Bava cliches apply again... tremendous visual flair, memorable images (a ball bouncing down a corridor shouldn't be so creepy), oodles of atmosphere, and the sound design is really good in this one too. My tastes in horror skew much more modern than they do cobwebby eldritch, perhaps because it's hard for me to imagine anyone doing it any better than this....

Spoiler: tldr

Mine #9. 1920. Arthouse horror godhead, and a (perhaps _the_) finest example of German expressionist film, absent which the style of subsequent horror cinema (plus film noir and a bunch of other things) would have looked much different. Its visual style remains as startling today as it was back then (maybe more so - Lars von Trier wishes he could come up with this). If Lovecraft's wheeze was to dodge the solid and sharp in his horror, couching it in terms of the soft and fluid and gaseous, then this is the obverse... every frame a thicket of angular forms dragged up from the subconscious, jagged diagonals, chaotic shapes and lines, distorted perspectives, a sort of visual atonalism. An early example of horror cinema deploying the fantastical for metaphorical purposes too, a stringent tale of authority, submission, tyranny and madness.

Spoiler: tldr

Mine #4. 1960. The opposite of Caligari. Subtle, poetic, minor-key, intimate, quietly inveigling. A charting of uncanny valley, the estrangement of the human face, making it into a surrealist mask, imbuing it with a macabre fascination...

Spoiler: tldr

Mine #1. Another that's more arthouse than grindhouse. A great Venice film (maybe the greatest), a great portrait of parental grief and guilt, and a distinctive mix of psychological realism and banal day-to-day ritual overlaid w/ the supernatural. Also formally fascinating... a bravura exercise in editing. Fragmentary, asynchronous, atemporal; foreshadowing and premonition enacted by providing literal glimpses of that to come. This idea of a mental breakdown manifested by disintegration in the text can descend into cliche in less capable hands, but Roeg (at least back then) was more than capable. A chilling and original work, and about as good as British cinema gets. Roeg's more recent career is a bit of a sad state of affairs, alas.

Spoiler: tldr

Mine #17. 1978. US Slasher #1. I'm prone to a bit of an over-simplification when it comes to the giallo vs the slasher, reducing it to style and weirdness vs naked, crowd-pleasing commercialism (not that I'm averse to that). This belies that dichotomy tho, and fulfils both ends of the deal very well. The mystery killer of the giallo is replaced by a merchandisable franchise fodder baddy, but there is plenty of artistry here too. As a portrait of gauzily unsettling suburbia it's as evocative as Lynch or Sirk, in its own way...

Spoiler: tldr

Mine #2. Agree with much of what has been said upthread. This does still feel remarkably modern, a rare example of a piece of art which has been copied/paid homage to/ripped off a trillion times but has not been neutered in the process. Rear Window is taken to be Hitchcock's great commentary on voyeurism, but I'm not sure this isn't better, in a sly sort of a way. We're supposed to be aghast at loony degen Bates spying thru the hole in the wall, but we've already seen her in her smalls - the film begins by swooping through a bedroom window to drop in a post hot sheet scene. It's full of looming and staring men, and the film toys with identifying the audience with gazer and gazed at, most obviously by ditching its apparent protagonist halfway through. I still have no earthly clue what the ending is supposed to be about, a horrendous lump of leaden and overly literal exposition parachuted in with 2 mins to go. I suspect Hitchcock tripped himself up with his clever-clever games at the audiences' expense. Fortunately the previous ~100 mins are so good that it is easy to forgive.

 

[Smudge]

Spot on about the end of Psycho! Says a lot for how good the rest is that that final 2 minutes doesn't kill it dead!