What's your Favorite Scary Movie?

BradyH1861 said:

Showgirls...


Brady H.

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Lmao!!!!

LiamJackson said:

The final two minutes epitomized horror. Unseen threat, no escape, sense rather than see...tension with attitude. I also appreciate the fact they managed to pull it off without a single sequence of "Insert knife into lower intestines, twist, remove, repeat..."

Ray, have you seen "Fallen" with Denzel Washington, and if so, what was your opinion?

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I'm not Ray, but I've seen "Fallen". I loved it. The idea that "Evil" moved from person to person with just a touch was facinating.

Films like Seven and The Silence of the Lambs have a frightening effect on some people, but I think they're mostly thrillers. Still, they're two of the greatest movies I've ever seen.

The Exorcist never scared me, although the book did, but I still think its a remarkable story of good and evil, and I love to watch it.

As far as scary movies, the first film that every got to me was George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. I had visions of that flick in my head for weeks after I watched it.

Another film that I think is a great horror flick but didn't scare me is Clive Barker's Hellraiser, which plays like a dark fairy tale without any inhibitions or prediction. It's just an unbelievable movie.

Another film that got me is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (original). The last twenty minutes of the film are like a nightmare, and you walk away from it wondering what you just saw. Other than those, there's also DePalma's Carrie, Kubrick's The Shining (poor adaptation, but great movie), Carpenter's Halloween and The Thing, and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, another film that fills my head with visions every time I think about it.

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream by night."
Edgar Allen Poe

I LOVE THIS FREAKIN' BANANA!!!

There's a horror movie starring Paris Hilton? Please tell me she gets killed early on. Please, please, please.

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So the official movie tees advertising "See Paris Die!" weren't telling the truth? That would've been the only reason worth seeing that film.

I'd have to say that Ginger Snaps is one of my favorites, along with The Fog, Halloween, and Silver Bullet.

I would have to say THE SHINING (1980 version)....That movie really creeped me out...

The Haunting..... the old black and white version

The Fly remake was some pretty disgusting stuff. Carpenter's The Thing. Jeepers Creepers was kinda chilling.

Tri

in the vein of 'the others,' an older movie called 'haunted' with kate beckinsale (sp) was pretty good, if not with a cheesy ending. that's my major gripe with horror movies, bad endings.

great horror movies to me are:

the exorcist

aliens

the thing

house

evil dead II

poltergeist

phantasm

the raven (with vincent price-- ya gotta check this one out, it rocks, cheesy fx aside)

the 'dawn/day/night/late evening/dusk/midmorning/afternoon of the dead' movies (the good ones)

slashers never really did much for me. i remember last year, my wife wanted to show her nephews and niece the freddy movies that scared her as a kid. it wasn't easy locating them at friggin' holloween, but i managed it. i got four of 'em, popped 'em in the DVD, and was fast asleep by the second one. my wife couldn't believe how boring they were! the kids thought so, too, and they'd never seen them. for me, there's got to be a re-watchability factor involved.

movies that bored me to tears:

rosemary's baby

the village

village of the damned (though i admit i didn't even make it through the entire movie)

virtually any big-budget sequel like poltergeist II and aliens III

okay, now i'm sure we all know the horror movie cliches by now, right? i'd like to add one that you might not see, at least not too often:

any otherwise brainless moronic teenager can find exactly the precise information he/she/they need about the terror befronting them within two websites. of course, when i look up something i'm almost instantly routed to either amazon or ebay, but that's a different story, i guess. and the internet has perfect information, too. i mean, it must be perfect to make these idiots so completely believe that the evil they're facing is some supernatural entity, not some crazy schlub with a cool gimmick. i wish i had *that* internet!

if you're being stalked by a pirate back from the grave seeking revenge on the ancestors of the crew that betrayed him, here's pretty much what you'll find on the second website in order after a basic search of 'pirates': blackbeard, captain kidd, jolly jack of podunk nowheresville. thank gawd for google, eh? (my most recent excursion into bad horror movies, which i love, was 'jolly roger: the curse of cutters cove', or something like that, wherein the picture of jolly roger was in fact a cropped pic of blackbeard, and a famous illustration at that! come on, please don't insult my intelligence, will ya not?)

i liked 'the others' and 'the sixth sense,' but they don't stand up to repeated viewings once the cat's out of the bag. and i agree, the whole father returning home sub-plot in 'the others' just dragged the story, i thought. i thought 'the ring' was good, even somewhat brilliant in spots. i remember thinking the acting in 'blair witch' was incredible in spots, though i'm not sure if it was acting or not in those places. the ending was chilling. 'the legend of hell house' had some pretty scary bits, too.

any movie that has a ghost walking in the background scares the hell outta me, don't know why.

I have to say that The Ring scared the sh** out of me. A week later I was driving home from the store, glancing at the clock and going "Okay, I just have to make 'til ten o'clock and I'll be fine..."

I love horror movies, so among my favorites are:

The Exorcist
Poltergeist
The Shining
Rosemary's Baby
Jacob's Ladder
Frailty
Dead Ringers
The Others

Honorable mention with a high cheese factor goes to:

The Amityville Horror (haven't seen the remake, yet)
The Entity
Nightmare on Elm Street (and spawn of...)
Halloween

And for horror/comedy nothing compares to:

Army of Darkness

Hmmm... looks like I'm going on and on...

The Exorcist scared me more as an adult than when I watched it as a teen.
It was simply the situation of having your child posessed, something evil squatting in your child, and sealing with it alone as a single parent.

Most films I watch I think I could cope with the situations, find a way out of them, but when your child is involved, and I don't know what parenthood is like without a husband, so The Exorcist wins for me, and I also loved The Ring for the same reasons.

Alien scared me as a kid.
The Ring and The Grudge were really creepy, but I didn't like The Ring 2.
The first Evil Dead was scary, the rest were fun to watch.

I would consider the classic Universal and Hammer movies atmospheric, but not scary, and I definitely enjoy watching them.

I have no desire to watch the endless stream of remakes, which seem to be an attempt by younger filmmakers to one-up the classics--they always seem to fail if you ask me. I loved the original Haunting, but what I saw of the remake (on cable), didn't impress me at all.

'the haunting' was on last night. my wife said that movie (the liam neeson version) creeped her out and i said i thought it was an awful mess and retreated to the computer for about an hour while it played in the background. i will admit the sets were amazing, though, the real star of the movie. still, for what it's worth and the effect it had, disney's 'the haunted mansion' was far scarier, lol. at least in THM it was fun looking for 'the mickeys.'

preyer said:

at least in THM it was fun looking for 'the mickeys.'

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I do want to see that. It looks entertaining. The Disney ride is awesome.

There are, of course, two exceptions: Batman Begins, which isn't really a remake as much as an overhaul--that worked, and War of the Worlds, which has a different focus and doesn't try to "fix" what wasn't broken in the orginal movie.

Not really horror, but relevant.

this hasn't been a stellar year for good movies. too many remakes or 'overhauls.' i heard where disney digitally reduced linsay lohan's breasts for 'herbie.' good gravy....

it's more suspense, but i watched 'freeze frame' tonight. it's an irish movie, so it might not be in every blockbuster around, but i thought it was pretty good, very well-acted and not having any thick british accents (or irish) i find sometimes are hard to understand.

i'd have to do a search on it, but there was one british horror movie i thought was really good. it had andy serkis in it, about a company of british soldiers lost in a fog who stumble on a deserted german trench in WWI. there was somewhat of a remake of it set in WWII called 'the bunker' which isn't worth the time.

as an aside, the haunted mansion ride rocks. next for me is pirates of the caribbean. when i was a kid riding the mansion with my step-sisters, the ride actually stopped for a few minutes in the part where the spirits are flying up into the sky.

thanks a lot, disney. you think i could sue over something like that? lol.

along those lines, there was a movie called 'hollow's end' about teens running a holloween haunted house that turns all the people into whatever scary character they played for the haunted house. then, at the end, they just throw in this completely off the wall lesbian thing. total waste of time. i mean, i love dumb horror movies, but this one made 'house of the dead' look like 'gone with the wind.'

stay away from 'ancient evil II,' also. to laugh at something because it's so bad, check out 'ghost lake.' for every cliche in the book, there's the awful 'jolly roger: massacre at cutter's cove.' actually, rent this one: it's hilariously bad. make a drinking game out of it. every time you catch a cliche, everyone else has to drink. trust me, ten minutes into it everyone is going to be hammered, in this case a good thing.

a more recent low-budget flick that fell short of its potential was 'shallow ground,' which could have been as, ah, 'good' a movie as 'cabin fever.'

is it time yet to start up a 'worst of' list?

I just remembered a recent one, 'Ghost Ship.' Now this was a fairly pedestrian jump-out-and-boo ghost story, but the opening sequence was worth the price of admission.

Anybody know what I'm talking about?

Here's one I don't think anyone's mentioned: The Pit. It was about this boy pushing people into a pit (I think there was a monster in the pit) I remember loving the movie. As a kid, there were several people I wished I could push into something like that. I was a chubby, smart, unpopular kid.

I'm glad I didn't have to bring up The Blair Witch project. It was very good and I was stupid enough to believe it. I had a lot of friends who told me that and I didn't bother to read the credits. Eventually I did, and I liked the movie a lot less then. LOL, I always read the credits now.

The Gate (first one with Stephen Dorff) was very good. I remember feeling really freaked when Stephen's character had the eye in his hand.


David

saw 'ghost ship' in the theatres. could have been an awesome movie, but it was a dud aside from the opening scene, as mentioned.

watched 'dead end' last weekend, which actually turned out to be pretty decent, especially considering the budget was virtually nil. it had actual characters. not a great movie, but i think it's worth watching and one really good example of how less is more. it had some shaky spots and sorely lacking in a special features, but good nonetheless.

I just rented the new Amityville Horror.

I'm a huge horror fan, and I am really hard to creep out. I have to say that even watching it mid-afternoon, I was on the edge of my seat. I thought it was a very well made movie. They took the story in what I thought were great twists. That poor kid out there when the step dad was chopping wood. That scene alone had me chewing my nails...and I wear acrylic nails!

not that it's going to stop me from watching it, but i'd heard how awful the movie was. just goes to show....

because we're writers, wanna-be's or pro, does it sometimes seem as if we're being too hard on movies because we're so tuned into plots and characters?

preyer said:

not that it's going to stop me from watching it, but i'd heard how awful the movie was. just goes to show....

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Even hubby liked it. He is hard to impress with anything. 9 times out of 10 if you ask him whether or not he liked any movie he'll say, "eh...it was o.k." This one he liked as much as I did.

because we're writers, wanna-be's or pro, does it sometimes seem as if we're being too hard on movies because we're so tuned into plots and characters?

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I've never thought of it like that.

I meant to add a few more other than The Shining...

Some of my favorites are:

Hellraiser
The Exorcist
Poltergeist
Phantasm II
Halloween 1 and 2
Friday the 13th 1-4 (the others except Freddy Vs. Jason aren't any good)..well maybe Part 6...
Re-Animator (cult classic)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Alien
Amityville Horror (1979 and 2005 versions)
The Evil Dead 1-2
Army of Darkness

That's just a partial list