In my continuing efforts to disavow all holidays, I will be celebrating Halloween by working at my dad's network tonight. Nonetheless, the last vestiges of my holiday spirit cropped up yesterday and demanded that I do a film-based retrospective.
So here we are. It should come as no surprise that the subject of this retrospective will be horror, one of my favorite of all movie genres. Something about the grotesque... the unknown... the tangible becoming intangible... intangible becoming tangible... it gets me.
Horror fans tend to obsess over their pet genre, tracking down obscure gems and popular turds alike for voracious consumption. My knowledge isn't nearly as encyclopedic as most horror enthusiasts, but hey, that's what the rest of my life is for. In the meantime, I'll focus on what I have experienced.
What you are about to see is not a list of the best horror films I have ever seen. You won't find horror masterpieces like The Thing, The Shining, The Cabin in the Woods, or Psycho. Rather, this is a list of the ten films that scared me the most when I saw them. It's a purely personal compilation. Well-constructed horror films are more likely to terrify, but each of us is frightened by such idiosyncratic things. Bob 1 might find insects terrifying but is unfazed by the threat of stalker psychos in a character's backyard. Bob 2 is unafraid of insects unless they talk, and unafraid of psychos unless they don't. Bob 3 finds anthropomorphic appliances disturbing on a deep existential level. It's a crapshoot: one that I find endlessly interesting. In fact, I would love to hear about your scariest movies.
I'm not a person who scares easily--it takes a lot for a movie to elicit any sort of visceral reaction from me--but we are about to embark on a tour of the ten movies that have done the most to shape the disturbances of my conscious and subconscious imagination.
As they say in the I Spy: Haunted Mansion computer game that I used to play: Enter if you dare... you're in for a scare.
Everything rhymed in that game.
