Jen and I watch exclusively scary movies. Nothing but. Our netflix queue is literally just netflix's entire Horror library. personally, i think the horror genre is the purest form of cinema, its the only kind of movie that grabs you on that visceral level and takes you out of where you are. Its the closest we can get to the kind of cinema hat appealed to the very earliest movie audiences who (anecdotally) fled from the movie theater in terror when they watched a train barelling toward the camera. Here are some standouts:
Saw: The Saw franchise is great. Both Saw and SawII have all the elements of great horror movies: Jump-shots, gnawing tension, a mystery, clever well-placed misinformation to screw with the audience, its all there. Im looking forward to Saw III
May: This one manages to be deeply disturbing while also having absolutely gut-bustingly hilarious dialogue. Great, well-drawn characters and a really original take on the Frankenstein myth.
Taking Lives:The last scene is horrific, and will make you hate Ethan Hawke even more than you do now.
The Fly: David Cronenberg is Hollywood's greatest scary filmmaker, hands-down; John Carpenter once said "Cronenberg is better than all the rest of us combined." Nobody has established so identifiable a filmic vocabulary and dialect; modern horror's only
auteur. He has this fantastic take on the whole man/machine thing which he fuses with a visceral, slimy, pulsating body-horror that is always gaping in terror at our bodies' tendency to hold together less well than our phsychology would like. The Fly is his most straight-up horror movie (in which Jeff Goldblum looks like Rambo), but his masterpiece is the baffling Russian-Doll mediation on media and idenity that is Videodrome (which predates the Internet, Screen-Names, On-Demand and Virtual Reality, but features them all).
The Changeling: abandoned wheelchain in a spooky attic of a house full of awful, awful secrets.
The Descent: An all female cast stuck in a cave system full of monsters. Great ensemble acting and interesting sisterhood-in-fighting-group-dynamic subplot going on.
Audition: Jen's reaction: "oh holy my jesus."
The Machinist: The scariest part of this is seeing Christian Bale minus a full third of his body-weight for the role. Keep in mind, Christian Bale was never Vince Vaughn. Him at 66% of his mass is profoundly unsettling.
Dark Water: The best scary movies are spare and economical, with nothing superflous or flabby. This is one like that. No-nonsense.
Shallow Ground: Ditto this one, except it was made for about an 8th of what Dark Water cost.
Pumkinhead: a classic.
Toolbox Murders: Tobe Hooper is a great workhorse director. He did Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist. Over the years, he's also been invloved with dozens of very serviceable shockers. Nothing groundbreaker, but he delivers. Toolbox Murders is an example.
The Gift: Another decent, jump-shot filled mystery. Sam Raimi redeems himself.
Eraserhead: Surreal. Literally, not in that over-used, meaningless way that people usually seem to use the term (by which they mean "weird" or "unreal"). Eraserhead is painted with images bubbling up from the subconscious.
Murnau's 1922
Nosferatu: A lot of old old old movies can be "appreciated", but only a few can still be "enjoyed" (this is what makes Charlie Chaplin possibly the greatest film artist in history). I consider Nosferatu the oldest movie that is still effective in its intent, that can be watched without giving allowances for its old-timeyness (its a silent black and white flick from the German Expressionist period). This is the first Dracula movie ever made, and I think its actual ancientness (its made almost a hundred years ago, in a film style that is now virtually pre-modern, and takes place a hundred years before that. It centers on a legend that, even within the movie, is hundreds of years old) gives it all the more creepiness. It has that kind of visual texture that they tried to recreate in the video within The Ring, only here its real. Jen, however, finds it goofy.
