Top 5 Horror Movies of the 1990s

This decade, preceded by the plastic 1980s, and let down by the promise of peace that accompanied the end of the Cold War, was a cynical and increasingly angry time. The emergence of the World Wide Web was a profound thing as fans began to congregate online in AOL chat rooms and on message boards. eBay became a going concern, and a lot of movies, once thought to be nigh-impossible to track down, were suddenly just a few mouse clicks and a credit card number away. Computers were The Hot New Thing, and this was reflected in a lot of films. 

By the end of the decade, whatever goodwill the end of the Cold War generated was all used up us and most of us had figured out that the fix was in, and we were the suckers. With Communism over and done with in the early 1990s, America needed a new enemy. When one didn’t appear readily, we decided to make a new enemy; it was us. And like the hit song from the 1990s, we were our own worst enemy, to boot.

As much as Jurassic Park, with its computer-generated and animated dinosaurs, was a watershed moment in filmmaking, CGI had a ways to go. That didn’t stop people from using it, badly, for most of the decade, until Peter Jackson and Weta Workshop improved the process dramatically to create believable characters that seemed real in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Conversely, a number of horror movies during this time were overly reliant on CGI to their detriment, while other filmmakers managed to work around the limitations of the technique or, in more than one case, jettisoned it in favor of good old-fashioned practical effects.

What makes the movies in this decade so hit-or-miss is the studios themselves. The venerable movie maniac franchises continued to thunder along under their own weight, and other companies, with star dust in their eyes, started remaking older films, slickly produced, but not very well thought out. There were also a number of smaller studios and even smaller movies that were wildly entertaining as B-movies, but weren’t scary or even very serious. Nevertheless, some innovations and interesting things developed, maybe even as a response to the naked and unashamed cash grab, that made the list below.

Stir of Echoes (1999)

Kevin Bacon is a blue-collar guy living with his wife and son in a suburb of Chicago. His wacky sister-in-law hypnotizes him at a party, and she tells him to be more open-minded, which turns out to mean, “now I can see ghosts and visions of past traumas.” This psychic ability runs in the family; their son has it, too. And wouldn’t you know it, it turns out that something horrible happened in the house before Kevin Bacon’s family moved in, and the spirit won’t rest (and neither will Kevin Bacon and his son) until the mystery is solved.

This movie often gets overlooked because it sits on the same tree branch as The Sixth Sense, which came out the same year. While not as gimmicky and as “gotcha” as the former, Stir of Echoes does offer up its own kind of disturbing scares, and in a wide variety, too: Jump scares, creep-outs, gross-outs, and even a creepy kid all conspire to make this movie greater than the sum of its parts.

David Koepp wrote the adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel (first published in the late 1950s) and directed the film as well. Matheson is a much-revered author for his various contributions to literature, television and film, mostly in the realm of fantasy, horror and science fiction, and Koepp was interested in paying him homage. As such, it has some changes from the book, but in the updating, it plays on some serious fears that were a part of the decade, including violence towards women and teenagers with guns. If you notice any familiar beats in this movie that you feel are a bit overused, you should know that Matheson is the one who first introduced those beats, and not the other way around.

 

Event Horizon (1997)

A salvage crew (in space) is tasked with the recovery of an experimental spacecraft called the Event Horizon, thought to be lost during its maiden voyage. It’s carrying a gravity drive that can fold space, and would be invaluable technology, if they can ever figure out what went wrong. The drive’s inventor joins the crew of the Lewis & Clark (that’s the ship’s name, I swear), all jaded hands at the wheel, and sure enough, they find the ship, and a big mystery with it. What happened? Where’d everyone go? What’s with all of the blood, anyway? The engineer inventor, played by Sam Neill, has his own agenda, and it doesn’t exactly line up with the rest of the crew, who are just in it for the bucks. And as these tensions mount, things begin to go horribly wrong with the routine salvage operation.

This rare gem of a movie turns a derelict ship into a haunted house, complete with ghosts and cultists and things from other dimensions. I’ll even forgive the capricious use of CGI to render a bunch of floating debris, all shiny and crisp, inside the ship because it would have looked just as bad if it was done with blue screen and traveling mattes. Thankfully, they get the gravity turned back on quick enough and you don’t have to spend a lot of time wondering if the movie was shot for a 3-D release (it wasn’t. The CGI is just that bad).

The cast is great, all character actors you’ll recognize, from Lawrence Fishburn to Sam Neill, in the only other interesting role he ever took after Jurassic Park. The movie itself, however, had a storied and torturous gestation process, with an auteur director (Paul W.S. Anderson), studio interference, multiple rewrites, and in the end, a patchwork film that no one was happy with. All that being said, this movie scratches a lot of itches and isn’t quite like anything else in the 1990s.

Panned when it was initially released, the film was marketed as science fiction, but make no mistake, it’s a horror flick, wearing a lot of influences on its sleeves, like sponsor patches on a NASCAR driver’s leather jacket. One of the things that isn’t readily known about the movie is that “the warp” concept of traveling through space was lifted straight out of Warhammer 40,000, so much so that Games Workshop fans consider it as part of the overall 40K universe.

The Prophesy (1995)

An L.A. police detective gets drawn into a weird web of mysteries; a dead body with no eyes, an expanded bible with additional chapters in Revelations about a second war of the heavens, body snatching, and what may or may not be a possessed child. It’s enough to make the detective, who was a seminary student, until he lost his faith, question everything he knows. And when the archangel Gabriel shows up, played by Christopher Walken, well...you know...you’re in...for one hell...of a movie.

The 1990s saw the apex of Christopher Walken’s career, and this movie showcases Walken at his most Walken-esque. His turn as Gabriel is exactly what you’d think it to be, and then it’s even creepier on top of that. Unsurprisingly, he’s got the best lines of dialogue in the movie, but he’s not the only big-name actor: Eric Stoltz and Viggo Mortenson also co-star, along with Virginia Madsen.

In truth, this isn’t the scariest movie of the decade, not by a damn sight. But it’s got a really unique story, some effectively creepy moments, and it’s one of those "idea" movies you keep thinking about after you’ve seen it. Despite being something of a flop in the theaters, it subsequently spawned four sequels. It never needed them. You can watch the first movie and feel like you got a complete experiences, and owing much to the quality of what came after, I’d take that advice.

 

Scream II (1997)

Two years have passed since Sydney Prescott survived the ordeal of the Ghostface killer. She’s now in college, with a new life, some new friends, and a few old ones. Everything should be perfect, but...Ghostface is back, cutting a gory swath through campus, even as the sensationalized events of the movie Stab, based on the real-life incident play out in the background.

Everyone that was still alive at the end of Scream is back for this one and you’ll likely not see who the killer is this time, either. But it’s an answer to the mystery that works within the story. And the blood! Everything is cranked up to eleven with this movie, and that includes the satire. Not content to be a meta-critique on slasher horror, Scream 2 takes some potshots at celebrity culture and the 24-hour news cycle for good measure.

There are not a lot of sequels that made the other top 5 lists, but Scream 2 is one of the few that maintains the emotional and intellectual drive of the first movie; if anything, it’s even more self-aware than the inaugural outing. And since sequels are such a part of the horror genre, there are rules for them, too, as Randy again explains. The genre conventions hold, even as they are being discussed. One of the few times you can watch a sequel and get as much out of it as the first movie.  

 

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Three college students head out into the woods with video cameras to film a documentary about a local bit of folklore, the Blair Witch. They disappeared. Later, their video camera was recovered and the tapes show the students at the beginning of their adventure, along with the strange things that plague their group when they cross into the woods.

Some films are timeless, and others are rooted in their time and place. The Blair Witch Project could not have been made at any other time because it is so specific to the level of technology used to create it and the zeitgeist from whence its inspiration comes. The movie begins with the declaration that “this is a true story” and then we go to video camera footage, and a new genre is born. This is the movie from which the term “found footage” originated, and it was so revelatory that the next ten movies that came out in that format were scored for using it; it was that big a deal.

I wish everyone could see this movie as I first did; it was an Academy Award screener, on VHS cassette, and I watched it on a square, boxy TV in a darkened room with six other people. There’s something about watching video tape on a video tape that adds a lot of authenticity to the movie, so much so that we all went searching afterward, just to make sure it really was faked.

Top 5 Horror Movies of the 1930s

 

This is the decade where movies officially came into their own, narratively speaking, with the advent of sound, and horror movies were right there from the beginning. In fact, the studio that became synonymous with horror, Universal, produced a whole slate of horrific features whose creatures were so impactful that they remain recognizable icons nearly a hundred years later.

Universal was carrying on the tradition of ghastly sights on the silver screen that started in the 1920s during the silent era; Lon Chaney and his grotesqueries were not far from the public’s minds, and many of the silent stars transitioned over to the talkies and continued to thrill audiences. Horror came into its own as a new kind of spectacle that only movies could deliver at the time. Now that sound was possible, the audiences could not only see the sepulchral crypt, but they could also hear the chains rattle, the coffin lid creak open, and the helpless young women could all scream.

Within reason, that is. In the middle of 1934, the Hays Code was enacted, Hollywood’s first attempt at self-regulation of their content. “Pre-Code”movies sometimes showed bare breasts (artfully, mind you) or other “shocking” scenes that were deemed grotesque and unsettling. And while there certainly some movies that benefitted from a lack of restraint, several movies listed below were made after the Hays Code was adopted and their impact was not diminished in the slightest. Most of these movies would also have a place on the cult classics list, and it’s that combination of transgressive and outré that sets them apart from others films of the decade.

The thirties were fueled by the Great Depression, providing a relatively inexpensive escape from reality of the bread lines and doing without. Science and scientific progress are hallmarks of the era, as magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics routinely featured experimental vehicles and buildings on their covers. It’s also noteworthy as the decade where Hitler rose to power overseas, producing an undercurrent of unease that wouldn’t fully be understood by the population at large until America entered World War II.

Mad Love (1935)

A gifted concert pianist’s hands are ruined in a train crash, and a strange doctor agrees to perform experimental surgery to graft new hands onto his wrists. But these hands belonged to a convicted killer, and they begin to act out their murderous impulses. But the pianist’s wife is also being persecuted by the odd doctor, who is obsessed with her. The mad doctor has elaborate plans for both of them, and it will not end well, for “each man kills the thing he loves...”

Peter Lorre’s first American production established him as one of the go-to guys for insane characters, but to be fair, they courted him after watching him in Fritz Lang’s masterpiece M (1931). It wasn’t quite typecasting, but when you’re Peter Lorre, what else are you built for, honestly? He’s compelling to watch, and this performance in these two movies is what forever typecast him as “that guy” in thrillers and mysteries. Director Karl Freund and cinematographer Gregg Toland borrowed heavily from German Expressionism to frame shots and most especially light the actors, which enhanced Lorre’s androgynous appearance and emphasized his bizarre disguise to great effect.

The screenplay was loosely based on a novel, The Hands of Orlac, and was a remake of a silent film of the same name. What’s really significant about this movie is that it’s one of the early (and one of the best) examples of body horror, specifically dealing with mutilation and the Frankenstein-esque tendency to reuse the anatomy of the dead. These willful mutilations performed by mad scientists may seem silly today, but soldiers returning home from World War I with missing limbs and other disfigurements didn’t think so. Peter Lorre’s crazy rigging, used to fool young Orlac, looks a lot like some of the medical instruments and contraptions used to affix prosthetics onto shoulders and legs for the veterans of trench warfare. Other movies would explore and remake this story over the years, but never with such style and aplomb as Mad Love.

What makes Mad Love work are the many things merely implied. Dr. Golgo, Lorre’s deranged surgeon, has an unhealthy fixation on Orlac’s wife, and his solution to that condition is, well, for 1935, obscene, at the very least. Several of the more racy elements that the newly formed Hayes committee categorically wouldn’t allow to be shown onscreen got shuttled off into the subtext, but the movie manages to get the point across, all the same. A near-perfect example of 1930s horror, Mad Love has become a classic on its own merits.

 

White Zombie (1932)

Young lovers, engaged to be married, rendezvous on the Island of Haiti and hurry to the sugar plantation of Beaumont, a man they just met on a ship, because that’s just what one does in the early 1930s. They pass by a bunch of hollow-eyed, shuffling field hand and are told that they are zombies, under the control of “Murder” Legrange, played with evil-eyed intensity by Bela Lugosi and looking particularly saturnine in the role. But Beaumont is already in love with the young woman he just met (ahh! Haiti!) and he asks the zombie master for help in wooing her. Legrange says the only way to bend the woman to Beaumont’s will is to kill her and bring her back...as a zombie!

One of the most enduring themes in 1930s horror is unrequited (and sometimes forbidden) love. This movie is no exception, and the film borders on melodrama at times. The standout star here is (no surprise) Bela Lugosi as the zombie master whose eyes and intense stare almost qualify as a special effect unto themselves. It’s no Dracula, but Lugosi was already famous for his turn as the Transylvanian count and he steals the show here, as well.

White Zombie makes the list because, for all of its flaws, it’s the first zombie movie. Zombies were an established part of many different folk traditions until the pulps got ahold of the concept and front loaded a lot of anti-immigrant hysteria and fear of miscegenation into the gruesome stories printed in magazines such as Weird Tales. This theme of a woman, helpless against the hypnotic charm and/or strength of the zombie master, would be repeated several times in other, better movies before George Romero rewired everyone’s conception of the walking dead in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead. Nevertheless, much of the lore and the allure of zombies continues to borrow from White Zombie.

 

The Black Cat (1934)

A young, bright, American couple on their way to (wait for it) their honeymoon in Hungary share a train car with Dr. Vitus Werdegast, who is traveling to see an old friend. Werdegast, played by Bela Lugosi, explains that he’d been interred in a prison camp for the past fifteen years. When the young bride, Joan, is injured on the road, Werdegast takes the couple with him to the home of his friend, the architect Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff).

I won’t spoil where things go from here, but I will tell you that the title of the movie, and the credit for same in the opening credits, is only glancingly related to the Edgar Allan Poe story. But what the movie does have going for it is as follows: It’s the first and best pairing of Lugosi and Karloff in the same movie, satanic cults, psychological torture, black magic, a dash of necrophilia, German Expressionism’s last gasp, human sacrifice, and the creepiest chess game ever played, and that’s all I can list without giving anything cool away. You have to see this film to believe it.

Critics’ reactions were mixed when the movie premiered but audiences loved it; The Black Cat was Universal’s highest grossing film that year, largely thanks to the teaming up of Lugosi and Karloff, two of the biggest films stars of the decade. This movie is the kind of bonkers that will leave you shaking your head at what they managed to cram into the movie, and what they got away with onscreen. One of the more gruesome scenes in the movie is accomplished with mere suggestion and it’s incredibly effective. The Black Cat is a fantastic example of Universal’s non-monster-centric horror output.

 

Island of Lost Souls (1932)

A survivor of a shipwreck is deposited onto a small South Pacific Island, along with some live animal cargo delivery addressed to the resident Mad Scient—er, doctor, one Doctor Moreau, played to perfection by Charles Laughton. He welcomes the newcomer, Parker, to his home and introduces him to some of the other inhabitants of the island, including a shy, beautiful woman named Lota. What Moreau fails to mention is that Lota (and the others) are engineered humans, comprised of various beasts and jungle animals. Parker is understandably shaken by this and he tries to escape, taking Lota with him, and not quite realizing that she’s also one of the animal-people, too, and that’s when things start to fall apart on the island of Dr. Moreau...

This movie remains the best version of the H.G. Wells classic novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau. A remake from the 1970s features Michael York and make-up by John (Planet of the Apes) Chambers and it’s middling at best. The less said about the 1996 film, the better. You know the one I’m talking about; the version that starred Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando and is so bad, there’s a separate documentary that goes into great detail about just how bad it is.

Island of Lost Souls also features Bela Lugosi in beast-man make-up as the lawgiver, and it’s from him that we get the classic line of dialogue, “Are we not men?” Laughton is fascinating to watch in the role of Dr. Moreau, gleeful in his genius, and also mercurial in temperament.

Most interestingly, the film was censored when it premiered, with many small towns refusing to show it. Not for the beast-men, or the implied sexual relationship between Parker and Lota, but for its tacit endorsement of evolution. Those small towns that did show it raked it right over the coals for this transgression. But the movie had the last laugh; the cultural impact of the film is significant, from the various lines of dialogue quoted and repurposed, the reference to Moreau’s punishment room, the “House of Pain” and Laughton’s and Lugosi’s performances all push this movie into cinematic history.

 

Freaks (1932)

Hans and Frieda are little people, working in a traveling circus sideshow, alongside a host of other freaks. They are engaged to be married, but a beautiful trapeze artist named Cleopatra starts making goo-goo eyes at him after learning of Hans’ grand estate and inheritance. Cleopatra and the circus strongman, Hercules, hatch a scheme for her to marry into Hans’ family, and shortly thereafter she would kill Hans and assume control of the fortune, and then she and Samson could be horrible people together forever. Hans is blinded by Cleo’s grace and beauty and scorns Frieda. Cleo plays her part in the scheme for as long as she can, but eventually her revulsion for Hans and the rest of the freaks comes out, and what happens after that...well, it’s the reason why this movie is considered a horror film.

Tod Browning is widely associated with Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, which he directed, but he will forever be remembered as the director of the cult classic Freaks. This pre-code gem bombed at the box office, and it’s easy to see why: here were circus “freaks,” shown living normal lives, being friends with their fellow carnies, and even (gasp!) falling in love, getting married, and having children! Oh, heaven forbid! The horror!

This humanizing aspect of the film (as opposed to treating the performers as mere oddities) may well have been the reason for its lack of a draw at the box office; this was the period of time when eugenics was the fashionable science, and such people who were born this way would have no place in the so-called utopia that the proponents of eugenics were peddling (and this included the nascent Nazi party). Freaks is clunky in places, and teeters on the edge of being exploitative in a couple of scenes. It was also heavily censored, coming in at just over 60 minutes (the original cut was rumored to be 90). But the film still holds up, and the denouement, when Cleopatra’s treachery is revealed, is quite macabre and unsettling.

If you'd like to check out past Top 5 Lists, you can find them all Right Here!

Top 5 Horror Movies of the 1970s

Cinema Verité. The death-throes of the studio system. Docu-dramas and New Age Woo conflated with UFOs, Bigfoot, The Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, the pyramids, the Moth-Man, and a variety of urban myths into a muddled roux of pseudoscience and fictionalized academic speculation.

It was a great time for monsters. Or rather, it should have been. Unfortunately, while the horror movies had a wealth of history and tradition to draw on, they instead relied on quick camera cuts, shaky, hand-held footage, and confusing storytelling to hide the fact that the mutant bear was, in fact, only a guy in a suit, and not a very good suit, either.

There was a lot going on in the 1970’s, both at home and abroad. Television had finally become ubiquitous in American households, and the networks wasted no time showing everyone the horrors of the Viet Nam war, the Manson children trials, the tragedy of the 1972 Olympics, and of course, the Watergate investigation. People were protesting on campuses, and four of them were killed at Kent State. The economy was in a recession and we were in the midst of an energy crisis. Is it any wonder we needed to escape to the movies?

Horror movies in this decade were largely reactive, and carried a verisimilitude of realism that wasn’t quite an imitation of reportage, but had enough leading headlines cobbled together to make it seem like the events could have happened. All pretense of decency was abandoned, and with it came shockingly realistic depictions of violence like what was shown (or implied) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Exorcist (1973). It’s not surprising that some of the most iconic and influential horror movies of all time were from this decade.

The Ongoing and Updated Top 5 Horror Movies Master List

This has become something of an October tradition around here at the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker.  And the lists are all spread out over the blog and it's hard for me to link them and for you to track them.

That's why I'm making an evergreen list, and I'll add to it each year. This is current up to 2019, and as new lists are created, they will find their way here, too. That means if you want to bookmark this post, it'll serve you well and you can jump on and off without losing your place.

Finally, know this: I will be updating these lists until I don't. As new movies come out, it may change the rankings of the other films. I may have an epiphany and change my mind about something. When I do, those updates will be made on the appropriate lists and I may not think to mention it.

Top 5 Favorite Long Form TV Series

This is a new category, brought on by the fact that we are certainly in the midst of a Television Renaissance as the medium has grown and expanded to now include shows that are longer than a mini-series but still have an ending, however nebulous it may be. These “Netflix” shows are really just the next phase of what cable networks like HBO and Showtime have been doing for twenty years now. The difference is that, instead of willingly placing oneself apart from the rest of the content providers (“It’s not TV…it’s HBO”) now everyone is on a level playing field thanks to a more egalitarian distribution system. This competition has been the best thing for show creators, the networks, and the fans, as amazing shows with oddball premises that wouldn’t have found a voice in 1998 are now among the most eagerly anticipated events of 2018. And a lot of these shows are horror and fantasy and science fiction and sometimes a mix of all that and more.

The Return of Finn's Top 5 Lists

You asked for it! You demanded it! You threatened my dog If you didn't get it!

Okay, none of that really happened. But it might've. You don't know for sure, do you?

Over the years, I've done a lot of Top 5 Movie Lists for various horror films, usually around October. It's been a while since I did them, and I decided to go back to some fun stuff here on this blog since lately it's all been real life and seriousness. We need some fun.

So, for October, I'm dropping five new Finn's Top 5 Movie lists! They will be added to the already illustrious pedigree you see splayed out below.

And just because I wanted to, I went back through all of the lists below and updated them, adding new movies and eliminating redundancies, as was my original intention in breaking out all of the sub-categories, anyway. I also eliminated all of the bonus movies and either worked them into the existing list, or shunted them off into another list completely. Again, now there's more movies that before, each one occupying a single list. Am I thinking about this waaaaaay too much? You bet! But who benefits? You, the faithful reader and horror movie fan. After all, more movies listed is more movies to complain about, or wonder aloud why it's on the list so high, or point out that it really belongs on another list...

If you're new to this blog, or these lists, here's the complete run-down to date. And if you're interested in fantasy films, I'm doing a smaller series of reviews over on the sister blog, Confessions of a Reformed RPGer. Part 1 of the series, "The Movies of Dungeons & Dragons," can be found here.

My Top Five Science Run Amok Movies
My Top Five Horror-Comedy Movies
My Top 5 Creature on the Loose Movies  
My Top 5 When Animals Attack Movies
My Top 5 Mummy Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Frankenstein Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Horrors from the Deep Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Killer Doll Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Horror Anthology movies

My Top 5 Favorite TV Horror Shows

My Top 5 Favorite Dracula Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Lovecraftian Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Haunted House Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Movie Maniac Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Killer/Creepy Kid Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Devils and Demons Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Ghost Story Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Monster From the Void of Space Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Zombie Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Vampire Movies
My Top 5 Favorite Werewolf Movies

Top 5 Science Run Amok Movies

Growing up in the 1970s, I had a healthy skepticism about the awesome power of science. I lived in a city in Texas that was, at the time, developing the B-1 stealth bomber at the nearby air force base. It’s common knowledge now, but obviously, no one knew anything about it at the time. They just had all of the elementary schools practice “disaster drills.” Yeah.

So, thanks to The Cold War and my fear of a Nuclear Holocaust, watching old monster movies from the fifties with mad scientists made perfect sense. Here’s what happens when you fully fund a guy for his research without doing your due diligence. Pretty soon, they are teleporting their own head onto insects and unleashing giant insects on an unsuspecting public. And for what, I ask you?

Science is still scary to people. Instead of irradiated mutants, we’re concerned about genetically-modified organisms. Science keeps trying (at least, in our fevered imaginations) to improve upon nature, and in doing so, usually bungs it up so badly that dinosaurs get loose in San Diego, or people come back to life as whackjob zombies, or any number of Worst Case Scenarios.

My Top 5 Creatures on the Loose Movies

It’s a tale as old as the movies itself. Man does something stupid, or brilliant, or brilliantly stupid, and finds/discovers/invents/stumbles across a monster, and then spends the rest of the movie trying not to get eaten.

I’m not talking about Japanese Kaiju movies, although they are certainly a part of the larger discussion (and, FYI, will get their own Top 5 List at a later date). I’m referring to the things that are larger than humans, but smaller than Godzilla. Or, optionally, man-sized, but far from man-like. The monster in question doesn’t have to be a giant animal; indeed, the best of this type of movie are monster that never were, or thought to have been myths, or just plain aliens.

There’s also a hunter versus hunted component to this kind of movie. Whatever is chasing us for food triggers these primal fears within us that we typically suppress. As a country that is mythically saturated by a fear of the unknown, the Other, the Outer Darkness, these movies are at their biggest and best the every thing our ancestors feared when they huddled in their cabins for warmth. Our cabins are way better now, with wi-fi and air conditioning, but the fear never really goes away. 

My Top 5 Favorite When Animals Attack Movies

Sometimes, the reasons for why movies scare us are not so complicated and tied up with our unconscious. Sometimes, it’s right out in the open, a “Duh!” moment for everyone to pick up on. One of our most deeply held convictions is the idea that we’re at the top of the food chain in every respect. Granted, there’s not much we can say about shark attacks, and other run-ins with wild animals, because usually, it’s our fault, right? 

What’s worse is when trusted domesticated animals turn on us. That’s a betrayal that cuts at the heart, as well as the throat. But let’s face it; when animals attack, it’s always a reminder that we’re not the kings of the world. We’re not in control of things, and you know, we never were. In fact, under the right circumstances, we’re nothing more than food...

This is where you cue the music for one of the many Bert I. Gordon giant insect films from the 1950s, or worse, one of the many “they used to be furry and cuddly, but now they are giant and horrible” movies from the 1970s. To call them formulaic B-movies is overstating the obvious. And while it’s tempting to load this category up with Giant Mutant Animals or Giant Mutant Insects, we’re going to shuffle those off to separate categories and focus on normal-sized animals that lose it for one reason or another, domestic or otherwise. It’s a much harder category to fill out, but the movies are better.

My Top 5 Mummy Movies

I’m including this category only for the sake of completeness; otherwise, it would have looked conspicuous by its absence. Mummies are my least favorite movie monster. I mean, I still like them and will watch them, but I’m always disappointed in the execution; I don’t think we’ve yet seen the Citizen Kane of Mummy movies. 

The problem with mummies is that we’ve moved past their cultural relevance. During the heyday, when Orientalism and Egyptology were in vogue, and new grave robbing—excuse me, archeological expeditions—yielded weekly finds in the newspapers, at a time when Egypt might as well have been Mars for all the common man knew, and these British plunderers were all too happy to ignore the warnings about disturbing the dead and cracking open tombs, well, sure, mummies were the shit.

Think about it: Empirical Britain, with its indulgent, institutionalized Colonialism, with its foot still on the neck of the British Raj in India, and now encroaching into Egypt to show the turban-wearing desert folk a thing or two about their five thousand year old culture. All too eager to overwrite Egyptian history through a British lens. What better way to punish these stiff-upper-lip-having, upper crust professors and their landed gentry friends than by having something from another culture’s history throttle the life out of them? The thing you pooh-poohed as being a silly superstition isn’t so silly when it’s crashing through your door, now, is it?

My Top 5 Horrors From the Deep Movies

Ever since we first took our steps out of the water, we immediately looked back over our shoulder and wondered what that splashing sound was. I was a member of the Jaws generation, one of the more influential horror films in modern cinema. Not just in terms of resetting and expanding what actually scares us by making use of the water as the metaphor for The Great Unknown, but also in managing to keep me out of swimming in a lake until I was a teenager. Even then, I stayed in motion constantly, kicking my feet as if my life depended on it—which it undoubtedly did.

What about the water is so terrifying to us? Is it the idea that it can instantly kill us? The fact that it slows us down and provides a hazard for us that the predators can cheerfully ignore? Personally, I think there’s something primal, if not primeval, about what lives in the crushing depths. We know we don’t belong in the water any more, and they do. It’s their domain, and we’re just trying to survive—badly.

My Top 5 Favorite Killer Doll Movies

One of the reasons why the clown scene in Poltergeist scares the hell out of us is that we’ve all had that experience at least once in our lives, usually with a favored toy or an artfully-thrown jacket and baseball cap, or something similar. In this case, the clown doll does double duty for being both (A) a doll, and (B) a clown that is disturbing even in the light of day. Our fascination with totems and effigies that move when we’re not looking, whether it’s Pixar’s Toy Story movies or the venerable and not-very-good Dollman franchise from Full Moon Entertainment, is actually a place holder for a lot of things: the Pinocchio story, the Frankenstein/Prometheus tale (gone wrong, of course), the betrayal from something innocent from our childhood, or just a plain ol’ stand-in for a loss of control from things beyond our ken. Pick one, or pick several. It doesn’t matter. It all adds up to one thing: sheer terror.

This is one of the few things that really scares me. There’s nothing worse than a creepy-looking doll suddenly turn its head to look Right. At. You. Just thinking about some of the movies on this list gives me the heebie-jeebies. As a life-long collector of action figures, there’s a niggling thought at the back of my head that they talk about me all judgey and stuff when I’m not in the room. Not that I don’t think I could defend myself from a pack of 3 ¾” action figures, but still...

My Top 5 Favorite TV Horror Shows

For horror and sci-fi fans growing up in the 1980s, TV was the best place for a quick fix if you were looking for something ghoulish and ghastly to watch. In addition to Twilight Zone reruns (always on somewhere) and later, The Outer Limits, there were several syndicated shows that promised at least an entertaining story, if not a scary one. Now in the age of dvds and streaming content, you can get what you want when you want...well, mostly. There are a number of shows, smaller, more obscure, that have yet to find their way to a blu-ray near you.

It’s hard to talk about horror anthologies on television without mentioning The Twilight Zone (1959-1964). As a fledgling effort, The Twilight Zone is lionized, and perhaps a little too slavishly, for its innovative approach and subject matter. Keep in mind, however, that for every instance of, say, Richard Matheson writing “Nightmare at 10,000 Feet” there was an episode that was a gentle or whimsical fantasy with no horror or terror or freakout by William Shatner in it. A lot of the stories were informed by the politics of the Cold War, and some were outright science fiction think pieces. None of this is a criticism, mind you. It’s just to say that while the show was overall a hit, not every episode of The Twilight Zone was a home run.

My Top 5 Favorite Lovecraftian Movies

When I was a teenager, I read my fill of H.P. Lovecraft, the man responsible for the Cthulhu Mythos and the current dust-up about the World Fantasy Award statue. Widely considered unfilmable for literally decades, we’ve only recently begun to see his weird and uniquely bleak visions translated into cinematic fever dreams.

To be completely fair, Lovecraftian cinema has been in effect since the 1960’s; it’s just not been done very well. Compromises were made in nearly every movie bearing Lovecraft’s name, some of them so egregious that it makes one wonder why they even bothered in the first place.

I think the best movies that encapsulate Lovcraft’s themes, tropes, and ideas tend to be the original movies made with a Lovecraftian sensibility; this notion that the more you know about the things just outside our consciousness, the more insane it makes you. This is an effective horror motif, and done correctly, like many of the movies below, it’s some of the most effective scares in book or movie form.

My Top 5 Favorite Haunted House movies

Is there anything more cliché’? More hoary and hackneyed? More played out? The Haunted House “trope” has been beaten to death, thanks to Scooby Doo, ABC After School Specials, and a ton of pop cultural appropriations. Along with the ghosts who frequently accompany them, no other supernatural occurrence has been so abused and ridiculed as the Haunted House.

And yet, some of the best horror movies ever made are haunted house movies. Some of the most terrifying films of all are about something being left behind, or being “not quite right” about the cornerstone of our notions of safety and security. Houses—our homes—are our defense against the forces of darkness that stop at our threshold. When our own walls revolt and offer us no protection, what hope do we have? That’s where the best haunted house movies get us: right where we live.

13 Days Until Halloween

I've been pretty busy writing these Top 5 Lists lately, and so with 13 Days Until All Hallow's Eve, now is a good time to stop and recap for the season. Here's the full list, just in case you missed anything:

My Top 5 Favorite Movie Maniac Movies

My Top 5 Favorite Killer/Creepy Kid Movies

My Top 5 Favorite Devils and Demons Movies

My Top 5 Favorite Ghost Story Movies

My Top 5 Favorite Monster From Space Movies

My Top 5 Favorite Zombie Movies

My Top 5 Favorite Vampire Movies

My Top 5 Favorite Werewolf Movies

I've been researching old spook
shows lately. I'm thinking of
putting one on at the theater.

 You will notice it is far from complete. For example, I don't have any Mummy or Frankstein movies listed, and that's because I'm going to start working on a book in my spare time that will cover all of the above, and much more. The as-yet-unpublished lists will include things like Creatures From the Deep, Creatures on the Loose, Comedy-Horror, When Animals Attack, and a bunch of other, really specific lists, like the Top 5 Horror Movies that Need to be Remade, and the Top 5 Worse Horror Movie Remakes, and a bunch of other things like that. So, if you don't mind being patient with me, I'll drop some occasional lists in for your consideration, and we'll see about getting this booger published somewhere, okay?

And hey, as long as we're talking about it, if you think there are some Top 5 Lists I need to cover in this as-yet-untitled movie guide, please share them with me and if I use your topic as a list, I will include you in the acknowledgements in the book.

In the meantime, for those of you who like to build up to it, there's a lot of inspirational movie watching in the above lists to get you in the Halloween state of mind. Thanks to everyone who favorited, forwarded, or otherwise commented on these blog posts. We'll do it again soon!

My Top 5 Favorite Movie Maniac Movies

In the last great renaissance of horror movies, roughly 1978 to 1888, we saw the emergence of a new kind of monster: the masked maniac, and they were legion. Inspired largely by the movies on this list, a horde of second, third, and fourth tier quickie, no-budget films literally spewed out of Hollywood like a Tom Savini neck wound, muddying the waters and diluting the quality, and incidentally, setting the bar for horror for a generation of people. Sympathetic monsters, like Frankenstein and poor Larry Talbot, were right out. In its place was the mute, force of nature, hulking menace wielding gardening implements straight out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog.

At the time, there was an emerging body of scholarship devoted to these films, and I readily tracked down whatever I could. Most of the popular opinion regarding the newfound fascination with horror was divided between the appeal of the Grand Guignol, or theater of blood, from Victorian France, and a resurgence of the kind of morality play that was performed during the Reformation and eventually transmogrified into fairie tales, proverbs, and in the 20th century, urban myths. Essentially, the gist of the story was this: good girls are spared, and bad girls get punished. The good are spared, and the wicked get what’s coming to them. An eye for an eye, literally.

All of this was gleefully, if not consciously, sublimated into films like The Driller Killer, Prowler, Maniac, Pieces, and one of the all-time cult classics, Sleepaway Camp, a film that almost made my top 5 list. It was the age of Fangoria, and these movies were meat and potatoes for the masses.

My Top 5 Favorite Creepy/Killer Kid Movies

Nothing delivers good scares like a creepy or a killer kid movie. The reason is simple: there is a persistent mythology of childhood that is part of the American gestalt. The reasons are legion, and the culprits are many, but chief among them is the notion that kids are supposed to grow up in this Mark Twain-esque, Norman Rockwell-like setting where the colors are all saturated and there’s good fishing at the pond, and teachers still get apples on their desks, and children are completely innocent and devoid of negative images, feelings and emotions until they magically turn eighteen and then are eligible to be killed in foreign wars.

This is all crap, of course. All kids are born feral and require constant vigilance to ensure they don’t turn out to be creepy or killer kids. They all play with bugs, poop, and dead things, and they see and hear all manner of stuff that they shouldn’t, often without context or explanation, and so they form their own weird associations with things like death and violence.

And that’s why Killer Kid movies are so scary. They show us the thing that we don’t ever want to acknowledge or admit to ourselves, and it’s this: the myth of childhood is actually a lie. We can’t protect our children from death, from dying, from craziness, from monsters, from any of it. That’s extremely frightening to most people, and it’s largely the reason for the myth in the first place.

Discussion: Fear on Film, from 1982

(From L to R) the moderator, Landis, Carpenter, and
Cronenberg on the set of this TV program that ended
up being a huge influence on me. How strange.

When I was growing up in Abilene, Texas, there were limited resources for a kid that was into weird stuff. Truly, had it not been for the baffling ability for Abilene to pull in KTVT  channel 11 and WFAA channel 8 from Dallas, along with KERA channel 13, the PBS station that ran Star Trek and Dr. Who and Monty Python's Flying Circus, I don't know if I would have turned out like I did. Well, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have had as deep a pop cultural education, in any case.

One of my most important early resources for news and information was Starlog magazine and Fangoria magazine. These early issues weren't so press release heavy back then; in fact, they often had to go find stories and make content for the magazine, which led to some really great articles about a lot of interesting stuff. One of those articles in an early issue, (maybe issue #9?) was called "Fear on Film" and it was a partial transcription and report about a round table discussion between John Landis, David Cronenberg, and John Carpenter. This was in 1982, and Cronenberg was the "old hand" at the time, having successfully made Rabid, Shivers, The Brood, and Scanners. Landis was white hot coming off of American Werewolf in London. And Carpenter had made a little movie called Halloween and also The Fog, and was working on The Thing. Talk about three directors at the top of their game. 

The article was interesting, and I never forgot reading it. But yesterday, I stumbled across THIS on the interwebs. Oh, thank you, sweet Interwebs!

Fear on Film, Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoGIyAtCJ-k

Fear on Film, Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2dKmFG-CTI

Fear on Film, Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vjjQH71Q7c

This was a great discussion, and if I had any complaints, it would be that it was only a thirty minute talk. The moderator is pretty good, but the three guys are good speakers and eager to talk about their work. Very interesting stuff, particularly from Cronenberg, whom Landis and Carpenter seem deferential to. If you've never seen it, give the interview a watch. 

It's telling to me that all of this is happening before Landis' tragedy on the set of the Twilight Zone Movie (though he may have been about to work on it), before Cronenberg made Videodrome and the Fly, and before Carpenter went off the rails completely. Basically, they are still young enough that they've got stuff to prove and talk about, and hadn't been completely eaten alive by Hollywood yet. 

I miss the early days of Fangoria. If I'd had a decent amount of art training, I might well have ended up a contestant on Face Off. 

My Top 5 Favorite Devils and Demons Movies

Possession and a loss of personal control, as I said earlier elsewhere in this series, are one of the things that most scares me in horror movies.  It’s no surprise, then, that I approach the subject of demon possession movies with some trepidation. I think with these movies, the phrase “Your Mileage May Vary” is terribly appropriate, because if you aren’t scared by these movies, or the ideas they contain, your list will be very different from mine.

Demons and devils in movies seem to be of two different varieties: The havoc-wreaking kind, and the possessing and controlling kind. There is frequent cross-over, too, as some uglies will possess a victim and then use that person to wreak havoc.

Curiously, there are very few “deal with the devil” movies, although that motif is still widespread in literature and short stories. I wonder why that is. I love those stories, myself. But these movies below kept me up at night, thinking and wondering, and concocting elaborate contingency plans for what to do if I ever come across a moldering old tome in a deserted cabin.