Time's Top 25 Horror Movies

Red Dragon. An EW list wouldn't even try that shit.

Here's where I knew it was bogus. From CARRIE:

"the distractingly attractive Sissy Spacek"

(giggle)

Hmm, I didn't know that Richard Corliss had booked passage on the fail boat.

From the Braindead/Dead Alive entry...
What the fuck is Meet the Feelies?

These always make me appreciate the CHUD lists even more.

*edit- I see Alex beat me to it.

To paraphrase Grandpa Simpson: I've coughed up scarier stuff than that list.

It had never occurred to anyone to release horror movies in late October? Oh, and way to use a goddamn still from Halloween V while praising Halloween as a masterpiece.

I'm not a huge expert of the genre, but how does any list like this not include THE THING?

I'm not sure if Bambi or Red Dragon is the stupidest entry on this list.

Or The Shining, Evil Dead 1 OR 2(although Dead Alive is a decent substitute), etc etc., and listing Red Dragon instead of Silence of the Lambs is really nuts.

This is probably the only highlight of the entire list:
Also, having Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat on there is semi-clever, although at this point it's a crock to say something's available on YouTube, instead of just embedding it in the page. Could be a "Time/Warner vs. Google" bit of legal nonsense, I suppose.

Just flip a coin.

Yeah, and that's certainly not a still from Spielberg's Jaws, either.

Wow, that was total garbage. Not the films, except for RED DRAGON, so much as the list itself. The inclusion of ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN, basically a technical demo almost certainly never INTENDED as a horror film, is the sort of smartassery that makes it clear that the author's heart wasn't in it at all. This is borne out by the nonexistent fact checking. Takeshi Miike was ELEVEN YEARS OLD in the year that Time gives as the beginning of his career - and no, he might be prolific, but he's not THAT prolific. MEET THE FEELIES? If you can't be bothered to get academic facts straight, who the hell cares what you have to say? RED DRAGON? Fail. No early-mid period Argento? Fail. No Hammer? No Corman? And BAMBI? You're paid to write about movies, are you? At least we got a token Bava film. The inclusion of the vile MEN BEHIND THE SUN is novel, but again, it's not so much a horror film as it is an attempt to accurately depict wartime atrocities. It might be horrifying what with its exploding anuses and animal snuff footage, but it doesn't belong here any more than something like SCHINDLER'S LIST... not to compare the two films for a moment.

It's really no surprise coming from the brilliant minds at the magazine that named your reflection in a mylar cover their Person Of The Year, a cop-out of truly deranged proportions. They need to just cease publication and retire the name, instead of dragging it further and further into disgrace.

These thread-bait lists are mutating into a new form of viral marketing.
"How do we get those kids on the internet to visit our site and talk about our magazine? Hey! Let's make a movie list with two or three completely absurd choices. That's like geek catnip! I'll bet those suckers will even provide a link for us!"

I'll echo this thought. Forget the list! Somebody out there actually expressed in print that they find Sissy Spacek distractingly attractive.

The rest of the article is now rendered even more irrelevant than it already was.

Honestly. And it's not like the list is coming from Fangoria. It's Time magazine. How do you trust Time's idea of "scary"? I'm surprised the Zapruder film isn't on the list.

Also, that's a still from HANNIBAL in the RED DRAGON entry.

My last shit was pretty scary, or at least scarier than Red Dragon.

This is absolutely correct. Absurd, shitty lists will soon eclipse porn as the most prevalent thing on the internet.

My last shit wasn't even as shitty as Red Dragon.

AMEN! I could not agree more. It's like, "OK I GET IT, you all think Final Fasntasy VII is the best video game ever"

I'd also like to add that Audition is the most overrated (non-Donnie Darko) movie I have ever seen. I hesitate to even classify it a horror movie because it takes so long to trudge through to anything interesting. Maybe it speaks to how jaded I have become because nothing in that movie was as horrifying or disgusting as people led me to believe. I mean, when a guy drinking vomit doesn't phase me, I think something is wrong.

There are several complaints about this list, but, as a member of the Michael Mann Club, slandering "Silence of the Lambs" and "Hannibal" only to go with "Red Dragon" as some sort of default best-Hannibal pick? I want to beat Time's editors to death with eight copies of "Manhunter" rubberbanded together.

I got the feeling that the author just liked Red Dragon the book more than the others. Also, that he had only seen about 15 horror movies in his life.

Word.

Seriously, when was the last time one of these mass-market "best X of Y" lists was worth more than the five seconds it took to skim through it before tearing out the page and wiping your ass with it? I can't think of a single one. Why are these even worth discussing any more? What's next: hey guys, a used car dealer actually lied to me, and I think it's news? It'll be news when EW or People or whatever publishes a list like this that doesn't make me want to roll my eyes like a drunk. Why bother giving them the site traffic? Just say no, people. Just say no.

Kubrick's The Shining didn't make the f**king cut???

I'm not just calling shenannigans here, I'm calling for a boycott of that rag. And here I thought TIME was prestigious.

Another waste of a list.

I let the Red Dragon pick slide, but the writer went too far with this nonsense from the Jaws paragraph:
Quint isn't a rich enough character? Chief Brody isn't a rich enough character? Hooper isn't a rich enough character? My god, I hope Lorraine Gary plows the stern of a sail boat into this writer's crotch.

I guess it's not what you'd call mass market, but the Onion AV Club does a terrific job at concocting lists like these. Even if you don't always initially agree with the choices, the write-ups are entertaining and convincing. I'm surprised more people don't link to them here.

Audition isn't really meant as a straight horror movie, hell the brutality in the film is pretty much a dream sequence. What got people initially was that the violence at the end is out of the blue, if you don't know about Audition it just comes across as a straight drama which goes a bit Lynchian near the end. Nothing beats that feeling of broad terror which I felt when I watched Audition with absolutely no clue as to what was going to happen (I was lucky enough to catch it on Channel 4 in 2001/2002 before it got massively overhyped).

Can I request a Chud list to cover this next year? Only start it in September so I can use October to watch the movies.

Also, gore-ific = gory, right?

2 reasons? Turf war... And it's easier to tear down than lift up. Just guesses, really.

I think you're giving EW too much credit, my friend...

Shill.

Time magazine making a mostly good list of the 25 greatest horror films of all time? Even Colonel Kurtz didn't know the horror.

I clicked on this topic thinking I knew how terrible this list would be.
I was wrong.
I mean, what the hell was going on here?
"Can a film be as crazy as its monsters? That was the feeling when moviegoers first saw George A. Romero's Pittsburgh-made zombie classic. Instead of the standard alternation of scare scenes and dialogue scenes (to give the audience a break between shocks), here the walking dead just keep on coming, seemingly by the hundreds, to attack the increasingly hysterical humans holed up in a house by the cemetery. Romero also broke one of the few horror rules left: that children don't eat their parents. After Night of the Living Dead, no social norm was safe."

To be fair, including Freaks, Les Diaboliques and Black Sunday redeems them a little.

This list is pretty lame (Red Dragon? Seriously?) but I wanted to smack the people I heard talking about it on the radio this afternoon. They didn't seem to get that it was in chronological order. One of these brainiacs began to get that it was (the whole years of the movies being in order from past to present was cluing him in) until the other moron said "No, it's a countdown".