A movie like Brainscan is unique. The characters in this film only exist in the time that the movie was made. Brainscan can almost be called a period film today due to its embracing the troubled...
Its a fun to play with friends, find fun quest and just have a blast! I have been playing for several years and i keep going back. always new things to do or find! Just wish there wasnt so many...
TLDNR REVIEW: “Amazing Spider-Man” is almost good, just like powdered mashed potatoes are almost real.
Look, guys. I realize that anyone that is reading this review has already made up their...
Raimi's low budget masterpiece does all the little tricks to freak out even the most hardcore Horror superfan. And it's funny, too. (The first Spook-A-Blast)
Oh, a body horror movie from David Cronenberg. I'm sure we won't see too many of those on this list.
It takes the original's goofy premise and turns it into a tragic metaphor on disease. Jeff Goldblum's transformation into Brundlefly is heartbreaking, and the make-up effects on this movie are still unsettling all these years later. Kudos to Mel Brooks for using his influence to get this horror classic produced.
Kubrick's final indisputable masterpiece. Aside from the film's brilliantly meticulous & iconic imagery, Kubrick's innovative use of sound & music by Wendy Carlos, Bartok, Penderecki, & Lygeti succeeded magnificently in creating The Shining's sustained atmosphere of mercurial, ghostly malevolence. Giving voice to an all-enveloping sense of terror that seems to belong intrinsically to this film & this filmalone.
One of the finest examples of two directors' visions being meshed together to create something extraordinary. Spielberg brings the warm family dynamics to the table, while Hooper counterbalances this by putting this suburban family through hell (literally). This dream team allows the film to be a nihilistic nightmare scenario without losing the emotional connection to the family's plight. Through finding the right tone, these two created one of the most fun horror pictures to come out in the modern era.
Granted a bigger budget and a strong cult following after the original, Raimi takes the same approach and core idea as his first film, slightly tones down the scares in favor of bigger laughs, and what doesn't scare us comes back in the copious amounts of gore utilized by Raimi and the good ol' folks at KNB.
If the first one was an underground favorite, Evil Dead II spilled into the vernacular and acquired a bigger, more mainstream audience, and it upped the odds even higher than the first one did.
Landis' horror-comedy masterpiece featuring the "will never be topped" makeup work of Rick Baker. The film is an ever-shifting amalgam of genres, brilliantly straying from drama & romantic comedy to macabre fantasy & outright gorefest, all while keeping keen focus on the tragic emotional conflict of it's main character. Today, the film remains a bold & singular cinematic statement in the halls of horror.
"Have you tried talking to a corpse? It's boring."
Herbert West has a very good head on his shoulders...and another one in a dish on his desk.
Stuart Gordon's first and arguably still best H.P. Lovecraft-based movie has everything you'd want from a classic 80's horror movie. Blood, guts, humor, sex, you name it. (In)Famous for the legendary Head Giving Head scene, Re-Animator also gave us Jeffrey Combs, who would become one of the best horror actors to this day. Two inferior, but watchable, sequels followed and Gordon has made his career doing H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, but none of them have been quite as successful as Re-Animator.
Again with the Savini. Grubby grindhouse classic. Rare starring role for the late, great Spinell, who kind of gets to rewrite Taxi Driver with that whole Caroline Munro subplot.
I would like to add to this list, but Art already added the Shining, which is TERRIFYING.
Then again...
13. Brazil
Yes I know it's an odd choice, but this movie used to scare the hell out of me, and well, still does. Perhaps the worst non-apocalypse(?) scenario in any sci-fi film. The government is the terror. The paperwork is the terror.
This frightening film stars George C. Scott as a man who has recently lost his wife and child in an automobile accident. Still grieving, he moves across the country to start a new job and a new life. When he moves into a large, old Victorian mansion he soon realizes he is not alone. A rubber ball bouncing down the stairs has never been so scary!
15. Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) d. Tony Randel
The perfect kind of sequel: The one that advances every idea from the first. In this case, advancing the ideas a film that already had some of the most fucked up, unsettling ideas in the genre. In this case, it's about bodily hedonism at its most extreme, and the people actually pursuing it.
For me, the creepiest moment has nothing to do with Julia's skin, or the Channard Cenobite. Surprisingly, as time goes on, it's that moment where the other Cenobites remember they were once human. How far they'd come. And how lost they are once they realize it. It doesn't last long, but it's a hollow, beautiful, disturbing thing.
How much fun is this movie? You have Leslie Nielson playing a bad guy, Stephen King saying "METEOR SHIT", thousands of cockroaches, and this....
If there ever was a movie better designed for a 12 year old boy, I haven't seen it. Not a bad story in the bunch. Scary as hell in places and at the same time hilarious. For EC Comics goodness, it doesn't get any better.
Carpenter has made better crafted and acted films (see #1), but this one really gets to me on a primal level. Much like Halloween, the scariest moments in this movie feature silent figures standing absolutely still, just projecting eerie menace from a distance. Plus, it has one of Carpenter's best scores. It doesn't get as much love as some of his other admittedly better classics, but I'm a big fan.
Herbert West has a very good head on his shoulders...and another one in a dish on his desk.
Stuart Gordon's first and arguably still best H.P. Lovecraft-based movie has everything you'd want from a classic 80's horror movie. Blood, guts, humor, sex, you name it. (In)Famous for the legendary Head Giving Head scene, Re-Animator also gave us Jeffrey Combs, who would become one of the best horror actors to this day. Two inferior, but watchable, sequels followed and Gordon has made his career doing H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, but none of them have been quite as successful as Re-Animator.
There are two 80s horror films I will likely never watch again, the first is the The Fly & the second is Altered States. Russell's "no acid required" bad trip of a film takes your brain to places sanity has no place being & showers us with a cascade of images so unsettling & violent that the film makes the videotape from The Ring look like an old episode of Mama's Family. Edited by Art Decade - 9/29/11 at 1:30pm
When Stephenie Meyer was still in grade school and viewed Small Wonder as high art, the foxy painter and photographer Kathryn Bigelow, girlfriend of director James Cameron, co-wrote this future cult classic with Eric Red, a strange hybrid of Western, horror, and romance that's frightening as all hell and (no pun intended) bleeding with atmosphere in every frame. It's Henriksen's most fearsome foe and you'd never think Chet from Weird Science would be this terrifying of a badass.
I love that the woman who directed this won an Academy Award, and years before The Hurt Locker (kind of, if it got a wider release) caught on with the masses, you can tell that Bigelow can get suspense right on the fucking money.
Scared the living shit out of me when I was 8. I don't suppose it stands up very well today but at the time, you had to ask what the hell was Disney thinking releasing this for kids.
Seriously, where the fuck were those outraged parent groups in the '80s when we needed them? The image of Jason Robards' hand getting crushed - splitting the skin - is as gory as anything in The Fly & is just as traumatizing. Thanks alot, Disney Channel!
The Nickelodeon The Evil Dead, the creature effects are fantastic, and I love the idea of a heavy metal album played backwards unlocking the doorway to Hell.
Not just the best Bava movie, not just the best horror movie set in a movie theater (so sorry, Popcorn!), and not just the best movie featuring Demons - It's one of my favorite horror movies of all time. There's also a movie-within-a-movie, so you're getting twice the value here, folks.
It's like a horror bottle episode. With pus. And katanas.
The movie-within-a-movie intercut with the start of the demon infection is wonderfully creepy. Demons also has one of my favourite 'oh shit' moments: When the pimp dies, you know they're all fucked.
26. Return of the Living Dead (1985) d. Dan O'Bannon
"You mean the movie lied?!"
The ultimate O'Bannon, this is a brilliant blending of Horror and comedy. Originally conceived as a straight sequel to Romero's Dead movies, luckily what we got was something delightfully its own weird beast. One of the most quotable horror movies of all time.
Love that movie so much. Tarman totally fucked me up when I was little. Freakiest monster walk of all time (#2- Sadako, from the original Japanese Ring)
Seriously, where the fuck were those outraged parent groups in the '80s when we needed them? The image of Jason Robards' hand getting crushed - splitting the skin - is as gory as anything in The Fly & is just as traumatizing. Thanks alot, Disney Channel!
When it comes to werewolf movies, everybodys got their favorite. AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON is the popular choice nowadays, but I'm a THE HOWLING man. Joe Dante (and John Sayles) delivers a movie that's smart, funny, and scary, with lots of clever in jokes that makes the geek in you smile yet all the while never cutting into the scary mood. And while the transformation scene is a distant second to AMERICAN WEREWOLF, it's still pretty damn impressive. A true classic.
When true evil comes calling, and you are all alone, what will you do? Rutger Hauer gives a great performance as the title character and has one of the most chilling lines ever uttered: "I cut off his legs." The long shots of open road and desert landscape add to the feeling of desolation as does the quiet, minimalist score.
I wouldn't say it's the scariest thing I've ever seen but I was in maybe third or fourth grade the first time I saw this and it was amazing. To this day I still dig the fuck out of anything that involves brain parasites. For a seven/eight year old it had it all. Cute chicks, aliens, axe wielding zombie skeleton killers.
On a side note...fuck you guys! So much amazing stuff on this list, holy shit. I actually have the good fortune of having two daughters that aren't too old to tell me horror is "for boys" yet so I recently just watched Something Wicked This Way Comes with them and they LOVED it.
Great list, and great movies. Though I'm kind of amazed a certain cannibalistic humanoid group of underground dwellers haven't been mentioned yet...*cough*
To be honest, I haven't seen this one in years so I'm not even sure if it's a classic. What I do remember is that final shot and it's enough for me to include it on this list. Talk about your fucked up twist endings.
To be honest, I haven't seen this one in years so I'm not even sure if it's a classic. What I do remember is that final shot and it's enough for me to include it on this list. Talk about your fucked up twist endings.
It's definitely no classic: the acting is terrible and the film-making amateurish. But oh god yes that ending. Totally fucked up, with the pedophile camp cook a close second. Am I the only one who would like to have had a spin-off movie about the creepy aunt?
It's definitely no classic: the acting is terrible and the film-making amateurish. But oh god yes that ending. Totally fucked up, with the pedophile camp cook a close second. Am I the only one who would like to have had a spin-off movie about the creepy aunt?
Yeah the last time I saw it was probably 8th grade so my memories are hazy. It's certainly not a movie that could be made today. And now for a no brainer entry:
31: Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
While the first definitely deserves to be on the list, this is the one that introduced us to Jason Vorhees properly. He doesn't have the hockey mask yet or the immortality but all the elements of what made him the quintessential 80's slasher icon are in place. And unlike the sillier and sillier sequels, this one still packs a punch.
It's definitely no classic: the acting is terrible and the film-making amateurish. But oh god yes that ending. Totally fucked up, with the pedophile camp cook a close second. Am I the only one who would like to have had a spin-off movie about the creepy aunt?
I honestly don't remember a thing about Sleepaway Camp outside the ending, I actually have it in a boxset with a bunch of other stuff that was a promotional item for buyers at Tower Records. I should watch it again and see. But that ending? Fuck.
And I can't post again without throwing out some Linnea Quigley love. She was a pretty big deal in my circle of friends and RotLD was the key to that. My sister was always renting my friends and I shit that we shouldn't watch and I can't see a pair of leg warmers on an attractive young lady without going half mast. All thanks to Miss Quigley.
Plus it's just legitimately ugly and grim, one of the better slasher rip-offs.
Watched this again last night, thanks to this thread. Funny to see Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter and Fisher Stevens in there! (Two future Oscar-winners! Is that a slasher record?) Savini's effects are brilliant, but the ending feels like it's lacking something. And the hooker Cropsy kills is one of the ugliest I've ever seen on screen.
What do you mean they cut the power? How could they cut the power, man? They’re animals!
This one's pretty self-explanatory. Even though James Cameron focuses more on action than Ridley Scott's horror setup, it doesn't change the fact that this thing is relentless as all hell, and no matter if you've seen it once or 317 times, it still has you on the verge of a massive panic attack. A true rollercoaster of a movie, with a never-better Sigourney Weaver, Bill Paxton at his funniest and wildest, and Paul Reiser as the most hateful corporate scumbag this side of OCP. Also commendable: Cameron, co-writer of Rambo: First Blood Part II, deservedly and smartly mocks the military-industrial complex of the Reagan era with a flair not many else were able to have.
Taking the absurdity of Re-Animator and ramping it up a notch, From Beyond is the story of one scientist's quest to to stimulate the pineal gland. And then it goes terribly wrong. It's surreal and gross and splattery and all of the things that a good eighties movie should be. Plus Jeffery Combs and Barbara Crampton!
Arguably the most fun you'll have with a Lovecraft adaptation, and my favorite use of practical effects outside of The Thing and American Werewolf in London. The slippery, interdimensional monsters are only eclipsed by Barbara Crampton's mesmerizing wardrobe transformations.
This has everything a good 80's horror movie needs: Tom Atkins being all cool and badass, an eerie John Carpenter (and Alan Howarth) score, and some juicy practical gore effects. Some were disappointed it didn't have Michael Myers in it, but fuck him, he was old news by this point anyways. Oh, and that jingle.
If you haven't seen this atmospheric Alan Parker film, track it down. It basically starts as a straight film noir with a seedy Mickey Rourke (redundant!) searching for a missing person in 1950's New York and then slowly the film takes an off-ramp into crazy voodoo horror land. I was absolutely floored by this the first time I saw, and it's been a favorite ever since. This also has one of my favorite DeNiro performances. Campy, creepy and dripping with dread all at once.
For my money, this is the most chilling & depressing film (not made about the Holocaust) of the 1980s. Watching it is like being slowly pummeled by heavy wet towels while someone screams the text of Mein Kampf in your ear. The film, strangely enough, ends with an upbeat Eurythmics electro-pop tune that plays over the final image of a shattered Winston as the credits roll. Thus providing a stark contrast between the 1984 that was imagined by Orwell & the 1984 that actually existed, where Pepsi was king & girls just wanted to have fun. Edited by Art Decade - 9/29/11 at 10:52am
37. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) d. Bruce Pittman
I happen to kind of be in love with Prom Night II. Michael Ironside plays the principal of a school at which his old flame died in 1957. Unfortunately, she's possessed one of his current students. And she's pissed.
