Best use of a song in a horror movie? - Page 2

When The Man Comes Around, Wonderful Wonderful. Great songs that were used in film/tv. I remember when I first saw Dawn Of The Dead '04, I expected to hear some rock song over the opening credits, and I got this awesome and unexpected Johnny Cash tune. From that point, I knew that this was going to be a really good movie. Whenever I hear Wonderful Wonderful, the first thing I think of is "Home". Without a doubt, one of the best, and most disturbing episodes of The X-Files.


I'll add in Goodbye Horses from Silence Of The Lambs. I'm actually surprised no one's mentioned it yet. That song just adds to the creepiness, of an already creepy scene.

The "Red Right Hand" usage in SCREAM kicks the shit out of the one in HELLBOY. In HELLBOY it's a cool little tune playing in the background as Hellboy suits up to kick some ass. In SCREAM it underscores the mood of the terrorised town perfectly.

I may need to rewatch Scream. I don't remember a lot in the way of mood at all.

well, the use of the intro to The Carpenters' "Superstar" that then transitions to the creepier Sonic Youth cover of "Superstar" in the High Tension trailer singlehandedly made me want to see that movie. too bad the actual film contained nothing close to that genius bit of song-image juxtaposition.

i can second the love for Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around" in the Dawn of the Dead remake.

they don't really stand out, but i love the Billie Holiday, Four Tops, and Stevie Wonder songs in The Thing.

That particular scene is some very nice film-making. The curfew's been set, it's a hot summer's day, and the streets are emptying. I know it's hip to hate on SCREAM, and I sure do loathe the wave of dumbassery that followed in its wake, but it's a pretty good film.

But HB's hand... the Right Hand o' Doom... it's red... I'll shut up now.

I second pretty much everything already said, especially Freebird in Devil's Rejects and The Man Comes Around in DOTD. I add Partytime by 45 Grave when the shit hits the fan in Return Of The Living Dead.

I don't hate Scream, I just found it to be poor by comparison with New Nightmare.
Nontheless, I'll try giving it another watch.

SCREAM owns NEW NIGHTMARE. It's the same concept, sure, but SCREAM sharpens it to a fine point and is far more clever. Plus, Heather Langenkamp is just terrible in NN.

See, I'd sort of put the two film names the other way round, there, and substitute the stars of Scream for Langenkamp.
I found Scream smug and self-satisfied, but not clever. New Nightmare was a little silly, but rather better-made, and actually contained some effective elements of horror to offset the post-modern smirking.

Seriously? You think Langenkamp was better than ANYONE in SCREAM? Whoa.

NEW NIGHTMARE just bores the tits off of me. It's got an effective opening and an interesting central conceit concerning the real Freddy Krueger, but it's also horribly acted, poorly paced, directed like shit, and not at all scary. SCREAM's not particularly scary, either, but it's smarter and funnier, and it has the balls to go all-out with the post-modernity. NEW NIGHTMARE sputters along trying to be both, and ends up doing neither right. And it has an annoying child actor along for the ride.

See, SCREAM works because it removes the supernatural element of the NIGHTMARE series. That way the film can be metatextual and get away with it. That, and it soundly kicks the ass of a genre that was beyond tired by that point. NN is just looking for a way to make the Freddy franchise fresh again. SCREAM kicks that franchise and its brothers in the nuts and tells them to stay down where they belong.

I sound like a SCREAM apologist, and I guess I kinda am. The sequels stretch the concept to breaking point and beyond, but there isn't an ounce of fat on the original. Can I see why horror fans hate it? Absolutely. I'm a horror fan and it pisses me off that SCREAM caused the industry to treat horror as a mockery in its wake. But in its own right, SCREAM is a good film.

Well said. And that doesn't make you a Scream apologist, it just makes you resistant to jumping on the "Scream sucks" bandwagon.

No, that isn't quite what I meant. I merely though Langenkamp was better than the main two of three actors in Scream.
Anyways, first things first- Craven created New Nightmare in an attempt to stop people making Nightmare on Elm Street sequals, not to revive the franchise.
I'll agree New Nightmare is pathy as hell, and the ending is a mess that almost ruins the film, but it has some excellent scenes, and comes the closest to anything I've yet seen to actually hinting at tackling the question of the effect horror films have on the people who make them, which is a sorely underused field.
Scream, by contrast, has no good ideas. It has a juvenile approach of pointing out cliches of a genre, repeating them endlessly, and thinking it has done something clever. I really can't find anything particularly imaginative in that, or anything to like it its parade of smug teenagers jeering at each other.
I don't see it going all-out with post modernity, I see it taking cheap shots.
I don't hate Scream. It's a watchable enough film, it just doesn't have the ideas or ingenuity of New Nightmare, even if it's better put together.
The genre had already be kicked to pieces reasonably effectively by Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer- it just didn't get the mass-market success.

No bandwagons involved here. I watched Scream expecting it to be a good film, having mainly heard that it was, and didn't particularly like it.

HENRY had no effect on slasher films because it didn't utilise slasher iconography at all. If making a nasty horror picture involving murders was all that was needed to make slasher films look ridiculous then they would have never gotten off the ground, because TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE did it waaaay back in 1973.

SCREAM subverts those clichés. It doesn't just point them out and then utilise them anyway. It has two killers instead of one. Billy Loomis is actually the killer, instead of the lame red herring he would've been in any other slasher. The big name is killed in the first act. The heroine is sharp as a tack.

The parts that ARE clichéd-the slut dying, the phonecall taunting, the climactic "big reveal" scene-are that way because of the killers themselves, and their obsession with crafting their murders cinematically. But their plan comes unravelled due to that self-same obsession, as they underestimate their choice of helpless victim and she ends up taking them down single-handedly. Sidney's triumph at the end of SCREAM works so well because it's both the natural conclusion to a slasher and an underscoring of the critique of the subgenre. It embraces that cliché, and others, whilst pointing out how they don't work. That's what makrs SCREAM as clever, ultimately-it works as a slasher film, whilst pointing out how silly slasher films can be.

And, all this aside, it's a fuck of a lot better made than NEW NIGHTMARE.

I'm not denying that. I just don't think it's nearly as interesting.

No fears, I wasn't directing the statement at you or, in fact, anyone in particular on these boards. I have, however, noticed a general trend whereby folks round these parts hate on Scream because of what it engendered (as opposed to the film itself). That seems silly and bandwagon-esque to me.