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Hallowe'en screenings
To set the scene for Hallowe'en, I've been taking a Facebook survey of people's favourite scary movies.
Because I'm looking for good Halloween viewing, I thought I'd list the five scariest movies I've ever seen. I don't mean gory, I mean scary: the kind of "why-am-I-watching-this,-seriously,-that's-not-cool,-holy-fucking-shit" scary movie that you try not to think about when you wake up in the middle of the night. A year later.
Note yours and tag me about it -- let me know what I really don't want to watch but probably will anyway.
What follows is my initial list (numbered), and then an alphabetical, somewhat annotated list of the recommendations I've received. Titles with an asterisk got multiple votes.
1. The Ring (US version)
2. The Blair Witch Project*
3. The Exorcist*
4. The Shining
5. Akira Kurosawa's Dreams
Others' recommendations:
Alien*
The Amityville Horror (original)
Audition
Cabin Fever*
The Changeling ("a good, classic creeper")
Cloverfield
Dawn of the Dead
Deadgirl ("If it doesn't make you uncomfortable you're probably a sociopath")
The Fly
The Fourth Kind* ("quite creepy, though not a traditional horror")
Frailty ("for a more thoughtful, lingering creepy...")
Hallowe'en (1978)* ("pretty scary, but I've seen it so many times")
Ju-On
Let the Right One In*
Misery
Ravenous
[REC]
Session 9
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (original)
Them ("a Romanian film was scary, both immediately and conceptually, and the American film The Strangers adapted it")
The Thing
28 Days Later*
28 Weeks Later* ("not everyone loved it but I thought it was very scary!")
The Vanishing ("a deeply creepy movie, but not very scary. Disturbing, I guess you would say")
Mark A. McCutcheon
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Paranormal Activity - watch it at night, with the lights out.
Ju-On - the original version of 'The Grudge.' Even with subtitles, it's seriously creepy (skip the dubbed version).
Event Horizon - more disturbing than scary; I couldn't watch it all th eway through.
Threads - British mockumentary on the effects of nuclear war. Not so much scary as horribly realistic and frightening.
The Last Winter - quite good.
Aliens
Thanks for explaining what Ju-On is; I'll check it out. (The US version of The Grudge was awful, just racist.)
Ju-On is one of those movies you save for a Saturday night in the winter. It's not really a summer movie...it needs to be cold and dark outside when you watch it.
The Last Winter is an excellent psychological thriller. The CG isn't all that great, but the movie doesn't depend on it the way you'd expect. Ron Perlman does a nice job, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY_BXNvbr8E
I've had a chance to screen 28 Weeks Later and The Fourth Kind.
28 Weeks Later did fall prey to some of the laws of the sequel (so archly critiqued and predictably parodied in Scream 2) but it stood up well to the first, better than I thought it would.
As for The Fourth Kind, I wouldn't have bothered if I'd known in advance it's an alien abduction film. I'm a rabid fan of SF-horror (note the Cornenberg pun) but the alien abduction story just loses me.
With 28 Weeks Later, the opening sequence and the later bunker scene (the first breakout of the virus and the herding of the residents into an underground 'safe zone') are probably the best. Both give a sense of what it must have been like during the first twenty-eight days - which was really only alluded to in the first movie. It helped to build that 'under seige' mentality that must have been present during the first wave of infection.
Apparently 28 Months Later is back on the books, and there are rumours that Danny Boyle wants to direct it (oh, we hope, we hope!). Set in Europe...where suddenly, the Chunnel is not sounding like such a great idea.
I like the scene when they're in the underground with only a night-vision scope to see with. Watching that scene I realized I gravitate to scary movies that emphasize the role of media. The uncanny effects and unreliable representations of media are what make films like The Ring, The Blair Witch Project, and Cloverfield work so well. (BTW, Avital Ronnell, in The Telephone Book and even in her short interview in Examined Life, has deconstructive insights about the ontological opposition of presence and life, on one side, to techne--i.e. media, representation--and death, on the other.)
So I think the next screenings will have to be Paranormal Activity and [REC]...
Are you going to put Shaun of the Dead on the list? It's not so much scary as brilliantly funny, but it's a good Hallow'een flick.
It's a fantastic movie, agreed; but this list is sticking to Scary.
Hmm. Role of media, eh?
'The Crazies' has a bit of that, though not too much. I did really like the satellite views at the start of the film, and you need to watch a bit of the credits to pick up an extra scene.
And Pontypool. Don't forget that one.
I'll add Blindness to the list. It is spooky.
Testament (was released in '83) is more dark and horribly depressing than scary, but it's one of the classic eighties era nuclear war films.
And I'll throw Saw and Saw 2 out there (a friend of mine is a producer for all of the Saw movies).
Paranormal Activity for the win!
We watched this movie last night and it does everything right that The Fourth Kind does wrong, on the principle that less is more: next to no explanation; strict adherence to the "amateur footage" point of view (much like Blair Witch Project); minimal production values; maximal concept. Some have criticized it as "gimmicky" but the gimmick works, at least for me. It deserves the adjective "Lovecraftian."
I'm too nervous to see Paranormal Activity 2 in theatres. I need to be able to turn the lights on when it gets scary (and that's saying something...I like a good, scary movie). After I watched the first one, I had to stay up for a while and read something soothing.