I can't believe Halloween is in 3 days. I still need to track down a Fellini's 8½ t-shirt for my Person With Really Bad Taste In Film costume. My plan is to work in the morning and then watch movies for the rest of the day. It's a lot different than what I do every other day.
Inspired by Halloween and by polyester_queen, I've put together a list of my Top 100 Horror Movies. As with any list, there's always complications, and I struggled a lot with what movies I would consider to be "horror". Like, Troll 2 is technically a horror film, and it's one that I enjoy more than any other horror film, but I don't really love it as horror, so I wouldn't say it's my Favorite Horror Movie of All Time. So then do I not include it at all? Do I have to figure out where it ranks for me as horror, and place it at like #60 or whatever? And if I don't include it, do I then also disqualify similarly silly films like Leprechaun 3 and TerrorVision? That feels all wrong. Funny Games was another really hard one. If it is a horror film, then I would say it's the best one ever. But is it? Is it more of a thriller? I've been going back and forth a lot. For right now, I'm only posting Part 1 of the Top 100 list, so I've still got time to decide. Either one of those could end up being #1 on the list, depending on how I feel the day I post it.
There are a few other movies that I really love that are either widely regarded as horror or just have some elements of horror, that I don't really think of that way myself. So here is my list of
The Top 7 Movies I Suppose I Could've Possibly Included On My Top 100 Horror List But Didn't (not ranked)
1. American Psycho (2000, Mary Harron)
2. Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch)
3. Freaks (1932, Tod Browning)
4. Gozu (2003, Takashi Miike)
5. The Monster Squad (1987, Fred Dekker)
6. Nekromantik (1987, Jorg Buttgereit)
7. Spider Baby (1968, Jack Hill)
My other issue is wanting to make this list both aesthetically pleasing and informative. Informative is pretty much out because I'm very bad at writing about movies. I'll try to write a little when I can, but for the most part, just add your own mental caption of "This movie is about awesome shit happening, and it's really amazing, and you should fucking see it!" to every single movie I list. For images, even though these movies are my faves, I don't own all that many of them. So occasionally I'll be able to take screencaps, but for the most part, I'll be going through Google Image Search. So if some of the pictures are really boring and small, or if they don't even have anything to do with the movie apart from coming up when I searched the movie's title, don't be alarmed and I'm sorry.
And finally, there are a ton of movies on this list I remember really loving, but have only seen once, possibly like 10 years ago. And there are also a couple movies I just saw in the last few days that I've fallen in love with that I haven't really had sufficient time to process with regards to how they measure up against other stuff. So for that reason, only the Top 25 is going to be ranked. The rest will be semi-ranked and put in alphabetical order. So like right now, I'm posting numbers 87-100. Were the whole thing accurately ranked, these would still be at the bottom of the list, #s 87-100, they're just not ranked beyond that. Likewise for #s 51-86 and 26-50.
Also, if you see an asterisk next to a director, that means it's my favorite film by the director. If the asterisk is next to the movie title, that means it's my favorite of the series it belongs to.
87. Army of Darkness (1992, Sam Raimi)
88. Audition (1999, Takashi Miike)
89. A Bay of Blood (1971, Mario Bava)
90. The Brotherhood (2001, David DeCoteau)
91. Cannibal Holocaust (1980, Ruggero Deodato)
92. Day of the Dead* (1985, George A. Romero*)
93. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989, Rob Hedden*)
94. The House by the Cemetery (1981, Lucio Fulci)
95. New Nightmare (1994, Wes Craven)
96. Phenomena (1985, Dario Argento)
97. Shock (1977, Mario Bava*)
98. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)
99. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006, Jonathan Liebesman*)
100. Trick or Treat (1986, Charles Martin Smith*)
On to Part 2.
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