What are your all time favorite horror movies?

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I don't think it does either of those things. I can clearly differentiate between real-world horrors and fictional horror staged for film. I can still be shocked and repulsed by real-world deaths, even if I revel in seeing excellent gore work in motion pictures. The lines sometimes blur when it comes to films like 'Faces of Death' (which is ostensibly a compilation of real-life gore but is mostly faked so it becomes more campy than shocking (but still macabre)), Italian cannibal films (which featured real-life animal killings, something which I find morally reprehensible and always skip through whenever I watch) or simulated snuff films (e.g. 'August Underground'), but I can still always know the differences.

Then again, horror/cult/exploitation movies are my primary passion and interest. I definitely look at them in a very different light when I carry an in-depth expertise about the genre and have even worked on some. I have friends who work in makeup and special effects, a field which has always interested me since childhood, so whenever I see gore in movies, my thoughts pour more over the quality of the effects and how they were accomplished (or, as of the last decade, frustrated lamentation over why CGI is being used for everything these days). I don't go into horror movies to get scared; sometimes I can get really enveloped in and slightly creeped out by a good story, but most of the time I'm always going in with a critical eye, so I assume I'm probably an exemption from your question.

Discussion on 'macabre' (LINK) can fit in this thread.

To expand on real life experiences: Common 'macabre' responses are temptations to more closely view bad-vehicle accidents; which can sometimes act as driver-distractions to cause additional accidents. Personally, I refrain from that 'macabre' tendency when I'm driving (that is I was cautioned about such distractions from an early age)!

LINK: Here is a (lengthy) description discussing 'macabre' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macabre

Universal horror
Hammer horror
Nosferatu
Night Of The Living Dead
Return Of The Living Dead
The Exorcist
Alien
Halloween
Hellraiser
A Nightmare On Elm Street
Friday The 13th
Sleepaway Camp
The Howling
Ginger Snaps
The Fog
The Last Broadcast
The Blair Witch Project

Way too many movies to mention. Horror movies are one of my big interests

Last edited by asherx on 12 Jan 2015, 8:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Is that the BBC movie? That's on of my favorites versions of Dracula. Very underrated.

Yep. It has some issues: it's very cheap, even for a TV movie, and a couple of the actors are dreadful. But the script is terrific (it stays mostly faithful to the book but actually improves on it by cutting out the more bland elements and adding a lot of good new dialogue) and most of the actors are incredible, especially Louis Jourdan as Dracula and Frank Finlay as Van Helsing.

I can only think of one horror film that has 'scared' me a bit in my adult life, and that is The Gorgon, a 1964 Hammer film with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee (of course), and Barbara Shelley. I felt genuinely apprehensive whenever Shelley's character was about to be transformed (and when she was, the Gorgon was played by someone called Prudence Hyman, strangely enough).

As a child, I was somewhat haunted for several weeks by the 'mirror in the bedroom' story in the 1945 horror portmanteau film Dead Of Night'.

I've seen well over a dozen Dracula films by the way, but have never come across the 1977 version referred to above!

I don't really find most horror movies scary. My favourite horror movies are the Thing (1982) and Alien. I love sci-fi and I'm a huge John Carpenter fan. A recent horror I found disturbing was Sinister (2012). The found footage snuff movies featured in the film are quite believable and horror kids are always scarier than adults.

There's a whole market for simulated snuff films. The most prominent example is 'August Underground'; seriously, if you taped that onto some blank VHS tapes and circulated it in the video underground, people would absolutely believe it was real. The 'Guinea Pig' films from Japan are considerably cornier, but hey, I sold my box set for over $100 on eBay, so someone likes it.

'The Thing' is one of my all-time favorite movies of any genre. That, 'The Evil Dead', 'Killer Klowns from Outer Space', 'Dead-Alive', anything Savini...I watched those religiously as a kid and was blown away by the visuals. Now I'm working in a special effects workshop. And who says horror movies aren't beneficial to America's youth?

That scene in Suspiria when the blind man is walking his dog through the square. Legendary.

PS. Demons 2. A Guilty pleasure. My niece was actually watching during the TV Scene, and I turned round & screamed at her with the ugliest face I could pull. She responded by throwing a large book square in my face (well deserved).

'Demons 2' is fun, no guilt at all. The first 'Demons' is an out-and-out classic, though. Pure '80s Italian sleaze, just the way I like it. It scared the heck out of me as a kid, but now as a twisted adult I can proudly wear this shirt in public:

Some of my favorite horror movies are Beetlejuice, Zombieland, Let Me In, Mama, My Soul To Take, A Nightmare On Elm Street, and You're Next.