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Since Halloween is only three days away, I thought I would start a new topic -- what are your favorite horror films? I'll start:

Halloween (1978)

Halloween II (1981)

Even though these movies were made three years apart, I think of them as one movie since the events of both films take place on the same night (Halloween 1978) and the films are so similar in terms of their look, feel and mood.

Halloween and Halloween II tell the story of Laurie Strode, an intelligent high school student who is stalked and attacked by a masked mental hospital escapee by the name of the Michael Myers. I love these movies for a variety of reasons. They are genuinely scary and contain two of the greatest "chase" sequences found in any horror movie anywhere. They spend considerable time and effort fleshing out the different characters and making them more than just tallies in a body count -- rare for horror movies of this kind. I also like how they try to convey the odd, eerie flavor of Halloween night itself. And, they gave us Jamie Lee Curtis -- still today the greatest of the late-70s/early-80s scream queens.

Halloween would go on to spawn six direct sequels (II, 4, 5, 6, H2O and Resurrection), a non-continuity sequel (III) and a terrible 2007 remake. Interestingly, when Jamie Lee Curtis returned to the part of Laurie in 1998's Halloween: H2O, the powers-that-be more-or-less ignored the continuity created by sequels 4, 5 and 6 and instead acted like they hadn't happened. So, if you're a hardcore Halloween fan, there are literally two different continuities in the series -- continuity 1 (the original, II, 4, 5 and 6) and continuity 2 (the original, II, H2O and Resurrection).

I have more choices but I'll let others chime in!

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Since Halloween is only three days away, I thought I would start a new topic -- what are your favorite horror films?

That's an easy pick for me... Polanski's trilogy: Repulsion (1965)-(I'm a big fan of Deneuve :wub: )-, Rosemary's Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976). Talk about the horrors of apartment-dwelling ! Boo!! :angel_not:

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Speaking of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, I'm a big fan of Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) -- the last two installments in the long-running Hammer Dracula series. Like the first two Halloween movies, I think of these movies almost as one movie since they both take place in early-70s London and are both so similar visually. (The only major difference between the two is that Stephanie Beacham plays Peter Cushing's niece in the first movie and Joanna Lumley plays the niece in the second.)

If you can get past the spectacle of 30-year-old-looking actors playing teenage hippies in A.D. 1972 and supposedly-menacing henchmen wearing ridiculous fur vests in Rites, these movies are very entertaining supernatural thrillers. Lee and Cushing are their usual outstanding selves in both.

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I like horror films that convey a long, sustained line of wierdness and discomfort, punctuated at unexpected times by shock. Repulsion, yes. And Diabolique. And Nosferatu. They're films you can look at again and again, and which pass the test of watching them in complete silence, without needing to be enhanced by musical score or sound effects.

I also like the look and the pathos of the Frankenstein films of the 30s, though they are not particularly "horrible."

Night of the Living Dead (the 60s original) is rather weird. Thel ow-budget look actually enhances the sense of strangeness and dread.

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Since Halloween is only three days away, I thought I would start a new topic -- what are your favorite horror films?

That's an easy pick for me... Polanski's trilogy: Repulsion (1965)-(I'm a big fan of Deneuve - Rosemary's Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976). Talk about the horrors of apartment-dwelling ! Boo!!

I agree. Rosemary's Baby scared the bejesus out of me when I first saw it as a kid and it still gives me the creeps. (As for Repulsion -- that rotting meal in the kitchen. Ugh!)

miliosr, I like the first 'Halloween' but the sequels that I saw- didn't catch many of them -- were not so great, frankly. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is very good.

The series of pictures Val Lewton produced at RKO back when -- I Walked with a Zombie, Cat People, The Leopard Man (all directed by Jacques Tourneur, with others that followed by young no-names like Robert Wise and Mark Robson) -- don't really frighten me especially but they are fine examples of ingenuity on a small budget.

I also like the Roger Corman produces series starring Vincent Price - 'House of Usher' 'The Tomb of Ligeia,' et al.

The horror genre is not a favorite of mine generally, though. I really don't care for 'Boo!' movies that operate on dread -- you sit and sit and sit waiting for something awful to happen and then it does, rinse, repeat. I think the best 'Boo!' director going right now is Wes Craven.

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The Exorcist was pretty frightful for me. And although Jaws is not strictly horrow, it scared me straight out of the family swimming pool for about a week when I first saw it. Looking back, I'm not sure how a 25 ft shark was going to get into our pool but as a kid, the water was a pretty scary place.

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I usually hate horror/slasher anything--maybe because my film background tips me off way to early. So yes, I tend to appreciate the Polansky films more, and they did give me reason to pause when I got my first apartments alone in the big city(ies). I like suspense, and below are two small instances...

"The Changeling" starring George C. Scott (and others I presume, but don't remember at all.) Typical plot of bereaved widower etc. going to work/live alone in a big old house in the country, but I will never forget...the stuck piano key that worked, and esp. a wet ball bouncing down a stair. Oooo!

The beginning (NOT the middle, and definately NOT the over-the-top end) of "Poltergeist" (which I saw at its premiere in Hollywood) and Spielberg's inside jokes to us film-students: Watch for the edit when the kitchen gets re-arranged...there isn't one. Or the 'squeeze-zoom' as the mother is sucked down the upstairs hallway. And for tension in the ordinary: can anyone forget that frantic counting between lightning bolts illuminating a sinister toy?

Oh yeah, I remember those C. Lee and P. Cushing films too. But my favorite Dracula is still Langella. (With affectionate remembrance of Gorey, and his "Gilded Bat".)

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Re: Rosemary's Baby. I wonder how effective the choice of building would have been had it been filmed after they cleaned the Dakota's facade. What had been dark and foreboding from nearly a century of urban soot, since has been shown to be a yellowish ecru, and not so scary but for the recollection that it had been the setting for that film and also, later, the site of John Lennon's terrible murder.

I didn't think RB was nearly as scary as Fatal Attraction. Does that count as a horror film?

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Re: Rosemary's Baby. I wonder how effective the choice of building would have been had it been filmed after they cleaned the Dakota's facade. What had been dark and foreboding from nearly a century of urban soot, since has been shown to be a yellowish ecru, and not so scary but for the recollection that it had been the setting for that film and also, later, the site of John Lennon's terrible murder.

I didn't think RB was nearly as scary as Fatal Attraction. Does that count as a horror film?

The look of the Dakota does add to the general weirdness - it's almost a character in the movie.

Technically Fatal Attraction isn't a genre piece, it has pretensions to more, but it’s a horror/slasher movie in spirit.

I had forgotten The Exorcist – you’re right, jllaney, it does pack a punch, bad as it is in some respects. (Although by me the scariest bits where at the beginning, where Linda Blair undergoes a horrific series of hospital tests to find out what’s wrong.)

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Since Halloween is only three days away, I thought I would start a new topic -- what are your favorite horror films?

That's an easy pick for me... Polanski's trilogy: Repulsion (1965)-(I'm a big fan of Deneuve :dunno: )-, Rosemary's Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976). Talk about the horrors of apartment-dwelling ! Boo!! :yahoo:

Wait...! What about Michael Crichton's 1978 "Coma" ? Does it applies as a horror movie...? I remember that when i first saw it as a kid, it scared the hell out of me...The intense paranoia that pervades the film is similar to that of Rosemary's Baby. Never suspected that yars later i would end up in the field... :)

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Since Halloween is only three days away, I thought I would start a new topic -- what are your favorite horror films?

That's an easy pick for me... Polanski's trilogy: Repulsion (1965)-(I'm a big fan of Deneuve :yahoo: )-, Rosemary's Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976). Talk about the horrors of apartment-dwelling ! Boo!!

Wait...! What about Michael Crichton's 1978 "Coma" ? Does it applies as a horror movie...? I remember that when i first saw it as a kid, it scared the hell out of me...The intense paranoia that pervades the film is similar to that of Rosemary's Baby. Never suspected that yars later i would end up in the field...

'Coma' is more of a thriller IMO. It certainly does have its creepy moments, although I think it's really Bujold who holds things together and makes it credible.

There is something about the idea of going into the hospital for something routine and never emerging again alive that gets to everyone, I suspect.

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The horror genre is not a favorite of mine generally, though.

Oh well, they're never a favourite of mine, so the ones I like are those on the periphery and are also other kinds of films as well. But Kubrick's 'The Shining' is definitely my 2nd favourite of all horror of whatever form. He so improved Stephen King's book IMO I consider it one of his crowning achievements. 'Rosemary's Baby' is also wonderful, as many have mentioned, and the witches chants' are especially effective in the Dakota, where Lauren Bacall and Yoko Ono still live, the latter owning 5 apartments; I'd love to know what she's done with them.... The movie was very chic at the time it emerged, with Mia Farrow's haircut and her youthful period well-publicized. I didn't find 'Repulsion' so frightening even though Catherine Deneuve is easily my favourite screen actress if I were to choose just one--and 'The Hunger' ought to have been a great movie, and could have been had it followed Whitley Strieber's brilliant novel's ending. As it was, the ending completely destroyed the sense of horror and the film is memorable for endless Vogue Magazine-type scenes of bored Bowie/Deneuve smoking endless cigarettes and, later, Deneuve campily 'playing' Ravel's 'Gibet' from '

'Gaspard de la Nuit.'

Also on the outer edge of horror, 'Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte' scared me even when I was a senior in high school, and the famous scene in 'Psycho' is easily the most frightening and brilliant horror scene I've ever seen: It's so great I still think of it nearly every day since I first saw it at the age of 8--when I had no idea what was coming, and Hitchcock and Leigh worked together so perfectly that her first cries are more like discomfort or inconvenience before you find the total pain setting in. For this scene alone, this to me is easily the greatest piece of horror film, as close as you could get to a snuff movie.

A lesser-known but most arresting mini-series was made on Thomas Tryon's 'Dark Secret of Harvest Home', with Bette Davis in a New England hamlet as a character called Widow Fortune. The whole vision of agrarian rituals of sacrifice to some sort of unnamed Corn God is quite stunning, and thoroughly haunting with its 'Harvest Lord', who was a young man brought up to be eventually sacrificed for the community, somewhat along the lines of Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery'.

Along different lines, the Oliver Stone/Bruce Wagner 'Wild Palms' miniseries is one of the best things I've ever seen, and when first aired, so creepy I couldn't even watch but snippets of it--it was one of the first things set in a 'near future' instead of a distant one. As it so happens, this film, made in 1993, was set in Los Angeles in 2007, so we're now there and some of the prophecy seems to have come to be. Angie Dickinson, Robert Morse, James Belushi and a host of other brilliant actors make this one of the most unsettling and upsetting films I've ever seen, although I don't know if you'd technically call it horror.

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This discussion has set me wondering: How does one distinguish a horror movie from a thriller? When I was a kid, everything terrified me, even Popeye cartoons (Bluto!); but now, the movies that get to me probably all fall into the thriller genre (most recently, for instance, "Zodiac" really gave me the creeps); ghosts and ghouls just don't do anything for me.

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That’s a very good question, Anthony_NYC. I think with pictures like ‘Zodiac’ (and ‘Jaws’) the distinction is blurred. You could argue that ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ is a horror movie. Throwing a couple of thoughts out at random:

In a classic-style horror movie, there is usually an element of the supernatural involved – zombies, vampires, the devil, monsters, etc. That’s still true, but new style horror films, like ‘Hostel,’ are based in naturalistic – well, sort of – situations and everything just gets really, really horrible.

(The original ‘Halloween’ has no monsters or ghosts, but still there’s no accounting for how Michael Myers survives and escapes, and no explanation for him – he’s just evil, as Donald Pleasence says.)

There’s a strong element of fantasy in horror films. Thrillers tend to be more solidly based in realistic situations – no ghosts, etc. – and they aren’t as graphic.

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But Kubrick's 'The Shining' is definitely my 2nd favourite of all horror of whatever form. He so improved Stephen King's book IMO I consider it one of his crowning achievements.

I first saw 'The Shining' in high school while babysitting my sister's apartment and I couldn't sleep that night.

and the famous scene in 'Psycho' is easily the most frightening and brilliant horror scene I've ever seen: It's so great I still think of it nearly every day since I first saw it at the age of 8--when I had no idea what was coming, and Hitchcock and Leigh worked together so perfectly that her first cries are more like discomfort or inconvenience before you find the total pain setting in. For this scene alone, this to me is easily the greatest piece of horror film, as close as you could get to a snuff movie.

It's what all slasher movies aspire too, I think.

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I find the scariest scenes in movies are ones when someone is about to get caught, regardless of genre. I cannot bear to watch the scene in Double Happiness in which Sandra Oh's character is talking at her front door to a guy who isn't even really her boyfriend yet, and her father comes home, discovers them chatting, and freezes her out for the rest of the movie.

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Re: Rosemary's Baby. I wonder how effective the choice of building would have been had it been filmed after they cleaned the Dakota's facade. What had been dark and foreboding from nearly a century of urban soot, since has been shown to be a yellowish ecru, and not so scary but for the recollection that it had been the setting for that film and also, later, the site of John Lennon's terrible murder.

By chance, today's NY Times has a brief article about the Dakota's ghosts, together with a picture of the cleaned up facade.

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Horrror is not my genre. I get scared far too easily and I don't understand the appeal of gratuitous scarifying (that isn't a word, is it?).

If I have to see a horror movie, I prefer the 'paranoid' type like Rosemary's Baby and The Others. Nicole Kidman and Christopher Eccleston made an excellent couple in The Others.

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If you're ever looking for a good haunted house movie to watch on Halloween, I would recommend The Legend of Hell House (1973) with Roddy McDowall and Pamela Franklin.

Based on Richard Matheson's book Hell House (which he adapted for the screen), The Legend of Hell House revolves around a group of individuals -- a scientist, his wife and two mediums -- who enter "the Mount Everest of haunted houses" to discover its secrets. Is all the trouble caused by "mindless, directionless energy"? Or are "controlled, multiple hauntings" to blame??

The movie is very creepy (just like the book) and plays as much as a detective movie as a haunted house movie. McDowall and Franklin are both excellent as, respectively, the jittery sole survivor of a prior attempt to investigate the house and a mental medium who is much too incautious with her investigations of the house. The final revelation is a bit of a let-down but, as the ending is completely faithful to the book, the fault for that must lie with Matheson.

Beware of black cats and serving trays . . .

As for the Halloween movies, I would only recommend the original, II, H2O and the beginning of Resurrection. Surprise, surprise -- they all star Jamie Lee Curtis.

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Horror is not my genre. I get scared far too easily and I don't understand the appeal of gratuitous scarifying (that isn't a word, is it?).

I’m inclined to agree. I really don’t enjoy getting spooked for its own sake, although once I start watching I tend to find it difficult to stop, if the movie is a good one. I like ‘The Others’ too. 'Scarifying' is a word, BTW.

If you're ever looking for a good haunted house movie to watch on Halloween, I would recommend The Legend of Hell House (1973) with Roddy McDowall and Pamela Franklin.

I haven’t seen it, miliosr. I’ll have to look for it if it gets shown this year. (The trailer for I Am Legend with Will Smith is in theaters now – we’ll see how that one turns out.)

My favourites are The Omen series (the old one)

The new one was strikingly ineffective, wasn't it? Not that the old one is a masterpiece, but it works. (There's also a very old Saturday Night Live sketch that I remember with affection ('It's 666 - the Devil's area code!').

I'll watch Sam Neill in pretty much anything.

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Don't Look Now (1973) starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland is a movie that scares the bajeebers out of me although it isn't really a horror movie. The plot is about John and Laura Baxter, a couple whose young daughter drowned in a horrific and avoidable accident. Now living in Venice the guilt ridden John starts to see images of his daughter in her red raincoat (she was wearing it when she drowns) walking through the streets of a forebidding Venice. He doesn't catch up to her until the end of the movie and when he does it's a head scratching shocker. Sutherland is fantastic is the role of John. Driven by guilt, haunted by images of his lost daughter, he makes John's pain a living overwhelming entity.

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Don't Look Now (1973) starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland is a movie that scares the bajeebers out of me although it isn't really a horror movie.
Thanks for the reminder about this one. Christie and Sutherland are truly wonderful. Off-season Venice isn't bad, either, in a major supporting role. All three have remained in my memory for a long, long time. :)
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I add my thanks, perky. It had crossed my mind to mention Don't Look Now and I didn't get around to it. The film looks very Seventies today, but in a good way, and the use of montage by the director, Nicolas Roeg, and the cutter, Graeme Clifford, is extraordinarily effective. The mood of foreboding is unremitting and still they manage to throw you.

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