Saturday, November 3, 2007

Tis the Season

Some of my favorite spooky movies of all time:

The Wicker Man (strange and wonderful)
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (a made for TV film from the 1970s starring Kim Darby--so creepy!)
Carnival of Souls
The Exorcist (I love how it builds slowly to terrific horror from a calm, grey beginning)
Rosemary's Baby (A masterpiece, pure and simple)
Stranger in Our House (made for TV in the 1970s, with Linda Blair)
The Blair Witch Project (A brilliant work of contemporary cinema, yes I said cinema, and very scary)
Masque of the Red Death (One of the only works by Roger Corman that is genuinely atmospheric and frightening)
Theatre of Blood (made for TV, I think, starring Vincent Price and Diana Rigg, which is reason enough to see it)
Mad Monster Party (maybe it looks like kid stuff now but it sure inspired Tim Burton with its brilliant animation)
Lost Highway (David Lynch crafts some of the most terrifying moments in film)
Night of the Living Dead (I still find this scary)
Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (A parody (or is it rip-off?) of the above, campy, hilarious and spooky)

1 comment:

John W. Morehead said...

Thanks for sharing these favorites. I resonate with many of them. I'd have to add Horror of Dracula (one of Christopher Lee's best and one of the best Dracula films in my view), and The Legend of Hell House (which came out the same year as The Exorcist and would have fared far better at the box office and with fans if it had not been eclipsed). Beyond the horror genre several sci fi films scared me as a child, such as Invaders from Mars where the thought of my parents being controlled by an evil alien force and becoming even more threatening was too much to handle!