In preparation for Halloween, everyone's listing their favourite horror flicks. Well, Final Girl is, and Ryan 'Stinkbrown' Lindsay is too. I'm sure a bunch of other people are thinking about it. Show me a barrel and I'll scrape it...
Runners up included Evil Dead 2 and 3, Final Destination (any of the first three, not the rubbish 3D one), Rec (Spanish), The Fly (Goldblum), The Hitcher (Hauer) and The Ring (Japanese). Which should give you an idea of how bad my taste in horror films really is.
Here's 20-11 then... come back tomorrow for part 2. You just know it's gonna piss you off some more.
20. Friday The 13th
It's well over twenty years since I saw the original, and I'm sure it wouldn't stand up after all this time, but I still remember the impact this movie had on me - particularly the ending. Diluted to death by a dozen inferior sequels, this stuck a spike through my heart like an arrow through Kevin Bacon's throat. And Jason wasn't even the killer!
19. 28 Days Later
What if zombies could run really, really fast, Christopher Eccleston was a right hard bastard, and Manchester looked like LA from a distance...?
The sequel is... OK.
18. The Strangers
17. Cube
Some ignorami consider this to have invented the torture porn genre and spawned a million Saws, Hostels, et al. The difference being there's more invention, imagination and genuine tension in the first five minutes of Cube than there was in the whole Saw franchise.
The sequels are good too.
16. An American Werewolf In London
Another of those horror films that defined my youth, and not just for Jenny Agutter in the shower.
Keep off the moors and stay on the road.
The sequel is rubbish, despite Julie Delpy.
15. Them (Ils)
Because, it seems, only the French truly understand there's little scarier than a bunch of unruly hoodies. Inspired The Strangers, Eden Lake and a bunch of other "aren't kids bastards?" flicks, none of which were quite as efficiently brutal.
14. Frailty
The film that made Bill Paxton scary. That's some achievement! (He directed it too, so it was all his own doing.) Great twists and a black-as-pitch ending.
13. Duel
The horror film that reminds you you're not as indestructible as you think you are in that little tin box you drive about in every day. Dennis Weaver does the everyman routine perfectly, Spielberg's direction has never been grittier, and the fact we never see the trucker makes him the perfect boogeyman.
I was tempted to include copycat 70s movie The Car in this list, if only for the scenes where the eponymous driverless vehicle refuses to go onto consecrated ground... and then explodes in a fiery devil explosion at the end. In my memory, I often get the two films confused and have that devil explosion tear up the sky after the Duel lorry tumbles over the cliff too. I'm always vaguely disappointed when it doesn't happen.
12. The Blair Witch Project
All you people who hate Blair Witch, sorry, but you're wrong. It may just be a lot of silly running about in the woods, but woods are scary places... and that facing the wall ending haunted me for weeks.
The sequel is bollocks.
11. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Since it was banned in the UK as a video nasty throughout my youth, I expected to be disappointed by TCM when I finally saw it. Disappointed, I was not. Disturbed, I was. Not by the expected scenes of chainsaw torture - which turned out to be mercifully few and actually quite restrained - but instead by the scene at the dinner table where Grandpa's corpse starts sucking the girls finger and she screams... and screams... and screams... and screams.
The remake was far too glossy.
Click here for part 2...
