[Halloween] Top 13 Favourite Horror Films by Decade

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I don't know if you've ever read the director's "defense". It's real moronic. It's basically along the lines of "Eh...uh...like the way society deals with poverty is as unfair as...eh a duck getting randomly shot. So I filmed a duck getting shot"


I heard a different defense, that it was meant to be a metaphor for the way the Serbian government treated it's citizens.

I don't buy any of that.
 
Yeah that list is a mixed bag, with some films I consider masterpieces (Salo, Henry, Ichii) and others I consider grade A garbage. And not the good kind of garbage I like.
 
I'll say something mildly controversial...

I vastly prefer Stephen King's Shining Miniseries to the Kubrik Film.
 
I'll say something mildly controversial...

I vastly prefer Stephen King's Shining Miniseries to the Kubrik Film.

Oh yeah? big fan of those hedge animals? :grin:
 
I saw that series first, never saw Kubrik's until much later. I much prefer the subtlety of the father's breakdown and the overall story. And I'm usually a fan of writer over director anyway.

I also liked the way in Doctor Sleep they acknowledged the movie and the book, in that while they take the movie's continuity, that movie sort of expands the ending to apply what elements were missing in the Kubrik movie to the end of Doctor Sleep.
 
I think the book does a much better job of tracking the father's descent into madness, his lurking misogyny and the disintegration of a marriage but most of the horror elements in the novel and the ending are lead-footed.

The weakest element in the film is Nicholson's performance, for all his perfectionism Kubrick either didn't control Jack or seriously misdirected him.

There is no sense of the father as a fairly decent but damaged man trying to recover from alcoholism and his anger and frustrated ambition.

He seems crazy out of the gate, with no significant inner life. The red bathroom and bar scenes are good though and hint at what could have been.

And if one thinks that's due to Nicholson being a self-involved ham incapable of playing subdued, check out his brilliant, modulated performances in Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens.

Kubrick isn't really a actor's director like Rafelson though and perhaps he and Nicholson didn't think the material warranted that kind of attention.

But once he goes full crazy he is in his element and he's undeniably strong from then on with a truly unhinged performance.

In contrast, Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers, who ironically Kubrick was frustrated with, are excellent, the best things in the film by far with wonderful performances.
 
I think Kubrick's Shining is best viewed as entirely it's own thing in regards to King's The Shining novel. Kubrick was intent on telling a completely different story - the book is about a good man corrupted by an evil haunted place, Kubrick's story is about a bad man where there's pretty good evidence in the film the "ghosts" don't even exist.
 
I am OK with genre bleed over and things not easily classified. To that end I offer an outlier not typically associated with the Horror genre, like "Requiem for a Dream." I'd like to add "Last Tango in Paris" as a harrowing descent into relationship breakup horror (yes, including the implications one hears about afterwards about how it was made).

Sometimes the stains upon a soul is the most lasting nightmare.
 
It's Friday. It's been a long, hard, week and my brain is drained. I flip through Amazon Prime looking when I notice "Curse of the Puppet Master" and I figure, what the hell.

And from right from the opening sequence , the signature fairground theme, al the old pupper, Blade, Pinhead, Lady Leech... it's nostalgia overload. I wouldn't say Puppet Master was my favourite horror franchise, but it had something.
 
It's Friday. It's been a long, hard, week and my brain is drained. I flip through Amazon Prime looking when I notice "Curse of the Puppet Master" and I figure, what the hell.

And from right from the opening sequence , the signature fairground theme, al the old pupper, Blade, Pinhead, Lady Leech... it's nostalgia overload. I wouldn't say Puppet Master was my favourite horror franchise, but it had something.

Yeah, I could never argue any of those films were good per se, but I was always entertained by them growing up. They hold a special place in my Horror heart, as does the Bloodstone trilogy.
 

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the most f-ed up movie I have EVER seen was Dead Ringers
Jeremy Irons plays twin OB/GYNs one falls in love with a patient, the other starts mutilating his patients

can you say Cronenberg?
 
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