A List to Ponder

Stacie Ponder over at Final Girl has requested Top 20 lists of favorite horror movies from her fellow horror bloggers. Because she is the alpha queen of horror bloggery, we must do as she says. Bad things happen to those who don't.


So without further adieu, here they are.

1. The Exorcist
With Regan’s violent rages, skin eruptions, and body secretions, The Exorcist captures the gross horror of puberty better than any film before or since.



2. Halloween
The second scariest closet I have ever experienced.


3. The Shining
Because it’s so much better than the book and Stephen King still can’t quite understand why. And Shelley Duvall is freakin’ amazing.


4. Psycho
The original Freudian freak show.


5. Alien
Sigourney battles double-jawed bugs while dodging buckets of extraterrestrial acidic drool. I named my cat Ripley. End of story.


6. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Every time I watch this, I think it will be dated and fun, but it ends up re-traumatizing me all over again. It’s just still that effective. And Leatherface is the scariest drag queen since Divine.


7. Friday the 13th
Goes from creepy to campy and ends with a girl fight. Three words: “Kill her Mommy.” No Jason-based sequel or remake will ever compete. There's even some subtext to be had beneath the cheese.


8. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Yay for slow zombies in bluish/green makeup! Yay for horror that criticizes the consumerist culture in a way the remake would never dare.

9. Carrie
The second best puberty-horror movie ever. I always hold out hope that things will end different. Sissy Spacek is just that good.

10. Rosemary’s Baby
“What have you done to its eyes?”


11. Videodrome
Videodrome draws you into its sleazy grasp early on and never lets you go. The line between reality and fantasy blurs beyond recognition and we start to wonder if the media-induced hallucinations of our protagonist are any different from our own. And Debbie Harry dishing out S&M punishment to James Woods? “Long live the new flesh!”


12. Suspiria
A bloody Technicolor hallucination that makes absolutely no sense (you can leave the school, ladies!), but has the gravitational pull of your worst nightmare … drawing you closer and closer to the dark mother within us all.


13. Silence of the Lambs
Two words: Jame Gumb and his psycho tranny tuck dance. OK, that was eight words.


14. Damien: Omen II
This movie creeped me out much worse than the original. Maybe because the idea of a kid struggling with his fate as the spawn of Satan coincided with my own homoerotic stirrings. Or maybe because a lady gets her eyes pecked out by a raven, then blindly wanders in front of a speeding truck. (And with Lee fucking Grant as Aunt Ann? I mean, come on!)


15. Martyrs
The French existentialist “fuck you” to Passion of the Christ.


16. Angel Heart
Underrated to the extreme. Great performance by Mickey Rourke. Perhaps one of his best. When he finally realizes the devilish truth and chokes out “who was the boy?” my spine is all ashivers.


17. Audition
That bag. Those acupuncture needles. The wire. Lordy!


18. Safe
Has that Rosemary’s baby’s creepy feeling to it while also being quite funny. The invisible killers that stalk Carol White – pesticides, germs, spiritual alienation, etc – aren’t supernatural. They are the silent, quiet horrors that stalk us all, every day. The last scene with her looking in the mirror saying “I love you” always gives me the sads.


19. Hellraiser
“And Jesus Wept.”


20. Requiem for a Dream
Plays like the Suspiria of drug addiction. The sense of dread and suffocation is almost unbearable. Like any good horror movie, things go from bad to worse for our characters … and there is nothing they can do to stop it. Ellen Burstyn shreds my heart to little pieces.