the Greatest Horror Movie Ever Is...?

[GOLGO 13]

I saw JAWS at the movies as a kid. Ocean officially ruined since then.

John Carpenter's The THING is the greatest horror remake in the history of all cinema. Carpenter at his most masterful.

[DrNewGod]

I saw JAWS at the movies as a kid. Ocean officially ruined since then.

John Carpenter's The THING is the greatest horror remake in the history of all cinema. Carpenter at his most masterful.

Yah, Jaws was POWERFUL!

[williamtheday]

The Drumpf Prophocies

[Iron Maiden]

A worthy choice as it delivered big time chills, definitely NOT something to watch with the lights off. Another made for TV vampire thriller that hit all the right (as in scary) notes was The Night Stalker.

We do share some common taste there. I loved The Night Stalker and Salem's Lot. I'll have to see if I can find those on cable. They rarely are broadcast these days although Me-TV runs the Night Stalker tv series. I tend to like ghost movies over slasher stuff with Buckets of Blood (now that's a great comedy by Roger Corman)

I'm going to go old school here and list

• Nosferatu: this silent film is still pretty creepy. Director F.W Murnau deliberately had the vampire move in very irregular speed.
• Bride of Frankenstein: James Whale expertly combines horror and comedy. Probably one of the most memorable scores for a horror film, done by Franz Waxman.
• The Uninvited (1941) One of my favorite ghost movies
• The Haunting: And I do meant the B/W version directed by Robert Wise not the terrible remake directed by Jan de Bont
• The Innocents: B/W movie directed by Jack Clayton with Deborah Kerr as a governess of two small children in a creepy mansion.
• The Exorcist: Lived up the the scares from the book
• The Exorcist III : With George C Scott and a somewhat unexpected cameo (watch it and see) This movie is underrated IMO. Certainly an improvement over Exorcist II

Roger Corman films, which look quite stylish in spite of their low budgets are almost a category by themselves but my favorites are:

The Pit and The Pendulum
Masque of the Red Death

Another low budget film which I saw just this week on TCM is Horror Hotel (USA) but was originally titled City of the Dead. For a budget of less than 100,000 pounds (most of which probably went to Christopher Lee), this is a creepy, atmospheric film

I like both versions of The Thing but still have a fondness for the first version from the 1950s

The originals of Night of the Living Dead and the first Halloween.

[Basara]

For me, it was Jaws. I couldn't even get in a swimming pool for a few years. My exasperated mother would proclaim that there wasn't a shark within 1000 miles of El Paso, Texas, and I just knew that if I got in that water, I was shark chow.

The Texts Chain Saw Massacre.

The thing about this film is all the stupid kids had to do was look up from their damned phones once.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

We do share some common taste there. I loved The Night Stalker and Salem's Lot. I'll have to see if I can find those on cable. They rarely are broadcast these days although Me-TV runs the Night Stalker tv series.

Salem's Lot was recently released on Blu-Ray and I bought it this past weekend. I plan to watch that on Halloween night. With the lights on of course. As for The Night Stalker TV series, it came out on DVD something like a decade ago, but it's probably out of print by now. Another underrated classic I don't think was mentioned in this thread was The Legend of Hell House which was said to be one of THE best haunted house movies ever.

[Iron Maiden]

Salem's Lot was recently released on Blu-Ray and I bought it this past weekend. I plan to watch that on Halloween night. With the lights on of course. As for The Night Stalker TV series, it came out on DVD something like a decade ago, but it's probably out of print by now. Another underrated classic I don't think was mentioned in this thread was The Legend of Hell House which was said to be one of THE best haunted house movies ever.

Oh, I forgot about that one. I think it does borrow from the Haunting a bit in that they both involve a team of investigators of the paranormal. But still provides its share of frightening moments.

Another oldie but goodie is The Body Snatchers with Boris Karloff and Henry Daniell, which was about those dark times in medical research. Based on a story by Robert Lewis Stevenson and based on the case of grave robbers / murderers Burke and Hare. Those who provided specimens for the medical schools were also known as Resurrectionists which I assume was a bit of dark humor of those times.

[bobellis75]

Tough call here...I love horror movies, but my usual go to answer is Halloween (1978). There are better done movies...but this one is very influential and relied so much more on tension than gore/violence/special effects and so on...it's a constant edge of the seat type of movie and those are the scariest movies to me...the ones that keep you wondering when that other shoe is going to drop...

[bobellis75]

For me, it was Jaws. I couldn't even get in a swimming pool for a few years. My exasperated mother would proclaim that there wasn't a shark within 1000 miles of El Paso, Texas, and I just knew that if I got in that water, I was shark chow.



The thing about this film is all the stupid kids had to do was look up from their damned phones once.

JAWS is another good call...another movie all about tension building. Maybe my favorite movie of all time...at least top 5.

[Iron Maiden]

And when you think back, you really don't see much of the shark in Jaws and this was almost by accident. The one they built didn't work very well so Spielberg used other means to show us the menace of the shark. And it was a better movie for it. I don't think people react as much in the theater as they did in the old days but I remember the shrieks in the theater when I went to see it at the now gone United Artists theater in Chicago.

A few more ghost movies that I like:

The Conjuring (both 1 and 2)
The Others

Another movie, from the godfather of the Walking Dead, etc.

George Romero's Dawn of the Dead

I recall seeing this in the theater and the screams were really load when the police were attempting to clean out an apartment full of the undead. For some reason, the only version that gets a lot of play is Zack Snyder's remake.

[stingray]

The original 1978 Halloween.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Here's another candidate: Ringu. This Japanese film from 1998 is about an urban legend where people are cursed to die seven days after watching a spooky videotape, when the young son of a newspaper reporter watches the tape, she desperately tries to save him. There's no gore, no violence, no bloodshed, but damn, the goosebump factor with this film is at times off the damn charts and is NOT something you watch with the lights off. It was remade here in the States as The Ring starring Naomi Watts, and while it didn't have the unmistakable chills of the original, it was plenty creepy too.

[DrNewGod]

• The Uninvited (1941) One of my favorite ghost movies

Was that the one with Ray Milland? That is a good one. I've seen it featured as an example of how film tiptoed around Lesbianism back in the day.

[Iron Maiden]

Was that the one with Ray Milland? That is a good one. I've seen it featured as an example of how film tiptoed around Lesbianism back in the day.

Yes, that has Ray Milland and there is a character in the film called Miss Holloway that runs a sanitarium. The way she talks about Mary Meredith the deceased wife of the previous owner of Windward manor, you get the idea that there was something between them. The movie's theme is very famous in some music circles, Stella by Starlight. It became a jazz standard when done by Miles Davis, along with Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles.

Probaby a more overt example would be the Mrs Danvers character played by an icy Judith Anderson in Hitchcock's Rebecca. IIRC, it's not there in Daphne DuMaurier's novel so that could be Hitchcock.

But I always liked that while it does have a bit of joking by Ray Milland, it handles the paranormal parts seriously.